Can I use the gallery images for my own projects?

It depends on the artwork. Most are in the public domain and free to use, share, and adapt. Others are shared under a Creative Commons licence that asks for attribution or restricts commercial use, and a small number have rights reserved by the holding institution. Every artwork's page shows its own Rights line and links to the source record — read that before reusing an image.

What dance styles are represented in the gallery?

The collection spans ballet, waltz, polka, tango, minuet, folk dance, swing, and many more — covering both social and performance dance traditions from the 1500s to the mid-20th century.

Through the Artist's Eye

Gallery of Dance

Q: Where do the gallery artworks come from?

Artworks are curated from open-access collections including the New York Public Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Library of Congress, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Wellcome Collection, Gallica, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

5,906 paintings, engravings, photographs, and illustrations celebrating 500 years of dance — curated from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Library of Congress, and New York Public Library.

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Source

Most of these works are in the public domain. Some are shared under Creative Commons licences that ask for credit or limit commercial use, a few have rights reserved by the holding institution, and for others the rights vary by item or were never recorded — each artwork’s own page shows its rights. Sourced from the New York Public Library, Wikimedia Commons, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Library of Congress, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Wellcome Collection, Gallica — Bibliothèque nationale de France, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Internet Archive, Europeana, the Smithsonian and others.

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Explore Dance Styles in Art

Interactive Exhibits

Explore historic dance art in motion — spin a 19th-century phenakistoscope disc, watch a flipbook animation of waltzing figures, and browse individual plates from lithograph grids of the Polka and Mazurka.

Browse 5,906 dance artworks

Showing the 48 most-loved. Searching, filtering by style and era, and paging through the rest need JavaScript — every artwork below opens on its own page without it.

Gallery of Dance

Explore Dance Styles in Art

Ballet

Waltz

Tango

Ballroom

Minuet

Spanish/Flamenco

Polka

Interactive Exhibits

Browse 5,906 dance artworks

Le Bal paré

Dance at Bougival

Dance in the City

Dance in the Country

Jennie Augusta Brownscombe Colonial Minuet - Bow to Your Partners s.d

Wilhelm Gause Hofball in Wien

The Dance Class

The Waltz

Bal du moulin de la Galette

The Dance

El Jaleo

Dancing Couple

Tango at the Street Cafe

The Dance of the Almeh

The Country Dance

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers

Philip IV (1605–1665), King of Spain

The tango and other up-to-date dances; a practical guide to all the latest dances, tango, one step,

The drawing-room dances

Cartier's practical illustrated waltz instructor, ball room guide, and call book. Giving ample direc

Beadle's dime ball-room companion and guide to dancing. Comprising rules of etiquette, hints on priv

The royall : Mr. Isaac's new dance made for Her Majesty's birth day 1711

How to dance. A complete ball-room and party guide. Containing all the latest figures, together with

Offenbach's dancing without a master; and ball-room manual. A complete self-instructor in the art of

The princess : Mr. Isaac's new dance made for Her Majestys birth day ; engraven in characters & figu

Dancing and prompting, etiquette and deportment of society and ball room

Antidance Literature | Western Social Dance: An Overview of the Collection | Articles and Essays | A

American dancing master, and ball-room prompter: containing about five hundred dances including all

How to Read a Dance Manual | Articles and Essays | An American Ballroom Companion: Dance Instruction

Wehman Bros.' book on the way to dance : a book which teaches the art of dancing without a master

Waltzing through Europe : Attitudes towards couple dances in the long Nineteenth Century

Wehman's complete dancing master and call book: containing a full and complete description of all th

A full description of modern dances

Waltzes, cotillions, dances, &c.

Oriental dance

Ballroom scenes

Brigand polka.

The dance

The waltz of long ago

Ballroom dancing

Hippodrome Polka.

Dancing couple, with penciled notation "Potiphar Papers"

Minuet la cour

La polka

Tamara Karsavina in The Polka

Polka

Ballroom dancers

Couple at Sherman's dance hall (newlyweds). San Diego, California

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Dance Sculptures

Lineage of Dance

Legends of Dance

Library of Dance

Listening of Dance

Explore Dance Styles in Art

Ballet

Waltz

Tango

Ballroom

Minuet

Spanish/Flamenco

Polka

Interactive Exhibits