As someone who routinely scours the web in search of great art images, I can testify that art museum websites vary in quality and usefulness on those counts from good to disappointing to appallingly bad. It’s astonishing how many major museums allow their online presence to fall into the latter two categories.

The website for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, one of the world’s great art museums and one that has been fairly adept in its adaptation of modern technology, has always been something of a mixed bag — professional and competent, with lots of information online, some of it very well presented, but with a somewhat clunky search system, some frustrating dead ends, disappointingly small images and an overall feeling that things could somehow be better.

Evidently those responsible for the museum’s website have also been of the opinion that it could be better, and after what is undoubtedly a great deal of thought, planning and hard work, have just unveiled a new website that is likely the best major art museum website in the world.

The redesigned interface is elegant, understated and when presenting the artworks, quietly beautiful. The website has been reorganized, streamlined and made more usable at almost every level.

The new home page, which thankfully dispenses with the pointless splash page from the old site, offers easy access to a number of paths into the site’s contents without overwhelming or confusing the visitor.

The listings for exhibitions are likewise simplified and at the same time more graphically appealing, the search feature is drastically improved and much more useful than its predecessor, and the listings for individual objects are a brilliant combination of clear, uncluttered presentation and easy access to deeper levels of information.

The Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, an online feature I have written about before, is not dramatically changed, but has been integrated into the other parts of the site more fully, putting this great resource to even better use.

A new MetMedia section collects videos, podcasts and web interactive features into an easy to use central interface.

Best of all perhaps, is the new image enlargement feature, in many cases replacing the disappointingly small images that used to represent the objects at their most detailed with a new full screen image viewer that is lightning fast and a joy to use.

I don’t know if the work was done in-house or by a third party design firm. If the latter, they deserve more recognition than the site gives them, but if the new site was created by museum staff, which I believe is the case, they just handed numerous high-end website design firms their lunch and sent them packing by showing them how a large scale website (of any kind) should be done. [Addendum: Lines and Colors reader Caz was kind enough to inform me that the site was designed by Cogapp, a design firm from Brighton, UK with offices in New York. The also designed the new website for the Barnes Foundation here in Philadelphia. My hat's off to them.]

In the process there are few trade-offs; the horrible long-string URLs (web page addresses) for individual pages utilized by the old site, which were difficult to copy and paste, send to a friend, or add to an article, have been replaced by short, human-readable addresses. The downside for someone like me is that the dozens, if not hundreds of links I’ve made to the Met’s site over the last 6 years are now broken and have to be replaced, but I’ll gladly accept that for the easier to use addresses going forward.

For those who can physically visit the museum, not only are the exhibition listings and visitor information sections much improved, there is a new zoomable interactive museum map that allows you to pinpoint specific galleries within the museum and explore their contents, as well as suggested itineraries for those who can’t devote a week or two to exploring the museum’s extensive and extraordinarily rich collections.

Exploring the collections and works online is now a genuine pleasure, so much so that I will issue my Major Timesink Warning about visiting.

The elegance, ease of use and intelligent application of sophisticated interface design principles throughout make the new Metropolitan Museum of Art website a shining example that we can only hope many other art museums will aspire to emulate.

There is a press release about the new site here.

Some, of course, are in private collections, visible to the public only if on loan to museums or in publications. A great percentage, however, is in museum storage. Another significant percentage actually is on view, but not in a way to encourage access by the general public; many publicly owned works hang in government buildings, schools and offices.

In one nation, at least, there is an attempt to bring much of this work to light.

A new initiative by the BBC and the Public Catalogue Foundation aims to make most of the publicly owned work in the UK visible online; seeking to digitize an estimated 200,000 works and make them available on a newly launched website called Your Paintings.

The site launched with an impressive 62,000 paintings already digitized and ready to search. The collection is not limited to British artists, simply art that is in British public collections.

There is a general search on the home page labeled “Find a Painting”. In the top navigation are tabs for Paintings, Artists and Galleries and Collections, within which you can browse.

