Research Guides: Intro to Arts Administration: AH 5351: Search for Images

Finding art images

Best practices for finding images of works of art:

Use sources that provide reliable information about works of art, such as the databases listed below.
Use sources that provide good quality images, such as the databases listed below.
Use Google Images carefully. The information about works of art (e.g. titles, dates, creator names, etc.) is not always accurate. The image quality is often not good.
Print books in the library are often the best place to find an image of an art object. You can scan the image at a high resolution and be confident the identifying information is accurate.

Top Recommendations

ARTstor

Note: ArtStor is now part of JSTOR. ArtStor users can still use their existing account on the JSTOR platform.
ARTstor contains images of art, architecture and archeology from a range of cultures and time periods, in European, American and Asian cultures.

Gallery
- Over 40,000 art, art history, and architecture digital images.
- Maintained by the Visual Resources Center at Tyler School of Art.
- Use for Temple University classroom instruction and for individual student study.

Temple In-House Image Collections

More Image Resources

AP Images [via EBSCOhost]

Note: As of 8/1/25, AP Images is no longer available on the EBSCOhost platform. Please access via AP Newsroom.
AP Images contains U.S. and international photos, from 1826 to present. Also includes graphics, charts, and timelines.

American Art in France : the La Fayette Online Catalogue
- Inventories over 1800 works produced between 1620 and 1940.
- Works by American artists and now kept in French public collections.
- Includes works of art of all media except prints and photography.
Art Project (by Google)
- Objects from museums around the world.
- Create personal collections and share works.
Closer to Van Eyck: Rediscovering the Ghent Altarpiece
- Thousands of high-resolution images of the Ghent Altarpiece.
- Results from Lasting Support, and Interdisciplinary Research Project to Assess the Structural Condition of the Ghent Altarpiece.
Frick Art Reference Library Photoarchive
Frick Digital Image Archive
- 15,000 works of art from Frick Art Reference Library
- Research documentation for 125,000 works of art

Index of Medieval Art (formerly Index of Christian Art)
The Index of Medieval Art includes images and descriptive data relating to works of art produced between early apostolic times and the sixteenth century. The collection now includes secular subjects as well as a growing number of subjects from medieval Jewish and Islamic culture.

The 70 Museums of Florence
- More than 1200 pictures & detailed descriptions.
Metropolitan Museum of Art (Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History)
- Authoritative website about the entire history of art.
- Includes images with descriptive information, essays, maps.
- Search by artist's last name or style/period of your work.
National Gallery of Art: NGA Images
- More than 20,000 open access digital images.
NYU Faculty Digital Archive
- Digital assets from faculty of all disciplines at New York University.
- Includes Ancient World Image Bank
World Images
- California State University IMAGE Project.
- Almost 75,000 images.
- Global in coverage.
- Includes all areas of visual imagery.
Yale-Van Rijn Archive of African Art
- Primarily sculpture, from antiquity to the mid-twentieth-century.
- Approximately 180,000 images of African art.
- Focus on Africa south of the Sahara, including works in collections and in situ to the present.
Yale Digital Commons
- Art, natural history, books, and maps, photos, audio, and video from Yale University's digital asset collections.

Temple University

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