The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. is one of the great art museums in the U.S., and a national treasure on which I am happy to see my tax dollars spent.

The NGA has long had a web presence, but it has never been quite what those of us who admire the museum’s collection might have liked, with small images of items in the collection and less than ideal presentation overall.

That has all changed, as the museum recently rolled out a beautiful new website.

Searching or browsing the collection is much easier, and many of the individual objects are now provided with zoomable high resolution images.

You can also still download images, as you could before, through the NGA Images database. Though the basic system for that hasn’t changed since my post on NGA Images in 2012, it is now more gracefully integrated into the main website.

I’ll point out again that though you can download a reasonably large image without an account, registering for a free account with a simple email address gives you access to wonderfully large high-resolution images.

As an example, an image of John Constable’s landscape, Wivenhoe Park, Essex (images above, third from bottom) can be downloaded without an account in a size from which I’ve taken the crop shown above, second from bottom. The bottom image shows a crop from the size available to those logged in to a free account (essentially the same as maximum zoom in the website interface, if you’re not concerned about downloading).

In addition to better presentation of exhibitions and items from the collection, there are other treasures to be found by looking around, with excellent features on subjects like Conservation Projects.

(By the way, the detail image of the hand from Vermeer’s exquisite Woman Holding a Balance in the examples above is not blurred; the extreme close-up just shows Vermeer’s brilliantly soft edges.)

Not to be confused with the more general Museum Day in September, which is sponsored by Smithsonian magazine (my post here), Art Museum Day is a relatively new event, started last year, that is sponsored by the Association of Art Museum Directors.

This Saturday, May 18, 2013, participating art museums in the U.S. Canada and Mexico will be offering free or reduced admission, special programs and other events in a bid to attract additional visitors.

The page on the AAMD site lists participating museums, with some indication of specific events, though you should probably check with your local museum in question for more specifics. There is also an AAMD press release about the event, with a more compact list of the museums, here.

The event is held in on the same day as International Museum Day, which features events at museums in Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceana and the Americas (look to links on the right of the IMD page for more information about museums and events in specific world regions).

(Above: images of a few participating art museums in my area: The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Brandywine River Museum, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum of American Art, The Delaware Art Museum)

While the Mauritshuis, The Royal Picture Gallery in The Hague, Netherlands, is undergoing renovations, some 35 wonderful examples of their extraordinary collection of paintings are touring the US.

The group includes Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring, as well as treasures by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Carel Fabritius, Rachel Ruysch, Jan Steen, Jacob von Ryisdael and others.

The show is currently at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, where it will be on display until June 2, 2013.

It then moves to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, where it will be on display from June 23 to September 29, 2013.

A smaller subset of 15 works, titled Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis, including Girl with a Pearl Earring as well as works by Rembrandt, Hals, van Ruisdael, Steen and Fabritius, will be on display at the Frick Collection in New York from October 22, 2013 to January 19, 2014, which is when I hope to see them.

(Images above: Johnannes Vermeer, Carel Fabritius, Abraham van Beyeren, Jacob van Ruisdael, Reambrandt van Rijn)

[Addendum: Reader Ælle points to an interesting interview with Mauritshuis Director Emilie Gordenker on ArtsATL]

One of the world’s great museums, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, reopened its doors today after 10 years of renovations.

The museum’s centerpiece, Rembrandt’s monumental work Officers and other civic guardsmen of District II of Amsterdam, under the command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq andLieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch, known as the ‘Night Watch’ (above, second down), remains in its original position; every other aspect of the museum and the presentation of its collection has been redesigned.

There is an article on the restoration on the Museum’s recently redone website (which I wrote about last September), along with a video and photos.

In addition there is a documentary on YouTube, a video of the opening celebration on NOS, an article and slideshow on CNN and a slideshow on Guardian, along with an article on the rethinking of the galleries, and a video of a flashmob recreation of “Night Watch” in a Dutch shopping center.

Those of us who can’t easily visit the renovated museum in person can enjoy highlights from the museum’s collection in high resolution on their website.

