Competition

Let us start with the competiton.
   The Art Guide is a large site with the same raison d'etre as Phryne: to link artists, paintings and galleries in the UK. However, it has the ambitious aim of covering all periods of art, and therefore it is may be expected to be less detailed than Phryne in the areas that we cover.

Bob Speel's well-established website does focus on the Victorian era, and has a large number of short biographies of artists, including animal, landscape and marine painters that we have largely chosen to omit from Phryne. Speel's biographies are solid: if you want to know where an artist was born, with whom he trained &c, this is the place to look. There is also good coverage of galleries, especially in the South-East of England; Speel is obviously keen on sculpture, and suggests 'sculpture walks' around some of the galleries. However the treatment of individual paintings is relatively brief.

Paul Ripley had the clever idea of reproducing contemporary obituaries of artists at his Victorian Art in Britain site. He also provides short biographies, a few reviews of galleries, and a selection of images.
  

Lists of 'Victorian links'

The magpie instinct is strong on the Web, and there are many unexplained and inexplicable lists on any and no subject, including Victoriana. However, some of the better lists of Victorian sites are very useful, and represent a Homeric labour that we have no intention of trying to replicate here.

The Victorian Web and the Victoria Research Web are major scholarly undertakings.

The Japanese engagment with Victorian literature is well-known: look at the Japanese signposts that dot the moors above the Brontë's vicarage at Haworth. Victorian Web Sites is a Japan with a literary focus; it is mainly substantial but occasionally frivolous -- Victorian animated GIFs (sic), anyone?.

The Pre-Raphaelites on their own have a share of Webspace that would no doubt have delighted Rossetti, appalled Holman Hunt, and caused Millais to issue a pile of invoices. Risto Hurmalainen (from Finland, where else?) provides an index to competing online biographies of the PRB and several more artists: although some of these turn out to be a little disappointing.
  

Sites with pictures on

The purpose of Phryne is to encourage and facilitate people in seeing original paintings (while being rather careful about copyright issues). However, if you can't manage to see the pictures in situ, many museum and gallery websites include reproductions of some pictures, and there are also several sites offering a tour through 19th-century art. Artcyclopedia is a search engine which lists other sites containing reproductions of a particular painter's work. Among these sites, Artmagick is probably the most relevant to 19th-century art, and their list of recently published books (with onward links to Amazon, naturally!) is also interesting.