General Information

The Tigertail Virtual Museum is dedicated to providing you with art and a little art history, free for the taking. It contains over five thousand pictures covering every period of Western art since the cave man. Unlike most of the sites on the net, it is not designed to sell you anything or send you somewhere else. We occasionally provide interesting links to supplemental information or pictures, but making links to other than our own site is not our charter.

This virtual museum differs from other virtual museums in several ways. First, it is designed to simulate the experience of walking around in a museum, whenever that is possible. We use image maps and your browser scroll-bar to do that. You just point at the map and click on the mouse and you will go to that gallery. You walk around in a gallery by using the scroll-bar. There is a general summary of all museum floors inside the lift.

Second, there is no attempt to use virtual reality in this museum, because it is still too clumsy and immature a technology. When VR is better and common to most browsers we may change the user interface.

Third whenever possible the art in this museum has been made to look as close as possible to the way it looked when it was created. Sometimes we succeed and pictures look great; at other times things could really be better. Please accept our apologies for work less than perfect. Often the problem with an image is that we didn't have adequate data to begin with, but with more difficult cases one suspects that our staff just didn't hit on the right way to do the repair. But to reprocess several thousand pictures is a challenging task in itself. As we get better resolution pictures we will try to correct and replace those pieces of art that are really not up to a reasonable standard. It is the attempt to recreate the art as it was, that engenders the name: Virtual Museum.

Some times the virtual restoration goes even further, sculpture may get noses, cracks in paint get removed, and in general we clean up the image so one can see what was intended. Sometimes we even go further than that and restore a work to what we think the artist intended, but never achieved. For example the Leaning Tower of Pisa, does not lean in this museum, even though it started to lean as the workmen built it. The tower viewed this way has interesting things to tell us about its design. If you want to know more about virtual restoration read our little illustrated essay on how we got started and what we do.

There are many other art resources on the net, including other web museums, some can be reached by clicking here.

But all is not hopeless. After you recognize that what you see in a virtual museum is NOT what you will see when you go to a real museum, you are far ahead. Most virtual museums on the web try to create a view of what you might see in a real museum. Why should a virtual museum try to simulate the problems of aging art? Here, since we know we can't get it right, relative to the way the picture looks today, we might as well try to get as close as we can to the way it looked when it was created. Or at least, so that the art will have a similar effect for you, as it did on the people that viewed it for the first time.

Some of the art in this museum succeeds for me, by giving me a thrill whenever I look at it on the screen. But for someone with a different set of values the screen may really be too bright, too intense for paint. So you have to judge the art you find here on your own visceral reaction to the picture, not on some comparison with some intellectual fantasy about the picture that should be there. Even here it is often hard to achieve that thrill with the materials that are available. But fairly often, far more often that I expected, it succeeds.

To see what kind of digital restoration is possible here are two examples, that pose different questions of interpretation and success. These two examples take a little while to load (about a minute at 28.8bps). But if you visually want to understand the art in this museum they are worth looking at.

Some other random remarks. In the museum, when books are referred to, links to the specific books are made to Barnes and Noble. We are an associate of B&N and get a small percentage of all purchases made from links on our site. The links are purely for your convenience but they also help support the museum.

If you really want to buy things from us, because you think this museum is cool or because you just have to spend money, go to the bookstore and look around. Currently we don't sell anything there, but the links to B&N and the fine art books there help support the museum.

The Tigertail Virtual Museum is organized similarly to Janson's History of Art. The art in the museum did not come from the book however. The book currently has a little more art than the museum, although in time that will change. There will, of course, always be overlap between art history books and the pictures in the museum because many people agree that some art is important, and the TVM will try to have as much of that common material as possible. Janson already has a good part of it, the museum is doing a good job of playing catch up.

In many ways the curatorial staff is uncomfortable with Janson's organization and categories of art, and some of our galleries differ remarkably from his textbook, however using THE most common beginning art history textbook as the organizing element in the museum does have advantages. First, and probably most important: it is easy to go and read about the art you are looking at. The book is available at a reasonable price (about $50 for 1000 pages, and over 700 colored reproductions) at almost every bookstore in the US and certainly in a large part of the world. It is available through our bookstore which is a Barnes and Noble affiliate.

All pictures in this museum are copyrighted. Some pictures in the museum may carry a copyright with them. Most of the 20th century art in the basement is copyrighted. If you copy this protected art then use it according to fair use provisions of the copyright law; we believe that the Tigertail Virtual Museum lives by those fair-use provisions; in any case, any copy you make of this material is subject to the copyright law in your country. If you are an artist and are concerned about the presentation of your art click here.

There is more detail available about copyright issues.