Visual Sources

Related Research Guide

Most of the information on this page about finding images came from the LibGuide, Art, Art History, and Design; see it for more information on image searching.

ARTstor This link opens in a new window
Search the Fashion, Costume and Jewelry collection.

The Costume Institute Online
Search more than 31,000 costumes and accessories in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection.
Fashion Museum Bath
Explore their Video Gallery for past clothing exhibitions.
Fashioning a Nation
A brief survey of American fashions from 1740 through 1895 from the Index of American Design collection at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Historic Threads: Three Centuries of Clothing
An online exhibition from Colonial Williamsburg's Museum Collection.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Clothing and Textile Collection
Search the Clothing and Textile Collection.
Smithsonian Collections Search Center (online catalog)
Search over 14 million records of museum objects, archives and library materials including more than three million online images, audio and video files, and blog posts.
Victoria and Albert Museum
Search the textile collections.

Finding Images in Print Sources

Find illustrations in print sources by searching the ND Catalog. Often older books on costume or fashion (pre-1940) will have photographs of earlier clothing. Many of these pre-1940s book have been digitized and can be found on Hathi Trust through the ND Catalog.

For example, searching "costume United States history" retrieves the illustrated History of American Costume, 1607 - 1870, by Elisabeth McClellan, published in 1937 and available online on Hathi Trust.
Sometimes the captions identifying illustrations can be retrieved by searching Google Books.
In JSTOR, captions can be searched by changing the default dropdown from "Full-text" to "Caption."
To find depictions of a particular subject, the library catalog can be searched with a phrase such as "slaves in art."
Another option is to try a topic in the library catalog along with the words "pictorial works," e.g. search for "clothing pictorial works."

ARTstor Image

Frederic Schall, Paul et Virginie. 1795, Print, 418 x 486 mm. Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg. Available from: ARTstor, www.artstor.org (accessed March 23, 2016).