Art History & Collector Resources On The Web
Posted by Margaret O'Connor on: 2005-08-12 18:34:35
A simple search at google may turn up plenty of information about famous artists such as Van Gogh, Rembrandt and Monet. But to find information about not-so-famous artists you really need to know where to look.
So, put on your detective cap and navigate over to the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Here are two great links at the web site to get you started:
Researching Your Art
Search Collections
Researching Your Art includes first steps, biographical resources, appraisal resources, specific guidelines for prints and posters and more. The Search Collections link lets you search the museum’s collection of over 40,000 works of art by American artists.
The site also has an “Ask Joan of Art” section where you can ask the experts at the museum a question about your artwork. They will respond with a brief factual answer and will direct you to sources that will aid your research.
Here are a list of web sites to help you further:
Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM)
See Researching Your Art for getting started tips for art collectors. The Smithsonian American Art Museum is dedicated to art and artists of the United States.
The museum maintains a number of specialized art databases at this link: Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS). The Art Inventories database lets you search, by artist name, over 360,000 works in public and private collections nationwide.
At this link you can search the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection of 40,000 artworks. More than 18,000 are illustrated online. You can search for specific artworks by artist name, painting title, art work type or art work subject.
tfaoi.com
Traditional Fine Arts Organization, Inc. A resource for collectors, life long learners and students of Art History. See this subsection of the site:http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/4aa/4aa215n.htm. There is a good page on how and where to get appraisals of original art objects.
the-artists.org
A portal for research on visual arts for art lovers, art students, artists, art historians, large and small collectors, museum curators, art gallery owners and exhibition organisers. The site contains an extended database of 20th Century and contemporary visual artists. The masters of the past hundred years are represented.
getty.edu
The Getty Museum & Research Institute. Book catalogues and art collections databases. See The Getty Provenance (history) Research Database.
Also try these databases at getty.edu:
The Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT)® The AAT is a structured vocabulary of more than 133,000 terms, descriptions, bibliographic citations, and other information relating to fine art, architecture, decorative arts, archival materials, and material culture.
The Union List of Artist Names (ULAN)® The ULAN is a structured vocabulary containing more than 225,000 names and biographical and bibliographic information about artists and architects, including a wealth of variant names, pseudonyms, and language variants.
ask-art.com
Easy to search for specific works of art by artist name. View an artist biography, photographs of art works, auction records and more. Offers limited information for free.
artnet.com
An on-line gallery facilitating the research, buying and selling of fine art. Has more than 90,000 works by over 18,000 artists.
While the above list includes web sites that you might come across in your google or yahoo searches, a few of the sites, the ones that link to searchable databases are not easily found through the search engines. Due to technical limitations, data within databases is generally invisible to search engines.
For future reference, the above links can be found on the www.websearchadvisor.com web site in the Fine Art category.
Happy Collecting!