Artsedge
helps artists, teachers, and students find and share information , resources, and ideas that support the arts as a core subject area in the K-12 curriculum. The site offers a daily news update on what's happening in the arts and education, a standards based curriculum that puts the arts in all disciplines, and a library of planning, research, and contact information for teachers.

Winslow Homer in the National Gallery of Art
features one of America's treasured 19th century artists. Follow the career and works of this self-taught painter from Civil War battlefields and farmlands to the North Sea fishing village of Cullercoats, the rocky coast of Maine, the Adirondacks, and the Caribbean. See 35 high-resolution images of his paintings. (Zoom in for a closeup of brush strokes and details.) See video clips about his life (1836-1910).

Exploring Themes in American Art
is 10 illustrated essays exploring themes in American art. Each essay focuses on one theme: abstraction, the figure, historical subjects, landscape, marine painting, portraiture, narrative, genre, still life, and topographical views.

John Wilmerding Collection
is a slideshow of more than 30 paintings and works donated to the Gallery by John Wilmerding, an authority on American art. It includes 19th and early 20th century landscapes and seascapes by Heade and Lane, still lifes by Peto and Decker, figure paintings by Homer and Eakins, and works by Church, Bingham, and Kensett.

Picturing France, 1830-1900
explores 19th-century painting in France and the culture it reflects. Organized by region, the site offers a glimpse of the history and cultural life of Paris, Auvergne, Normandy, Provence, and other areas. More than 50 works are examined.

Interact
is a collection of self-guided explorations of American art and the work of artists. See slideshows on Joseph Cornell, Ruth Duckworth, and angels in American art. Visit an artist's studio. Learn what it takes to restore a valuable painting. Discover clues to the story behind "The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane" and other paintings. Hear lectures by art critics and sculptor Maya Lin, and roundtables of artists discussing their craft.

Picturing America
aims to introduce students to America's art treasures and promote American history and culture in schools and public libraries. This initiative invites K-12 schools, home school consortia, and public libraries to apply for a set of 20 laminated posters and a teachers resource book. Posters include images of "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere," "Washington Crossing the Delaware," and "Looking Down Yosemite Valley," and works by Audubon, Catlin, Benton, Cole, Homer, Rockwell, Wyeth, and others.

William Blake Archive
brings together Blake's disparate, widely dispersed, and often restricted major visual and artistic works in one searchable website. The archive contains scalable electronic editions of Blake's illuminated works with full, up-to-date bibliographic information about each image.

The Collection of the National Gallery of Art
is the homepage for one of the finest art collections in the world, illustrating major achievements in painting, sculpture, and graphic arts from the Middle Ages to today. Visitors can search the collection by specific artist, title, or a combination of criteria, review research on the Gallery's World War II paintings, tour the collection by medium and school, or download a Gallery Guide in English, French, German, Italian, or Spanish.

Picasso: The Early Years, Brochure
presents the first comprehensive survey of Picasso's work before cubism, from the academic and realist work of his youth to his emergence as a brilliant stylist in late 1906.

Art for the Nation: Collecting for a New Century
offers 14 in-depth studies of works by various artists represented in the National Gallery of Art. The studies include information on the artist, technique, and history behind each painting.

Johaness Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance
examines Vermeer's use of light, proportion, symbolism, and other techniques in this 17th century masterpiece. How the museum restored the painting is also explained.

Campfire Stories with George Catlin: An Encounter of Two Cultures
takes students on a virtual journey with the artist and ethnologist to meet Native Americans of the 1830s. His portraits, scenes of American Indian life, and writings depict cultures prior to U.S. expansion into tribal territories. The site is designed to enrich the study of U.S. history, geography, and environmental conservation, as well as leadership and character development.

Van Gogh's Van Goghs
features nine paintings, a history, and a chronology of the life of this ingenious Dutch painter. Van Gogh was 27 years old when he decided to become an artist after unsuccessful attempts at being an art dealer, a teacher, and a clergyman. He taught himself mostly by studying the prints and reproductions he collected. The paintings he produced before his death at age 37 set the direction for many of the expressionist tendencies in 20th century art.  

NGAkids Still Life
lets kids of all ages compose their own still life paintings (on the web) using images of fruits, flowers, and other objects and artistic elements. Experiment with perspective, size, and spatial arrangements; add textured brushstrokes. See a slideshow of 38 still life paintings. Identify common elements; try to guess the artists who painted them.

BRUSHster
lets you paint on the web. More than 40 brushes and textures are offered with a full palette of colors and effects that blur, ripple, and fragment your designs. Click "auto" to see the computer generate screen designs.

Manet's The Dead Toreador and The Bullfight
explores why the artist, stung by critical comments in 1864, cut his painting Incident in a Bullfight in two and then painted The Dead Toreador and The Bullfight on the resulting two canvasses. Using x-rays and intensive scientific analysis of the two existing paintings, historians have discovered fascinating connections between these seemingly unrelated works.

Northern European Painting of the 15th-16th Centuries
explores the paintings (and accompanying texts) to holdings at the National Gallery of Art. The Gallery states that "the 15th and 16th centuries saw the rise of capitalism and a burgeoning middle class, the creation of modern nation states, and the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation. For artists, an innovation of equally far-reaching importance was the perfection of oil paints in the Low Countries, which allowed northern painters to depict the world with unprecedented precision.

The Gallery's American Collection Online
features American paintings from the late 1700s-1900s. Included are works by John Copley, Henry Tanner, John Sargent, James Whistler, Gilbert Stuart, and more. Much art of the American colonial period consisted of portraits, as settlers sought to establish their identities in a new world. After the new nation achieved its independence, landscapes and scenes of native flora, fauna, and folk customs began to express its unique qualities and illustrate its untapped resources.

Thomas Moran
was one of the major landscape painters of his day, and painted some of America's most prominent natural treasures, including the Rocky Mountains, the Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone. He also arranged for the first government-sponsored survey of Yellowstone, and his images "were later reported to have played a decisive role in the debate that led to the establishment of Yellowstone as the first national park in March 1872."