Libraries: South Asian Art: Museums and Image Resources

Arts of India

A Bodhisattva
10th century
Indian
Bronze with silver inlay
The Walters Art Museum

Museums

National Gallery of Asian Art
The arts of South Asia and the Himalayas are closely intertwined with the subcontinent’s many religious traditions. This region, which includes India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and Tibet, is the birthplace of three major religions: Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism.
The Collection Online:The Metropolitan Museum of Art
A collection of over 400,000 images of works of art from the The Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection. High quality images available for download.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
LACMA maintains extensive research collections that support the museum's diverse exhibitions, art collections, and programming.
Cleveland Museum of Art
The Cleveland Museum of Art is renowned for the quality and breadth of its collection, which includes more than 66,500+ artworks and spans 6,000 years of achievement in the arts.
British Museum Image Collection
This image collection is from the the British Museum which was founded in 1753 and opened its doors in 1759. It was the first national museum to cover all fields of human knowledge and open to visitors from across the world.
Aga Khan Museum
The Aga Khan Museum presents and collects art from historically significant Muslim civilizations as well as contemporary Muslim communities and diasporas around the world. The core of its Permanent Collection — spanning a vast geographic area from Spain and North Africa in the west, across the Middle East, to South Asia and China in the east
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco
We've got more than 18,000 objects online, and we're always adding more

Image databases

JSTOR
Contains almost 1,000 full-text journals spanning multiple disciplines. Some journals go to back to the mid-1800's. There is a gap, typically from 1 to 5 years, between the most recently published journal issues and the issues available in JSTOR.
Oxford Art Online (including Grove Art)
Includes 30,000 articles and images on every aspect of the visual arts. Searchable images are from organizations such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as 40,000 editorially selected image links to museums and galleries, which provide essential visual support for art history scholarship. Also includes access to the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms.

Museums continued

Philadelphia Museum of Art
The museum’s South Asian Art collection is among the premier collections of its kind in the country. It boasts about 4,000 works of art in a range of mediums and encompasses a vast temporal and geographic scope
San Diego Museum of Art
The San Diego Museum of Art’s mission is to inspire, educate, and cultivate curiosity through great works of art.
State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
Victoria & Albert Museum
From ancient Chinese ceramics to Alexander McQueen evening dresses, take an incredible journey through 5000 years of human creativity with our online collections.
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
Here, you can find thousands of artworks, from around the world and across the centuries. You can get details about the artworks, including conservation and exhibition histories, and download images.
Norton Simon Museum, Asian Art Collection
An impressive group of European masterworks from the Renaissance to the 20th century, and a stellar collection of South and Southeast Asian art spanning 2,000 years. To date, about 40% of the entire collection of 12,000 objects is represented on this website.