The Artists page gives an initial selection of popular artists, perhaps giving you the mistaken impression that these are then only ones available, but use the alphabetical selection at the top to narrow the selection by artist’s surname, and the numbered links below the thumbnails to browse further.

The reproductions offered on the site (at least currently) are not high resolution, as one might hope, but they are large enough to enjoy; and the detail page for each work lists the institution that houses the work for further follow-up. (Particularly fruitful in this regard are works housed in the National Gallery, which often has nicely high-resolution images that can be zoomed full screen.)

There are plenty of other features to the site, with background information, efforts to ask the public to help tag the content of the paintings for searches, guided tours by various individuals, and more.

I’ll issue my customary major time-sink warning.

(Images above: Sir John Everett Millais, John Constable, Gustav Courbet, Titian, Rembrandt, Alfred Sisley, Alfred J. Munnings, Peter Paul Rubens, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Sir Albert Joseph Moore)

[Via Art Daily]

(My related posts: Sir John Everett Millais, John Constable, Gustav Courbet, Titian, Rembrandt, Alfred Sisley, Alfred J. Munnings, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh)

Peacay, author of the amazing blog, BibliOdyssey (see my posts here and here), was kind enough to point out recently that the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, one of the world’s great museums, is now posting high resolution images of almost all of the works featured in their online collections. This practice extends right down to the posters and prints in their shop.

While not as stunningly high-resolution as the images on the Google Art Project (my post here), these can be viewed whole more easily and they go way beyond the selection offered there.

You can search the collections, or, as I prefer to do, browse through their lists of artists alphabetically; find someone you’re interested in, say, Vermeer (grin), and see a selection of the works available for viewing online.

Click on a thumbnail image to access the detail page for a given work, for example, The Little Street, and click on the plus sign or link for “Extra large view of the image” below the preview image to see the larger version (images above, top, with detail crop below it).

Some enlargements are higher in resolution and have more detail than others, but all I’ve encountered have been large enough to be worthwhile.

The collection includes artists who are quite famous, like Rembrandt (images above, 3rd and 4th down), a little less famous, like Pieter de Hooch (above, 7th and 8th down), and lesser known but wonderful artists like still life painter Floris van Dijck (above, 5th and 6th down).

The museum’s online collection also contains gems you might not expect, like one of Van Gogh’s beautifully textural ink drawings, or a stunning Monet.

It’s also worth coming back through the front of the site and exploring that way, though I find the artist listings the most rewarding in terms of high resolution images. You could spend a lot of rewarding time here just checking out artists with whom you’re not familiar.

If your taste for great northern European art (and others) is anything like mine, I’ll issue my standard Major Time Sink Warning.

[Thanks also to Valentino Radman and Lok Jansen for mentions of high res images at the Rijksmuseum.]

There are times I just want to hug the internet, and say “I love you Internet!“.

Google, that monolithic giant of search, advertising, maps, stats and online software, whose offerings and initiatives have ranged from the amazing (search, maps) to the not-so wonderful (privacy issues), has spun off a new initiative for which I will forgive most of their transgressions.

Google on Monday unveiled a new feature called Google Art Project that is nothing short of wonderful and amazing, and, if Google’s history is any indication, stands to become even more wonderful and amazing as time goes on.

The project is an online archive of ultra-high-resolution images of great works of art.

Google has applied their “Street View” technology, familiar for providing zoomable street-level images within the context of Google Maps, to the display of both the works and the galleries in which they reside.

Google Street View has been put to unofficial art related use before, notably with the Virtual Paintout (my post here) in which artists virtually “visit” a specified location by way of Google Street View, and use the images as reference for “on location” paintings.

Here, the technology is being put to much different use by Google, allowing some of the best views of great paintings available online.

