Copyright-Free Images of the Founders?

May 24, 2006 2:43 PM

Looking for copyright free color images of some of Revolutionary figures

I am working on an educational series for the local newspaper. We will have weekly educational pages for school kids examining the American Revolution through biographies of some of the players. Now we need decent quality images of the subjects. There is a very small budget for buying copyright permission, but the more we can get for free the better. In particular, we need images of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Paul Revere, The Howe Brothers, Thomas Hutchinson, Phylllis Wheatley, Betsy Ross, the Marquis de Lafayette and Benedict Arnold.

I poked around the Library of Congress American Memory site and came out wanting. Any ideas?

posted by LarryC to education (6 comments total)

I can't imagine any collection out there will have much more than the American Memory archive. It can take awhile to search, since not everything is tagged well, but there are plenty of medium-res images (paintings, drawings, etchings, etc) of all of these people there, aren't they? Or do you need all of them in one consistent style? That might be a bit harder.
posted by luriete at 3:02 PM on May 24, 2006

No need for a consistent style, anything colorful is fine. I spent awhile at American Memory looking for George Washington portraits, thinking that would be the easiest, but came up with only a few muddy black and white book plates.
posted by LarryC at 3:16 PM on May 24, 2006

Wikipedia's George Washington page has at least 8 color pics of the guy. Start there.
posted by mediareport at 4:02 PM on May 24, 2006

Did you try clipart.com? (Disclaimer: I worked there, years ago). It's not completely royalty-free, but for most practical purposes it is.
posted by ldenneau at 6:06 PM on May 24, 2006

I often use Google Image search with site:.gov For example here is a search result for Phyllis Wheatley.

Not every image in the .gov domain is public domain, but most are, so it's a good place to start (along with wikipedia which is mentioned above...)
posted by Philbo at 7:45 AM on May 25, 2006

Try this way of searching the LoC.
posted by CiaoMela at 9:55 AM on May 25, 2006