(Images above: renovated hall, Rembrandt van Rijn, Pieter Claesz, Johannes Vermeer, Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch, Gabriël Metsu, Rembrandt van Rijn)

[Thanks to "Ælle Ayres" for links and updates.]

The Frick Collection, as I pointed out in my post from 2010, is a relatively small museum in New York that is remarkable in its ratio of size to masterpieces.

Though perhaps without as much drama and attention as the website makeovers of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2011 and the recent redesign of the Rijksmuseum website, the Frick Collection recently debuted a freshly redesigned version of its web presence.

The new Frick site is cleaner, more modern and most importantly, better organized. There is a dedicated secondary site, collections.frick.org, devoted to searching the collections, though it is integrated with the main site. The search and browse functions, and particularly the display of search and browse returns, is much improved over the old site.

The display of the works themselves, though in a clearer, more neutral setting, is largely unchanged. The images have a zoom feature, but unlike more flexible ones on the sites of the Morgan Library, the Rijksmusem or the National Gallery in London, which can be zoomed in a fullscreen interface, this one is restricted to a relatively small window that cannot be enlarged, and part of the window is always obscured by the preview thumbnail. It’s unfortunate that the museum chose not to address this in the makeover.

That being said, it’s still a delight to be able to easily find and zoom in on gems from the Frick’s superb collection, even in a limited interface. There is also now a revised and improved “virtual tour” of the museum’s rooms and grounds, itself in a zoomable interface with hotspots on the works linked directly to the detail page for the work (above, second from bottom).

It’s a fun way to pay a virtual visit to a great museum.

Longtime Lines and Colors readers may have noticed my tendency to be cranky about art museums that are seemingly without clue in their approach to using their website to best advantage (though I take great delight in pointing out those who are using them well, as in the case of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the recent makeover of the Rijksmuseum website).

It’s sometimes not for lack of trying. Museums often put effort into producing articles, interactives, videos and other projects in various media aimed at engaging their audience and encouraging people to be more informed and involved in the appreciation of art and art related topics.

Short documentary video, in particular, is an area into which a number of art museums have put time and energy, whether accompanying particular exhibits, highlighting collections, exploring topics related to conservation and curation or simply general forays into art history.

ArtBabble, which I mentioned not long after its initial launch back in 2009, is a website produced by Indianapolis Museum of Art (whose own website I praised here) that provides a centralized source for browsing and viewing short video productions about art related subjects by a number of partner museums.

The site has just been relaunched after a major redesign, with a more efficient and elegant interface, better search features and an expanded variety of browsing paths. You can browse videos by themes, medium, period and style, location, people and more, including a list of artists.

Pages within a particular category are accompanied by an excellent set of sub-menus on the left sidebar of the other subcategories at the level you’re browsing.

I actually find the Partner Channels page, which features the growing list of participating institutions, to be one of the most fruitful sections from which to browse. I find that some museums produce materials more of interest to me personally than others.

What’s still missing is a more sophisticated search feature, with options for narrowing your search, though the current one does make provisions for filtering your results. You can also filter pages that offer browsing within topics.

Most of the videos are professionally produced to one degree or another. Many simply take the form of curators, conservators and other museum staff commenting on particular works. Others delve into the process of a particular medium, like the Museum of Modern Art’s short series “Pressure + Ink: Introduction to Printmaking“. The videos on mediums and techniques are generally overviews and not specifically instructional.

Some of the videos are aimed at engaging children in looking at art, and there is a video type “For Kids” that will let you filter for them; though I don’t see a way to filter them out of the results (which would be convenient).

Also, though most of the videos are in English, a number are in various languages (sometimes with subtitles). These are usually from particular museums (e.g. Prado, Van Gogh Museum).

A few of the features are longer, such as the series of recorded lectures “Wyeth Lecture in American Art” from the National Gallery, Washington.

How fascinating you find the kinds of videos offered will, of course, vary depending on your interests, but if you like them, the Art Babble site, particularly in it newly energized form, is a cornucopia of short documentary art videos and worth a Timesink Warning.

