National Gallery of Art Library

We welcome those curious about art to use our collections. Learn more about our policies and prepare for your visit.

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 predominantly 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 catalogs in North America (more than 100,000 publications from the 18th century onward) is shelved on the concourse level by name of the house or dealer, and up to 10 per day can be retrieved for a reader. 

Published documents of fewer than 50 pages—small catalogs, pamphlets, invitations, and other ephemera—are housed in the vertical files. Documenting exhibitions primarily from the mid-20th century onward, the collection offers exhibition histories and material valuable for provenance research.