In all candor this is a seldom asked question. Statistically it is asked less than one in a million times. However maybe it ought to be asked more since publishing on the web is not cheap, and if the museum does not get regular funding it may go away. The bottom line is somebody has to pay. There are four ways you can help.

1. Contribute to help our ongoing expenses and for continuing development of the musem.
2. Fund some scholarships by a contribution to our scholarships fund.
3. Help fund us to create ebooks for the web. by contributing to our publishing fund.
4. Become a museum member for $25/year.

Well, there are many responses to this question. First some art will not look good on any monitor, artists that specialized in dark hues and magic things happening in shaded areas generally look bad on any monitor. Second some scans we got from the web newsgroups were just not good enough to really have a good looking one. If it is the only copy of the picture that we have, the artist is important and we don't have a similar picture, then it gets included in the museum until we can get a better one.

If all the pictures in the museum do not look good on your screen, then try adjusting the brightness and contrast knobs until they do. Some monitors have these adjustments under "firmware control" so you may have to read the manual for you monitor to find out how to do it.

There is a test picture for you to help adjust your monitor, click here for the picture.

To adjust your monitor more precisely: First try to set your monitor to maximum brightness and maximum contrast. Then load the test image. Now reduce the brightness until the white box on the bottom left of the test image just begins to dim. Then reduce the contrast until you can see each distinct grey along the bottom set of boxes. The last two boxes are usually hard to separate unless you are in a dark room with a good monitor.

Another possibility is that your graphics card has a gamma and color controls. If your system has these controls you can use these to adjust the appearance of the test picture.

To check for color cast errors. The continuous gray and the gray boxes should not be tinted at all. The bed, green, and blue continuous strips are pure colors, saturation reduced until they turn white. In the white areas the color strips should retain just that color and not discolor. If they do discolor and your monitor has individual color adjustment you can try and adjust things.

Once both these element are satsifactory the Vermeer picture should end up looking pretty good, without any overall color cast to it. The rest of the museum has been made with this same standard, so at this point your viewing should be fine.

It is also possilbe that you have an older graphics card is not quite capable of displaying the colors and intensities that are necessary for fine art. The only solution in this case is to buy a good graphics card and get a reasonable monitor for your machine. We suggest that you get one capable of displaying at least 24 bit color with a resolution of 1024 by 768 or better.

Pictures in books are put there by printing little dots of varying colors next to one another on the paper. These combine to look like a variety of colors. However it is difficult to get deeply saturated colors and blacks that come anywhere close to a real black. So the printed version can't represent what the artist may have created. The printer tries to do the best he can given he's going to print the picture. Most pictures in this museum have been scanned from printed versions of the pictures. The scanner responds to different inks in different ways. Not just the color but the components in the ink. What looks green to you may look nearly blue to the scanner.

So the person who scans the picture tries to make the screen image a good approximation to the original, or maybe he doesn't do anything at all. But then, no matter what it did to adjust the art, he posts the picture to the net.

If you want to understand more about this read our web page on restoration.

The result that is in the museum may or may not come out to look like a textbook or art book version of the picture. We hope it looks closer to the original than the book it came from. Our goal in any case is to make it look as good as we can.

The adjustment of an image presented is as much a matter of taste as it is of technology (or technological incompetence) coupled with overall goal of any particular web museum. If a web museum tries to create a picture of what art looks like now in a museum, they will produce one thing; if they do, as we do, to try and create pictures close to original as the artist saw it, then you see the results and taste of a different restoration.

Any person behind a museum that claims to be "objective" in the presentation of art images is fooling themselves if they believe it. Images turn into disasters unless choices are made when you photograph, print, or scan a picture. Each technology gives one the power to manipulate images in powerful ways. There is no such thing as a "netural" or "objective" way to use these technologies. You have to adjust what you have captured or printed. That adjustment is a matter of taste. That taste defines the look of the museum. Real museums are no better at reproducing art than anyone else when it comes to using modern technologies. Actually real artists do a significantly better job when they control the printing of an art book.

Most of the other museums on the net scan their own art and then post it. So they have control over the original scanning, the resolution, and the look of the picture. Originally this museum collected art that has been posted to network newsgroups. We did not run around the net and gather art, in the newsgroups the art comes to you. For a year we automatically collected the art being posted to the fine art newsgroups, and got a lot of porno images as well. We discarded the porno and tried to identify and organize the images. That's how the museum got started.

Therefore, in the beginning, we had no control over the art in the museum except what we made of it after we have gotten it. — These days, since January of 2002, few pictures we add to the website come from the newsgroups, we scan slides and books to get high resolution images so we can do a better job of restoration. Then we edit them to try and clean up distortions caused by aging, photography, printing, and scanning; then we try to create a web friendly version that you can look at and understand the picture on your computer and still understand what the painter had in mind when he created the work. So our art is intended to look different. We try to recreate the way the picture looked when the artist saw it. We don't try to recreate the art as it is in a museum today.