(Images above: Art babble interface; Dallas Museum Of Art Collection: The Seine at Lavacourt by Claude Monet – Dallas Museum Of Art; The Landscape Painter Martín Rico - Prado, Madrid; Pressure + Ink: Introduction to Printmaking – MoMA; Vincent Van Gogh In Paris: Montmartre – Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Conserving Norman Rockwell’s “United Nations” – Norman Rockewll Museum; Wyeth Lecture In American Art: Ground Swell: Edward Hopper In 1939 – National Gallery, Washington)

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is one of the world’s great museums, with a collection rich in famous masterpieces from the likes of Rembrandt and Vermeer, as well as hundreds of lesser known treasures.

The museum’s website, like many museum websites, long left something to be desired. Though numerous images were available, many in high resolution, they were not easy to search or browse, and overall presentation was somewhat awkward.

The museum recently launched a completely redesigned website, with a much better interface, easier access for searching, and in particular much better provisions for browsing and discovering images.

Choose Language at upper right if you would like to change to English, and then “Collection” to either Explore or Search the collection. The Explore section offers highlights, a good place to start, and offers categories like Artists, Works, Subjects and Styles which are then subdivided into subcategories.

The selections within a given artist or subject are no longer presented as tiny scrolling thumbnails, but as large scrolling thumbnails (certainly an improvement).

The individual images are then presented fullscreen, adapting dynamically to the size of your browser window, and overlaid with navigation widgets (I don’t know of a way to hide the latter), including controls to zoom the image. You can also move the image within the browser window by clicking and dragging.

The “i” at the bottom of the screen brings up an information panel with information about the image, links to details and a “Download image” link. To download images, however, requires creating a free “Rijksstudio” account (basically just an email address). You must then, for every image you download, choose the level of rights (“Personal use”) and click an “I agree with terms and conditions” checkbox — every time.

I will be quick to say that the new site is a vast and welcome improvement over their old one, and the images are large and well reproduced, but this kind of nonsensical legal paranoia mars the experience and makes the museum look small minded and disrespectful of their visitors.

(Hello! Almost all of these works are hundreds of years old, therefore in the public domain, and are not subject to copyright by international, or even specifically Dutch, copyright law. The standard here in the US is that photographs that just reproduce public domain artworks are also in the public domain. Perhaps this has yet to be tested in Dutch courts; but the checkbox barrier to downloading, or even viewing the work without the navigation widgets, just seems petty.)

That being groused about, the new site is well worth visiting and exploring, and a Rijksstudio account is worth setting up, if only for the unobstructed view of the high resolution images. Their intention is for visitors to form their own Rijksstudio collections, essentially bookmarked images similar to the collections you can make in the Google Art Project. They go on to offer to sell you prints of the images, or crops of them, in various modes (hence, I suppose, some of the reproduction rights BS).

Though not quite at the level of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s fantastic website makeover, this is still a worthy world-class museum website, suited to a world class museum, and a welcome addition to the web’s list of outstanding art resources. (Now if only the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay would follow suit…)

(Images above: Rembrandt, Vermeer, Aelbert Cuyp, Cornelis Springer)

In what has become a welcome tradition, tomorrow, Saturday, September 29, 2012, is Museum Day here in the U.S.

Sponsored by Smithsonian Magazine, an offshoot of the cultural cornucopia of museums known as the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, all of which are free every day, Museum Day is a chance for participating museums to open their doors for free to encourage new visitors, albeit in a controlled, limited way.

Every U.S. household can order two tickets for any one museum, choosing from an extensive list of participating museums across the country. Not all of them are art museums, but a significant number are.

Most of the museums participating are smaller, regional museums. However, those, as I have pointed out in the past, are often treasure troves of wonderful specialized collections.

You can use the Find a Museum page on the event’s website to find a museum in your area, either by typing in a location, or by choosing from a dropdown menu of states.

You must order tickets online ahead of time.

For more, seee my previous posts on Museum Day 2011 and Museum Day, 2010.

(Images above: Some participating museums in Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey: Brandywine River Museum, Philadelphia Art Alliance, Allentown Art Museum, Delaware Art Museum, Biggs Museum of American Art, Montclair Museum, Newark Museum)