Blog

May is National Barbecue Month, allegedly. Why the hedging? Because the closest to an official citation we could find was this post on the USDA blog from 2012. But we’ll go with it because a) it gives us the excuse to post this mid-19th century watercolor from The Walters Art Museum, b) we like barbecue, and c) it’s close […]

May is National Bike Month! Did you know that there are more than a billion bicycles worldwide? Perhaps more surprisingly, the basic configuration of a bicycle hasn’t changed much from the chain-driven model developed around 1885. The first pedal-propelled bicycle was reputedly invented by Kirkpatrick MacMillan in Scotland in 1839. While not everyone agrees on his breakthrough, […]

Spring time is here and butterflies are already making their annual appearance, according to butterfliesandmoths.org. To celebrate, we’ve compiled a slideshow of selections from a wide variety of eras, regions, and fields of study, from science to art to costume design. Search the Artstor Digital Library for butterfl* to find more than 1,000 images with the keywords […]

We are constantly adding new content to the ARTstor Digital Library, and searches you performed in the past will very likely yield additional results in the future. Did you know you can now save search parameters to easily run the same search again? After you perform a search, you will see an option to Save this […]

The Artstor Travel Awards are back and they are now open to undergraduate students! This year the theme is cities: their histories and development, their depictions in art and documentation, their architecture, their ruins, their governments, their peoples, their myths. Create an Artstor image group or groups and a single essay of 500 words or […]

Since 1955, Tax Day has typically fallen on April 15 for those living in the United States. You might derive some comfort from knowing that your feelings today were not unknown in the 16th century, as evidenced in these three Netherlandish paintings of tax collectors by Marinus van Reymerswaele from the Art, Archaeology and Architecture […]

For over twenty years, Panos Pictures has been using photography to communicate critical social issues and stories beyond the mainstream media landscape to new and diverse audiences. More than 30,000 of their images of contemporary global affairs are currently available in the Artstor Digital Library. In this Panos-produced video, Ami Vitale shares the story behind a photograph she took […]

Artstor is partnering with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to provide access to more than 10,000 high-quality images from six leading museums. As part of its collaboration with Artstor, the DPLA will aggregate and make available data records and links to images from six major American museums: the Dallas Museum of Art, the […]

Spring is here! The return of sunshine inspired us to look at Botticelli’s Primavera, a masterpiece of the early Renaissance and arguably the most popular artistic representation of the season, even if – as we shall see – its interpretation remains inconclusive. Botticelli painted Primavera sometime between 1477 and 1482, probably for the marriage of […]

It’s time to spring forward this weekend! Daylight Saving Time starts at 2AM Sunday morning, don’t forget to set your clock ahead one hour before you go to bed tonight. We made this slide show of beautiful clocks and watches to help you remember.