How to Cite a Painting in MLA & APA: Museum vs. Online (Examples)

By MLA Generator Editorial Team · Updated July 7, 2026

A painting is one work with two ways of meeting it: you stood in front of the canvas, or you looked at the museum’s photograph of it online. MLA and APA both handle the split, but in opposite places — MLA swaps out the entire location element, while APA keeps the museum and merely appends a URL. Then the styles disagree about the title itself: MLA writes The Starry Night, APA writes The starry night, and half the guides on the internet copy the wrong one into the other style. Both the MLA Style Center and APA Style publish official artwork formats, and this guide follows them exactly — including the one-character punctuation rule almost everyone misses.

The shortest answer: in MLA, give the artist, the italicized title, and the year. Saw it in a museum? Follow the year with a comma, then the museum and city: Bearden, Romare. The Train. 1975, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Saw it online? Follow the year with a period, then the italicized website and the URL: Bearden, Romare. The Train. 1975. MOMA, www.moma.org/collection/works/65232?locale=en. In-text, cite the artist: (Bearden).

What counts as a painting or artwork

The formats on this page cover the physical work itself — the thing hanging on the wall or standing on the plinth. APA states that the same pattern serves paintings, sculptures, photographs, prints, drawings, and installations; MLA’s template stretches the same way. If you experienced the work in person or through a museum or gallery website, you are in the right place.

Some art-adjacent sources are better cited as something else:

• An artwork reproduced in a book or textbook is usually cited as the book itself, per the MLA Style Center — or as a work inside the book’s container when the image is your real subject. The MLA section below shows both.
• A photograph, chart, or illustration made for an article or webpage — a press photo, an infographic — follows the image format, where the image usually sits inside a page or article container.
• An AI-generated image has its own MLA guidance built around the prompt, not an artist; see the edge cases below and the ChatGPT guide.
• Your own photo of the artwork is not the source — cite the artwork itself, with the museum as the location.

If a person made it and a museum, gallery, street, or collection holds it, this page applies.

Information to collect before you cite

The wall label or the museum’s collection page gives you everything:

• Artist’s name — the author slot in every style.
• Title — italicized in MLA and APA alike; if the work is untitled, note what it depicts so you can write a description.
• Year of creation — or an approximate date (“ca. 1890”) or date range (“1503-19”) when that is all art history offers.
• Medium — oil on canvas, bronze, gelatin silver print. Required by APA in square brackets; optional in MLA.
• Museum or collection, and its city — APA also wants the state or province and country.
• Website title and URL — only if you viewed the work online. Use the museum’s stable collection page, not a database or search link.
• Date you viewed it — MLA and APA do not require it here, but Harvard, Vancouver, IEEE, and AMA want an access date for anything online.

The generator at / pulls the artist, title, and date from a pasted museum page and formats the rest. Double-check the year — collection pages often display the acquisition year more prominently than the creation date.

One painting, formatted in all seven styles

The painting below is the one APA Style uses on its official “Artwork references” page (Publication Manual, 7th ed., Section 10.14), so the APA row is the official reference verbatim. The MLA row applies the MLA Style Center’s official viewed-online pattern to the same work.

The source: Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, painted in 1889, oil on canvas, held by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Viewed on MoMA’s website at www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/vincent-van-gogh-the-starry-night-1889/. Accessed July 5, 2026.

Two details in those first two rows separate a correct entry from a plausible-looking wrong one. The first is how the title is capitalized. Both styles italicize it, but MLA keeps the headline capitals — The Starry Night — while APA drops to sentence case: The starry night. Competitor guides routinely show APA artwork references in title case, which is wrong in APA for any work’s title.

The second is where the viewing goes. MLA replaces the location element wholesale: museum and city for an in-person viewing, italicized website plus URL for an online one, with the punctuation after the year changing to match (more on that below) — and the website’s name is reproduced the way the site styles it, which is why the MLA’s 2016 post writes MOMA while the row above writes MoMA, the museum’s styling today. APA never drops the museum — the online reference is the in-person reference with a URL appended. The Chicago row shows the author-date reference-list form our engine produces; the Chicago Manual itself says artworks are usually handled in the running text instead, and the edge cases below give its note and bibliography forms. Harvard, Vancouver, IEEE, and AMA have no dedicated artwork templates, so their rows adapt each style’s standard pattern for a described object online.

The in-text citation for the same painting:

• MLA: (Gogh) — the citation keys to the works-cited entry, which the MLA’s Dutch-name rule alphabetizes under “Gogh, Vincent van,” and an artwork has no page number to add. In running prose, MLA capitalizes the particle when the surname stands alone — “Van Gogh painted…” — unlike APA.
• APA: (van Gogh, 1889), or narrative: van Gogh (1889)
• Chicago: usually just the running text — “Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889)…” — with a footnote only in the notes-bibliography system if one is required; in an author-date paper, (van Gogh 1889) keys to the reference-list entry shown in the table
• Harvard: (van Gogh, 1889)
• Vancouver: (1) or superscript ¹
• AMA: superscript ¹ only
• IEEE: [1]

How to cite a painting or artwork in MLA

The MLA 9 works-cited template for a work you saw in person puts the museum and city in the location element:

Artist Lastname, Firstname. Title of Artwork. Year, Museum, City.

The MLA Style Center’s official example:

Bearden, Romare. The Train. 1975, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

For a work you viewed online, the website becomes a container — italicized, like any container — followed by the URL. The MLA’s own example for the same work:

Bearden, Romare. The Train. 1975. MOMA, www.moma.org/collection/works/65232?locale=en.

