These are organizations that have digitized a number of high resolution scans. I am only listing sources that I think are quality, with either creativ

High Quality Collections of Digitized Art and Archival Finds — simon sarris

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2025-01-08 01:30:06

These are organizations that have digitized a number of high resolution scans. I am only listing sources that I think are quality, with either creative commons license or public domain licensing on most of the items.

New York Public Library Collection — Not exactly an art collection, it contains almost a million scans of old drawings, maps, and photographs. Lots of really cool historical stuff. My favorite are the thousands of restaurant menus, searchable by decade back to the 1800’s. It even has airline menus from the 1980’s such as TAP Portugal and the Air France Concorde.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art — over 400,000 images of public domain works. High quality organization and keyword search works very well.

The British Museum — over 2 million well categorized, searchable records, almost all of which are Creative Commons licensed. In April of 2020 they greatly upgraded their search capabilities.

Louvre Collection — more than 480,000 works in the Musée du Louvre and Musée National Eugène-Delacroix, with digitization ongoing. Categorization is very good, but make sure your text search is in French.