Have students locate a piece of artwork that fascinates them. Ask them to write their impressions. Below you will find a list of several prominent museums along with descriptive quotes from their web pages:

          Established in 1793 by the French Republic, the Louvre Museum, in the company of the Ashmoleum Museum (1683), the Dresden Museum (1744) and the Vatican Museum (1784) is one of the earliest European museums. The collections of the Louvre Museum represent works of art dating from the birth of the great civilizations of the Mediterranean area until the western civilization of the Early Middle Ages to the middle of the XIXth century.

          The National Gallery of Art houses one of the finest collections in the world illustrating major achievements in painting, sculpture, and graphic arts from the Middle Ages to the present. Search the collection by specific artist, title, or a combination of criteria.

          The Smithsonian is composed of sixteen museums and galleries and the National Zoo and numerous research facilities in the United States and abroad. Nine Smithsonian museums are located on the National Mall between the Washington Monument and the Capitol.

          The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the largest and finest art museums in the world. Its collections include more than two million works of art–several hundred thousand of which are on view at any given time–spanning more than 5,000 years of world culture, from prehistory to the present.

          Chicago's newest major museum and one of the nation's largest facilities devoted to the art of our time, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) offers exhibitions of the most thought-provoking art created since 1945.

          Welcome to LACMA---The Los Angeles County Museum of Art! LACMA is the premier visual arts museum in the Western United States. Its holdings include more than 150,000 works spanning the history of art from ancient times to the present.

          The world's largest and most inclusive collection of modern painting and sculpture comprises some 3,200 works dating from the late nineteenth century to the present. It provides a comprehensive overview of the major artists and movements since the 1890s, from Paul Cézanne's The Bather and Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night to masterworks of today.

          If these museums do not appeal to your students' artistic interests, have them visit the World Wide Web (WWW) Virtual Library Museums Pages. This is a directory of online museums and museum-related resources.