Research Guides: The Arts in Shanghai: Fine Arts, Visual Arts, and Architecture: Finding Images

Art databases

Most of these links are to publicly-available Museums and Art Galleries that have digitized their collections. Although they are freely available for you to search through, pay careful attention to licensing restrictions and copyright statements for artworks that you intend to use in your research, writing, and other projects. For more help with citations & using images ethically, please visit this link.

ARTstor This link opens in a new window
ARTstor is a repository of images of art, architecture, and design. The images are sourced from museums, libraries, archives, and photographers. ARTstor includes a suite of software tools to view, present, and manage images for research and teaching. ARTstor is supplemented by additional content, including publicly available image collections and locally-produced NYU collections.
***Announcement: On August 1, 2024, Artstor will merge with JSTOR. Moving forward, JSTOR will serve as a search platform for the images that were once hosted on Artstor along with the usual JSTOR content. Contact Giana Ricci, Librarian for the Fine Arts, giana.ricci@nyu.edu with questions.***

In order to download images, users must create an ARTstor account.

ArtLinkArt
An online database project for Chinese contemporary art

Artnet This link opens in a new window
The ArtNet price database provides international auction sales records of fine art, decorative art, and design dating from 1987 to the present.
To access the "Price Database," under the "Price Database" menu near the top, select "Use the ArtNet Price Database"; on the next screen, hit "Login" in the center of the screen and you will be logged in.

You do not need to create an account for NYU access.

Artnet is not accessible through the NYU VPN.

ArtServ: Australian National University
Artsy
ArtUK
Excellent resource for locating over 220,000 works of art in the UK's national collections. Focus your search by artist, gallery, medium, or license.
Boston Public Library Digital Collections
British Library Images Online
CC Search (Now Openverse)
CC Search (now Openverse) is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone. This includes digitized collections from major museums, which promises to continue growing over time.

Please note that CC does not verify whether the images are properly CC licensed, or whether the attribution and other licensing information we have aggregated is accurate or complete. Please independently verify the licensing status and attribution information before reusing the content.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
Europeana
Fondazione Zeri -- Fototeca (University of Bologna)
Frick Digital Image Archive (Frick Art Reference Library, New York)
The Getty Museum (Los Angeles)
Huntington Archive of Buddhist and Asian Art
Indianapolis Museum of Art
Library of Congress American Memory
Metropolitan Museum of Art
National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.)
Dedicated CC0 images, digitized and uploaded to Wikimedia, from the NGA.

You can also visit the NGA Images Website or search through the NGA library’s department of image collections for alternative search platforms
The New School Archives Digital Collections
New York Public Library Digital Gallery
Pharos, the “International Consortium of Photo Archives"
PHAROS is an international consortium of fourteen European and North American art historical photo archives committed to creating a digital research platform allowing for comprehensive consolidated access to photo archive images and their associated scholarly documentation.
Photogrammar
Rijksmuseum (Netherlands)
Smithsonian Collections Search Center
VADS is the online resource for visual arts.
Victoria & Albert Museum
Yousef Jameed Centre for Islamic and Asian Art
The Ashmolean Museum is home to some of the finest collections of Chinese art in Europe. The collections range from jades and ceramics of the Neolithic period through to modern, often contemporary, paintings and prints.

This is an excellent resource, pay particular attention to its Online Publications

Huntington Archive of Buddhist and Asian Art

AP Newsroom This link opens in a new window
AP Newsroom (formerly AP Images) contains photos and audio gathered by Associated Press reporters around the world. Content is updated daily and continuously. The archive also includes the NYC Associated Press Daybook (the AP Daybook), the current year's photo report, and historical images dating from the 1500s. Photos and audio may be downloaded or printed.

Art of the Photogravure

Many of the databases below include historical and documentary photography, as well as fine art photography.

ARTstor This link opens in a new window ARTstor is a repository of images of art, architecture, and design. The images are sourced from museums, libraries, archives, and photographers. ARTstor includes a suite of software tools to view, present, and manage images for research and teaching. ARTstor is supplemented by additional content, including publicly available image collections and locally-produced NYU collections.
***Announcement: On August 1, 2024, Artstor will merge with JSTOR. Moving forward, JSTOR will serve as a search platform for the images that were once hosted on Artstor along with the usual JSTOR content. Contact Giana Ricci, Librarian for the Fine Arts, giana.ricci@nyu.edu with questions.***

In order to download images, users must create an ARTstor account.

Boston Public Library Digital Collections
Europeana
Historical Photographs of China
An online collection of digitized images of pictures taken between 1870 and 1950. Its 6,000-plus images can be searched by keyword, date, and so on. The collection's designers are continuing to expand it and are seeking feedback from users.
Library of Congress American Memory
The New School Archives Digital Collections
New York Public Library Digital Gallery
Photogrammar
Smithsonian Collections Search Center

Boston Public Library Digital Collections
Duke University Collections
Library of Congress American Memory
New York Public Library Digital Gallery
Visual Collections: Images of art, history and culture from David Rumsey and Cartography Associates
Virtual Shanghai
Virtual Shanghai is a research and resource platform on the history of Shanghai from the mid-nineteenth century to nowadays. It incorporates various sets of documents: essays, original documents, photographs, maps, quantitative data, etc. The objective of the project is to write a history of the city through the combined mobilization of these various types of documents. The implementation of this approach relies on the use of digital and GIS technologies.

These databases may prove useful to locating and discovering artworks, but the digital images themselves may be watermarked or of lower-quality.

Lessing Photo Archive

Cartoon Image Database
Hoover Institution Political Poster Database (Stanford University)
British Cartoon Archive
Modern Sketch (1934-1937)
A digital and comprehensive archive of issues from this rare Chinese periodical. Modern Sketch (Shi Dai Man Hua)for 1934 to 1937 contains caricatures, cartoons, and humorous writing that defined the golden era of Shanghai’s comic art during the mid-1930’s.

In a related digital collaboration, John A. Crespi, Colgate's Luce Associate Professor of Chinese, provides scholarly analysis combined with full-color, high-resolution images from Modern Sketch at MIT’s Visualizing Cultures.
Chinese Pamphlets
from the Center for Research Libraries Digital Delivery System - includes English Translations of mass education materials published in Hong Kong and in Mainland China, particularly Shanghai, in the years 1947-1954. Open access.

Vogue Archive This link opens in a new window
The Vogue Archive contains the entire run of Vogue magazine (US edition), from 1892 to the current month. Every page, advertisement, cover and fold-out has been indexed so that images can be found by garment type, designer and brand names.

Chinese Cigarette Card Collection
Digitized collection of Chinese cigarette cards. Note that these images are under copyright, and may not include detailed information.