The Blanton Image Gallery

I looked at the Blanton's image gallery (http://blantonmuseum.org/works_of_art/gallery.cfm). There are 152 scanned images that can be sorted by artist, date, or title. The images are a hodgepodge of the Blanton's collection, ranging from a tempura panel of the Madonna and Child with Angels from the 1410s to a photo of a sculpture in the museum called Patrick from 2004.

The images are not particularly large. They range in size from about 44 pixels x 272 pixels to 322 pixels x 272 pixels. The smallness of the images make both finer detailed works and large-scale works difficult to see. A few works have text that cannot be read. However, the images do give the view a fairly good idea of color and media (but not texture or depth), and in the case of sculptures, set up.

The metadata provided for the thumbnails is appropriately basic: title, artist, and date. However, a much more detailed description is given if an image is selected. The additional information includes medium, size, provenance, and a description of the image that helps the viewer understand what they are looking at.

I imagine this website is for the casual viewer. It is intended to peak interest, and encourage online viewers to go to the Blanton and see the artworks in person. The website is very intuitive and straightforward with a simple search engine and plain (but attractive) graphics. Once a viewer clicks on an image, s/he can then go forward or backwards through the images, which are by default arranged by artist name. This allows the viewer to see a wide range of works without any apparent rhyme or reason except they are all at the Blanton.