How to Cite Art (Paintings, Sculptures & Visual Works)

Artworks are primary sources for art history, cultural studies and visual analysis, and they cite differently from texts because you are referencing an object. The good news: almost every element you need is on the museum's catalogue record, which is usually public.

The Core Elements

Artist, title of the work, date of creation, a description of the medium, dimensions (optional but standard in art history), and the current location — museum and city. Add the accession or inventory number: it is the one identifier that distinguishes this object from every other version, cast or print of the same work.

Read the Catalogue Record

Museum records are the authoritative source for all of this, and they are more specific than captions. The Art Institute of Chicago's record for the Monet below gives the title, "1906", "Oil on canvas", "89.9 × 94.1 cm (35 3/8 × 37 1/16 in.)", the credit line "Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection", and the accession number 1933.1157. Everything in the examples on this page was taken from records like that.

Quick Reference by Major Style

MLA (9th Edition) is common in art history. MLA assembles the entry from its template of core elements — author, title of source, publication date, and location:

APA (7th Edition) has a dedicated artwork reference page. It does not print a template line; it prints a worked example and a list of rules, from which the element order is plain:

APA's own published example, which is where that order comes from:

APA's rules for this format are worth having in front of you: use it for "all types of museum artwork, including paintings, sculptures, photographs, prints, drawings, digital art, crafts, and installations"; list the artist as the author; "always include a description of the medium or format in square brackets after the title", and the description is flexible — "[Painting]", "[Oil painting]" or "[Oil on canvas]" are all acceptable; "for untitled artwork, include a description in square brackets in place of a title"; the museum and its location go in the source element; and link to the museum's page where there is one.

Applied to the verified record:

Chicago's artwork guidance lives in the Chicago Manual of Style itself; its free Citation Quick Guide has no artwork entry, so we do not reproduce a Chicago template here. Check the Manual or your library's Chicago guide. The elements you will need are the same ones above — artist, title, date, medium, dimensions, collection — and the catalogue record supplies them all:

Artworks in Books or Catalogues

When you accessed the image in a publication, identify the work and then the publication you actually used. Murdoch University Library's APA guide gives this pattern for a reproduction in a book, with its own example:

The general shape: original artwork details first, then the publication and page where the reproduction appears.

Online Museum Collections

Most major museums publish stable record URLs, and some also publish a recommended citation. Use theirs where they offer one.

Unknown Artist or Untitled Works

For an anonymous work, museums usually give a descriptive attribution, and the right thing to do is reproduce it. A verified example:

Note that "c. 1918" and "French, 20th century" are the museum's own wording, and that the example also shows the circa rule in practice.

For a work whose actual title is Untitled, cite it as the title:

Some artists use "Untitled" in quotation marks as part of the title, with a parenthetical subtitle. Follow the record exactly:

Where a work genuinely has no title and the museum gives none, APA's rule applies: put a description in square brackets in the title position.

Sculptures and Casts

The format is the same, but medium and cast history matter, and bronze sculptures exist in multiple authorized casts. Cite the object you are actually writing about, with its inventory number. The Musée Rodin's record for its own monumental cast of The Thinker gives a date of conception of 1903, notes that the cast was "made by Fonderie Alexis Rudier in 1904" and "transferred to the musée Rodin in 1922", and lists the medium as bronze, dimensions H. 189 × W. 98 × D. 140 cm, and inventory number S.01295:

The museum's page also records that The Thinker began in 1880 as the crowning figure of The Gates of Hell, under the title The Poet, at about 70 cm, and that it was enlarged in 1904. If your argument depends on which version you mean, say which, and give that object's number.

Photographs as Art

Photographs cite like other works, with one extra wrinkle: the negative's date and the print's date can differ, and museums record both. The Art Institute of Chicago holds several prints of Dorothea Lange's best-known photograph, and its records date each one twice. Two of them:

Those are two different objects from one 1936 negative: the museum records the first as printed by the Library of Congress and the second as printed by Irwin Welcher, and they differ in size. This is exactly why the accession number matters — "Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936" does not identify which print you looked at.

Copy the full title from the record, too. Works acquire popular short titles — this one is universally called Migrant Mother — and the catalogue title is what makes the print findable.

Installations, Performances and Exhibitions

APA's artwork format explicitly covers installations, so an installation held in a collection is cited like any other work — the Gonzalez-Torres example above is one.

An exhibition is a different kind of object, and APA gives it its own format with the curators in the author position. Its own published examples:

APA's rules here: the curators go in the author element; when the curator is unknown, the exhibition title moves into the author position; the year or range of years of the exhibition is the date; the museum and its location are the source.

For a performance, cite the documented event — the institution's own exhibition or programme record — rather than a description from memory:

Museum Labels and Wall Text

If you are citing the label rather than the work, APA has a format for that too, and a caution with it. Its own example:

APA's rules: describe the plaque in square brackets rather than naming the artwork, so it is clear you are citing the plaque; use the plaque's date if it has one and "n.d." if not — "Do not use the date of the artwork or item being described". And the caution: "Information on a plaque is likely consolidated from other sources, making the plaque a secondary source. If possible, cite the same information from a primary source that your readers will be able to retrieve."

Multiple Works by One Artist

Each work you discuss gets its own citation, because each is a separate object with its own date, medium and collection. Where you are characterising a body of work rather than a single object, do it in prose and cite the individual works you actually analyse.

Figures and Illustrations in Your Paper

When you reproduce an artwork as a figure, the caption carries the identifying information, and the note carries the copyright attribution. Under APA the figure number is bold above an italic title-case title, with notes below:

Reproducing an image is a rights question as well as a citation question. For work that will be published, check the museum's image terms; for work that stays inside a course, university guides generally treat the requirements as lighter. Our guide on citing graphs and figures sets out the note-and-attribution pattern in more detail.

Where These Rules Come From

• APA: the "Artwork References" page on the APA Style site (apastyle.apa.org), citing Publication Manual Section 10.14. APA's site blocks automated requests, so it was read through an Internet Archive capture; the van Gogh, exhibition and plaque examples and every quoted rule above come from that page.
• APA, corroborated: Murdoch University Library's APA 7th guide, "Images" (libguides.murdoch.edu.au/APA/images), whose Bedford example is quoted above (Murdoch prints its page reference as "p.154"; the space is ours), and James Cook University Library's APA guide, "Images, Figures & Tables" (libguides.jcu.edu.au/apa/images-figures).
• MLA: the MLA Style Center's template of core elements (style.mla.org).
• Chicago: artwork is covered in the Chicago Manual of Style and not in the free 18th-edition Citation Quick Guide, so no Chicago template is asserted here.
• Every artwork on this page was checked today against the holding museum's own catalogue record: the Art Institute of Chicago's public API (api.artic.edu) for Water Lilies (1933.1157), Water Lily Pond (1982.825, dated "1917–19"), Judd's Untitled (2014.5), "Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (2022.343), To the Amputees—Join the Workforce (1931.151) and the two Lange prints (2013.1557 and 2013.1558); and the Musée Rodin's own record for The Thinker (musee-rodin.fr), which supplies the 1903 date of conception, the 1904 Alexis Rudier cast, the 1922 transfer, the bronze medium, the dimensions and the inventory number S.01295.