José Gil de Castro
El Libertador Simón Bolívar
oil on canvas
1825
Casa de la Libertad, Sucre, Bolivia
Art Media
As a visual medium, art historical research has benefited from the availability of high quality digital image databases. Some of the most popular include:
- Artstor This link opens in a new windowNew interface available at JSTOR Artstor.
Artstor is a digital image library that provides over 1.6 million images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences from around the globe and across time periods. Included are images from international museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, photo archives, and artists and artists' estates. Register for free with the site to access its full range of services.
Museum Collections
Art museum websites are an excellent place to find images of the artworks in their collections, or comparative images for other works of art you may be studying. Often, a museum may have digitized a substantial part of their collection and placed the images online.
Here are several large, useful collections (with image numbers as of July 2017, when available):
- The Art Institute of Chicagoover 95,000 records with images
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art447,997 records with images
- The Blanton Museum of ArtIncludes the Jdy and Charles Tate Collection of Latin American Art
- The Brooklyn MuseumIncludes the Arts of the Americas Collection
- National Museum of Mexican ArtCollection includes over 11,000 pieces from ancient Mexico to the present.