Throughout the history of botany, scientific illustration has been an essential component of cataloging and studying the world's plants. Botanical Art & Artists offers visitors an in-depth compendium of resources and information on botanical art and illustration that casual enthusiasts, aspiring artists, and academic botanists all can appreciate. This well-organized, comprehensive website includes...

Maria Sibylla Merian was born in 1647 to a family of artists and printers in Frankfurt, Germany. As a young girl she first painted flowers before scrutinizing the way caterpillars transitioned into moths and butterflies. Over the course of her life, Merian continued to document nature, plants, and insects, first in Europe and later in what is now Suriname in South America. Merian's detailed...

Nature is a source of inspiration for many artists, but how scientifically accurate are the depictions? As the collection's name suggests, "How to draw and paint leaves and trees" provides "tips and techniques for how to draw and paint botanically correct trees and leaves." Whether you are an amateur artist or a seasoned professional, you will find resources to support your artistic endeavors....

Between the years 1737 and 1739, Elizabeth Blackwell published A Curious Herbal: a series intended to help physicians and apothecaries identify plants and herbs that could be used for medicinal purposes. Blackwell not only illustrated all of the plants featured in A Curious Herbal, but she also engraved and hand-colored all of her illustrations. Blackwell was one of the first botanical artists to...

The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) opened this exhibition by Dunne-za/Canadian artist Brian Jungen late in 2009. Jungen takes consumer objects: sports jerseys, Michael Jordan Nike sneakers, golf bags, plastic trash bins - and transforms them into sculptures that force us to take a new look at these objects. For example, the golf bags are turned into totem poles; the...

British Art Studies is an online, open access art history journal published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Yale Center for British Art. First released in August 2015, British Art Studies features Articles, Editorials, Conversation Pieces (a feature where the journal invites multiple scholars to respond to a single question or idea), and Look First (a feature that...

Over the past few years, the British Museum has continued to expand their online offerings. In their "Explore" area, they have created a number of online tours that explore Asia, Africa, ancient Greece, Egypt, and Japan. This particular online tour covers the Americas through a number of thematic collections culled from their vast holdings. Visitors might wish to start by looking over the tour...

Andy Warhol: The Last Decade, was organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum, and is now on view at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition features several large pieces that Warhol created in collaboration with other artists, especially Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Francesco Clemente. One of these works, the Origin of Cotton, 1984, can be viewed in the online exhibition. Inspired by Warhol's collaborations,...

Many things from Japan have migrated over to the borough of Brooklyn, but none of them probably have the elegant simplicity of Utagawa Hiroshige's prints of his hometown of Edo, now known as Tokyo. Working through the 19th century, Hiroshige created 118 woodblock landscape and genre scenes of mid-nineteenth century Tokyo. While the actual prints are rather delicate, they can be viewed at one's...

The entire borough of Brooklyn has never been able to make a collective trip over to the Mut Precinct in Egypt, but fortunately a number of very talented individuals working for the Brooklyn Museum have been going that way for over thirty years. The Temple Precinct of the Goddess Mut (pronounced “Moot”) has been an important religious site for almost two thousand years, and on this website,...