The J. Paul Getty Museum came up with a clever idea for exhibiting fragile, light-sensitive, illuminated manuscripts: a two-part exhibition. The show goes up, and pages of the manuscripts are turned on a specific date to revel new images. In this case, the show started in December 2011, and pages were turned on February 28, 2012. The advantage of the web version of the show is that visitors can...

Considered to be the last of the Old Masters, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes has been the subject of a number of insightful retrospectives and special exhibitions over the past decade. Designed to complement a current exhibition at the Frick Museum in New York, this online collection offers images taken from the last years of his distinguished career. Perhaps the most intriguing drawings offered...

Shortly after the conclusion of the Civil War, Union veterans formed the Grand Army of the Republic, or the G.A.R. Through the Reconstruction era and the Gilded Age, the G.A.R. was a powerful organization that lobbied the federal government for federal and state Soldiers Homes for invalids, advocated for the creation of Memorial Day, and also provided support for soldier reunions. This digital...

Escape from your daily desktop concerns with this exhibition from the Smithsonian, featuring watercolors, pastels, and drawings by artists such as Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, William H. Johnson, John Steuart Curry, Jacob Lawrence, and Sam Francis. From a 1937 black & white, pen and ink, drawing by Isabel Bishop showing a man playing cards, to a 1951 abstract by David Smith that suggests a...

Organized by the Museum for African Art, New York, and presented online by the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Grass Roots is a history of 300 years of African basket making, brought by African people to the American South. The grasses that grow in the marshes along the Atlantic coast in the Southern United States, where African slaves were brought to work on rice plantations, were...

Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene were brothers who formed an important architectural firm which went on to design a number of notable residences, including the Blacker, Gamble, Pratt, and Thorsen houses. Their substantial collection of architectural drawings, photographs, personal papers, and other manuscript materials found their way into the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library...

The Getty Museum is known for a number of firsts when it comes to creative art exhibits, and they have recently embarked on the first retrospective fully dedicated to the drawings of Gustav Klimt. This particular exhibition was organized by the Albertina Museum in Vienna, in collaboration with the Getty Museum, to mark the 150th anniversary of Klimt's birth. Klimt was one of the seminal figures of...

From 1890 to 1917, H. Ambrose Kiehl took hundreds of photographs of his family as they moved around from Port Townsend to Seattle. During his life, Kiehl worked as an engineer on a number of projects, and this collection documents interesting parts of Washington, including Fort Lawton, which later became Discovery Park in Seattle. The collection of images went largely unappreciated until it found...

Under the direction of Monk Rowe, Hamilton College has built an amazing collection of interviews with jazz musicians, arrangers, writers, and critics. The college started collecting all of these interviews back in 1995, and since that time they have interviewed over 300 people. First-time visitors will note that each interview includes an audio file of the conversation, a photograph of the...

Jointly maintained by Brad Leissa and musicologist David Vickers, this site is designed to serve as “a valuable resource for both Handelian scholars and enthusiasts.” They have done a splendid job, and the site contains copious information on the latest recordings of his works, along with timely reviews of these recordings. The site also features a thorough discography of both Handel’s operas and...