Although I have spent a lot of time on these sites the notes are missing from my blog so I am tying up a loose end here by creating a blog entry for this task. The task in question asks us to explore Bridgeman Art Library and Oxford Art Online.
Bridgeman Art Library
The sheer volume of work available is overwhelming but it is a great resource when you have a specific search in mind. There are also some suggested categories which are interesting to explore. There were 5056 results for ‘Art Nouveau’, so I refined the search to ‘Art Nouveau Jugend’ to bring up a smaller selection related to the famous magazine – this brought up a more manageable 64 results.
Other searches similarly bring up large amounts of results so refinement of search is always key. I enjoyed looking at works related to science such as natural history, medicines and biology.
Bridgeman boasts to having more than 3 millions images ready for use and there is a wonderful variety to choose from. You could be forgiven for thinking it only features historical art and photographs when using certain searches but there is also a wide selection of contemporary media available.
Oxford Art Online
Oxford Art Online provides access to both Grove Art Online and Benezit Dictionary of Artists. The former with over 30,000 pieces of work and the later with over 11,000 pieces of work. Similar to the Bridgeman Art Library it categorises work with some slightly different options.
I found this library to be more difficult to navigate and many of the results seemed to be locked. This library also has a heavier focus on articles rather than images. The images that are available do seem to be less biased towards painting/illustration than the Bridgeman Library.
Bridgeman library is my preferred site for sourcing images and I found a lot of useful images from here for Assignment 4.
Daniel's OCA Blog: Book Design 1 