At the moment they are working with 17 museums, each of which has contributed one or more gigapixel level images to the project; and an impressive start it is:

Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin – Germany
Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian, Washington DC – USA
The Frick Collection, NYC – USA
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin – Germany
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC – USA
MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC – USA
Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid – Spain
Museo Thyssen – Bornemisza, Madrid – Spain
Museum Kampa, Prague – Czech Republic
National Gallery, London – UK
Palace of Versailles – France
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam – The Netherlands
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg – Russia
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow – Russia
Tate Britain, London – UK
Uffizi Gallery, Florence – Italy
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam – The Netherlands

Starting from a list that appears on the project’s home page when you mouse over the initial image, you can choose a museum, then browse the museum’s corridors, or go right to an artwork.

Unlike the stingy feeling so many museums project with tiny preview images and zooming images that have to be scrolled in frustratingly small little windows, the artworks here are available in a full screen zooming interface, and when I say “zoom” I mean it really zooms, down to an astonishing level of detail.

This is like the Haltadefinizione project that I wrote about here, but with a better interface and without the annoyance of watermarking.

In the images above, I’ve chosen to visit the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and zoom in to a nose-up-against-the-canvas view of Rembrandt’s The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq, commonly known as The Night Watch.

Though the Flash drop-down for browsing museums and works is a bit glitchy, the interface’s provision for scrolling and zooming is wonderfully fluid, and the ability to get your eyeballs right up to Rembrandt’s textural brushwork is just delicious.

I’ve left the zooming control in my images just to demonstrate it, but it and other interface elements politely melt away when not in use. In the upper right is a Visitor Guide button, which provides a general introduction to the project (there is also a short introductory video here), and an info (“i”) button which gives access to an information panel with a menu of options for information about the painting, provided by the museum in which it hangs.

Of note in that menu are links to “More Works by this Artist” and “More Works in this Museum”, which can lead to a nice browsing experience.

There are some amazing images to be seen, including The Harvesters by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Van Gogh’s The Starry Night at the MoMA, Hans Holbein’s enigmatic The Ambassadors (my post here) in the National Gallery, London and (be still my beating heart) Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in the Uffizi!

Wow.

I’ll give my Major Time Sink Warning and bid you enjoy!

All art on the internet should be like this.

[Via MetaFilter]

(A wiki, by the way, is simply a kind of website, specifically, a potentially collaborative website created with wiki software, that allows for contribution, editing and administration by people with no knowledge of HTML.)

Wikimedia Commons is the Wikimedia Foundation’s online free-use media resource, containing over 7,000,000 media files — sound, video and of course, images.

Among the images are an increasingly large number of art related images — paintings, drawings, etchings, engravings and the like. It has become one of the larger art image repositories on the web (see my posts on The Athenaeum, ArtMagick, AllPaintings, The Web Gallery of Art and The Art Renewal Center). You may have noticed links to Wikimedia Commons among the links provided with a number of my articles about artists from history.

You can use the search feature at the top of every Wikimedia Commons page to look for a specific artist, of course, but one of the nice things about the arrangement of the material is that it enables a certain kind of browsing, one conducive to discovering artists and works that may be new to you.

An initial search for “paintings“, for example, brings up a page that provides access other category listings, such as Paintings by artist, Paintings by city, country, period, medium, subject, technique, and even Paintings by museum.

One of the most productive to my mind is the “Paintings by date” category, and from that landing, “Paintings by century“.

Here it’s easy to narrow down, for example into 19th century paintings. At this level, you’ll be presented with a number of thumbnails for a variety of paintings from the century, a sort of skim through some of that century’s artists, and a further breakdown into decades. Here is where I like to browse, by choosing a decade, for instance, 1880s paintings.

Though there are further breakdowns at that level, into individual years, the thumbnails for a given decade present a nicely varied selection of works to view by a variety of artists. Though hardly comprehensive, it makes for a fun way to explore and sample a selection of works by artists both familiar and not.

The images above, for example, all were represented on the 1880s paintings page as thumbnails, from the top: James Tissot, Henryk Hector Siemiradzki, Carl Spitzweg, Aleksandr Novoskoltsev, Vincent van Gogh, Willem de Zwart, John Singer Sargent, Jules-Eugé Lenepveu, Ilya Repin, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Edouard Manet and William Merritt Chase.

