There are excellent web resources for art and art history research and study. Many national museums and libraries have online collections, so you will find other relevant resources by searching the Internet for museums in specific countries. The resources linked below were chosen specifically for excellent visual content, but include only resources in English.
Wikipedia is a great tool for a summary of a topic. Wikipedia content is constantly revised, and entries vary in quality. Some of the content is excellent, some is questionable.
Many educators frown on the use of Wikipedia. Why?
How can you use Wikipedia in a way that benefits your research process?
Recommended Art Resource websites from Professor Lazo:
The sites below offer excellent images for research in art and art history and are especially good for illustrating a research paper or creating a class presentation. See the Web Resources tab for many other resources.
American Memory Project
Art Images for College Teaching
Bridgeman Images
Google Art Project -- A unique collaboration of over 150 acclaimed art museums in 40 countries. The search capabilities are very clunky and it is recommended to use the Search by Museum category to browse. Create and share your own "collections."
Guggenheim: Collection Online -- "The Collection Online features a searchable database of selected artworks from the Guggenheim’s permanent collection. The site currently contains more than 1450 artworks by over 470 artists from the Guggenheim’s overall permanent collection of over 7,000 artworks."
Metropolitan Museum of Art Online Collections Outstanding online collections from the Met. Categories include: Islamic Art, Decorative Arts, American Painting & Sculpture, European Painting, the Costume Institute, Drawings & Prints, Africa, Oceania & the Americas, Egyptian Art, Musical Instruments, and others.
Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) -- A well-designed site with focus on fashion, craft, 2D design, and contemporary artists working in the UK and internationally. Repository for many specail collections in the UK.
Web Gallery of Art
Find an interesting website using Google or another browser? Not sure if you can use it for academic research? It is not always easy to determine if information on the World Wide Web is credible. However, the guidelines below will help you understand clues about the reliability of web resources.
Objectivity
For more in-depth information on evaluating websites, see: