A Guide to Theatre Research

Features the world’s leading galleries, museum collections, foundations, artist estates, art fairs, and benefit auctions in a growing database of images of art, architecture, and design. The collection spans historical, modern, and contemporary works, and includes the largest online database of contemporary art.

Images from archives, museums, libraries and research centers such as the New York Public Library, Smithsonian, Library of Congress and Getty Research Institute. The images have no known copyright restrictions.

Millions of photographs from the LIFE magazine photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today

Images of costumes and accessories from the fifteenth century to the present. The MET allows use of their images for "limited non-commercial, educational, and personal use only."

400,000+ images from the Museum's collections. Some images may be used freely for non-commercial scholarly purposes - look for an "OASC" under the image to verify.

5000 high-quality scanned images of costume and set designs from the Motley Collection at University of Illinois. The Motley group designed sets and costumes from 1932 to 1976 for plays by Shakespeare and modern classics, opera, ballet, and motion pictures. Their designs were used in productions in the West End of London, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the English National Opera, and in the United States on Broadway.

Explore New York’s past through nearly 185,000 images and objects from the collections of the Museum of the City of New York. Includes a large theatre collection.

This database is a guide to original artwork in the library's collection, including costume design and production design drawings, animation art, storyboards and paintings. Via Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts. Works are available for educational, noncommercial use only.

Features historical and contemporary fashion images. The V&A allows use of their images for "For educational use: this means the one-time use of Content by a student at an Educational Establishment."

Explore the history, culture and meaning of fashion. This site is a partnership between Google Art and Culture and 170+ museums and other partners worldwide

The Wellcome Library of Medical History provides images on themes ranging from medical and social history to contemporary healthcare and biomedical science. Many of the images have creative commons licenses allowing re-use.

80,000 images, global in coverage and includes all areas of visual imagery. Via California State University