Research Guides: HIST 400: Senior Thesis Seminar (HC) 2025-26: Visual Sources

Images as Sources

1930s advertisement from Shanghai (Source: Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

Background

Oxford Art Online
Oxford Art Online is an art reference library that includes Grove Art Online, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and the Benezit Dictionary of Artists. Subject entries, biographies, images, biographies, and thematic timelines (antiquity to present).

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Extremely rich site for understanding the art of a particular region and time. Use the Time Period and Geographic menus to see key Works of Art, Related Exhibitions, and, under Related Content, Thematic Essays.

Image Sources

JSTOR Images (formerly Artstor)
A digital library that provides access to thousands of digital images derived from a variety of museum, library and archival collections. Images support a variety of disciplines including architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design.
If you are a first-time user, register your user name and password for greater services. This includes the ability to download images, organize them in saved folders and add them to PowerPoint presentations.

Banque d'images (Bibliothèque nationale)
Many images from France's Bibliothèque nationale collections are searchable here.
British Museum, Collection Online
Gives access by topic, time period, geography and more to a wealth of digitized art, artifacts and many other objects at the British Museum.
British Museum Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts
Searchable database of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts with descriptions of individual images.
Digital Image Collections
New York Public Library has digitized many of its notable art and photography collections to aid researchers.
Image Sources (Princeton University)
See sources for images including libraries, museums and organizations.
Photos, Prints and Drawings from the Digital Collections at the Library of Congress
Provides information on, and access to, digitized versions of photographs, prints and drawings relating to history in the U. S. and around the world. To see all digital collections at the Library of Congress (including texts), use this link.
POP : la plateforme ouverte du patrimoine
Online access to French cultural resource collections. Note in particular, Joconde, the database for museum collections.
Smithsonian Collections Search
Search over 8.59 million catalog records of museum objects, and library & archives materials. More than 963,000 of these records contain online images, video and sound files, electronic journals and other online resources.
Wellcome Images
The Wellcome Library makes more than 40,000 images searchable online relating to medicine and social history. Note that the Advanced Search includes a year range option.