Art Institute of Chicago
Thousands of artworks in the museum’s wide-ranging collection—from our world-renowned icons to lesser-known gems from every corner of the globe—as well as our books, writings, reference materials, and other resources are available for download.
ARTstor is a database of over one million digital images encompassing architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and material culture. An Account is required.
This site enables global audiences to learn about the UK’s national art collection. It features art in every UK public collection and is a collaboration between over 3,200 British institutions.
As the first art museum in Austria, the Belvedere is committed to an Open Content Policy for images of artworks no longer protected by copyright. These images are made available in print quality and free of charge via the Belvedere Website.
British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts
Search images of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in the British Library, one of the richest collections in the world.
Cleveland Art Museum
30,000 public-domain artworks from the CMA’s world-renowned collection—all without asking permission.
CAA list of Free Images for Academic/Scholarly Use
Collections that students can use for academic purposes, mostly from museums. Scroll down for the website list.
Creative Commons offers access to search services provided by other independent organizations such as Flickr and Wikimedia Commons.
Getty provides images of works that are in the public domain and their collections. Materials can be accessed via a web interface, the Getty Search Gateway.
Aggregates art collections from a growing list of museums worldwide set in a dynamic, user-friendly platform. View or create shared personal collections for research and inspiration.
Harvard Art Museums
More than 200,000 images are available from the university’s collections of 250,000 objects.
Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA)
Public Domain Images in the collection can be downloaded from the IMA website (search collection). If you select commercial use, you are then required to describe the project for which you would like to use the image in detail. In addition, the Museum asks you to credit the source of the image.
Records for approximately 5,000 works and 4,100 images of works are available through a web interface. All images are in the public domain.
LACMA offers 20,000 high-quality unrestricted images of art from their collection and is available for everyone to download and use freely.
Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalogue
The PPOC Collection offers over 1.2 million digitized images drawn from primarily American history, including photographs, fine and popular prints and drawings, posters, and architectural and engineering drawings.
Mauritshuis, The Hague
All the works of art of the Mauritshuis collection can now also be admired online. Most of the collection has been photographed in high resolution, allowing you to zoom in to the smallest details.
Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET)
All images of public-domain artworks in the MET Museum’s collection are now available for unrestricted use.
Images of works of art identified as in the Public Domain (CC PDM) have been identified as free of known restrictions under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights. MIA’s collection contains over 50,000 works in the Public Domain! You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the works, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.
Munch Museet, Norway
Single-artist collection with 1,150 paintings and some 18,000 prints, free to download,
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
Over 60,000 high-resolution are available for download.
NGA Images is a repository of open-access digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. 29,000 images are available for non-commercial use.
More than 50,000 images are available to download from 20 institutions across Denmark.
The National Museum has more than 20,000 images available for download and use, free of charge.
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm
Most of the collection, 6,000 images, are available for download via Wikimedia Commons.
New York Public Library (NYPL) Digital Collections
Free, public domain access to download and use more than 180,000 high-resolution images in this collection of more than 700,000 digitized images. All are available for educational use.
Online Museum Resources on Asian Art (Columbia U)
OMuRAA identifies online visual resources having to do with Asian Art– including collections databases, digital image libraries, archived websites of special exhibitions, online presentations of focused collections, and websites for teaching with and about art — and indexes them in ways that are familiar to teachers and students in world history, world literature, and general art courses.
Access many images and virtual exhibits from fourteen significant museums in Paris.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
360,000 images – more than a third of the collection.
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
As of 26 February 2020, 2.8m digitized images from across the Smithsonian’s multiple museums, research centers, libraries, and archives are freely available online.
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich
Full access to out-of-copyright works. Strong on Munich-based painters of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Around 15,000 works (a quarter of a million) have been photographed in hi-res, with all public domain images free to download and use.
The metadata is not embedded in the downloaded image. There are no options for high or low-resolution images. In its Image Rights, Reproduction, and Terms of Use, the Gallery asks that you provide them with information about your project if you are making scholarly or commercial use of a CC0 designated work.
Yale University
Some 250,000 images from the university collections, including the Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art, are available and free to download.