Once on the page for an individual work you can sometimes (though not always) click through a linked mention of the artist’s name into a page of works specifically by that artist, for example, William Merritt Chase.

The possibilities for discovering artists are extensive.

I’ll give my usual Major Timesink Warning for resources this large and potentially engrossing.

Enjoy!

The collection, though not as extensive as those of larger museums, has the density of an expensive fruitcake, with so many yummy masterpieces in such a small space that it’s mind-boggling. It includes major works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Holbein, Whistler, Constable, Corot, David, Goya, Hals, Ingres, Renoir, Titian, Turner, Velázquez, Whistler and Van Eyck, among others.

For those who can’t get to the collection physically, the museum has databased much of the collection online, with Zoomable images of most works.

Their collections database search feature, though poorly organized and something of a drag to wade through, is usable once you understand how it works.

Choose Browse the Collections, then focus on a subject, like Paintings, focus on a region, say, Dutch, Flemish, German and Swiss, narrow down further, let’s say to Dutch, and then you’ll finally see some thumbnails of works.

In the initial display of a limited number of works, it’s easy to miss the tiny “next” button at the top of the interface (and not at the bottom of the list where you might expect it), but you may find it easier to select a particular work from the drop down menu.

If you click on an artist’s name instead of a specific work, you’re dropped on a page with a description of the artist, but no thumbnails of works. Just when you’re tempted to think that your search has returned no visible results, look for the linked (though not underlined) text saying “View objects by this artist”.

Then you will see thumbnails of viewable works. Click on the thumbnail or title of the work to view the main image, and then look for the link to the Zoomable image (and sometimes a selection of detail images).

The Zoomable image, like those of so many museums, is restrained in a box and partially obscured by the zooming thumbnail (wouldn’t want you to get away with a high res image, you naughty image thief, you), but the box is large enough to see detail in enough of an area to make the effort worthwhile.

Upkeep on the site has apparently been a low priority, as some items are missing or unviewable. (Hans Holbein’s portrait of Sir Thomas Moore is among them, alas. See my post on Hans Holbein the Younger.)

What is there, however, reflects the Frick’s superb collection. Many of the works are among the finest examples by the artists represented.

That includes three (count ‘em three) Vermeers, not far from the five in the nearby Metropolitan Museum (see my most recent post on Vermeer, with links to others).

For those who can get to the the collection in person, it’s worth noting that the usual $18 entry fee will be waived tomorrow, Thursday, December 17, 2010, in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the day the collection first opened its doors to the public.

In addition to the usual gems, there is currently an exhibition of 17th and 18th Century drawings, The Spanish Manner: Drawings from Ribera to Goya, on display until January 9, 2011.

As of this writing, The Athenaeum lists their online collection of art images at 43,339 (with 14 added in the last seven days), making it one one the largest art resources on the web, perhaps second only to the Art Renewal Center.

The Athenaeum is one of my favorite online sources of images from art history; they frequently have good selections of a given artist’s work, reproduced large enough to enjoy and with well balanced color (which can be a problem on some art image repositories).

You can search the archive via Google with the search box on the home page or the “Visual Arts” landing page.

You can also browse alphabetically by artist name, or even name of the work.

In the lists for individual artists, be aware that there are frequently multiple pages of thumbnails, linked from small numbers at the top of the list. You can sort these lists by title, date and medium and toggle the order of each.

Click through the thumbnail or title link to the detail page for the work, and click on the image again for the large reproduction.

You can also browse a museum list; these lists can be sorted by title, artist or date. In the museum listing details click on “Artworks at this museum” at the top to see works in the Athenaeum archive from that museum’s collections.

This can be a fascinating way to browse, in that it produces an interesting mix of artists and styles.

The above images, for example, are all from the collection of The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (from top: Edmund Tarbell, Raphaelle Peale, Thomas Eakins [no longer in the collection, alas], Cecilia Beaux, Winslow Homer and Theodore Robinson).

(See also my posts on Edmund Tarbell, Thomas Eakins, Cecilia Beaux and the web site of The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.)

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.