Art Subject Guide

For more information on finding images in JSTOR, please visit JSTOR's guide.

St. Olaf Library also subscribes to other databases that include image files. Here is our complete list of image databases.

St. Olaf College Archives also has browsable image collections.  Click here to browse images from Northfield and the College.

Many museums post high quality photographs of their artworks online.  Here are a few American museums you can investigate. 

• Minneapolis Institute of Art
• Museum of Modern Art (New York City)
• Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City)
• Art Institute of Chicago 

There are many more art collections around the world. Try searching for your artists and the word museum or gallery to find examples, or search for a city or country and the words art museum to find other museums with online collections (for example, search for Japan art museum or Mary Cassatt museum.) Once you are on the museum's webpage, the images are usually found in a section called collections.

There are many websites where you can browse for images; these may be especially helpful for personal projects (for example, designing a poster for your club.)

Always check the licensing statements when downloading images from the web to use in your own work.  See Citing vs. Licensing below for more details.

• Wikimedia Commons -- Among other things, this is where the images used in Wikipedia are hosted.  When you find an image you like, click the "more details" button to see the licensing attached to the image. Note that most of the images uploaded to Wikimedia are made by amateurs who may not fully understand copyrights and licensing; if you have a question about an image on Wikimedia, please ask Karen Olson.
• Flickr -- a website for photographers, some of whom post images with Creative Commons licenses. Flickr's search interface has a license-type dropdown that you can set to limit your results to images you can reuse.
• Google Image searches -- Google's image searches also allow you to filter by license type. Run your search, then hit the "tools" button and pick the "usage rights" dropdown menu to select the kind of license you need.

There is a difference between simply citing an artwork as a source for your research and actually reproducing within your own research (i.e., in a slide deck for a presentation or as a figure within your essay.)

A citation tells your readers exactly where you found the image so they can view it, too.  See the Citation Styles section of this guide for more help on formatting citations.

Reproducing the artwork, however, requires more than a citation. It requires a license, that is, legal permission to reuse the image in your own work. While the doctrine of fair use will cover most image re-use in an academic context, "fair use" does not cover all situations. And "fair use" is even more difficulty to apply once you graduate and are working with images as part of your profession. 

A better practice than claiming "fair use" is to look for images that have clear licensing terms attached. When you are looking for images online, look for a statement that says permissions or licenses. Sometimes there will be a permissions statement directly attached to each image; for example, if you download an image from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, this message pops up:

For other museums, you may need to search the site for a blanket statement about image licensing.  FAQ pages are good place to look for this, or sometimes there is a link at the bottom of each image page. For example, the Art Institute of Chicago's blanket statement says their images are available via a Creative Commons Zero license, indicating the images are free of copyright and therefore available for you use in your project.

Please contact Karen Olson if you have questions about licensing artworks for your projects.