Finding Images Resource Guide
This guide provides an overview of tools and basic strategies for finding reproductions and illustrations of works of art and other images. Included is information on connecting to digital collections, reference sources, selected Internet resources, image copyright, and citing images. All collections marked VCU are available on both campuses OR off campus with EZProxy.
AP Images VCU
Searchable collection of about 700,000 news photos with captions. International Photo Archive, focused on North America; Euro/Asia Photo Archive, regional photos; and Graphics-PDF, maps, diagrams, and other graphics. Coverage 1860 - present.
ARTstor VCU
Curated collections of digital art images and associated data for noncommercial and scholarly, non-profit educational use. Select "Search and Browse for Images" to enter. Uses cookies and pop-ups. Note: Through the Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) initiative, scholars may download - free of charge - high resolution publication-quality images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collections in ARTstor.
Grove Art Online VCU
Searchable access to the entire text of The Dictionary of Art (1996, 34 vols.) and The Oxford Companion to Western Art (2001) with ongoing additions of new material and updates to the text, plus extensive image links.
images.MD VCU
A compilation of over 50,000 high-quality images from more than 90 collections that span all areas of internal medicine. The collection includes photos, radiographs, slides, graphs, tables and original artwork derived from Current Medicine's series of illustrated atlases.
JSTOR VCU
Contains digitized copies of complete runs of hundreds of scholarly journals,
many of which contain illustrations and art reproductions. Select the "caption"
feature (in the Advanced search) to limit your search to image captions. In
the list of journals, you can also select "Art" to limit your results
to art journals (though many non-art journal also have images).
VCU Libraries Digital Collections
An emerging collection of
digitized images, text, video, and audio. Includes Rarely Seen Richmond, a collection of more than 600
postcard images of Richmond, most dating from 1900-1930.
Complete list of all Arts databases - click "Brief View" to see full description of each database.
Architecture
- Index to Italian Architecture: A Guide to Key Monuments and Reproduction Resources. Cabell Library NA 111 .T4 1992
- World Architecture Index: A Guide to Illustrations. Cabell Library Reference NA 202 .T4 1991
Illustration
- Illustration Index. Cabell Library Reference N 7525 .V3 1980
- Illustration Index VIII, 1992-1996. Cabell Library Reference N 7525 .A672 1998
Painting
- Census of Pre-Nineteenth-Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections. Cabell Library Reference ND 611 .F73
- A Checklist of Painters, c1200-1994 represented in the Witt Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Cabell Library Reference ND 35 .W5 1995
- Gemalde in Deutschen Museen (Paintings in German Museums). Cabell Library N 2210 .S27 1994
- Index to Reproductions of American Paintings; a guide to pictures appearing in more than 800 books. Cabell Library Reference ND 205 .M57
- Index to Reproductions of European Paintings; a guide to pictures in more than 300 books. Cabell Library Reference ND 45 .M6
- Paintings in Dutch Museums: An Index of Oil Paintings in Public Collections in the Netherlands by Artists Born Before 1870. Cabell Library N 2450 .W74
- The World's Master Paintings: From the Early Renaissance to the Present Day. Cabell Library Reference ND 40 .W75 1992
- World Painting Index. Cabell Library Reference ND 45 .H38
Photography
- Index to American Photographic Collections. Cabell Library Reference TR 12 .E85 1996
Prints
- Print Index: A Guide to Reproductions. Cabell Library Reference NE 90 .P17 1983
Sculpture
- Sculpture Index. Cabell Library Reference NB 36 .C55
Various Media
- Costume Index: A Subject Index to Plates and to Illustrated Text. Cabell Library Reference Z 5691 .M75
- Post-Biblical Saints Art Index. Cabell Library Reference N 8079.5 .R63 1994
- Historical Art Index, A.D. 400-1650: People, Places, and Events Depicted. Cabell Library Reference N 8210 .R6 1989
- Picture Researcher's Handbook. Cabell Library Reference N 4000 .E8 1996
Site Indexes and Metasites
AICT - Art Images for College Teaching (http://arthist.cla.umn.edu/aict/html/index.html)
Intended primarily to disseminate images of art and architectural works in the public domain on a free-access, free-use basis to all levels of the educational community, as well as to the public at large. The images displayed on this site have been photographed on location by the author, who consents to their use in any application that is both educational and non-commercial in nature.
Artcyclopedia (http://artcyclopedia.com/)
Comprehensive index to over 7,000 artists and links to approximately 80,000 works, primarily painting and sculpture.
Art History Resources on the Web - Image Resources (http://witcombe.sbc.edu/ARTHLinks4.html#images)
Art History Professor Chris Witcombe has assembled a list of links to specialized image sites, including resources for slides, photographs, digital images, film, and video. The site itself is also a large collection of image links categorized by time period.
Digital Librarian: Images (http://www.digital-librarian.com/images.html)
Provides an alphabetical list of links to sites containing images of just about anything, including viruses, wildflowers, daguerreotypes, history of the American West, medicine, posters, presidential and first lady portraits from the Library of Congress, Life magazine, NASA, and the Yankees. Many links are to sites of photographs, documents, manuscripts, and book texts and plates.
Google Advanced Image Search (http://www.google.com/advanced_image_search?hl=en)
Google provides a gateway to millions of images on the web; locates images embedded in web pages.
VCU Libraries Medical Images Resource Guide (http://www.library.vcu.edu/tml/bibs/medicalimagesonline.html)
A resource guide detailing some of the online resources that provide access to medical images.
