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Artists site guide
America's Distinguished Artists
a national registry of historic artists
About America's Distinguished Artists
America's Distinguished Artists is a a national registry of historic artists sponsored by Traditional Fine Arts Organization (TFAO). It is one of TFAO's Catalogues. Deceased American painters, photographers, sculptors and artisans of note who created representational art are indexed by last name in alphabetical order. An artist qualifies for inclusion in the catalogue if he or she produced significant artistic output while residing in, or visiting, the geographical area now encompassed by the boundaries of the United States. With thousands of artists researched, America's Distinguished Artists is the most complete and in-depth catalogue of its kind. Students, teachers, scholars and collectors world-wide make use of its contents.
For each listed artist there either is a link to a page in Resource Library, a link to a page from another source, or links to both a page in Resource Library and to a page from another source. TFAO's years of cumulative research saves viewers considerable time in finding valuable biographical information. Viewers avoid linking to many websites listed on first pages of search results where the links are mainly tools for marketing purposes and provide scant biographical information.
Many links are to essays that are published in Resource Library by noted scholars. Numerous other links are to artist biographies provided in the form of Resource Library articles with source material from art museums. Editor's notes following Resource Library's articles and essays often contain related information found nowhere else.
All links to artist biographies contain 100% free information. TFAO avoids websites that require a fee to view complete biographies and those that have information likely to be temporary. TFAO receives no compensation for providing links to biographical information in other websites.
Before 2005 the catalogue was named Distinguished Artists Series. In 2005 it was renamed Distinguished Artists. In May 2008 the catalogue was renamed America's Distinguished Artists.
Individual pages in this catalogue are continuously amended. Refreshing or reloading pages enables readers to view the latest updates.
Do you know of artists not yet included? We would like to hear about them. For details please click here.
Presentation protocol
Links to Resource Library pages are presented first, followed in some cases by a link to one other source. If there is a mention of an artist in any page of Resource Library, the currently most informative link to a page referencing the artist is presented. If there is information for an artist from qualifying pages elsewhere in the Web, a link is made to the most informative page if we judge that information to be of special importance beyond that included in Resource Library.
Recent editions
For the 2011-2012 edition, TFAO researched all non-Resource Library artist listings in the America's Distinguished Artists catalogue. If a listing was from a non-Resource Library Web page, TFAO added the word "from" following the artist's name plus the name of the outside source.
For the 2012-2013 edition, TFAO added information regarding Resource Library citations.
The enhanced 2012-2013 edition information serves two purposes: 1. visitors are given more information on the level of information provided in Resource Library articles and essays; 2. TFAO's researchers have better signals informing them when to search outside Resource Library for further information on an artist in future editions of America's Distinguished Artists. For example, if a biography is located or recommended from an outside source, the researcher will check America's Distinguished Artists for prior entries. If there is a Resource Library essay already referenced in the catalogue, the researcher need not link to information on the artist contained in the outside source.
The 2013-2014 edition will add entries as new biographies become available from Resource Library essays and articles, plus biographies from other approved online sources.
Finding additional images of artworks
Besides the artwork images presented through the links to pages referenced in America's Distinguished Artists, many more images are available online.
As of 2012 sources of interest include The Athenaeum and Google Images. These sites use separate approaches to find and display images.
The Athenaeum is a directory of images that can be accessed in several ways. One of the ways is by artist name. Let's say that you want to see images of paintings by Joseph Kleitsch. If you chose the artist's name on April 4, 2012 you would have found images of 162 paintings attributed to Joseph Kleitsch that were uploaded by volunteers. The images would be listed in alphabetical order by name of the painting. You would be able to magnify images by clicking on them. It's not clear that the images or their descriptions were independently checked for accuracy, or if checked, the name of the expert. Also, the sources of the images were not provided.
Google Images uses algorithms to find images already online.
If you want to see images of paintings by Joseph Kleitsch you would enter
the artist's name in the search box. The results you would see include images
of paintings produced by the artist plus other images not related to the
artist. If you conducted your search on April 4, 2012 you would have found
about 120 images of Kleitsch paintings -- plus photos of the artist and
his signature -- before non-Kleitch images started being mixed in with those
of the artist. You would find that images of some of the paintings were
duplicated several times. A benefit of the Google Images search would be
that for each image you would have access to the Web page containing it
and therefore the context in which it was shown.
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