Art & Design Image Databases
This is a list of image database related to art and design, BUT if you need other types of images there are many more on the Image Databases page.
- Ad*Access This link opens in a new windowOver 7,000 U.S. and Canadian magazine and newspaper advertisements in five product categories - Beauty and Hygiene, Radio, Television, Transportation, and World War II propaganda. 1911-1955.
- AP Newsroom This link opens in a new windowCurrent and historical photographs, audio clips, & news from the Associated Press. The Archive is licensed for educational use. Coverage: Photographs (1826-present), audio clips (1920’s-present), news stories (1997-present).
- Art Images for College Teaching This link opens in a new windowImages of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance European art & architecture that can be used in any application that is both educational and non-commercial.
- ARTstor This link opens in a new windowOver a million images of artworks, photography (artistic and documentary), and the built environment (architectural structures and monuments).
Coverage: Dates vary.
- Credo Reference This link opens in a new windowOver 600 reference books, including encyclopedias, dictionaries (English and foreign language), thesauri, books of quotations, as well as a range of subject-specific reference books.
- Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850 - 1920 This link opens in a new windowOver 9,000 images that illustrate the rise of consumer culture, especially after the American Civil War, and the birth of a professionalized advertising industry in the United States.
- Grove encyclopedia of classical art and architecture This link opens in a new windowEssays on ceramics, metalwork, mosaics, painting and sculpture, art forms, artists, rulers, philosophers, architecture, archaeological sites and stylistic developments. 2000 BC to present.
- OAIster This link opens in a new windowFull-text articles, books, texts, audio files, videos, images, and datasets stored in over 1,100 open access repositories all over the world.
- Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975 This link opens in a new windowSociology. Rock and roll, counterculture, peace and protest, fashion, civil rights, Vietnam, student activism, underground publications.
- rhizome.org This link opens in a new windowArt. Includes creation, presentation, discussion & preservation of contemporary art that uses new technologies in significant ways. Features ArtBase, an archive of new media art including some 2500 projects, discussion and critical writing posts from 1996 to present. Users may set up individual accounts at the site to subscribe to Rhizome's email lists, browse recently added content, post to rhizome discussion lists, & submit projects to ArtBase.
- Smithsonian Institution Collections Search Center This link opens in a new windowArt, Political History, Natural History, Folklife, Culture, Air and Space, Humanities, Photographs, Horticulture.
- VADS This link opens in a new windowOnline portfolio of Brtitish visual art collections comprising over 100,000 images. Offers teaching resources based around the VADS image collections, browsing by collection, or by the themes of applied arts, architecture, design, fine art, and media.
- Web Gallery of Art This link opens in a new windowA virtual museum and searchable database of European painting and sculpture of the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque periods. 1000-1850.
- WorldImages This link opens in a new windowOver 100,000 images free for non-profit educational purposes. The images are searchable by art form, style, nationality, city/site, historical era, material, technique or medium. You can also browse the images by continent and topic, or by subject (“portfolio”). Global coverage & includes all areas of visual imagery.
Finding Images in Image Databases and Books
Please see the Finding Images Research Guide for more complete information on finding images, copyright, and presentation tools & techniques.
- You can see a list of all the library's image databases from the "By Type" drop down menu on the Research Databases page. Or use the list to the left here.
- You can also check the library catalog for art books with images. Just use the keyword for the type of image you want and an abbreviation like ill or illus for illustration. Example: birds and ill or type in birds and illus. Other words for finding images that you can use in catalog searches are pictoral works, illustration, or "___ in art", for example "flowers in art".
- We do own the Illustration Index, Sculpture Index, and Havlice's World Painting Index (tells you what book has a reproduction or illustration of known works by known artists) and Martha Moss's Photography Books Index, volumes I and II, a subject guide to photo anthologies.
- If you do a keyword search under “catalogue raisonne” you will get all the books of the complete works (catalogue raisonne) of particular artists.
- We also own several issues of the Dover Pictorial Archive Series
- "Visual communication", “advertising,” and “marketing” are subject headings that can have image books. For example, if you do a keyword search using "advertising and annual” you will see all the titles we have that are advertising awarded images and campaigns (Annual Clio, National Addy, Graphis, Art Director's Annual, Photo Annual, Major marketing campaigns annual). If you look under the subject heading “Advertising Campaign – Periodicals”, you will see others.
