What is the best site to post a photo of a painting to find who the artist was?

Answer 1

There's an app for smartphones ("Google Goggles") that lets you take a picture and do an image search to find out more about it. According to the reviews, paintings (the more "famous", the better) are one of the few things it actually does well, which makes sense if you think about it. It does okay with statues, monuments, and buildings if they're a) sufficiently distinctive and b) you're at more or less the same angle from it as the images in Google's databases were taken from.

Here's some anecdotal experience of my own:

I just tested it on the page image from this page, and it was identified as "Plum Garden over Shin-Ohashi Bridge", which after looking THAT up appears to be correct.

I tried it on "Nighthawks" and several parodies, and it correctly identified the original but not the parodies, which is both good and bad: good because it doesn't make you think the parody of Nighthawks is Nighthawks itself, and bad because if you already knew it was a parody and were trying to figure out what the original image being parodied was, you may be out of luck.

It did successfully recognize a couple of Muppet-based parodies of "American Gothic" (one with Kermit and Miss Piggy, and another more cartoony one of Elmo and ... some female Muppet that looks like Elmo but with gold rather than red hair) as being parodies, though it only identified the original in the Kermit case; it just identified Elmo & Friend as being a parody of something.

It did not correctly identify "Proserphine" by Thomas Hart Benton, instead thinking it was a book cover (in fairness, the book cover suggested is basically a picture of the painting with some added text, but it would have been nice had it identified the original). I guess THB isn't famous enough, or at least that particular painting isn't famous enough.

It identified a picture of the Gateway Arch as "St. Louis Skyline", which I guess is close enough, though if you were actually there and taking a picture of it I'd think you'd probably know you were in St. Louis (actually, if you were where the image I was using as a source was taken from, you'd be in East St. Louis, and Google Goggles being less than helpful would be among the least of your problems).