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.
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 13th – 15th 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.
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.
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. You can start your search and library here: 600+ Free Art Books 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
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.]
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