Library & Cultural Services: Art History: Websites / Open Access Resources

Websites: Introduction

There is a huge amount of information available for free on the Internet, although the quality is variable. Some reliable sources are suggested below - but always make sure you evaluate what you find! You can find more information about evaluating sources on the library website.

General Art History Websites

The Art Guide Provides access to art history websites, such as subject gateways, image databases, search engines, or mailing lists. The collection covers the full range of European medieval, modern, and contemporary art history, and Aesthetics.
Art History Resources on the Web Online resources covering the history of art throughout time and across the globe, compiled by Dr. Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe, professor of Art History at Sweet Briar College.
ArtSource A collection of networked resources on Art and Architecture, as well as original materials submitted by librarians, artists, and art historians.
Art UK Digitised archive of artworks from over 3,200 public collections in the UK.
Courtauld Books Online Open access series of online scholarly books published by The Courtauld Institute of Art, freely available to read online and to download without charge.
Dictionary of Art Historians A biographical and methodological database intended as a starting point to learning the background of major art historians of western art history.
Europeana Largely free digital collections covering art, music, fashion, photography from libraries, museums, galleries & archives across Europe.
Google Arts and Culture Allows you to browse art work from collections around the world.
Metropolitan Museum of Art: Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Chronological, geographical, and thematic exploration of the history of art from around the world, as illustrated especially by the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection. The Museum's curatorial, conservation, and education staff—the largest team of art experts anywhere in the world—research and write the Timeline, which is an invaluable reference and research tool for students, educators, scholars, and anyone interested in the study of art history and related subjects.
Metropolitan Museum of Art Publications Five decades of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's publications, available to read, download and/or search for free.
The Watercolour World Free online database of documentary watercolours painted before 1900

Galleries and Museums

Image Databases

Art UK
Digitised archive of artworks from over 3,200 public collections in the UK.
Metropolitian Museum of Art - Open Access Artworks
A collection of over 400,000 hi-res images of public-domain works from the collection that can be downloaded, shared, and remixed without restriction.
Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive
Open-access archive of more than 100,000 digitised photographs of British art and architecture. You can download, compare, and contrast the works using digital tools. More than 44,000 images are available for reuse, offered with a Creative Commons licence for non-commercial purposes.
VADS (Visual Arts Data Service)
Archive of over 140,000 images from 300 different UK art and design collections, available free for use in education.

19th Century Art

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide Founded in 2002, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide is a scholarly, refereed e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, architecture, and decorative arts across the globe.
Web Gallery of Impressionism The Web Gallery is a virtual world and free online encyclopedia of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, offering a wide collection of images from different artists and periods in time.

20th Century Art

AHRB Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its Legacies
The International Dada Archive The collection of the International Dada Archive is made up of works by and about the Dadaists including books, articles, microfilmed manuscript collections, videorecordings, sound recordings, and online resources. Primary access to the entire collection is through the International Online Bibliography of Dada, a catalog containing approximately 60,000 titles.

Contemporary Art

Axisweb Features profiles of professional artists and curators, interviews, discussions, art news and debates.
Queer Arts Resource Includes contemporary and historical queer art.

African Art

African Art Exhibition of 1923 at the Brooklyn Museum A digitized selection of textual and visual documents related to Stewart Culin's important 1923 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, Primitive Negro Art, Chiefly from the Belgian Congo. Includes correspondence, an exhibition catalogue, newspaper and magazine clippings, images, and other textual resources.
Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives at the National Museum of African Art A research and reference center with over 300,000 still photographic images documenting the arts, peoples and history of Africa over the past 120 years.

American Art

Smithsonian Archives of American Art Since 1954, the Archive has collected roughly 16 million letters, photographs, diaries, sketches, scrapbooks, business records, and other documentation that supports the study of the history of the visual arts in America.

British Art

William Blake Archive A free site on the World Wide Web since 1996, the Blake Archive was conceived as an international public resource that would provide unified access to major works of visual and literary art that are highly disparate, widely dispersed, and more and more often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity, and extreme fragility.
AXIS Visual arts service that provides information about artists and craftspeople living/working in Britain

Latin American/Caribbean Art

Essex Collection of Art from Latin America (ESCALA)
Caribbean Art and Visual Culture An open access, searchable web site featuring video and audio interviews, photographs, biographies, and professional resumes by and about Caribbean artists, RSS feeds of prominent Caribbean art critics, and other information on and by Caribbean artists.
Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art The International Center for Arts of the Americas (ICAA) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston launched the Documents of 20th-century Latin American and Latino Art digital archive to provide access to primary sources and critical documents tracing the development of twentieth-century art in Latin America and among Latino populations in the United States. Countries featured in the first phase of this multiyear project include Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Latino USA.