Tough perhaps not definitive in terms of image quality or resolution, the Vincent van Gogh Gallery is nonetheless a terrific resource on the iconic Dutch artist, notable for the breadth of the material it presents.

As a labor of love for 14 years, Canadian David Brooks has attempted to collect an online catalog raisonné of Van Gogh’s works, no mean feat given the artist’s prolific nature.

There are catalogues of Van Gogh’s paintings arranged chronologically, alphabetically or by category in both text and thumbnailed listings. There are also galleries of his watercolors, graphics and letter sketches, as well as his wonderfully textural and often unjustly overlooked drawings.

Even if you have a dozen books on Van Gogh, you will likely be delighted here to encounter paintings and drawings that you have never seen.

I found it particularly enjoyable to browse by category, getting that way more of a mix and juxtaposition of time periods, from the dark earth tones of his early work to the brilliant sunbursts from Arles and Saint-Rémy.

You can also browse another Van Gogh Gallery that offers a complete catalog of paintings, though in a less flexible variety of access.

For a more definitive view of Van Gogh and his works, see the excellent resources on the site of the Van Gogh Museum, which I recently mentioned in my post about the restoration of his famous painting The Bedroom.

For additional resources on the artist, including museum listings and other image archives, see the Van Gogh listings on Artcyclopedia.

The joy here, though, is in the discovery of works by Van Gogh outside the 100 or so that you usually encounter.

The website of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is large and sprawling and full of amazing stuff, much like the museum itself. Also like the physical museum, wandering around and exploring is often rewarded with unexpected delights and treasures.

One of the treasures on the Met’s website is the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. Essentially a site of its own within the larger museum site, the Timeline is an ongoing project, sponsored by three foundations and created and maintained by the museum’s curatorial, conservation and education staff, that currently catalogues 6,000 works and places them within the contexts of time, place and thematic essays.

The Timeline’s features can be explored from any of these directions, as well by links to world religions, and directly searched via search box or index. You can search for artists or works of art, and many are featured in pages devoted specifically to the artist or work, as well as within the larger thematic essays.

Most of the articles have images that can be enlarged or zoomed, and are linked to further images and information within the museum’s larger object database.

From the Timeline’s front page you can flip through panels of works, timelines or thematic essays, or use the drop-down menus at top for access to dedicated pages for same, across geographic areas via world maps, or find works of art through a detailed search box.

Once drilled down to a topic, you can also follow the links in the “Related” section to any number of additional lines of browsing.

A major time sink as well as a tremendous resource.

ArtMagick one of those delightful art sites dedicated to a few related genres of painting; in this case some of the more interesting movements in late 19th and early 20th Century art.

According to their own description: “ArtMagick is a virtual gallery dedicated to the continual quest of seeking out obscure 19th century artists and long-forgotten paintings and poems illustrating a ‘magic world of romance and pictured poetry’. The majority of the content in the archive covers the Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist movements.”

The categories also include selections from the Art Nouveau, Romanticism, Aestheticism and Neo-Classical movements, as well as a selection of “Golden Age” illustration and even a section of “Fairy Painting” (which was a popular genre in Victorian England).

Though far from comprehensive, the site serves as a great place to browse, looking through work by artists you know, as well as perhaps discovering a few you’re not familiar with.

The site also features information about upcoming related exhibitions, museums with relevant collections and related poetry (more closely intertwined with visual arts movements at the time than in most other periods).

You can search or browse by Art Movement, Latest Images or Random Images. In each case, breadcrumb navigation allows you to backtrack to more images by a given artist.

I should give the customary time sink warning. You can get happily lost here for several hours.

(Images above: Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Arnold Böcklin, Gustave Moreau, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, John Martin; links are to the images on ArtMagick. Here are my posts about Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Arnold Böcklin, Gustave Moreau and John Martin.)

One of the problems confronting small museums, that are most often originally based on the art collection of an individual at their inception, is the question acquiring and maintaining a physical space in which to display the works.

