My Own Private International Art Museum -- Photographs of Paintings: 2003-2014

Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, Louvre Museum, Paris

I love art museums and have been to about 150 worldwide--some several times--plus a good smattering of European churches and palaces, where amazing art is also in abundant supply.

While I am happy that I have gotten to some of the most prestigious museums in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere--including the Met, MOMA, Art Institute of Chicago, MFA Boston, the National Gallery of the U.S. and of England, the Louvre, Musee D'Orsay, Prado, Hermitage, Uffizi, Rijksmuseum, Vatican, Guggenheim in New York and Bilbao, and several more--I have also enjoyed stellar collections in places like St. Louis, Dayton, Des Moines, Madison, Toledo, Mason City, IA, Champaign and even Las Vegas.

Although many art museums don't allow any photography, even of their permanent collections without a flash, several do--and  I've taken photographs of thousands of paintings where permissible.

I'm not really sure why, as most of the paintings I've captured--and many, many more--can readily be found online (I love WikiArt.org and Google Art Project). And it's not as if I've ever shown anyone any of these photos, beyond a few included in blog posts and travel galleries, nor even looked at them much, if at all, myself.

Frank Weston Benson, Sunlight, Indianapolis Museum of Art

But it seemed like a good, or at least time-consuming, idea to post some here. And I can't deny it was fun to look though the 635 gigabytes (that's not a typo, but represents much more than art pix) of photos I have stored on portable hard drives to (re)discover photos of paintings I've long since forgotten having taken--and then trying to find/verify the artists and titles online.

The photos below cover a wide swath of art museums, from major to relatively minor, though only museums visited after I had a digital camera (sometime in 2003) are represented, thereby leaving out anything from Italy and many other places.

The artists include some of my favorites but were selected somewhat randomly, are not meant to be comprehensive and, like the museums, each is represented just once (except the Louvre, from which I included Mona above--photography is now allowed, not that it stopped me when it wasn't--and something else below).

The good number of female portraits shown is also coincidental, and their is no specific intent to showcase any museum's best, most famous or even my favorite painting. (I also like sculpture, photography and other art museum holdings, but have included only paintings.)

These were all taken within permanent collections--special exhibit photography is almost universally forbidden--but it's possible that some paintings below are no longer owned from the museum where I saw and shot them, or that photography guidelines have changed.

Enjoy. But please stay behind the virtual ropes.

Edward Hopper, High Noon, Dayton Art Institute

Unsure of artist/work, thinking perhaps by George Rouault, Denver Art Museum

Amedeo Modigliani, Portrait of a Woman, Detroit Institute of Arts

Pablo Picasso, Weeping Woman, Tate Modern, London

Caravaggio, The Lute Player, Hermitage, St. Petersburg

Ferdnand Leger, Title Unknown, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio

Francisco Goya, Portrait of the Duchess of Alba, Hispanic Society of America, New York, NY

James Tissot, Waiting for the Ferry at the Falcon Tavern, Speed Art Museum, Louisville

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Summer, Louvre Museum, Paris

John Sloan, Boy With Piccolo, Charles H. MacNider Art Museum, Mason City, IA

John Steuart Curry, Our Good Earth, Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, WI

Edgar Degas, Two Dancers - Yellow and Rose,  Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires

Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte, Art Institute of Chicago

Alexej von Jawlensky, Spanish Woman with Mantilla, Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA

Henri Matisse, The Grey Hat, Cincinnati Art Museum

Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun, Varvara Ivanovna Ladosmirsky, Columbus Museum of Art

Eduoart Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Courtauld Gallery, London

Giorgio de Chirico, Ariadne, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Alex Katz, Sunny #4, Milwaukee Art Museum

Joan Miró, May 1968, Fundacio Joan Miro, Barcelona

Vincent van Gogh, Olive Trees, Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Andrew Wyeth, Christina's World, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

Agnolo Bronzino, A Woman and Her Little Boy, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, Museo del Prado, Madrid

Georgina de Albuquerque, Summer Day, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro

Marc Chagall, Adam and Eve, St. Louis Art Museum

Edouard Vuillard, La Salle Clarac, Toledo Museum of Art

Raoul Dufy, Title Unknown, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

Vassily Kandinsky, Painting With Red Spot, Musée National d'Art Moderne at Pompidou Center, Paris

El Greco, St. Peter in Tears, Museo del Greco, Toledo, Spain

Raphael, Madonna with the Christ Child and John the Baptist, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam