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.
Part of the Wellcome Library collection, Wellcome Images "contains historical images from the Wellcome Library collections, Tibetan Buddhist paintings, ancient Sanskrit manuscripts written on palm leaves, beautifully illuminated Persian books and much more."
Find 18th and 19th century historical maps at the city, country, and continent levels for North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania.
Image related Reference works
Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography
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Includes 1200 essays on historical photography worldwide. Coverage includes all the key people, processes, equipment, movements, styles, debates and groupings which helped photography develop from being ‘a solution in search of a problem’ when first invented, to the essential communication tool, creative medium, and recorder of everyday life which it had become by the dawn of the twentieth century.
Encyclopedia of twentieth-century photography
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While it only has a few entries on Japanese photographers they are useful. Also helpful are the entries on genres (landscape, portrait) and techniques.