Whistler Interactive at the Freer & Sackler Galleries

Whistler Interactive is an online exhibition about the artist James McNeill Whistler. It is an exhibition to give an overview of his life and artwork using digitized materials from the art collections and archives of the Freer & Sackler Galleries.

Go to: http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/current/whistler.htm The link for the interative exhibit is at the top right corner. The museum's main digital collection is at: http://www.asia.si.edu/collections/default.htm

Selection Decisions: The Freer & Sackler Galleries seem to have an extensive digital collection with over 6,000 objects online and a note mentioning that more objects are posted every month, but this Whistler exhibit was one of the few interactive online exhibits I noticed on their site. This exhibit does not contain all of their Whistler collection, but I imagine a curator has chosen the highlights from their collection that best give an overall view of Whistler's work. The exhibit also features photos from their archives, and images of his letters, books, etc.

The exhibit has different topics to look at (biography, artwork, related musuem exhibitions, and resources), each with subsections as well as a timeline so you can jump to the topic you are most interested in. I found this easily navigable, although a little slow to load sometimes. There are also downloadable PDFs of the written exhibit content.

Metadata: Every digitized image has a little information button you can scroll over. When your mouse hits it, it reveals: name/title of object, artist/author, date, material (for artwork), size, the collection it belongs to and the accession or catalogue number.

Object Characteristics: Unfortunately the digital images are not very large and cannot be made larger. If the exhibit focuses on a detail of the image, you can click to see the whole image, but it still is not very large. If you leave this mini-exhibition though and go back to the searchable online collection of the museum and find the images there, you can see them larger, copy or save the JPEG file and order rights to reproduce copies. I could find the artworks, however, I had trouble finding archive materials this way.

Intended Audience: I think this exhibit would best serve the general public or someone with a little interest in art but not a lot of background or training. The information gives a good overview but is not very detailed. It does give a good idea of the scope of the museum's Whistler collection. Someone wishing to do more serious research would probably just use the museum's general digital collection which is categorized and searchable and has larger images. For very detailed research or to obtain better images, you would have to contact the intsitution, but that information is also provided.