Incredible Visual Art Resources

The following list of museum sites is just a starting point. These are some of our favorite art sites here at ClassBrain. We plan to add to this list over time, so check back to see what else pops up. If you have a site that you think is an exceptional art resource, please let us know at info@classbrain.com

The Thinker Imagebase
The ImageBase is a searchable image and text database of objects from the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor).
The collections (110,000+ objects - over 82,000 are online) belong to the people of the City and County of San Francisco. This is a wonderful art research tool! The ability to zoom in on the details of the images makes this project especially great for online research.
Source: Fine Art Museums of San Francisco

The National Gallery of Art - Online Tours
The National Gallery allows you to tour their online collections by theme, school, or artist. There are special study guides that can be downloaded in PDF format in five different languages. This becomes a great resource if you’re doing a foreign language project related to art. In addition to a great set of standard online collections, there are Quick time VR tours of Van Gogh, Alexander Calder, Cambodian sculpture, and the Crown Point Press exhibit.
Source: The National Gallery of Art

The State Hermitage Museum - Russia
On 7 February 1852 in the building of the New Hermitage the first Russian public museum was open to visitors. The tradition of collecting works of art led down in Catherine's time became a part of the state policy. This Russian museum houses a magnificent collection of art. You can browse through their collections, or use the quick search to find a particular piece or artist.

Two especially interesting features on their site are the QBIC color and layout searches. With these two tools you can search for artwork that has a certain color combination or a particular layout of elements. You should try this out just to see the interesting results.
Source: State Hermitage Museum


The National Gallery - London
Another exceptional art resource online is the National Gallery. Infinitely flexible on how you can search, you can explore by artist, time period and subject, themes, with the help of beginner’s guides or as a full text search. The themes search includes resources on very specific painting types, such as: horses, fruits and flowers from 1700-1800, and self portraits from 1600-1700, just to name a few.
Source: The National Gallery - London

Harvard University Art Museums - Collections Online
Collections Online provides access to basic information about approximately 67,000 works of art, about one half of the permanent holdings of the Harvard University Art Museums. This collection is searchable by artist or title and you can limit your search to include only those entries that have images. This is an excellent online resource for the study of visual art.
Source: Harvard University

Specialized Collections at Harvard University
Sargent at Harvard
Sargent at Harvard is a searchable database that makes available images and textual information relating to the American artist John Singer Sargent (1856-1925)
Source: Harvard University

Art Museum Image Consortium - Thumbnail Catalog
This is an excellent tool for preliminary research. Unfortunately at this time we can only see thumbnail images of the artwork in this consortium. However, each work has a brief description and the location of the actual piece of art.
Source: AMICO