Wikipedia:WikiProject Visual arts/Sources
WikiProject Visual Arts
This page is a guide to useful sources for articles on visual arts topics. It is merely a collection of suggestions, and other good sources may exist.
References are essential
Many articles, particularly on contemporary artists, groups and "movements", are deleted for failing to demonstrate notability by providing viable references from secondary sources, independent of the subject—i.e. not just the subject's own website or postings on other web sites. There is a guide to Wikipedia format at Referencing for beginners.
Useful external resources
Unfortunately, 19th-century books available online are likely to be out of date and often contain serious errors, and thus should generally be avoided.
- There are over 1,500 books published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, which are fully available as PDFs online (though the copyrights are still reserved). They can be found at Thomas J. Watson Library Digital Collections and at MetPublications.
- Guggenheim modern art books for free
- Paris Musees released digital artworks
- Art Institute of Chicago released digital images
- Getty Museum artworks: virtual library to download
- New York Public Library: released artworks, images, books.
- Smithsonian Open Access: Artworks, images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo. 3 million images and resources available for open source use as of late 2020
- Oxford Art Online: Users of The Wikipedia Library can access this resource, which includes the online edition of the Grove Dictionary of Art. Residents of the United Kingdom can do the same through their local library; contact here if there are difficulties. Many US libraries also have online access for library card holders.
- ULAN, the Union List of Artist Names from the Getty Research Institute: Lists names, including variants, dates and family relationships to other artists. The "preferred" name should generally be used.
- Getty AAT: "The Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) is a structured vocabulary of around 34,000 concepts, including 131,000 terms, descriptions, bibliographic citations, and other information relating to fine art, architecture, decorative arts, ..."
- The Bridgeman Art Library Image Search: Useful for finding the current location of art works and details about them (museum, size, date created, etc.), though Google images gives wider coverage
- Cameo database from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Highly specialized database on pigments and materials
- artcyclopedia.org: Search to locate resources about an artist
- ArtLex art dictionary: Definitions of terms
- Art UK: Comprehensive database by Art UK (formerly the Public Catalogue Foundation) of artworks in public collections and public spaces in the United Kingdom.
WikiProject Visual Arts