Art History 381: Images of Japan's Floating World

The Digital Collections at the UWM Libraries include over 180,000 photographic images, maps, and books drawn from the collections of the American Geographical Society Library, the Archives, Special Collections, and the Curriculum Collection.

Several major museums and libraries have instituted an open access policy by designating most or all of the public domain art in their collections with a creative commons license making them available for use for any purpose with no restrictions attached. Artvee sorts through and aggregates the best of these images in one location to make them easy to discover and download.

Approximately half the holdings in the Photo Archive are represented by descriptive, nonpictorial records in the Photo Archive Database. Searchable by key word and artist name, the database is particularly useful for patrons conducting iconographic or thematic research as searches can be conducted across periods, styles, and media.

The collections of the Prints & Photographs Division include photographs, fine and popular prints and drawings, posters, and architectural and engineering drawings. While international in scope, the collections are particularly rich in materials produced in, or documenting the history of, the U.S. and the lives, interests and achievements of the American people.

This site is a living database with new materials added every day, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more.

Search over 17.1 million records of museum objects, archives and library materials including more than 6.3 million online images, audio & videos and blog posts.

CC Search is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone. Creative Commons, the nonprofit behind CC Search, is the maker of the CC licenses, used over 1.4 billion times to help creators share knowledge and creativity online.

Four ways to search by image via Google: Drag and drop, upload an image, copy and paste the URL for an image, right-click an image on the web (some functions require Chrome browser).

The National Museum of Asian Art preserves, exhibits, and interprets Asian art in ways that deepen our understandings of Asia, the United States, and the world.

Located in the heart of San Francisco, the museum is home to one of the world’s finest collections of Asian art, boasting more than 18,000 awe-inspiring artworks ranging from ancient jades and ceramics to contemporary video installations. Dynamic special exhibitions, cultural celebrations and public programs for all ages provide rich art experiences that unlock the past and spark questions about the future.

Established in 1971, the museum is one of few U.S. institutions dedicated to the arts and culture of Asia and the Pacific Islands, serving the city of Los Angeles and the Greater Southern California region. The museum’s mission is to further intercultural understanding through the arts of Asia and the Pacific Islands.

International museums you can visit virtually.

ColBase is a database of collections of the four national museums: Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara, and Kyushu.

Fukuoka Asian Art Museum is the only museum in the world that systematically collects and exhibits Asian modern and contemporary art. The works in the collection of the museum are not imitations of Western art or repetitions of traditional works. Instead, they seek to overcome the existing framework of art, being made by artists living in ‘contemporary’ Asia. These artists attempt to acutely express their messages in and about this changing world of Asia. FAAM's exhibitions of Asian modern and contemporary art are rich in depth and quality, and wide in scope. They present the originality and charm of Asian art in a way that cannot be experienced in any other museum in the world.

The Nara National Museum is located in a corner of Nara Park surrounded by the Tōdai-ji Temple, the Kōfuku-ji Temple, and the Kasuga Taisha Shrine. With the cooperation of temples, shrines, and other cultural properties’ owners, we conserve and study cultural properties, including artworks and archeological artifacts related to Buddhist art.

The 1933 Art Deco building in lush Volunteer Park is the Seattle Art Museum’s original home and the location of our extensive Asian art collection, making it one of the most beloved treasures in our creative, cultured, and curious city.

This site provides high-definition images of the National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties owned by the Tokyo National Museum, Kyoto National Museum, Nara National Museum, Kyushu National Museum and the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties aligned under the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, together with their descriptions in multiple languages (Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean).

This section of the guide introduces digital collections from the Asian Division as well as those containing Japanese or Japan-related items from other divisions of the Library of Congress.

The V&A has been collecting Japanese art and design since it was founded in 1852 and now holds one of the world's most comprehensive collections, including ceramics, lacquer, arms and armour, woodwork, metalwork, textiles and dress, prints, paintings, sculpture and modern and contemporary studio crafts. Of particular interest is the collection of over 30,000 Edo-period ukiyo-e prints, paintings, drawings and albums.

The Ukiyo-e.org database and image similarity analysis engine, created by John Resig to aide researchers in the study of Japanese woodblock prints. The database contains over 213,000 prints from 24 institutions.

The Cleveland Museum of Art’s collection of Japanese art is one of the most distinguished collections outside of Japan. Today, the museum’s Japanese collection comprises some 1,950 works spanning a period of approximately 5,000 years and includes masterworks of painting, sculpture, and prints, as well as ceramics, metalwork, and other decorative arts.

The MFA houses the finest and largest collection of Japanese art outside Japan, with superlative holdings of early Buddhist paintings and sculpture. The Kano- and Kyoto-school paintings, ukiyo-e paintings and prints, swords and Nō masks are unmatched in the West, and recent acquisitions have established the Museum as a center for Meiji-era art and visual culture.