Maintaining a physical space is often more difficult for small museums than large ones. Even though large museums have much higher expenses, they also have larger support and financial structures. There is a balancing point museums must reach in terms of support to make the operation of a physical museum viable. This is particularly difficult in places where real estate is at a premium, as in New York City.

Such has been the struggle for the Dahesh Museum of Art, which moved between several venues, and left its last one due to the high cost of renting the space. It is currently a museum without a physical home. But the good news is that the Museum has put some of its collection online in a virtual exhibition.

This is particularly nice because of the museum’s rather unique mission, as the only museum in the U.S. devoted to 18th and 19th Century European academic art.

This, as fans of the genre(s) will tell you, is important because this art often gets short shrift among the larger art establishment. It is seen as the stodgy, formulaic art that post-war 20th Century Modernism (the pinnacle of all artistic achievement) came along to save us from (as well as liberating us from the associated stifling conventions of draftsmanship, perspective, representation and such outmoded concepts as “beauty”, but I digress).

The Dahesh collection started with Lebanese writer and philosopher Saleem Moussa Ashi, whose pen name was Dr. Dahesh. His collection of more than 2,000 academic paintings, sculpture and works on paper form the core of the collection.

It is worth noting that the museum has also paid attention to illustration (an equally bankrupt form of making images, even more reviled among the modernist factions, and obviously “not art” – sigh).

Not having the museum in a physical space for the time being is unfortunate, but as they look for a new home for the collection, parts of it travel on loan; and the online presence gives those of us who love this misunderstood and neglected chapter of art history a source of inspiration.

Most of the images are zoomable, which, while not as satisfying as full high-resolution images, is still better than just small ones. The collection is a little awkward to browse, the only alternative to a search is alphabetical arrangement; and someone had the misbegotten idea to watermark some of the smaller images (please stop demonstrating your ignorance, whoever you are), but the zoomable images can be enjoyed.

The museum shop does currently has a physical presence, at 55 East 52nd St. in Manhattan. They have an interesting selection of books, prints, posters and exhibition catalogs.

(Images above: Edwin Long, José Tapiró Baró, Ernst Karl Eugen Koerner, Aguste Bonheur)

Anyone who has read Dear Theo, the book of Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother, which, in essence, is a kind of autobiography, knows that the popularized image of the artist as an uncouth, irrational, semi-literate wild man, stabbing at the canvas in frantic desperation like a crazed orangutan, couldn’t be further from the truth.

Though certainly emotionally troubled, Van Gogh was a thoughtful, well read and articulate individual, whose insights, observations and accounts of his personal journey as an artist are illuminating on many levels.

Van Gogh wrote hundreds of letters, a number of which contain sketches, or even well developed drawings, that frequently presage his paintings or refer to the circumstances under which they were painted. Together, they form an account of the artist’s life and work that is unlike anything we have from other major artists.

There are several other collections of Van Gogh’s letters, from those specific to a particular time in the artist’s life, like Vincent Van Gogh – Letters from Provence (The illustrated letters), to more comprehensive collections like Letters of Vincent van Gogh (Touchstone), The Letters of Vincent van Gogh (Penguin Classics) and Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh (Bulfinch).

The latest and most deluxe collection, which should soon be available, is Vincent van Gogh — The Letters (Thames & Hudson) (details here), a multi volume set collecting all of his letters with new transcriptions and translations, reproductions of the illustrated letters and reproductions of all of the works that are referred to in the letters. It promises to be a unique study of the artist and his work, told from the artist’s point of view; but at a list price of $600 U.S. ($480 on Amazon), it’s not exactly a mass market collection.

The book set accompanies a new exhibit at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (choose a language at the upper left), called Van Gogh’s letters: the artist speaks, that showcases many of his letters from the museum’s collection and displays them with related paintings and drawings, forming an exhibition in which the artist, in effect, provides the commentary on his own work.

The exhibition runs until the 3rd of January, 2010, but it is part of a larger project, in which the letters were reexamined and photographed in preparation for both the exhibit and the book; and the museum has mounted excellent web resources that will continue after the exhibition has closed.

