the
Internet Public Library the
Internet Public LibraryThis pathfinder will help you find images of art works on and off the Web. This could include pictures of paintings, sculptures, etc.; some of the tricks for finding art images on the Web can also be used to find other Web images as well.
For many art works, especially famous ones, the greatest assortment of images in one place will likely be a book devoted to the subject. A book on Van Gogh will usually lots of pictures with the text, and may even have an index of illustrations so you can find the one that you want. You may be able to find such books at your local public or university library: try looking for the artist's last name as a Subject in the Online Catalog or Card Catalog.
If you can't find a book on the artist, pictures of the work you are looking for may be in an anthology containing the works of many artists. There are indexes that will tell which anthologies have pictures of which works. Such indexes can be found under many Subject Headings in library catalogs:
Pictures-Indexes
Painting-Indexes
Sculpture-Indexes
Sometimes you will find more regionally-specific indexes. To find these, try looking for the the artist's country between a set of double dashes (--) before the term "Indexes":
Painting--United States-Indexes
Sculpture--Great Britain-Indexes
You can use these subject headings to guide your search, or ask the staff at your library for help finding these indexes.
There are lots of art images and image collection on the Web, but they can be hard to find and many of the collections are relatively small. Many of the image collections on the Web are made available by the museums that own the originals, so it can be helpful to know where the original work is. If you do know where the original is, try looking for the museum in: Yahoo's Yahoo's Art Museum and Gallery hierarchy (this page may not contain a link to the museum's home page directly, but it provides links to different lists of museums (sculpture museums, architecture museums, etc.) as well as a link to Web Directories for Museums and Galleries.
Some other valuable resources for finding Web images:
World Wide Art Resources http://wwar.com/ is an index of art resources on the web, searchable by artists' names, museum names, exhibition titles/subject, among other ways. This is a rather high-tech site with a few too many pop-up windows, but it is an excellent resource.
Swedish University Network SUNETArchive http://ftp.sunet.se/pub/pictures/art is an ftp archive of hundreds of famous paintings, mostly Western, and mostly by men. There is one directory per artist, listed by the artist's first name; there are a few images in each directory, but this is in no way a comprehensive collection of paintings by these artists.
Searching for Web images:
Curiously enough, perhaps the fastest and most efficient way of finding images of any kind (not just art images) on the web can be to guess what someone else will name the image, and then use a search engine to look for that name. This works best with images of generic things (cats, cauldrons, trees, etc.) and with famous images (da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Van Gogh's Starry Night, etc.
The Search Engine best equiped to find images is AltaVista, which lets users search just for words associate with images, instead of words anywhere in the text of the document. For example, you could be looking for a picture of the Mona Lisa, and use a search engine to look for all the pages with the phrase "mona lisa" in them, but that won't find an image right away. Using AltaVista, search for:
image:"mona lisa" or image:"monalisa".
This will only bring back pages with the words "mona lisa" or "monalisa" associated with an image (that is, as the name of an image file).
Using AltaVista, you can also shorten, or "truncate" your search strings to catch variants of words. For example, if you are looking for pictures of Starry Night, you may find images called: starry, starryn, starry-night, starry_night, etc. To catch all of them, you can use the * symbol (shift-8 on most keyboards) like this:
image:starry*
That will find all images that have a name beginning with "starry"--including people who put of pictures of "A starry night in Texas" or any number of other things not related to Van Gogh's painting. In order to cut back on such occurences, try combining terms:
image:starry* and (vangogh or "van gogh")
This will look only for pages with image files called starry-something, and also mention Van Gogh.
A modified version of this tactic works with other full-text search engines like Excite and HotBot . While these engines don't have the ability to search for text strings in the image file name, you can work with the knowledge that most image files end with the string ".gif" or ".jpg": it is often productive to try to guess the name of the file. To find Starry Night, you could search for
(starry.jpg or starry.gif) and ("van gogh" or
vangogh)
If you can figure out what name someone is likely to call the file, try searching for it. Using the Boolean or Advanced Search feature on search engines (where available) you can add the artists name with the "and" command to increase the chances of finding the image you want. If the first name you try doesn't work, try adding to the name: starry1, starry01, starryn, etc.
If you want images in a particular size, it is good to know that .jpg images are likely to be larger than .gif images because .jpg images don't take up as much computer memory; they lose a little quality in the process, but not usually enough to notice with the naked eye. If you only want large images, try just looking for images files ending in ".jpg".
Using search engines find images is a very haphazard method, but there seems to be a critical mass of information on the Web, and a sufficient degree of predictability in how files are named that this method actually works well.
This pathfinder created by Ken Irwin.
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Last updated Jun 27, 2001