Recommended Art Image Databases
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JSTOR (formerly ARTStor)Repository of hundreds of thousands of digital images, from across many periods and cultures. Architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, design, and other forms of visual culture are represented. Provides tools to actively use images for scholarship, teaching, and learning. You can browse ARTstor collections while on SU's campus, but in order to download or save content, you will need to register for an ARTstor user account.
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ArtsyArtsy features the world’s leading galleries, museum collections, foundations, artist estates, art fairs, and benefit auctions, all in one place. Our growing database of 300,000 images of art, architecture, and design by 40,000 artists spans historical, modern, and contemporary works, and includes the largest online database of contemporary art.
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EuropeanaMulti-lingual online collection of millions of digitized items from European museums, libraries, archives and multi-media collections.
Open Access Image Collections
Open Access, by AJC ajcann.wordpress.com, CC BY-NC-SA
Many cultural institutions are now allowing the downloading of images of artworks from their respective collections which are in the public domain.
Other Image Resources
Images are all around us and are easily searchable thanks to sites like Google Images, Flickr, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest to mention a few.
Free to use images (copyright-free/public domain/Creative Commons licensing):
- Unsplash.com
- Smithsonian Institute's Flickr
- Nappy.co
- Wikimedia Commons
- Art Institute of Chicago
- National Gallery of Art
- Creative Commons Openverse
- Free to use films are located at Internet Archive's Prelinger Archives.
It depends upon your assignment whether these are acceptable ways of gathering and using images. Please consult with your professor if you have questions about whether or not these are suitable ways of searching for images for your given assignment.