There is a web site devoted to the project at www.vangoghletters.org that is essentially a comprehensive, online, databased version of the book project. It can be searched by period, correspondent or place; or filtered for letters with sketches. There are also advanced search capabilities and background features on the artist, his time, the people with whom he was corresponding and more.

The letters are displayed as original text, translated, with notes and facsimile reproductions of the letters themselves, as well as reproductions of artwork (by Van Gogh and other artists) referred to in the letters.

It’s easy to miss the small links at top of the columns to the facsimile versions and artworks, and it’s worth looking through the Quick Guide they have offered to getting the most out of the resource (it pops up by default the first time you access the letters).

As if this wasn’t enough to delight lovers of Van Gogh’s work, the museum is also maintaining a wonderful Van Gogh Blog, in which letters form the artist are posted daily, giving the effect of the artist writing a daily blog post, or corresponding with you personally on a daily basis (whichever appeals to your disposition). The posts are accompanied with drawings and sketches.

The blog just started in the beginning of October, so you can catch up and then read a daily post from Van Gogh to start your day. Wonderful.

Addendum: Peacay has posted a very nice article with images and quotes from the letters on Bibliodyssey.

One of the best things about the internet is its exponential rate of growth. If there’s something you can’t find today, wait a few years (or months, or days) and it just may pop up. “All things”, to paraphrase the zen-like passage from the Bible, “come to he who waits.”

When I started writing Lines and Colors back in 2005, my very first post was about the Art Renewal Center, a sprawling art image resource dedicated to representational art. Since then I’ve discovered many other art image portals, like terrific Web Gallery of Art (see my post here), and The Athenaeum, which has recently been one of my favorites; as well as several others that I frequently link to in my posts about well represented artists from the past.

Sites like ARC, the WGA and the Athenaeum are constantly adding to and improving their image catalogs, but occasionally I’ll be surprised to find a new (at least to me) major trove of online art.

A case in point is the Allpaintings Art Portal, which I wasn’t aware of until a few months ago (at allpaintings.org, allpaintings.com is just a squatted domain). Im not certain how long the site has been established, but it boasts over 33,000 images (though some of them contemporary, in a “Users Gallery”), as well as a blog and Art News listing.

The works are arranged in general stylistic categories with oddly varying degrees of specificity, like Baroque, Impressionism, Hudson River School, Barbizon School, Symbolism and Realism, with subsections for individual artists.

The image “thumbnails”, actually quite large, are presented as square crops and alphabetically arranged, oddly enough, by the artists’ given names rather than by surname.

While not “complete” in any sense of the word, or even “as complete” as some of the art image sites that have been established for many years, the site nonetheless contains an impressive number of images, carefully selected and nicely presented; with well balanced color and good quality of reproduction.

The best thing about the Allpaintings Art Portal, though, is the size of the images. While many of the other art portals have very large images for some works, the Allpaintings site seems to be taking pains to post large images whenever possible, some of them are among the highest resolution images of paintings you’ll find in art portal sites.

Once you’ve drilled down through an artist to an individual painting. look for the link above it to “View larger Image” (the image itself at that point is often linked to a detail crop, or a series of them, click on the text link for the full large image).

The selection of images is impressive as well. Though fewer artists may be represented than other portal sites, the selection of images for an individual artist may include images not found in the others, such as one of the best resources for the pre-tonalist work of George Inness (my post here), good selections of American Impressionist Theodore Robinson and undersung French Impressionist Gustav Caillebotte (my post here), a section dedicated the Pre-Raphaelites (my post here) and related painters, including John William Waterhouse (my post here), a wonderful selection of very high resolution detail crops from Caravaggio’s paintings, and probably the best resource anywhere for one of my (undeservedly obscure) favorites, Frits Thaulow (Hooray! — my post here); just to name a few.

(Image above: Caravaggio, Frits Thaulow, Theodore Robinson, George Inness, Gustav Caillebotte, John William Waterhouse)

As usual in this kind of situation, I’ll issue my Major Time Sink Warning. There are enough beautiful images here to keep you avoiding work for weeks on end.

Enjoy.