Both galleries and pictures should not take much time to download. Much energy has been spent to get as much graphics to you in the minimum number of bytes that need to be transmitted on the net. If your modem runs at 56,000 bits per second (56Kb), then no gallery or larger version of a picture should take more than about 45 seconds to load. Faster connections should see proportionally better response times.

If you are experiencing much longer download times, then the problem can be your connection to the Internet or congestion somewhere on the net or congestion at our server. We try to provide enough CPU and communications bandwidth at our site to accommodate everyone comfortably, so the problem may be along the path to you, or between you and your service provider. It is also possible a much bigger picture has gotten published on our site by accident. So, if the problem occurs with only with one picture, please let us know.

In the past we get most of our pictures by running a program each evening that scaned all the art related usenet newsgroups and downloads image files from them. Since January 2002 we have been getting high resolution images from scanning books or slides.

Pictures that came from the UseNet newsgroups have been download automatically by a program that wakes up every night and scans the newsgroups for new pictures. We get little information about the images. We get just the file name the person used when they uploaded the picture to the newsgroup. In the worst case images are named using a number (maybe a catalog number or a year), but often it provides a little more information like an artist name or picture name. Far more often today, the file names provide much better information than they did in the past.

Our staff then sorts the pictures into related pictures, keeping the ones that should belong in the museum, and discarding other stuff (like porno images). Sometime the program collects Jellybean art and advertising art, both of which we now have fine collections.

Using our experience, we examine the good pictures and try and associate an artist, a date, and a location to the image. This is done by using the information provided with the image, checking art books, and looking at lists of pictures painted by an artist. This identification phase is difficult, but not as hard as you might think, styles are pretty strong fingerprint of art. Of course, mistakes can be made. With more than five thousand pictures, if we have not put several pictures in the wrong place, it would be amazing. So if you find a picture not in the right place please let us know.

One byproduct of this is that the real name (if any) given by the artist to the picture is lost unless, of course, we find the exact picture in a good reference book. So the museum would welcome additional identifying information about any picture so we can correct and improve the labeling of the art we have.

Once the art has been identified, it is then reworked by our team of restorers who try to make the colors and image approximate the way the art looked when it was created. They remove cracks and other signs of age adjust the picture to look good on the web. Then four different size images corresponding to the restored picture are created: a thumbnail, a small, a medium, and a large version of the picture.

Both the thumbnail pictures and the larger versions are highly compressed versions of the original scans. This is done so that download times on the net can be kept to a minimum. If you really want a better copy, and you are a Tigertail member, then email info@tigtail.org; if we have a better version, we will send it back to you by email. There is no charge currently for this service. If it becomes too cumbersome then we will probably begin charging for it.

Another point you should take note of is that we are still in very primitive days in the computer industry. Inexpensive equipment that can handle pictures well is less than five years old. In twenty years, the scans currently in this museum will look primitive and awful. But they are the best we can achieve now, given the equipment that people are using. Hopefully the future will see pictures you can enlarge until you see every brush stroke, with a download time similar to what you see on the net today. In fact, we are currently collecting high resolution scans with 4000 pixels in the largest dimension for a future version of the museum.

A great scan, a photograph, or printed reproduction is never a substitute for seeing the real thing. Visit your local museum, and when traveling visit museums where you go. The knowledge of what to look for in a picture, the familiarity with art that you can gain in the virtual museum will give you an appreciation of what to look for when you visit the real art.

You must be looking at a previous version of the museum. In this version all pictures come in three standard sizes. However you can only view the larger images if you become a supporting member of the museum.

Pick one that fits your screen by clicking on one of the three square size selection boxes at the bottom of the top banner on every museum page. Microsoft Internet Explorer has added a feature that rescales a picture to the size of the window you are using to display the image. So if you use the latest version of M$ IE you should not have this problem at all.

This is an infrequently asked question, but it deserves a reasonable answer. The museum is here to help you discover fine art. You don't have to do it all at once. In fact it is better to do it slowly. Bookmark the galleries you like and come back often and wander around and find pictures that please you. Don't look for pictures that you should like, look for ones that truly express something you feel about the world or yourself.

There is something obvious that most people don't understand. Most fine art before the twentieth century was created to save or advertise an image of something. That is, the painter acted like a combination of camera and advertiser.

So portraits were made for people who could afford them to show what they looked like to the present and future generations. That is they were a family photo album. Kings and Queens used pictures to show how important they were.

Pictures were also created to represent a favorite place. To remember a nice place, or to see what other places looked like without going there. While the New World of America was being explored artists traveled the frontier and made pictures to show other people what it was like. There were artists that painted mile long canvases of landscapes along the Mississippi River. They would then give "travel shows" along the American East Coast and in Europe featuring a "trip down the Mississippi", where the canvas painting would be rolled behind the person as they talked about the new frontier.

