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600+ Free Art Books Online

David Teniers the Younger, David Taisniers, an example of the art books available online for free

600+ Free Art Books Online

Hefty art books, with full-color reproductions on glossy pages, demand respect on any shelf or coffee table. But they can be expensive, take up space, and use up paper.

Three American art museums have gifted us all with free access to their collections of art books. Without committing to making a payment beyond our internet and phone charges, we can build our own online libraries of art books and exhibition catalogs, courtesy of the Guggenheim, Met, and Getty Museums.

Below are links and instructions to get you started building your own online library.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Exterior photo of Guggenheim Museum re. free art books online

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum publishes books and catalogs to coincide with its exhibitions. The Guggenheim offers access to view 200+ of its published texts which accompanied shows, from 1936 – 2005, on their archive.org page.

Just click on an image and you’ll get a pop-up screen with an online magazine style layout.

You can flip through the pages forwards and backwards with simple clicks on the right and left hand sides of the book. Information about the publication is listed beneath the text, and similar texts are listed beneath that information.

If you’d like to download the publication, just click on the search icon (magnifying glass in the upper right), and you’ll get a pop-up window with several format choices: .pdf, ePub, Plain Text, DAISY, and Kindle.

The Met Museum

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) offers 50 years’ worth of its publications on art history available to read and download for free. These 1,500+ publications are available on their MetPublications page.

They include books, online publications, Bulletins, and Journals, dating back as far as 1964.

“MetPublications includes a description and table of contents for most titles, as well as information about the authors, reviews, awards, and links to related Met titles by author and by theme. Current book titles that are in-print may be previewed and fully searched online, with a link to purchase the book. The full contents of almost all other book titles may be read online, searched, or downloaded as a PDF."

Use the search box on the left side to find a publication by Title, Author, Keyword, Publication type, Thematic category, Format, or Collection/Department:

American Decorative Arts

American Paintings and Sculpture

Ancient Near Eastern Art

Antonio Ratti Textile Center

Arms and Armor

Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas

Asian Art

Drawings and Prints

Education

Egyptian Art

European Paintings

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

Greek and Roman Art

Islamic Art

Medieval Art and the Cloisters

Modern and Contemporary Art

Musical Instruments

Objects Conservation

Paintings Conservation

Paper Conservation

Photograph Conservation

Photographs

Robert Lehman Collection

Scientific Research

The Costume Institute

Watson Library

"Many of these out-of-print books will be available for purchase, when rights permit, through print-on-demand capabilities in association with Yale University Press. For the Met's Bulletin, all but the most recent issue can be downloaded as a PDF. For the Met's Journal, all individual articles and entire volumes can be downloaded as a PDF.” Met Publications

The Getty Museum

Exterior photo of J. Paul Getty Museum re. free art books online

Getty Publications offers over 250 art books, free to browse and download, through their Virtual Library. The Virtual Library’s free-to-download books and texts come from several Getty institutions: the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Conservation Institute, and the Getty Research Institute.

All of the books are available in .pdf format.

Want to check out free photos from museums? In the past few years, many museums, libraries, and corporate collections have uploaded photo libraries online and made them available to the public. Some have even made their images open to public domain use, with free downloads.

If you'd like to explore further, see our articles Museum Collection Images, Craft Museums, and Digitized Knitting Magazines.

Collectible Art Books

If you love flipping through glossy pages of photo-rich specialty books, you'll find a great selection of art, design, fashion, and architecture books at the online stores The Met Musem Store and Taschen. [This post contains affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more information.] You can find our curated art and craft book shop by clicking on any of the book covers below.

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Museum Collection Images

Museum collections inventory boxes on shelves

Museum Collection Images

In the past few years, many museums, libraries, and corporate collections have uploaded their photo libraries online and made them available to the public. Some have even made their images open to public domain use, with free downloads.

Below is a list of entities where you’re welcome to search their databases for art and craft images.

Just click on the links provided to access images.

Exterior photo of the Met Museum re. free art books online

Art Images from Museums & Libraries

The Metropolitan Museum of Art offers a treasure trove of easily searchable crafted items, many which are not on view but are tucked away in their archives.

Searching by Object Type gets results for beads, ceramics, glass, porcelain, pottery, printing blocks, tapestries, needlework, textiles, linen, lace, etc., including furniture and textiles from 8000 BC to the present.

You can filter The Met’s Open Access Artworks on the left hand side by Artist/Culture, Object Type/Material, Geographic Location, Date/Era, and Department.

The Department breakdown for searching is (in alphabetical order): American Decorative Arts (8982 pieces), American Paintings and Sculpture (4799), Ancient Near Eastern Art (6157), Antonio Ratti Textile Center (42), Arms and Armor (5864), Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas (6125), Asian Art (30274), Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection (2415), The Cloisters (2261), Costume Institute (7732), Drawings and Prints (49619), Egyptian Art (12606), European Paintings (1943), European Sculpture and Decorative Arts (30889), Greek and Roman Art (12799), Islamic Art (12329), The Libraries (139), Medieval Art (6812), Modern and Contemporary Art (1046), Musical Instruments (1856), Photographs (6723), Provenance Research Project (311), and the Robert Lehman Collection (2362).

You can also filter by Highlights, Artworks on Display, Artworks with Image, and Public Domain Artworks. To get you started, here’s a page with images in the public domain, including a Ceramic Bowl from the 13^th – 15^th century, and an Embroidered Sampler made by Hannah B. Loring, dated 1812.

Google Arts & Culture includes more than 250,000 works of art from more than 250 museums worldwide, including Japanese, Kuwaiti, Danish, and Australian museums.

If you’ve got a gmail account, you’ll have a Profile in the upper right in Google Arts & Culture. There, you can create a List of Favorites and a Gallery. You can click on Nearby to get a mapped list of galleries and museums near your current location.

You can explore featured artists, themes, and stories. Click on EXPLORE in the upper right corner to be directed to a page with Highlights, Categories, Collections, Top Stories of the Week, and Popular Topics.

For example, after searching for “crafts,” the site suggested 542 Stories, 3 Themes, 4,859 photographed items, and 10 museum views to get me started.

(I wanted to dive right into a photo featuring “Weaving, Honba Oshima Tsumugi Fabric” from the collection of Kyoto Women, as well as a photo of Akamba beadwork from the collection of Kenya National Archives. This is a true treasure trove, laid out in a stunningly visual searchable platform.)

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art The LA County Museum online collections database offers up, among others, searchable categories for Gods and Goddesses, Greek Ceramics, So Cal Design, Spanish Colonial Art & 19th Century Art, Woodcuts, Glass, and Portraits through its collections portal.

The American Folk Art Museum’s online image collection includes works on paper, paintings, quilts, photographs, furniture, Fraternal art and objects, and books, sculptures, and signs.

The New York Public Library’s Digital Collection has a treasure trove of over 180,000 easily searchable items in their online database, including photographs, advertisements, ephemera, maps, atlases, illustrations, postcards, book jackets, etc.

The New York Public Library’s Open Access Maps project includes more than 20,000 works which are in the public domain.

The British Library has uploaded images to its Flickr Commons Project. A good place to start is the British Library Commons page.

The Museum of New Zealand's online collection includes “800,000 artworks, taonga, photographs, collection objects, and botanical and zoological specimens from Te Papa’s collections.” Objects can be searched based on whether there are images, and whether the images are downloadable. The collection includes categories Taonga Maori, Pacific Cultures, History, Photography, Art, Botany and Zoology.

The National Gallery of Art “...Images is a repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. On this website you can search, browse, share, and download images. A standards-based reproduction guide and a help section provide advice for both novices and experts. More than 51,000 open access digital images up to 4000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use. NGA Images is designed to facilitate learning, enrichment, enjoyment, and exploration.”

The Rijksmuseum has curated its database of images into collections, which are searchable by themes, such as Embroidery, Fashion, Still Life, and Animal Drawings.

The Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries and the Freer Study Collection have over 40,000 works available for high resolution download.

CRAFT MUSEUMS

600+ FREE ART BOOKS ONLINE

CRAFTING RESOURCES

Additional Museum Resources

Below are links to some museums that are either not that user-friendly for searching for crafted items, or have few crafted items but are a great potential resources for inspiration nonetheless.

Norway’s National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design has a collection of over 400,000 art and craft objects which you can view online, and a page where you can start your search by technique.

If you need to translate from Norwegian to English, you can use Google's Translator.

Stanford University’s French Revolution Collection

If you’re a cartoonist or collagist, you might really enjoy perusing the more than 14,000 high-resolution images from Stanford University’s French Revolution Digital Archive, a partnership between Stanford University and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

You can look at medals, coins, prints, illustrations, and artifacts at the Parliamentary Archives and Images of the French Revolution.

Stanford University’s Cantor Art Center has over 45,000 works of art available to browse.

The Getty Museum’s Open Content Program

The Getty Search Gateway links to the J. Paul Getty Museum Collection Database, the Getty Research Institute Research Library Catalog, the Getty Research Institute Collections Inventories and Finding Aids, and the Getty Research Institute Digital Collections.

The Guggenheim Museum has "...over 1,700 artworks by more than 625 artists, the Collection Online presents a searchable database of selected artworks from the Guggenheim’s permanent collection of more than 7,000 artworks. The selection reflects the breadth, diversity, and tenor of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s extensive holdings from the late 19th century through the present day. The Collection Online is continually expanded to include a larger representation of the museum’s core holdings as well as recent acquisitions.”

The Museum of Modern Art has 77,000 works available for perusal online.

Other Choices

There are museums which don’t have extensive online collections of work, but which feature images from current and past shows, where craft items may be included. Our post Craft Museums points you to a list of museums which collect and show contemporary American crafted items.

You can do online searches to study and get inspiration from works that have been collected, photographed, and put online to share. You'll find quick links for quilts, textiles, folk art, fiber arts, contemporary crafts, handicrafts, weaving, wood works, ceramics, pottery, and glassworks collections to visit in person or view online.

For more inspiration, see what American Crafts have been featured in a TV show dedicated to American craft-making - with the first three seasons available for free online. It's great to see the craft-makers, their processes, and their work spaces.

We've created a page of quick links for you to get started with Crafting Resources, including where to get great free resources for crafting, crafting How-To's, and the online stores we source from for our own projects.

Collectible Art Books

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Vintage Graphics

Vintage Graphics Image Bank

Searching for free images online can be time-consuming and daunting. The Graphics Fairy site has an image bank of over 5000 images, and is easily searchable by vintage graphics type and theme.

Available for free on The Graphics Fairy are vintage stock images, antique graphics, illustrations, and printables that are in the public domain.

You can search by themes such as children, advertising, wedding, flowers, postcards, travel, garden, animal, retro, maps, botanicals, natural history, and many more.

Hover your mouse over "Categories" in the top menu and you'll see a list of 78 different categories you can dive into.

Karen Watson, the brains and blogger behind The Graphics Fairy, is generous with her collection of goodies. Besides the graphics, she offers instructions for DIY/craft projects. Many of these projects involve transferring her site’s graphic images onto objects – glass jars, coffee mugs, fabric, and furniture.

Karen’s projects have the look and feel of classic pieces that you might find at high-end stores, and she shows you how to achieve the desired effects with clearly explained and photographed step-by-step instructions.

Vintage Graphics Project Ideas

Some of my favorite projects from her site are: furniture painting techniques; how to age galvanized metal; how to print on fabric using an ink jet printer and freezer paper; and, transfer and decoupage projects.

Images available on The Graphics Fairy can be used to make transfers, and for decoupage, scrapbooking, DIY projects, craft tutorials, and home decorating.

And, as long as you follow Karen’s rules, you can use them as free printables for your own website.

If you need help getting started, you'll get a lot of ideas by visiting The Graphics Fairy's Transfer Printables page, followed up by checking out suggested transfer methods for DIY projects.

Image Transfer Method Instructions

After checking out Karen's My Top Tip for working with Transfers, you'll be ready to tackle some image transfer methods outlined by The Graphics Fairy and other DIY sites. Here are some quick links:

How to Transfer Typography onto Furniture

The Citra Solv Method

The Wax Paper Method

The Freezer Paper Method

Transfer Method for Inkjet or Laser Prints

DIY Packing Tape Transfers

Transfer to Leather

6 Ways to Print on Fabric

High Quality Image Transfers on Fabric

Chalk Paint Transfer Technique

Wood Transfer Method

Clear Contact Method

Easy Clay Image Transfer

Transfer a Simple Image onto Glass

How to Mirror Your Images for Transfers

How to Reverse Your Images with Picmonkey

· Don't miss: Crafting Resources, Museum Collection Images, Vintage Maps, and Free Paper Printables for Kids.

Terms for Graphics Reuse

Here are the generous terms for reuse for The Graphics Fairy:

“The Graphics Fairy is an Angel Company. You are free to use all clip art images in any of your projects created for resale or pleasure. Please do not use more than 6 of the graphic images within any one project, or within a single page of a blog or website. My images may not be used on free graphics sites (in other words if you own a “free graphics site”, do not post my images on your site to give away for free). You may sell my graphics, as collage sheets, or printables, if you desire, providing you follow the 6 image rule. A link to the Graphics Fairy is very much appreciated, when including the images on your blog or website. Thank you! © The Graphics Fairy 2007”

Please also check out her Disclaimer webpage outlining public domain and copyright issues with the reuse of images.