Art of the Western World through the Annenberg CPB Project. See the episode on A Fresh View, an hour-long video (also available in the Kelley Library); the first half hour focuses on Impressionism.

Special Exhibit at the Met:
Americans in Paris: 1860-1900
This exhibit features many of the American Impressionists I talk about in this lecture, and both artists and paintings Robert Hughes discusses in American Visions: The Gilded Age. All of the works on view can be accessed in the gallery.

Also, new at the Met: Gustave Courbet

At the National Gallery of Art, there's an appropriate new exhibit: Paris In Transition: Photographs from the National Gallery of Art with a link to other photographs in the permanent collection.

Even newer: the Met's summer 2007 exhibit, Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings: The Clark Brothers Collect features works by Realists, Impressionists, Post-impressionists, and other examplars of modern painting.

Realism

Thomas Eakins (Met) and the page on his Photography, 1880s-1890s.

Homer, Eakins, and Bellows: American Paintings 1875-1925 at the National Galler of Art

Impressionism

This is a true find: an exhibit of American Impressionists at a place called the Musée d'Art Américain, Giverny, the sister institution to the Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago, where I once worked--alas, now closed. The collection is online at the above link.

The National Gallery's exhibition, American Impressionism and Realism is available here.

New at the NGA: Selected Paintings and Selected Color Prints by Mary Cassatt.

Art in Context offers a substantial number of works by American Impressionists, with clear scans and enlarged views. The pages are currently being worked on, however, so may not be available.

A Crisis of Tradition and the birth of Contemporary Art is a section from the newly designed A World History of Art pages. Scroll down to the nineteenth century.

The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Nebraska owns a substantial number of American Impressionist works.

Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (Met)

Beyond the Easel: Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, 1890–1930 (Met)

Here's an interesting, well-written and illustrated student paper from Princeton on Monet's Water Lilie paintings.

Something I found linked to a blog: Monet and Japan (from the National Gallery of Art in Australia). Choose a topic from the drop-down menu, and compare Monet's works with Japanese prints. The blog in question is Lotusgreen's Japonisme.

Photography

History and Theory

camera obscura this site contains a history of the object/process--and quite a bit more

Snarkout.org's got an interesting article on the history and use of the camera obscura.

Here's a terrific Flash page on Early Photography 1839-1860.

From the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford, here's an online exhibit on Cameras: The Technology of Photographic Imaging. See also the collection of early photographs.

Photography: Processes, Preservation, and Conservation (Met, New York)

The Dawn of Photography: French Daguerreotypes, 1839–1855 (Met) & animated video of the Daguerrotype process.

The Daguerreian Era and Early American Photography on Paper, 1839–1860 from the Met Timeline of Art History.

Here is an online exhibition from UT Austin called The First Photograph

A History of Photography from its beginnings till the 1920s: a page by Dr. Robert Leggat which provides a good quick introduction to the history of photography and photographic processes.

George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film: features online exhibits and links to other online collections. See especially the index of checklists available.

Timeline of Photography Hermann Krone’s Historical Didactic Museum of Photography as a model for the history of photographic processes and techniques: a timeline sponsored by SEPIA (Safeguarding European Photographic Images for Access), which includes sample photos along a horizontal axis. Covers from 1836-1896.

Masters of Photography: includes an extensive list of photographers.

The American Museum of Photography contains information on photographic processes and their history.

American Photography: A Century of Images (PBS): a support page for the PBS documentary. It includes a discussion of photography as art, photography and war, among other topics, and an image lab.

Further research: Britain's National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television provides a number of useful resources.

Photographers

The Masters of Photography site linked above has more than enough information to get you started if you want to conduct research on idividual photographers. I've included a couple of special link below, however.

Julia Margaret Cameron's Women, from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Ansel Adams's Manzanar Photographs During World War II, thousands of Japanese Americans were "relocated" to internment camps, primarily in the western portions of the United States. One of these camps, Manzanar, lay outside my home town, Lone Pine, in the Owens River Valley in California. Ansel Adams documented life at Manzanar, and many of his photographs are catalogued on this site. If you're ever in the area, a museum is being set up in the old Manzanar gymnasium, and other photographs are frequently exhibited in the Eastern California Museum in Independence. An aside: the artist Isamu Noguchi, born in Japan of an American mother and the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, voluntarily joined the camp near Poston, Arizona for seven months, hoping to generate a major art installation--which was never realized.

Binh Danh's Chlorophyll Art Bin Danh is a Vietnamese-born photographer who creates photographs by exposing negative film over plant leaves. This article consists of a profile by NPR's Ketzel Levine (known to fellow gardeners as the "doyenne of dirt"). The images are, quite simply, beautiful.

Essays and further reading

Art and the Semiotics of Images: Three Questions About Visual Meaning by George Dillon, discusses the relationship between language and image.

Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide is an online journal devoted to the topic. It contains authoritative and intresting articles on a variety of subjects; it's also the source of the article on Tanner I linked to the DMA image, Painting the World's Christ: Tanner, Hybridity, and the Blood of the Holy Land by Alan C. Braddock.

Arizona's non-profit Traditional Fine Arts Organization has a resource library with essays about most aspects of American and other art since 1800.