Art lovers who vis­it my home­town of Wash­ing­ton, DC have an almost embar­rass­ing wealth of oppor­tu­ni­ties to view art col­lec­tions clas­si­cal, Baroque, Renais­sance, mod­ern, post­mod­ern, and oth­er­wise through the Smith­son­ian’s net­work of muse­ums. From the East and West Wings of the Nation­al Gallery, to the Hir­sh­horn, with its won­drous sculp­ture gar­den, to the Amer­i­can Art Muse­um and Ren­wick Gallery—I’ll admit, it can be a lit­tle over­whelm­ing, and far too much to take in dur­ing a week­end jaunt, espe­cial­ly if you’ve got rest­less fam­i­ly in tow. (One can’t, after all, miss the Nat­ur­al His­to­ry or Air and Space Muse­ums… or, you know… those mon­u­ments.)

In all the bus­tle of a DC vaca­tion, how­ev­er, one col­lec­tion tends to get over­looked, and it is one of my per­son­al favorites—the Freer and Sack­ler Gal­leries, which house the Smithsonian’s unique col­lec­tion of Asian art, includ­ing the James McNeill Whistler-dec­o­rat­ed Pea­cock Room. (See his “Har­mo­ny in Blue and Gold” above.)

Stand­ing in this re-cre­ation of muse­um founder Charles Freer’s per­son­al 19th cen­tu­ry gallery—which he had relo­cat­ed from Lon­don to his Detroit man­sion in 1904—is an aes­thet­ic expe­ri­ence like no oth­er. And like most such expe­ri­ences, there real­ly is no vir­tu­al equiv­a­lent. Nonethe­less, should you have to hus­tle past the Freer and Sack­ler col­lec­tions on your DC vaca­tion, or should you be unable to vis­it the nation’s cap­i­tal at all, you can still get a taste of the beau­ti­ful works of art these build­ings con­tain.

Like many major muse­ums all over the world—including the Nation­al Gallery, the Rijksmu­se­um, The British Library, and over 200 oth­ers—the Freer/Sackler has made its col­lec­tion, all of it, avail­able to view online. You can also down­load much of it.

See del­i­cate 16th cen­tu­ry Iran­ian water­col­ors like “Woman with a spray of flow­ers” (top), pow­er­ful Edo peri­od Japan­ese ink on paper draw­ings like “Thun­der god” (above), and aston­ish­ing­ly intri­cate 15th cen­tu­ry Tibetan designs like the “Four Man­dala Vajravali Thang­ka” (below). And so, so much more.

As Freer/Sackler direc­tor Julian Raby describes the ini­tia­tive, “We strive to pro­mote the love and study of Asian art, and the best way we can do so is to free our unmatched resources for inspi­ra­tion, appre­ci­a­tion, aca­d­e­m­ic study, and artis­tic cre­ation.” There are, writes the gal­leries’ web­site, Ben­to, “thou­sands of works now ready for you to down­load, mod­i­fy, and share for non­com­mer­cial pur­pos­es.” More than 40,000, to be fair­ly pre­cise.

You can browse the col­lec­tion to your heart’s con­tent by “object type,” top­ic, name, place, date, or “on view.” Or you can con­duct tar­get­ed search­es for spe­cif­ic items. In addi­tion to cen­turies of art from all over the far and near East, the col­lec­tion includes a good deal of 19th cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can art, like the sketch of Whistler’s moth­er, below, per­haps a prepara­to­ry draw­ing for his most famous paint­ing. Though I do rec­om­mend that you vis­it these exquis­ite gal­leries in per­son if you can, you must at least take in their col­lec­tions via this gen­er­ous online col­lec­tion and its boun­ty of inter­na­tion­al artis­tic trea­sures. Get start­ed today.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 35,000 Works of Art from the Nation­al Gallery, Includ­ing Mas­ter­pieces by Van Gogh, Gau­guin, Rem­brandt & More

40,000 Art­works from 250 Muse­ums, Now View­able for Free at the Redesigned Google Art Project

Rijksmu­se­um Dig­i­tizes & Makes Free Online 210,000 Works of Art, Mas­ter­pieces Includ­ed!