Web Gallery of Art (http://www.wga.hu/index.html)
Contains over 17,000 reproductions of European painting and sculpture from the Gothic through the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Searchable by author, time-line, school, form, type, title, or text. Also provides an alphabetical list of artists and an artist index.
Yahoo!-Arts (http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/)
Choose the option to search all of Yahoo! In the search box type in title and artist, e.g., "Water Lilies Monet." Yahoo! ranks the results so the links most relevant to your search will display first.
Specialized Image Collections
American Memory: Photographs, Prints, and Drawings (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/browse/ListSome.php?format=Photograph)
Noteworthy collections of thousands of photographs of Americana. Examples include over 4,000 panoramic photographs taken between 1851 and 1991 and architecture and interior design of the 20th century.
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Art Imagebase (http://www.famsf.org/fam/about/imagebase/index.asp)
The ImageBase is a searchable image and text database of objects from the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor). The collection of 110,000+ objects is searchable by keyword, artist, country, and period.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/)
More than 13.7 million images, including photographs, fine and popular prints and drawings, posters, and architectural and engineering drawings. While international in scope, the collections are particularly rich in materials produced in, or documenting the history of, the United States and the lives, interests, and achievements of the American people.
New York Public Library Mid-Manhattan Library Picture Collection Online (http://digital.nypl.org/mmpco/)
The Picture Collection Online is an image resource site for those who seek knowledge and inspiration from visual materials. It is a collection of 30,000 digitized images from books, magazines and newspapers as well as original photographs, prints, and postcards, mostly created before 1923.
Rhizome (http://www.rhizome.org/)
Rhizome.org is an online platform for the global new media art community. Programs support the creation, presentation, discussion, and preservation of contemporary art that uses new technologies in significant ways.
Smithsonian American Art Museum Research Databases
Includes the Inventories of American Painting & Sculpture which reference over 360,000 works in public and private collections nationwide. Images are in the process of being digitized.
SPIRO (http://www.mip.berkeley.edu/query_forms/browse_spiro_form.html)
A visual online catalog of architectural slides from the University of California, Berkeley Architecture Slide Library. There are currently about 63,000 records linked to images with descriptions searchable by Personal Names, Object Titles, Locations, Subject Terms, or Abbreviations. Searches can be refined by selecting a Period or Topic.
Visual Collections: Images of Art, History, and Culture (http://www.davidrumsey.com/collections/)
View maps, fine art, photographs, architecture, and other items from over thirty renowned collections. Includes advanced searching, a high resolution zoom-in tool, abilty to view multiple images simultaneously, and detailed image descriptions.
Seek permission before downloading images
On the Internet, copyrighted works are often used without proper authorization. Many works of art in digital form are protected and easily tracked by rightsholders.
A digital image can be an original, a reproduction, a published reproduction, or a copy of a published reproduction.
Examples:
- Original - original digital artwork created with Web graphics/authoring tools
- Reproduction - copy of an artwork
- Published reproduction - a digital image that reproduces a work of art and is accessible from a public Web space
- Copy of published reproduction - a 35mm slide that is a copy of a work in a book; a printout of an image from ARTstor
What is Fair Use?
Digital images may be used by educators, scholars, and students for:
- display in connection with non-commercial lectures and presentations, including those for professional development
- workshops and conferences in the education field
- reproduction in an academic course assignment, such as thesis or dissertation
- public display of academic student work undertaken as part of a course for which the student is registered
- retention of images used in academic work in personal portfolios for such purposes as graduate school and employment applications
- use for peer conferences
What is not Fair Use?
Digital images generally may not be used for:
- reproduction and publishing in publications, including scholarly publications
- creation of derivative works, or manipulation of digital images into new digital works of art
Resources
- Copyright and Image Management - Georgia Harper, Office of General Counsel, Univ. of Texas System
- Copyright & Art Issues - compiled by Christine L. Sundt, University of Oregon
- Stanford University Guide to Copyright & Fair Use
- Art Resource
- Artists' Rights Society
- Stim, Richard. Getting permission: how to license & clear copyrighted materials online & off.
Documenting sources for images can be challenging, especially with the variety of electronic resources now available. Many different style manuals exist. Listed below are several writing style manuals that may be consulted along with examples. Always ask your instructor for the style appropriate for the course.
The basic information you will need:
- Artist name
- Title of the work
- Date it was created
- Repository, museum, or owner
- City or Country of origin
- Dimensions of the work
- Material or medium such as oil on canvas, marble, found objects
If you found the image in a book you will need the author, title, publisher information, date, and page, figure or plate number of the reproduction.
If you found the image online you will need an access date, the web site address (URL) and in some cases an image ID number.
- MLA
Cite the artist's name, title, usually underlined, and the institution or individual who owns the work, and the city. - Turabian-style Citation Format
Cite the artist's name, title in italics, the medium and support, the date, and the institution or individual who owns the work, the city, and, if needed for clarification, the state. If the location is unknown use, “whereabouts unknown” in parentheses. - APA
Artist (last name, first name), artist’s role (in parentheses i.e. Artist, Architect), title, the work type, in brackets [Painting, Cathedral, Chair], country of origin or city, and state, and repository. - Chicago
In the humanities citations are provided in footnotes and endnotes along with a bibliography. Images can be cited using captions or in a bibliography. Check with your instructor for the correct manner.
For more help with various citation styles, check out the Citation Styles Resource Guide.