I’m compiling a list of museums with useful online catalogs. Many institutions have websites with a few pictures, but some have put significant numbers of objects on line, with detailed descriptions and high-resolution photographs. Those are the ones I’m interested in. I will be adding museums to this list as I go, and welcome suggestions for others. Institutions with textile holdings are of course the most interesting, but any can be added to the list.
- Hermitage, St Petersburg, Russia. Paintings, Sculpture, Machinery and mechanisms, Arms and armour, Furniture and carriages, Ceramics and porcelain, Applied arts, Jewellery, Textiles, Numismatics and glyptics, Costume, Archaeological artifacts
Textiles: lots of tapestries, some lace, embroidery (lots of 18-19th c., some earlier), tassels and fringe (17-19th) - Victoria and Albert, London, England. One of the better online collections, with many items, good organization, and lots of detail.
- British Museum, London, England
Highlights only – 4000 items, organized by culture, place, material
- Swedish Historical Museum (Historiska Museet), Stockholm, Sweden
Tremendous resource for Scandinavian artifacts – lots of Viking and medieval data. Search is in Swedish. There’s a Google translate button to help you get started. If you click on “FöremÃ¥l”, you are taken to a search page that also provides complete lists of search words for different categories (item, material, etc). - Swedish National Museum (Nationalmuseum), Stockholm, Sweden.
- National Museum of Ireland
I hope they add more – not a lot of textiles included. - National Gallery of Australia
Asian textiles especially. Good Indonesian collection, but the search function is awful. - Textile Museum of Canada
Nice browse functions. Search for “card woven” instead of “tablet woven.” - The Textile Museum
Can browse current and past exhibitions, highlights; as yet no general search function. - National Museum of Denmark
Great, zoomable photos of various exhibits. - Bibliographica Textilia Historiae database indexes books, articles, royal decrees, and all sorts of other works on the history of textiles from the late 15th century onward.
- “An Atlas of Medieval Combs from Northern Europe,” by Steven P. Ashby, is not a searchable textile database, I admit, but I found it a useful reference. If I come across enough resources of this sort I’ll give them their own page.
- The Rijksmuseum has a searchable online database with some textile content (and many other pretty things).
- Ditto for the US National Gallery of Art.
- The Fitzwilliam Museum has primarily Egyptian textiles.
- Institut fur mittelalterliche Realienkunde – search for “Textilie” in “Materielle Objekte”.
- Royal Institute for the Artistic Heritage of Belgium
Katrin Kania sent me a few resources:
If you have suggestions, please leave a comment here or email me at the contact address in the sidebar.
