General Art Collections
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The Met CollectionThis free database contains images of over nearly 500,000 works of art from the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The database is searchable and it is also divided into 22 subject groups including, for example:
American Decorative Art
Asian Art
Islamic Art
Musical Instruments
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WorldImages [San Jose State University] This link opens in a new windowWorldImages "contains approximately 100,000 images, is global in coverage and includes all areas of visual imagery. WorldImages is accessible anywhere and its images can be freely used for non-profit educational purposes. . . . The images can be located using many search techniques, and for convenience they are organized into over 900 portfolios."
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Oxford Art Online This link opens in a new windowThe Advanced Search enables a user to search among the nearly 20,000 art images in this resource.
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Google Arts & Culture Project This link opens in a new windowA collection of high-resolution images from museums and cultural institutions around the world.
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Getty Research Institute Open Content Images This link opens in a new windowNearly 80,000 freely available images are currently available in this growing collection from the Getty Research Insititute.
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ArtUK This link opens in a new windowSearchable image collection composed of artworks from over 3,000 public art sites in the United Kingdom.
Topical Art Collections
Here is just a small collection of the growing number of high-quality digitized art collections available online.
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Discover Islamic ArtAn online exhibit of Islamic art objects drawn from Museums around the world. It is a project of the Museum With No Frontiers.
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Chinese Painting and Calligraphy This link opens in a new windowAn online catalogue that provides access to the Seattle Art Museum's collection of 152 Chinese painting and calligraphy which has never been studied in depth and is heretofore largely unpublished. The online catalogue, includes thoughtful and provocative essays about major works by renowned scholars, with high-resolution, zoom-able images of the works of art, and thorough documentation, including transcriptions and translations of inscriptions and colophons, and seals which are transcribed, identified and located.
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accessCeramics: a contemporary ceramics image resourceThis is a juried site of work by contemporary ceramic artists. It includes images of selected works that can be used for educational purposes. Most of the artists represented are from North America.
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Paul Mellon Centre Photographic ArchiveContains over 100,000 photographs of British paintings, sculpture, architecture and the decorative arts, much of it in private hands.
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Rijksmuseum Open Image CollectionsThe collection provides access to more than 125,000 paintings by Dutch artists, such as Rembrandt and Johannes Vermeer.
Access the collection through the Rijksstudio application link at this site