Occasionally artists will become particularly fascinated with the work of one of their predecessors, and study the work of that artist in depth. Such is the case with Jonathan Janson, and artist originally from (if I’m not mistaken) Seattle, now living and working in Rome.

Janson has a deep and abiding interest in the work of Johannes Vermeer, one of the most enigmatic and fascinating figures in the history of art. The result of that fascination is twofold.

One happy result is that Janson has gifted us with Essential Vermeer, an astonishingly extensive and beautifully crafted web resource on Vermeer and his work, that is the high mark for any web resource devoted to a single artist (see my previous post on Essential Vermeer). The only close second, in fact, is Janson’s other, somewhat similar, site: Rembrant van Rijn: Life and Work (see my previous post about the site under its old title, Rembrandt: life paintings etchings drawings and self portraits).

In addition, Janson has created an extensive sub-site devoted specifically to the study of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, and has recently started a blog called Flying Fox, focused on Vermeer, exhibitions and loans of his works as well as other related topics. (The name Flying Fox is from an inn in Delft that was likely central to Vermeer’s world.)

I liken Janson’s Vermeer and Rembrandt sites to the 21st Century equivalent of artist monographs, but bringing to bear the advantages of web technology to extend the lines of information deep into the resources of the web.

Another difference between these sites and traditional monographs is that monographs on artists are usually written by art historians, who study art from a certain perspective, but rarely the perspective of a working artist. The advantages of the latter viewpoint are particularly evident in Janson’s study of Vermeer’s Painting Techinque.

Janson not only brings the perspective of a painter to his writing and research on Vermeer, but moves the knowledge in the other direction, to the second result of his fascination with that artist, in the way it has transformed and informed his own painting.

Many of Janson’s recent works are in-depth and in-practice explorations of Vermeer’s techniques, some of which he has codified in a book, How to Paint Your Own Vermeer: Recapturing materials and Methods of a Seventeenth-Century Master.

Janson’s own explorations of Vermeer’s approach even extend to humorous recasting of some of Vermeer’s famous compositions into his own modern counterparts, a practice that can be simultaneously hilarious and poetic, as in his Girl Playing a Guitar, in which a purple Stratocaster takes the place of Vermeer’s more demure instruments in Woman with a Lute and The Guitar Player.

You can see the same humorous but beautifully painted approach in Janson’s adaptation of Vermeer’s composition from A Lady Writing (see my post on A Vermeer Comes to California), as Young Girl Writing an Email (image above, larger version here), in which Vermeer’s elegant box (perhaps a music box?) has been replaced with a boom box and his quill and inkwell with a laptop. Janson has retained the pearls on the table, and, of course, that wonderful earring.

Vermeer can be surprisingly painterly at times, belying the apparent “realism” of his paintings, and can also be remarkably “soft”, despite the perception he gives of intricate sharp detail. Also, perhaps because of his use of a camera obscura, Vermeer seems in general preoccupied with matters of focus, both in terms of degrees of visual sharpness and compositionally. Janson explores both of these aspects of Vermeer’s work in his own compositions, the soft edges and painterly touches being particularly evident in Girl Writing an Email (details above).

On Janson’s site you can see other examples of his Vermeer inspired interiors as well as his contemplative Seattle landscapes and watercolors.

There is currently a show of Janson’s work at Galleria dell’Incisione in Brescia, Italy until January 30, 2009.

Janson’s fascination with Vermeer has put him on a path of exploration that reaches into the past and future at the same time, in the process throwing a contemporary light on the master’s approach, and giving us a unique perspective from an artist who has done his best to look at a great painter from the “inside”, while revealing his own sensibilities and unique artistic vision.

I’ll start out by giving the Major Time Sink Warning.

The Museum of Online Museums is site maintained by Coudal Partners, a design firm based in Chicago.

Basically it’s a list of links to an eclectic collection of online sites, either virtual museums, or online extensions of brick and mortar museums.

It ranges from the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Timeline of Art History, to obscure and wonderfully bizarre collections like The Galleries of Thrift Store Art and the Museum of Vintage Octopus Pulp Covers.

