Tools & Resources

The internet’s best art shelf, curated by the Guru: free courses, open museum collections, artist databases and daily inspiration. Everything below is free (or has a generous free tier), and everything is worth a bookmark.

Museums

• Art Institute of Chicago — Great API and public-domain images.
• MoMA — The flagship of modern art.
• Rijksmuseum — Dutch masters with generous open downloads.
• Tate Modern — Britain’s modern and contemporary powerhouse.
• The Louvre — Home of the Mona Lisa.
• The Met — Encyclopedic collection with a huge open-access program.
• Van Gogh Museum — The largest Van Gogh collection in the world.

Inspiration

• Artsy — Discover, learn about and collect art.
• Colossal — Daily doses of astonishing contemporary art.
• Hyperallergic — Sharp, independent art journalism.
• Juxtapoz — Street art, illustration and underground culture.

Artist Databases

• AskArt — American artists, biographies and auction records.
• Getty ULAN — Professional artist-name authority database.
• WikiArt — 250,000+ artworks from thousands of artists.

Free Images

• Europeana — Europe’s digital cultural heritage.
• Getty Open Content — High-resolution masterpieces, free to download.
• Openverse — Search engine for openly licensed media.
• Smithsonian Open Access — Millions of images free to reuse and remix.
• The Met Open Access — Hundreds of thousands of public-domain artworks.
• Wikimedia Commons — The internet’s biggest free media library.

Learn

• Google Arts & Culture — Virtual museum tours and gigapixel artwork viewing.
• Khan Academy Art History — Beginner-to-advanced courses, completely free.
• Met Timeline of Art History — The gold-standard chronological reference for art history.
• Smarthistory — Free art history lessons and videos by real art historians.
• Web Gallery of Art — European painting and sculpture from 1100–1850.

🧰 More Fuel

• Reference & research: Getty Research Institute, Internet Archive, Library of Congress Digital Collections
• More museums: Louvre, Prado, Uffizi, National Gallery of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, LACMA
• Art news: The Art Newspaper, Artforum, Apollo

And of course — the Art Arcade lives here too. Learning by playing counts double.