The venerable U.S. Library of Congress, that vast and vastly underestimated trove of knowledge and culture from the nation’s past, keeps moving more and more of its treasures out onto the web, which is a Good Thing for knowledge and culture lovers of all stripes.

The Prints and Photographs Collection, among its other treasures, has a searchable archive of wartime posters from World War I. The posters are from all viewpoints, and are usually dedicated to promoting their individual viewpoints in an effort to influencing the outcome of that conflict in one way or another (see my post on Propaganda Posters). To that end many artists and illustrators, some historically renowned, were employed in their creation.

The archive can be browsed in a default sequence (the basis of which is unclear), or by category; and can also be searched.

Each image has a higher resolution JPEG version and an even higher resolution archival TIFF file. There is also bibliographic information on the poster, including, where known, the artist’s name.

Some are more interesting than others, of course, and it takes a little digging, but there are some gems to be found.

[Via MetaFilter]

Brynn Metheny is a freelance illustrator based in Oakland, California who loves to draw imaginary creatures.

Metheny has taken this fascination with made-up animals and extended it to the point of conjuring up an entire continent, Orcura, through which flows The Morae River. The river basin has a bestiary and a Classification of Species to describe the animals that inhabit it.

The Morae River project is laid out in its own web site, complete with descriptions of the animals, their habitats and behavior. Animals like the Blue-Throated Hulompolus and the Red Tailed Mardik share characteristics of real animals, arranged in fanciful ways and portrayed with what appear to be pencil and watercolor drawings (though the color may be digital, I don’t know).

I like the way the sketch-like pencil drawing of the animals’ environment is often left in place and color is applied only to the animal, leaving a nice contrast of combined media in the same piece.

Metheny also has a blog and a web site, as well as pieces on ConceptArt.org

[Via LCSV4]

Since I wrote my post about the great 19th Century German landscape artist Caspar David Friedrich back in 2006, many additional resources for viewing his work have appeared on the web; and there is a new exhibition of his work, Caspar David Friedrich — Nature Animated along with a complimentary exhibit, Friedrich, Eight Contemporary Commentaries at the NationalMuseum of Sweden (to 10 January, 2010).

Sadly, some of Friedrich’s work was lost in the Allied bombing of Dresden during World War II, though some of that has been recreated in interpretations from black and white photographic records by other artists in subsequent years. (Unfortunately, displays of his work are not always quick to point out which pieces are recreations, and I’m not the one to give you guidance on that point.)

Friedrich was a prolific artist, however, and there is finally an abundance of web resources to view his work as he regains popularity with contemporary art lovers. His popularity waxed an waned during his own lifetime. Friedrich had success in the early part of his career, but fell into disregard and even disdain in the latter part of his life, a life that was marked by tragedy of various kinds almost throughout.

Friedrich’s work can be stunning, particularly his evocative landscapes, in which he attempted to convey more than the landscape itself, stating: “The artist should not only paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also omit to paint that which he sees before him.”

OK, so you’ve got this image, and you want to find something similar or related; and you want to find it with needle-like accuracy out there in the vast and windblown haystacks of the web.

Search engines, of course, come to mind. Those tireless workhorses of web direction (and misdirection) are always happy to give out their directions (and maybe a few ads) to help in your righteous quest, oh Grail Seeker.

But suppose you don’t have that magic word, the name of the painting or artist, What then?

Enter similarity based image search, the ability to search for other images based on the characteristics of a known image. There are several approaches to this, and several kinds of search engines to use.

In investigating them, I started out with an image that was common, but not too common, Titian’s portrait painting known as Man with a Blue Sleeve (The National Gallery, London, also called A Man with a Quilted Sleeve, which may or may not be a self-portrait, I think it is).

I got an interesting variety of results from several visual search engines with similarity based search features, though none of them returned the image I was hoping for (at least in the first round), Rembrandt’s similarly posed self-portrait (see my post on Web Gallery of Art).

The first kind of search engine can be particularly helpful in this kind of search, in that they allow you to actually upload an image you already have and search for similar images; completely image based, no search words necessary.

TinEye (images above, top) allows you to browse your desktop, upload an image, or enter the URL of an image file on the web, and search for similar images. It does a good job of finding other versions of the same image, which can be very helpful in identifying an image for which you don’t have a name or artist. It wasn’t that helpful for finding related images by the same or other artists, but you could start there and carry on with a more generalized search engine.

BYO Image Search Lab (above, 2nd down) from Idée Labs also lets you upload an image or enter a web URL, but the returns are quite different. I was actually very impressed with the engine’s returns of images with similar composition, color and value, and it returned fascinating images; but it was not particularly helpful in finding other images by Titian or similar images by other artists. It’s fun, though. Idée Labs also has searches based on a selection of colors, or combined tags.

The other engines require that you first find an image through traditional word-based search and then show you similar images to the ones found.

Incognia (above, third down) did a decent job of finding some other paintings by Titian, but was not extensive in its returns and doesn’t identify the source of the image on the thumbnail.

Pixolu (above, 4th down), which uses a Flash based interface, found a wider range of Titian images. It allows you to control the size of the thumbnail display, and drag multiple images to a sidebar and click “Refine” to focus your search. The thumbnails are not directly linked to their source, however. You have to click on them and then look to the right under the thumbnail size control, for the image URL.

Of course, the big boys want to play at this game too.

Venerable Google, which essentially owns web searching (something like 80-90% of all searches now) has a solid similar images labs feature (above, 5th down); probably the most useful and extensive of the lot (they’re #1 for a reason). Google found a range of Titian portraits, as well as similarly composed portraits by other old master artists, and displays the link to the original under the thumbnail. Subsequent pages of results started to stray more widely off topic, but retained a mix of relevant results for several pages. (Still didn’t turn up my Rembrandt, though. Perhaps that was too much to ask.)

Bing, Microsoft’s rebranded search engine, appears to have an automatic similar image feature. When searching for images, clicking on any one image brings up its source in a browser frame, and displays related images in another frame to the left. I don’t like the frame based interface, or the fact that it won’t let me Command-click (on the Mac) to open multiple images in additional browser tabs.

Bing did an OK job of finding some similar images (above, second from bottom); but as I scrolled down in the related images frame (above, bottom) some of the “similar images” just boggled my mind.

Correction: OK, I owe Microsoft an apology (sort of). Apparently the images to the left are not related by similarity, but are results from the original search term. It is evidently finding “Titan” in addition to “Titian”, thinking I’m too lame to have actually meant “Titian” (thanks for nothing, Clippy), which explains the colorful figure of the Boy Wonder and the football stuff. Still wonky, though; and now not related to the topic of this post. Sorry.

Addendum: I want to give you the benefit of one of the key things I’ve learned about searching in my 14 years on the web; and particularly over the last few years of researching topics for Lines and Colors: and that is that search engines are not where you begin and end your search.

Search engines are a great place to begin a search, particularly if you learn to use their more powerful advanced features, but search engines can only take you so far. Much of the web is the so called “deep web”, billions of pages beyond the reach of the major search engines because they are behind logins or database driven sites that don’t get indexed easily. (The last estimate I heard is that Google, by far the largest and most powerful of the major search engines, reaches less than 20% of the total pages on the web. Granted, most of this is corporate documentation, but it’s still a striking figure.)

Use search engines to start your search, but then focus in on the local search available within databased sites that may have the information (or image) that you’re seeking. For example, if go to the large online art sites like Art Renewal Center, Web Gallery of Art, CGFA, The Athenaeum, or Artcyclopedia and use their local search features, and you’ll often have greater access to their resources. The same applies to the online collection databases of museums.