Look at what follows 1975 in each version, because this is the rule nearly every unofficial guide misses, and the MLA states it explicitly. In the museum version the year sits in the publication-date slot, so it takes a comma before the location. In the online version the year is a supplemental element after the title, so it takes a period before the container. One character, two different structures. Two other notes from the same official post: the publisher is omitted when it matches the website’s title (which is why no “Museum of Modern Art” appears before MOMA), and the medium — oil on canvas, bronze — is an optional element you may add when it matters to your discussion. The 2016 post’s URLs drop “https://”, and MLA 9 keeps that practice: URLs are truncated by omitting the protocol, which is retained only for DOIs, when the link will not work without it, or when you need a live hyperlink.

The in-text citation follows the MLA’s blanket rule that it “should key to a works-cited-list entry”: cite the artist’s surname, (Bearden), or name the artist in your sentence and add nothing — a painting has no page numbers.

The variants you are most likely to need:

An untitled work. Replace the title with a brief description in sentence case, not italicized:

Bearden, Romare. Collage of a jazz ensemble. 1975, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The same logic covers works whose “title” is really a catalog designation. Related MLA quirk: buildings, earthworks, and ancient artworks are not italicized either — the Great Sphinx of Giza stays roman.

A painting reproduced in a book. The MLA Style Center’s guidance: usually you just cite the book you actually consulted. When the artwork itself is your subject, treat it as a work inside the book’s container:

Bearden, Romare. The Train. 1975. Romare Bearden: His Life and Art, by Myron Schwartzman, Harry N. Abrams, 1990, p. 214.

A sculpture or photograph in a collection. Same template, no changes — the format is medium-agnostic. If the distinction matters, add the medium as an optional element after the location: …Museum of Modern Art, New York. Bronze.

How to cite a painting or artwork in APA

The APA 7 reference template, from APA Style’s official “Artwork references” page (Publication Manual, 7th ed., Section 10.14):

Creator, A. A. (Year). Title of work [Type of artwork]. Museum Name, City, State, Country. URL

The official example:

van Gogh, V. (1889). The starry night [Painting]. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, United States. https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/vincent-van-gogh-the-starry-night-1889/

The rules behind it: the artist is the author. The title is italicized in sentence case — capitalize only the first word, proper nouns, and the first word after a colon. The bracketed description of the medium is always included, and its wording is flexible: [Painting], [Oil painting], and [Oil on canvas] are all acceptable. The museum and its full location — city, state or province, country — form the source element. Include the URL when you viewed the work on the museum’s website, using the stable share link rather than a database URL; no trailing period follows it. For a work you saw in person, the reference is identical minus the URL:

van Gogh, V. (1889). The starry night [Painting]. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, United States.

The same format covers paintings, sculptures, photographs, prints, drawings, and installations — change the bracket, not the structure.

Untitled artwork: put a description in square brackets in place of the title. No date: write (n.d.). Approximate date: write (ca. 1890).

In-text: parenthetical (van Gogh, 1889) or narrative van Gogh (1889). The lowercase “van” stays lowercase even at the start of the citation, because that is how the artist’s name is styled.

Edge cases

Your APA title is in headline capitals. The Starry Night is correct in MLA and wrong in APA, where references take sentence case: The starry night. This is the single most common cross-contamination between the two styles’ artwork formats, and plenty of citation guides print the wrong one.

You need Chicago style. The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition (September 2024), covers artworks at section 14.133 — it was 14.235 in the 17th, so pages citing the old number are running stale guidance. CMOS says information about artworks “can typically be presented in the text, rather than in a note or bibliography.” When you do cite one, the note form reads: Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931, oil on canvas, 9½ × 13 in. (24.1 × 33 cm), Museum of Modern Art, New York. The bibliography form inverts the name and swaps commas for periods: Dalí, Salvador. The Persistence of Memory. 1931. Oil on canvas, 9½ × 13 in. (24.1 × 33 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Add the URL at the end if you consulted the work online. The table above shows the author-date reference our engine produces for author-date papers.

The image came from Google Images. Google is a search tool, not a source, and the MLA Style Center says never to cite it as one. Click through to the page actually hosting the image and cite that website as the container — if the trail ends at a museum’s collection page, you are back to the standard online-artwork format.

The photo of the painting is on Wikimedia Commons. The MLA has a dedicated post: cite the artwork as usual, with Wikimedia Commons as the italicized container and the file page’s URL as the location. The artwork’s own facts — artist, title, year — still lead the entry.

The work is in a temporary exhibition, or on a street. Both have official MLA Style Center posts, and both keep the standard template: the location element names the venue or the physical spot — gallery and city for an exhibition piece, street or intersection and city for street art. An anonymous, untitled mural takes a description in place of both artist and title.

The image is AI-generated. MLA’s updated generative-AI guidance builds the entry around the prompt, in quotation marks, as the title — then the tool and version, the company, the date you generated the image, and the shareable URL. No human artist slot. Details in the ChatGPT guide.

You need AMA, IEEE, or Harvard. AMA 11 has no dedicated artwork template: cite the book or article reproducing the work, or handle an online image as a web object — title, website name, dates, URL. IEEE likewise has no official artwork type; library guides recommend adapting the online-media format — [1] V. van Gogh, “The Starry Night.” [Painting]. Available: URL. [Accessed: July 5, 2026] — and you should treat that as a recommended adaptation, not an official rule. Harvard has no single governing body, so follow the pattern in the table above and stay consistent; if your department publishes its own Harvard variant, it wins.

The principle underneath all of it: credit the artist, name the work the way your style names it — MLA capitals or APA sentence case — date it by its creation, and then locate it where you met it: the museum wall gets a comma, the museum website gets a period and a container. Get those two slots right and every variant on this page is a substitution, not a new format.

Editorial methodology and sources