The Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (Netherlands Institute for Art History) is the central Dutch documentation centre for visual art. In that domain, the RKD also acts as a knowledge and research centre. Its sphere of activity covers the entire spectrum of visual art in the Western world from the late Middle Ages to the present day.

The documentation includes a collection of more than six million photographs and reproductions of works of art, a library of some 450,000 volumes, a collection of cuttings and small printed items numbering several million and archive material relating to artists, art historians, art dealers etc. The photographic portfolios have largely been classified by artist. There are also three major portfolios classified by image, i.e. general iconography, Dutch portrait iconography and Dutch topography.

The pictures from the RKD collection can also be found in the RKDimages database. This database features images and descriptions of primarily Dutch and Flemish works of art from the fourteenth till the nineteenth century. At the moment, the database contains records of  85,000 artworks, about 1.3 percent of the RKD's entire image collection. RKDimages enables the recording of attributions, dates and historic orgins of artworks.

Overviews of the collections and an ever growing amount of documentation can be found on the RKD website.