Free Fine Art Collections: Home

Search hundreds of University and Museum art image collections all in one place.

Smithsonian Open Access gives free and easy access to over 2.8 million 2D and 3D images from all 19 Smithsonian museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives and the National Zoo, with no restrictions on how you can use, alter, or reuse the images.

Art Images from Museums & Libraries

• Google Art Project (250,000 images)
• L.A. County Museum (20,000)
• New York Public Library-Historic Maps (20,000)
• Norway National Museum (30,000)
• SFMoMA Rauschenberg Collection 
• Stanford University's Cantor Art Center (45,000)
• Stanford University's French Revolution Collection (14,000)
• The British Library (100,000)
• The British Museum (4,200)
• The Getty (100,000)
• The Guggenheim (1,600)
• The Met (400,000)
• The Morgan Library Rembrandt Sketches (300)
• The Museum of Modern Art/MoMA  (65,000)
• The Museum of New Zealand (30,000)
• The National Gallery (35,000)
• The New York Public Library: Photos, Maps, Letters (180,000)
• The Rijksmuseum (210,00)
• The Smithsonian (40,000)
• The Tate (70,000)
• The Whitney (21,000)
• The Van Gogh Museum (3500)
• Yale Center for British Art
• Yale's Great Depression Photo Collection (170,000)
• Vermeer (36)

Explore thousands of artworks in the museum’s wide-ranging collection—from our world-renowned icons to lesser-known gems from every corner of the globe—as well as our books, writings, reference materials, and other resources.

NGA Images is a repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. On this website you can search, browse, share, and download images.

Whether you're an artist or a designer, an educator or a student, a professional or a hobbyist, you now have more than 406,000 images of artworks from The Met collection to use, share, and remix—without restriction.

Also available: access to hundreds of art e-books.

• Archives of American Art

  ​The Archives of American Art is the world’s preeminent and most widely used research center dedicated to collecting, preserving, and providing access to primary sources that document the history of the visual arts in America.

• Artcyclopedia

  ​A comprehensive database of artists and their works. Users can search the website by an artist’s name, the name of an artistic work, or for a particular art museum.

• The Art Story

  Contains articles on artists, movements, and times periods that were central to modern art.​

• Artsy | The Art World Online

  ​Features the world’s leading galleries, museum collections, foundations, artist estates, art fairs, and benefit auctions, all in one place.

• askART

  ​An online database containing close to 300,000 artists, providing biographies, images, citations, museums owning their work and galleries representing the artist's work.

• Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) and Répertoire international de la littérature de l'art (RILA)

  The Getty provides access to the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) and to the Répertoire international de la littérature de l'art (RILA) for no charge on its website. These citation databases, searchable together, cover material published between 1975 and 2007. For material published after 2007 see the International Bibliography of Art (IBA).

• Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

  Explore over 8,000 Documents of 20th and 21st⁠-⁠century art in Latin America, the Caribbean, and among US Latino communities.

• Getty Research Portal

  The Getty Research Portal is an online platform providing global access to digitized art history texts. The Portal is comprised of catalog records that link to full, digitized texts hosted by the contributing institutions or their service providers.

• Google Books

  Search the world's most comprehensive index of full-text books.

• International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR)

  Offers impartial and authoritative information on authenticity, ownership, theft, and other artistic, legal, and ethical issues concerning art objects. IFAR serves as a bridge between the public, and the scholarly and commercial art communities. We publish the award-winning quarterly IFAR Journal; organize conferences, panels, and lectures; offer a unique Art Authentication Research Service and provenance research services; provide comprehensive Web-based resources, such as the Catalogue Raisonné Database and the Art Law & Cultural Property Database; and serve as an information resource. We invite all people interested in the visual arts to join our organization and help support our activities.

• Latin American and Caribbean Contemporary Art Web Archive

  The Latin American and Caribbean Contemporary Art Web Archive is a collection developed by the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation's Art & Architecture Librarians, and is an extension of an existing effort focused on collecting publications in all formats that document contemporary art and artists of Latin America and the Caribbean. The agreement defines contemporary art as it refers to 'developments in the visual arts from 1975 to the present,' with material sought 'for the entire career of artists who have been active at any time since 1975.' This archive aims to preserve for researchers the personal and official websites belonging to notable contemporary Latin American and Caribbean artists, artists’ collectives, artists’ groups, galleries, museums, and related entities in order to assure the continuing availability of the important content they contain.

• Met Publications

  The Met presents over 5,000 years of art from around the world for everyone to experience and enjoy.

• The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

  Pairs essays and works of art with chronologies, telling the story of art and global culture through the Museum’s collection.

• Photographers’ Identities Catalog

  Photographers’ Identities Catalog (PIC) is an experimental interface to a collection of biographical data describing photographers, studios, manufacturers, and others involved in the production of photographic images. Consisting of names, nationalities, dates, locations and more, PIC is a vast and growing resource for the historian, student, genealogist, or any lover of photography's history. The information has been culled from trusted biographical dictionaries, catalogs and databases, and from extensive original research by NYPL Photography Collection staff.

• Whitney/Guggenheim Art Resources from the Mid-20th Century

  Via archive.org: Digitized Highlights from the Collections of Hilla Rebay and Juliana Force - A Collaborative Project Between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. This collection contains digitized versions of key selections from the personal libraries of two women who helped shape the mid-century New York art world— Hilla Rebay at the Guggenheim (then the Museum of Non-Objective Painting) and Juliana Force at the Whitney.