Alcove 9: An Annotated List of Reference Websites

Arts, Fine and Decorative: Fine Arts

Web Gallery of Art
Database of European painting and sculpture of the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque periods browseable by artist name, period and style with “tours” of styles and movements.

Olga’s Gallery
Provides biographical information on popular Western artists up to the early 20th century with images of their works. Find artists by country, name or movement.

ArtLex Art Dictionary
Provides definitions for more than 3,500 terms used in discussing visual culture, along with pictorial examples of art object images arranged in chronological groups.

Exploring Themes in American Art
Created by the National Galley of Art with essays, artworks, and artist information address recurring themes in American painting.

Joconde Catalogue des Collections des Musées de France
French language site provides access to artworks from major French museums searchable by subject, artist and time period. Comprehensive source for images of European paintings, however, offers little descriptive information other than artist, title, and location.

Contemporary Artists Index
Contemporary Artists Index from the Cleveland Institute of Art indexes approximately 20,000 artists, artists groups, photographers, craftspeople, designers, and design firms whose work appears in group exhibition catalogs.

Dictionary of Art Historians
Biographical information about art historians includes educational background, methodologies, and approaches to scholarship.

European ARTNET
European ARTNET provides information on contemporary artists, their activities and exhibitions as well as photos and texts.

Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide: A Journal of Nineteenth Century Visual Culture
World's first scholarly, refereed e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, architecture, and decorative arts across the globe.

Perseus: Interactive Sources and Studies on Ancient Greece
A multimedia interactive database designed to facilitate the study of archaic and classical Greece and to expand the ways in which ancient Greek literature, history, art, and archaeology can be examined. Contains over 20,000 thumbnail images and 5,000 full-screen images.

William Blake Archive
The Blake Archive contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 27 copies of 16 of Blake's 19 illuminated works. The Archive provides context for the full, up-to-date bibliographic information about each image, transcriptions of all texts, detailed descriptions of all images, and extensive bibliographies.

College Art Association (CAA)
The College Art Association supports the professional and scholarly activities of artists and scholars in order to cultivate the ongoing understanding of art as a fundamental form of human expression.