The Division of European and American Art is responsible for over 70,000 drawings, paintings, photographs, prints, sculptures, and objects of decorative art dating from the 12th century to 1900 and held by the Fogg and Busch-Reisinger museums.

The European holdings are particularly strong in early-Renaissance Italian, 17th-century Dutch, and 19th-century British and French drawings, paintings, and prints, and include signature works by Fra Angelico, Mary Cassatt, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Claude Monet, Nicolas Poussin, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Rembrandt van Rijn. The collection of American art is best known for colonial- and federal-period painting, late 19th-century painting and sculpture, and drawings and watercolors of all periods. It includes works by John Singleton Copley, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

The division oversees the largest collection of terracotta studies by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in the world and an exceptionally fine group of works by Auguste Rodin. Decorative arts include silver from America and the British Isles, 18th-century German and Austrian porcelain, and a celebrated group of ceramics designed by Josiah Wedgwood. Among the photography holdings are key nineteenth-century images that represent the history of photography and the aesthetic use of photography in the United States and Western Europe. Among the highlights are unique daguerreotypes by Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes, large-scale portraits by Mathew B. Brady and Studio, and photographs of the American West by Timothy O’Sullivan.