Paintings were created to tell stories. That is to illustrate the people and events described in the Bible, history, and Greek mythology. This was done to embody the story in a beautiful picture so people would remember it. Why would an artist do that? Primarily because the people who were paying his bill, wanted them. This was usually the church, and that is why so many artists illustrate Bible stories. It is also why the same Bible stories get illustrated over and over, there are after all many churches. Decorating churches with art that taught these stories also taught the people who saw the art the stories. It was a painless Sunday school. Artists always liked to illustrate the most gruesome and/or sexy stories, so you will find many illustrations of the beheading of John the Baptist, because this captured people's attention; it may have also have fed some sadistic need in the artist as well.

So when you look around the museum ask yourself: Why did this artist paint the pictures he did? The answers will help you understand and accept the art. You may not want to draw this kind of picture, but you can begin to understand why they drew it the way they did.

Different ages financed art in different ways. In the early and high Renaissance, the church and the aristocracy financed art and artists, so art was primarily religious, and occasionally portraiture. By the time of the Mannerists the subject matter of art had broadened considerably because more aristocrats wanted to embellish their homes and public places with art. In the Baroque period funding was still primarily by private subscription. As the commercial age and age of exploration dawned, so did a rich non-aristocracy who wanted pictures of family and pictures for their homes. Thus around the time of the American Revolution there was a move toward the artist being responsible to a much larger community that wanted to buy pictures. That is the marketing of the art became harder and at the same time more people were doing art. By the nineteenth century the rich middle classes would buy art, and since so many more people wanted it there was a corresponding increase in the number of artists. As artists no longer worked for one person, to make money they had to create art for the taste of the people to whom they wanted to sell. This changed the nature of the subject matter. By the mid-nineteenth century there were class distinctions in art as strong as the ones in society. Only the top (popular) artists were paid well; most other artists struggled to make a living. It will be ever so.

In the twentieth century the camera had generally taken over realistic representation. Art went it's own way—to paint feelings and relationships that the camera could not record. The late twentieth and twenty-first century will see art take a new turn since digital photography and PhotoShop like programs give a great deal of artistic expression to everyone.

Behind the primary principle of being a portrait, a landscape, or a story picture, there is what the artist said about these things, the way he put the idea into art. So once you understand what artist needed to do to get his fee, then you can go one step farther and ask how he expressed his own views beyond it.

When you get to this point you know as much or more than most people who go to art museums. Then when you go to your local museum, or when you visit one while traveling, you can mentally compare what you know about art from what you found here with the real art you find there. If this Virtual Museum teaches you and gives you pleasure doing it, it will have fulfilled its purpose.

You're right it's not in the museum. But looking at each and every picture is the only way you can really answer this question. There are about five thousand pictures so feel free, it may take a little time, but you will find out eventually. If your are a museum member you could also send email to info@tigtail.org, but don't expect a great answer. There are thousands of pictures and what you describe may not "click" with the person who answers your question.

The answer to question 10 will give you some insights as to how to search the museum.

Art in the public domain can be freely copied and used, even for commercial uses, without payment of royalty to anyone. The art in this museum is edited by our staff to create images of the way we think the art may have looked when it was created, this is not a direct copy of the art. This new image is copyright by Tigertail Associates.

For material copyrighted by Tigertail Associates you may print it out, incorporate material into your homework, use the pictures as screen savers or desktop backgrounds, and give copies of them to your friends. The copyright prohibits you from reusing these images for commercial use, including their use on the web without our express permission.

Art of the twentieth century is mostly copyright from its inception if it were created in a country that subscribes to the copyright convention and the artist hasn't released it into the public domain. So by-in-large the 20th century art of India is not copyrighted, because India does not subscribe to the copyright convention, and almost everything else created in the last half of the 20th century is copyrighted.

For 20th century art, we have found it impossible to contact all copyright owners for permission to show their art in the museum. It is difficult enough to try and find the vital statistics of a 20th century artist much less his address — so contact is nearly impossible. As a nonprofit educational organization US copyright law defines our use of copyrighted art as 'fair use'. However, we encourage artists or their representatives to contact us about copyright issues. We want all great artists represented in the museum, so the public can see the variety of contemporary art, and we would like to have their explicit copyright permission.

If you are an artist please follow this link. If you are an artist and are upset that we haven't included you in the museum, please feel free to send us glossy photographs, a short biography, and copyright permission to use your materials (or send us email with digitized versions of your pictures along with the other information), and we will evaluate your material for one of the 20th century galleries.

Visit our copyright desk.