Though there are plenty of art related links, the MoOM is not entirely art oriented, and you’ll find such gems as Very Small Objects, The Museum of Useful Things, The Virtual Typewriter Museum and the Squished Penny Museum.

The majority of the selections are art or design oriented, however; bearing in mind that’s a broad definition that includes things like The Museum of Bad Album Covers, The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies, The Magazine Cover Archive, A Few Thousand Science Fiction Magazines, The Comic Book Cover Browser (which I’ve mentioned before), and the Museum of Imagined Contemporary Art.

There are also big items like the National Portrait Gallery (my post here), the Rijkemuseum, The Van Gogh Gallery, Art Treasures from Kyoto and the Russian Museums List.

There is a small, blog-like column on the left called “Now Showing”, in which half a dozen items are featured and described in more detail.

The MoOM is updated quarterly and you can sign up for a mailing list notification.

Remember, I did give you the Major Time Sink Warning.

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where I had the privilege of studying as a painting major, is the oldest art school in the United States. Modeled after the academic schools of Europe, it has a long tradition of training American artists and a correspondingly long history of collecting American art for its associated museum.

The school and museum share a web site, which has just been completely redesigned and rearranged, and it is now much easier to browse the museum’s extraordinary collection. The collection is particularly rich in beautiful 19th Century paintings.

You can search for individual artists, view their paintings, sculpture or works on paper separately, or view all works together. You can also simply browse the collection as a whole by the same criteria, a delightful exercise that will lead you to unexpected treasures. In addition you can browse by artist, medium or period.

My one complaint (as usual) is the size of the images. There are larger versions associated with most of the works, and though adequate for getting a feeling for the work, still much smaller than they need to be for real appreciation. Hopefully that will be supplemented with additional images or some kind of image zooming feature in the future.

In the meanwhile, once you find a piece you like, you can search the web for additional images or information on that artist (here’s a great new visual search engine, SearchMe, that has an interface like the Mac “Cover Flow” system used on their new OS and on the iPhone/iPod Touch, and makes visual browsing more efficient).

Even better, of course, if you have the option, is to visit the Academy here in Philadelphia, where they always have a superb selection form the permanent collection on display in the beautiful Furness building.

(Images above: Cecilia Beaux, George Inness, Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, John White Alexander, Charles Courtney Curran, John Sloan. Links are to my previous posts on those artists.)

The Web Gallery of Art (WGA) is one of the best and most extensive of the “online museums” on the web.

The WGA is more specific than some, with a focus on European Art from the Gothic to the Romantic periods (1100 to 1850). The gallery has a search function, as you would expect, as well as an alphabetical Artist Index (at the bottom of every page).

Clicking on an artist’s name in the index brings up either a page of thumbnails, or, if the artist’s listing is extensive enough, text links to two or more sections, each of which has a page or more of thumbnails.

Clicking on a thumbnail opens a pop-up with a large version of the image. (I’ve experienced some problems with this when using Safari for Mac, try refreshing the window if it’s blank. The popup feature works more reliably in IE and Firefox). The popup has a choice of images sizes, though 100% seems optimal for quality.

There is also a column in the thumbnails pages with an “I”; clicking on this gives you a page with a medium size image and text details about the image (date, size, medium and description or background information). The artist thumbnail pages and image detail pages also have a link at page top to the artist’s biography.

An interesting feature of the WGA is the “Dual Mode” (a link at page top), which makes use of frames (a browser feature that allows for the display of more than one web page in the same window) to allow you to either search a list in one frame and have the results display in the other (the default), or, if you deselect that choice at the bottom of the frame, you can search two lists independently, bringing up two different selections side by side for comparison. (In the image above I’ve chosen to compare Titian’s Man With the Blue Sleeve to one of Rembrandt’s self portraits.)

As usual with frames, it’s often possible to find yourself a bit confused and you may need to back out to the front page and start over, but it’s a nice feature if you get used to it.

The Web Gallery of Art has an extensive database of over 20,000 images, lots of information about the artists and the individual works, and nicely includes many drawings and graphics as well as paintings. This can be a terrific resource, and/or a major time-sink.

Enjoy.