People often email and ask "Where can I find a painting by artist X on the Web?"
This museum is, of course, our first suggestion. If you have wandered around here and didn't find what you want, then come back to the Information Booth on the Entry Floor and ask for an elf to search for you (You will have to give him some clues of course). If you still can't find it or if the virtually restored painting you found is not to your liking (some people prefer a painting to look like it is old, yellow, and faded) then these are probably the next best sites. In each case, the link gives the site's alphabetical index of artists (not the home page of the site).
Several museums have opened up a reasonable proportion of their art to the public. Two that provide high resolution images are:
The Fine Art Museums of San Francisco have a large collection (of over 75,000 images) of high resolution art available. To prevent you from copying it, presumably because they believe they own the public domain, they break their images into smaller tiles which your browser puts together into the big picture. I find their site cumbersome to use, but at least it provides quality pictures. Go to http://www.thinker.org , go to the bottom of the page, put in an artists name, and click go. Since they only include art from one of their many museums you will not succeed in seeing Caravaggio, but they do have a lot of art.
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has 1,250 images from their collection available. Go to Rijksmuseum , then click on "artists", pick a letter that starts the name of the artist you are interested in, say "V" for Vermeer. There will appear a list of artists, click on "Vermeer", They have four Vermeers available, click on one of them to see more. Finally click on the "+" to see a good high resolution image. Again only art from the Rijksmuseum is available.