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Ear­li­er this year, Col­in Mar­shall intro­duced you to The Art Assign­ment, a week­ly web series that cel­e­brates the cre­ative process and “today’s most inno­v­a­tive artis­tic minds.” The series typ­i­cal­ly fea­tures the hosts, John Green and Sarah Urist Green, “trav­el­ing around the coun­try, vis­it­ing artists and ask­ing them to give you [the audi­ence] an art assign­ment.” But some­times they take a break from their trav­els and look back at influ­en­tial artists who shaped the mod­ern art scene — like Andy Warhol.

Above, you can watch “The Case for Andy Warhol,” a three minute video that puts Warhol’s life and work in artis­tic per­spec­tive, explain­ing why his work, some­times dis­missed as a pass­ing fad, is real­ly worth your time and con­sid­er­a­tion.

When you’re done with the clip, you can head over to this Smart His­to­ry clip where Steven Zuck­er and Sal Khan break down the artis­tic mer­its of Warhol’s famous soup cans. This one runs sev­en min­utes.

And stay tuned, The Art Assign­ment will be back soon with a primer on Mark Rothko.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Uncen­sored Andy Warhol-Direct­ed Video for The Cars’ Hit “Hel­lo Again” (NSFW)

Andy Warhol Shoots “Screen Tests” of Nico, Bob Dylan & Sal­vador Dalí

Andy Warhol’s 1965 Film, Vinyl, Adapt­ed from Antho­ny Burgess’ A Clock­work Orange

All artists are mor­tal. Lucian Freud was, by any­one’s def­i­n­i­tion, an artist. There­fore, Lucian Freud was mor­tal — as, so his artis­tic vision empha­sized, are the sub­jects of his “stark and reveal­ing paint­ings of friends and inti­mates, splayed nude in his stu­dio,” which, wrote William Grimes in Freud’s 2011 New York Times obit­u­ary, “recast the art of por­trai­ture and offered a new approach to fig­u­ra­tive art.” Freud “put the pic­to­r­i­al lan­guage of tra­di­tion­al Euro­pean paint­ing in the ser­vice of an anti-roman­tic, con­fronta­tion­al style of por­trai­ture that stripped bare the sitter’s social facade. Ordi­nary peo­ple — many of them his friends — stared wide-eyed from the can­vas, vul­ner­a­ble to the artist’s ruth­less inspec­tion.”

Or, in Freud’s own words: “I work from the peo­ple that inter­est me and that I care about, in rooms that I live in and know.” Just as every mor­tal artist’s career must begin with a first work, so it must end with a final work, and in the clip at the top of the post you can wit­ness a few min­utes from the very last day the painter spent paint­ing some­body who inter­est­ed him and whom he cared about, in a room he lived in and knew. He spent it on this can­vas, an enor­mous and unfin­ished por­trait of his assis­tant David Daw­son and his whip­pet Eli called Por­trait of the Hound.

“Every morn­ing, sev­en days a week, I sat for Lucian,” said Daw­son to The Tele­graph’s Mar­tin Gay­ford. “There was a very open accep­tance of his not hav­ing so long to live. But he still had a burn­ing desire to make a very good paint­ing, right up to the end. He was paint­ing three weeks before he died.” Daw­son shot this footage of Freud’s final work­ing day, July 3, 2011, which made it into the doc­u­men­tary Lucian Freud: Paint­ed Life [part one, part two]. “We are in Freud’s home, which is very qui­et, with lots of paint­ings on the walls, and filled with a sub­tle, nat­ur­al light,” writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Elisa Wouk Almi­no. “He was par­tic­u­lar about paint­ing under a north­ern light, which he once described as ‘cold and clear and con­stant.’ ”

Whether Freud lived the last tru­ly painter­ly life, we can’t know for sure; we do know, how­ev­er, that he lived one of the most res­olute­ly painter­ly lives in recent his­to­ry. “Lucian did­n’t both­er about what he did­n’t need to,” said his final sub­ject. “What was impor­tant was try­ing to make the best paint­ing he pos­si­bly could. Work was what kept him going: that need to get out of bed, pick up a paint­brush and make anoth­er mark, make anoth­er deci­sion. So that was what he did. It was a good way to go about liv­ing a life.”

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jack­son Pol­lock 51: Short Film Cap­tures the Painter Cre­at­ing Abstract Expres­sion­ist Art

Aston­ish­ing Film of Arthrit­ic Impres­sion­ist Painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1915)

Watch Picas­so Cre­ate Entire Paint­ings in Mag­nif­i­cent Time-Lapse Film (1956)

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.