History of Art: Free Web Sources

JSTOR Daily provides context for current events using scholarship found in JSTOR, a digital library of academic journals, books, and other material. They publish articles grounded in peer-reviewed research and provide free access to that research for all of their readers.

by Edward Mccurdy Published 1923. On Internet Archive.

Short snippets of Rodin, Monet, Renoir and Degas

The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History pairs essays and works of art with chronologies, telling the story of art and global culture through the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collections.

A collaborative project between Qatar Museums, Qatar Foundation and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, the Mathaf Encyclopedia of Modern Art and the Arab World provides a major resource on artists from the Arab world and their histories

MetPublications is a portal to The Met's comprehensive publishing program with over 1,500 titles, including books, online publications, and Bulletins and Journals from the last five decades

Smarthistory is a collection of videos and essays. a collaboration of more than 200 art historians, archaeologists, curators and other specialists.

The world’s pre-eminent and most widely used research center dedicated to collecting, preserving, and providing access to primary sources that document the history of the visual arts in America.

The Beinecke's collections afford opportunities for interdisciplinary research in such fields as medieval, Renaissance, and eighteenth-century studies, art history, photography, American studies, the history of printing, and modernism in art and literature.

National Library of France.Includes a section on images (site in French)

The British Museum's Department of Prints and Drawings contains the national collection of Western prints and drawings.. It is one of the top three collections of its kind in the world. There are approximately 50,000 drawings and over two million prints dating from the beginning of the fifteenth century up to the present day.

Crawford Art Gallery is a National Cultural Institution and regional art museum for Munster, dedicated to the visual arts, both historic and contemporary.

The Drawing Center, a museum in Manhattan's SoHo district, explores the medium of drawing as primary, dynamic, and relevant to contemporary culture, the future of art, and creative thought.

Browse, search and find information on the works, artists and collections of the Ateneum Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma and the Sinebrychoff Art Museum. The Finnish National Gallery has freed nearly 12 000 images licensed with the CC0 licence. Images marked CC0 can be freely used by anyone. They can be shared, modified and used in any context, including teaching, research, and commercial purposes, for example. These images are free to be used because the copyright (70 full calendar years after the death of the artist) has expired. The collections are also on Europeana

The Frick is known for its distinguished Old Master paintings and outstanding examples of European sculpture and decorative arts.

Includes videos about artists included in exhibitions, lectures etc.

Committed to innovation, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation collects, preserves, and interprets modern and contemporary art, and explores ideas across cultures through dynamic curatorial and educational initiatives and collaborations.

All images of public-domain artworks in the Museum's collection are now available for free and unrestricted use

All the surviving letters written and received by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) are contained in this edition of his correspondence. By the Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences

The digitized collection showcases a vast amount of Van Gogh’s work—including not only landscapes, but also his many portraits, self-portraits, drawings, city scenes, and still-lifes.

Links to art history resources on the Internet, curated by Dr. Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe

Art UK works with the UK’s public art collections to showcase their artworks to the world. There are already over 200,000 artworks on Art UK. The art is from museums, universities, town halls, hospitals and even a lighthouse. It is spread over 3,250 venues from the Shetland Islands to the Isles of Scilly. Much of the art isn’t usually on display in real life and a high proportion had not been photographed before we started our work in 2003.
At the moment it’s mainly oil paintings with a small and growing number of watercolours and other works on paper that partner collections have added to the site.
They will soon be adding the nation’s sculpture collection of the last thousand years. The first of some 170,000 sculptures will join the site in 2018.

From the Getty Research Institute

Cultural collections from all over Europe.

Free digital backlist titles from the Getty Publications Archives

Features content from over 1,000 leading museums and archives who have partnered with the Google Cultural Institute to bring the world's treasures online. Includes sections on artists, mediums and movements.

Download 200+ Free Modern Art Books from the Guggenheim Museum

free database of references for Persian paintings, Ottoman paintings, Arab paintings and Mughal paintings. This site enables you to locate printed reproductions, commentaries and weblinks for thousands of Islamic paintings, including illuminated "carpet" pages, decorated Quran pages, and book bindings from over 230 collections all over the world.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art provides access to catalogues, brochures and books about German Expressionism, modern art, Southeast Asian art, and more.

A virtual museum and searchable database of European fine arts from the 8th to 19th centuries.

In addition to creating art, many artists wrote diaries and letters and made sketchbooks that contain rich details about their lives and creative processes. Help transcribe documents from the Tate collection, and reveal the secret lives of artists.