The National Gallery of Australia is one of the largest museums in the country. It houses more than 160,000 works of art in Australian art, Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander art, Asian art, European and American art, Asian art and Pacific art. Users can conduct a keyword search or browse by the different categories.
Australian Prints + Printmaking provides “a gateway for information on printed images from Australia and the Asia Pacific region”. The site provides a database of prints and printmaking by artists from Australia and the pacific regions, including New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. The site also allows users to explore the collections through three experimental web interfaces, designed by Mitchell Whitelaw and Ben Ennis Butler. The interfaces are created as part of their research into ‘generous interfaces’ that attempt to provide new ways to explore digital collections. Users can search or browse by artists, subjects, works and networks, and decade summary.
A division of the Fashion Institute of Technology, the Museum at FIT (MFIT) is one of the specialised fashion museums accredited by the American Alliance of Museum. The museum’s permanent collection contains about 50,000 garments and accessories from the 18th century to present. The works include pertinent designers such as Chanel, Dior and Balenciaga. Users can search or browse by time periods and types.
Display is “a curated collection of important modern, mid 20th century graphic design books, periodicals, advertisements and ephemera”. Developed by Kind Company, a web and print design agency based in New York, the intention was to spread awareness of Graphic Design as “a source of educational, historical and scholarly analysis for teachers, students, designers and independent researchers”. Images from Display are digitised from original items within the collection.
According to their Annual Report 2014, the Philadelphia Museum of Art contains about 227,000 works of art in their collections. More than 100,000 images are made available through their digital collection. Users can search by keywords, artist, country of work and curatorial departments.
The Cleveland Museum of Art houses close to 45,000 objects that span across 6,000 years. Their online collection provides access to close to 34,800 images. Users can search or browse by various collections, creators and types.
Founded in 1965, the Israel Museum is “the largest cultural institution in the State of Israel”. They houses encyclopaedic collections, ranging from pre-history to the present day in archaelogy, fine arts and Jewish art. Their digital image database, IMAGINE, allows users to search and browse the collections by exhibitions, collections or departments.
The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco houses more than 18,000 objects ranging from “tiny jades to monumental sculptures”. From the “earliest dated Chinese Buddha image to the contemporary works”, their collections span across different cultures, dynasties, religions and geographies over 6,000 years. The museum provides more than 12,000 images in their online collection. Users can search or browse the collections by the different types of art.
One of the oldest galleries in Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) houses more than 70,000 works of art. Their digital collection contains close to 59,000 images of Australian and international works of art. Users may search or browse by the different collection areas.
The National Geographic Society is one of the largest scientific institutions in the world, focusing on geography, archaeology, natural science, conversation and the study of world culture and history. They offer stunning photographs, which can be a good source of images in these areas for educational and personal purposes.
The Guggenheim Museum contains an extensive holding of over 7,000 artworks from the late 19th century to present day. Their collection online presents “a searchable database of selected artworks from the Guggenheim’s permanent collection of over 7,000 artworks”, which includes works from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The database can also be browsed by artists, dates, mediums, movements and venues.
The Van Gogh Museum is an art museum dedicated to the works of Vincent van Gogh. It contains the largest collection of his paintings and drawings in the world. The digital collection contains more than 830 works by Vincent and his contemporaries. The digital images of the works can be downloaded for non-commercial purposes in high-resolution, which are an average of 6,000 x 6,000 pixels. The collection can be searched or filtered by artist, location, year, type and genre.
Getty Images is one of the world’s leading suppliers for stock images. Through their embed tool, users can drop an image into their blog, website or social media feed without worrying about copyright restrictions. The tool will generate a code that will automatically include the necessary attribution and link back to the licensing page.
Funded by the Duke Endowment “Library 2000” Fund, Ad*Access is a project that presents images and database information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955. The images provide a perspective of major campaigns and companies in 5 main areas: Radio, Television, Transportation, Beauty and Hygiene, and World War II.
The National Gallery in London contains the national collection of Western European paintings from the 13th to the 19th centuries, with works by Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Renoir, Van Gogh and more. The collection can be filtered by subjects, themes, artists, styles and timeline. Subjects include Travel, Still Life & Objects, People & Costume, Land, Sea & City, Work & Leisure, Seasons & Weather, Religious & Biblical, Mythological, Plants & Animals and Historical.
As one of the largest museums in the world, the Metropolitan Museum (MET) provides access to more than 400,000 high-resolution digital images of public domain works across different periods and geographic locations. Such works can be downloaded directly from the Museum’s website for non-commercial use—including in scholarly publications in any media—without permission from the Museum and without a fee.
NGA Images is an online repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. The Gallery has one of the finest art collections in the world with works spanning from the Middle Ages to present day. Their strongest collection is the Italian Renaissance collection, which includes masterpieces from Raphael, Titian, Filippo Lippi and Giovanni Bellini. Through NGA Images, more than 37,000 digital images are available free of charge for download and use.