Research Guides: Art Research Guide: Finding Images

Image Sources Available through Rowan University Libraries

Consult Library Search to find books at Campbell Library containing high quality reproductions of art in a large number of styles, media, and historical periods. Use the links on this page to find online images.

Art Full Text
Use Art Full Text to search for art images within periodicals. You may limit your search to "Art Reproduction" under Document Type.
Grove Art Online
A searchable list of illustrations appearing within articles of Grove Art Online

Free Image Collections from the Web

The links listed below are a very small sample of websites containing art images.

Artcyclopedia
A guide to art on the Internet. 8,700 artists listed, 2,600 art sites indexed, over 100,000 links
Art Images for College Teaching
Art Images for College Teaching (AICT) is a personal, non-profit project of its author, art historian and visual resources curator Allan T. Kohl . AICT is intended primarily to disseminate images of art and architectural works in the public domain on a free-access,
free-use basis to all levels of the educational community, as well as to the public at large.
Getty Search Gateway Open Content Program
Currently, there are over 100,000 images from the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute available through the Open Content Program.
Google Arts and Culture
Image Collections and Online Art
An extensive classified list of links to online image websites compiled by the University of Michigan School of Art & Design
New York Public Library Digital Gallery
Provides access to over 600,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library.
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Includes illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more.
Public Domain Image Resources (list provided by Wikimedia)
Extensive list of sources for finding images in the public domain.
Umbra Search
Umbra Search is a project that highlights images of African American history through digitization, bringing together materials from over 1,000 libraries.
Web Gallery of Art
A virtual museum and searchable database of European painting and sculpture from 12th to mid-19th centuries.
Wikimedia Commons
A database of 13,606,278 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.

Finding Original Sources for an Image

Here are two ways to find sources for an image on the Internet. These may be used to find the owner of an image, to identify the content of image, to see how an image has been used, or find a higher resolution version. The search will find similar images as well as other instances of the original.

Google Images
You may initiate an image search in Google Images by dragging and dropping an existing image into the Google search box, or by copying a URL there.
TinEye
TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.

Collective Management Organizations for Fine Art

Artists Rights Society
Artists Rights Society is a major US collective management organization for visual artists. It represents over 80,000 visual artists and estates of visual artists from around the world.
Art Resource
Art Resource licenses “[h]igh quality images of works of painting, sculpture, architecture and the minor arts” from museums and archives around the world.
Images for Academic Publishing
ARTstor's Images for Acacdemic Publishing program provides “free print-quality images for use in scholarly publications," even without an ARTstor subscription.

Adapted from “Obtaining Copyright Permissions” by University of Michigan University Libraries, used under a CC-BY 4.0 license