National Gallery of Art

Our rare books collection comprises over 12,000 volumes of early printed books and primary source material related to the history of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, particularly the Italian, Dutch, Flemish, French, German, Spanish, British, and American schools. 

The library’s department of image collections is a study and research center for images of Western art and architecture and is one of the largest of its kind. Its holdings number over 16 million photographs, slides, negatives, microforms, and digital images. 

The library offers more than 3,000 scholarly journal titles, including over 1,000 current digital and print subscriptions to scholarly journals of art history in Western languages. A selection of current newspapers and general-interest magazines is available in the periodicals reading room.

One of the best collections of auction catalogues in North America (more than 100,000 publications from the 17th century onward) is shelved on the concourse level by name of the house or dealer, and up to ten per day can be retrieved for a reader. 

Published documents of fewer than fifty pages—small catalogs, pamphlets, invitations, and other ephemera—are housed in the vertical files. Documenting exhibitions primarily from the mid-twentieth century onward, the collection offers exhibition histories and material valuable for provenance research. 

The library holds a variety of noted research and reference collections on microfilm and microfiche. The library’s collection includes large sets of auction sales and exhibition catalogs, personal papers, dissertations, and rare periodicals.

Learn about using the library, accessing avaliable reference resources, and our online catalogue.

We welcome inquiries on a wide range of subjects supported by the library's collections and resources available elsewhere.

For the well-being of our visitors and staff, the library is temporarily closed to the public. We will gladly respond to research inquiries by email, telephone, and regular mail.