The Philadelphia Museum of Art has contributed approximately 7,500 images of its encyclopedic and celebrated permanent collection to the Artstor Digital Library. The selection in Artstor includes works across the diverse collecting areas of the museum.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art houses more than 240,000 objects that represent the creative achievements of the Western world and Asia from antiquity to present times. The comprehensive Asian collections feature works in diverse media that embrace the cultures of the continent, even reconstructed architectural spaces including a Japanese teahouse and halls from a Chinese palace and an Indian temple. The European collections date from the medieval era to the present, with iconic works throughout and notable Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, including Paul Cézanne’s The Large Bathers, Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers, as well as the finest public collection of Auguste Rodin’s sculpture in North America (The museum administers the Rodin Museum, which is located across the street from the main building). An exceptional collection of historic American art completes the Western holdings. The museum’s trove of modern and contemporary art includes the work of Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, Sol Lewitt, and countless others.

The museum was chartered in 1876 and it opened the following year. In 1928, architect Horace Trumbauer’s new Greek-Revival building on Fairmont Park opened its doors. Under the direction of Frank Gehry, the museum plans to enlarge and modernize its current space while maintaining its Neoclassical exterior. The campus is completed by the newly renovated Art Deco Perelman Building and two eighteenth-century houses in Fairmount Park, Mount Pleasant and Cedar Grove.