In part, dark pictures are a matter of style. Rembrandt, for example, liked to paint dark pictures which make the highlights so much more important. Oils are a perfect medium for this. You can produce subtle variations of very dark colors which an observer has no trouble seeing. When you reproduce a picture like this in print, you throw away all the detail in the light areas and make the dark areas less dark with more variation, and you get a reasonable picture, but one that is a long way from the original. Scan that dark image and try to reproduce it on a screen, which does much better at highlights than shadows, and the result is pretty much a disaster.

There seem to be no solution to these problems. Bringing up the dark background so you can see in on a screen in a moderately lighted room will completely destroy the picture. Leaving it dark and making the viewer turn off all the lights will help. But unless the monitor is adjusted perfectly, the picture will still look bad. Some art looks better on the net than other things do... It's really unfortunate, but the medium doesn't permit us to do everything well.

Well in some ways they did. The common religious themes were painted over and over. There are really only two kinds of pictures: Women with babies and those without. Women with babies are usually called Madonna and Child. Pictures of young nude women are commonly called Venus.

But I suppose that is not the point, beyond the similarity of the image is the details of the picture that tell you a lot about the people (in portraits) and the artist's feelings about events. On the surface the art must please the person who commissioned it. The details can tell all kinds of fascinating things about what the artist thought about when he did the painting.

From the Middle Ages on (and maybe before), icons were placed as symbols in pictures to remind you of (and to symbolize) ideas in the picture. Every artist does this to some extent; it is a game to figure out the meanings.

But never-ever believe an art historian about the meaning of art! They specialize in making up stories about icons and symbols in art. Since an art historian's salary depends on how well they lie, they get very good at it. That means you should enjoy how cleverly they construct their story, but it also means that you have to evaluate their stories and believe your own feelings and reasoning when it comes to the interpretation of art. If you get good at it you too can become an art historian.

Because the museum is designed for long term viewing. The organization of the museum is historical. Each gallery presents you with thumbnail sketches of artists who came from the same period and probably belonged to the same art tradition. So by sightseeing a gallery, hopefully, you will get a feeling for that period in art. If you see a style or image that catches your fancy, you can usually look at more pictures by the same artist or enlarge the ones that are there.

Try and use the search functions, the elves should let you find what you want.

We haven't been here at the North Pole long enough to try. But we'll plant some and let you know.

Update.... no problem they keep staring at the grow-lite.

If you are not a member then the only picture sizes that we provide are small pictures.

If you are a member then you haven't picked an enlargement size that fits your screen.... go to the top of any of the museum's pages (including this one) click on the size you want, that will change the default enlargment size..Note that if you use your browser back button, you will loose this information. So if you have changed the size here use one of the links in the header to go to the part of the museum you are interested in looking at rather than backing up. Note also that the size will get stored in any bookmark you keep to the museum. So when you return you will not have to set the size again.

This question comes up so often it probably ought to be the first question in the FAQs. I just can't stand to renumber all the questions.

Well, first we are a nonprofit educational site. We don't sell anything (nor buy any art). So we don't know anything about prices. Your best bet is to get hold of an reasonable appraiser. Probably a good place to start that, if you live in North America, is at the PBS website for Antiques Roadshow. If you live out of the United States you will need to contact a reputable appraiser somewhere near you.

Second if you do have a picture by Utrillo you should probably look for documentation tracing the ownership of the picture, and tracking it back as far as you can. One problem with Utrillo pictures are that fakes abound, and it is difficult to tell a fake from a real Utrillo. Documentation will help you a lot in this. This documentation is called the `provenance' of the picture. This advice is not specific to Utrillo, although about 80% of the requests that come in are about a Utrillo picture.

I know that the web seems to be one big commercial mall. Somehow the noncommercial, educational enterprise should fit in somewhere. If it doesn't, we are all lost to Mammon.

Tigertail Associates is a nonprofit tax deductible educational corporation; we don't sell anything on the website, nor do we carry advertising. However we do accept donations. If you like the website, feel obliged to contribute to help us stay on the web.

One approach to getting a print of a picture is to do it yourself. If you have a good color printer, then the high-resolution version of a picture from the museum should print pretty well and give you a nice 8 1/2 by 11 size picture. If you want something bigger than that and have the equipment to do it, send us email and someone will look for a better resolution digital copy. Alternatively your local twenty-four hour reproduction center may be able to print a larger version for a reasonable price.

If you don't want to do it yourself, or you feel your abilities out run your talents as a fine art printer, and you still want to buy a reproduction of a particular picture, visit one of the commercial art reproduction sites on the web. Using your favorite search engine look for "fine art reproductions" or "fine art posters". Perhaps one of the sites will have reproductions of the picture you like. However, unless you want a popular image, finding a particular picture will probably be difficult; however you may find a good alternative image by the same artist. To get you started, here are several links you can try. The positions of the listings below is not significant — it happens to be the order in which someone asked or suggested that we list a site.