This page was updated
on 11 March 2008

François de Dardel's
favourite links

Still life Fine arts
There are many sites. I will give you a few.

The remarkable Web Gallery of Art is a Hungarian site (in English) with European painting and sculpture of the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque periods (1100-1850), currently containing over 15400 reproductions. Good comments, excellent quality of the pictures. Plus music files as a bonus, from many composers of the same period.
The Mark Harden's Artchive offers works from about 300 artists, with very good pictures. Best site of this kind so far.
A huge site: The Art Renewal Center with mostly realistic, classic works (style pompier) with 2600 artists and 25000 first quality pictures, from Aagard to Zurbarán, including Michelangelo, Dürer and of course Ingres. An absolute must, but slow-loading... And don't read their "Philosophy" pages.
From the Web Museum in Paris, you can access lots of museum sites around the world. I suggest you start with the Très riches heures du duc de Berry, which is an absolute master work of the French Middle Ages.
The Web Museum also has an artist index with some 200 painters listed, from Pieter Aertsen to Francisco de Zurbarán.
The Vincent van Gogh Gallery is well presented, in 15 languages...

Book Literature

This is in French only, sorry. Littérature française has been prepared by Daniel Blériot. This is a good anthology of French literature, with works from 24 of the most famous writers. The link has been changed again (March 2007).
Un site entier dédié à Jean de La Fontaine, l'œuvre complète en ligne.

Music

I have now a dedicated page of music links, listing sites with classical MIDI files and particular focus on JSB.

Tapisserie de Bayeux

La première BD de l'histoire ! Version panoramique de la célèbre tapisserie de la reine Mathilde.
This 230 ft long tapestry is the ancestor of comic strips. More seriously, it is a most delightful and moving chronicle of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. This site gives a description in English (and French) of this masterwork and provides a striking panoramic view. Interestingly, a small section of the tapestry shows the comet of Halley.

Mouth Languages

See my language page. At the bottom of said page, you will find several "linkguistics".
Do you want to translate a text from or to Afrikaans, Esperanto, Frisian, Latin, Turkish ? Just connect to TravLang. Of course, more usual languages are also covered. Useful to get a quick tranlation of a not too abstruse word. I made a test with the French-German dictionary. Out of 10 not very current words in my mother tongue, the dictionary supplied only 2 answers...
For fun, visit the official Europanto site. If you know a little of French, English and a few words of German, you can probably be fluent in Europanto.
Une mine d'informations les plus diverses sur le français, par Desiderio.
The LEO dictionaries (German-English, German-French and German-Spanish) with corresponding discussion groups are a fantastic source of enjoyment for all those mastering German as well as one of the three other languages.

Satiric page in German

See the Schandmännchen page. Punchlines, sports, cartoons. You must be reasonably acquainted with German and international politics to enjoy it fully...

Learning or Teaching German ?

See the DeutschAktiv page of Caroline Burnand, who offers unusual tools to teach the language. Examples can be downloaded.

Reading ?

If you know anybody who cannot read, I warmly recommend a method developed in South Africa: Teach any child or adult to read. You will find their address and order form on their site. I purchased the method to teach a young Indian who had not had the chance to go to school.

Gold coin Philosophy ?

See the web site of Felix Voirol and specifically his Taboo-Breaker pages. Several of his ideas seem to be consistent with mine. Among many things ranging from biology to flying a plane, he has interesting language pages (see also my own language section).

Coffee Fair Trade / Commerce équitable
Some of products we are consuming, coffee, cocoa, bananas, oranges, are purchased at ridiculously low prices from poor countries. When commodity prices fall dramatically, global international trade has a catastrophic impact on the lives of millions of small scale producers, forcing many into crippling debt and countless others to lose their land and their homes.

Fair Trade (UK)
Trans Fair (USA)
Max Havelaar France, in French. From now on, look for this coffee in your supermarket.
Max Havelaar in Dutch
Association Commerce Équitable (France)
Réseau Solidarité, in French
Ingénieurs sans Frontières, in French
Artisans du Monde, in French
ATTAC, in French (Association pour une Taxation des Transactions financières pour l'Aide aux Citoyens),
con una versión en español
and with a version in English (a bit thin, this one)

Jean-Louis von Dardel, a Swedish artist

His web site shows a few of his productions. No comments, but good pictures, some inspired by surrealism:

Painting
Sculpture
Models
Scenography

Laughing Humour

The Computer Stupidities offers a vast collection of mishaps discovered by computer support people.
Murphy's law: here a page in French. Si vous ignorez la loi de Murphy, allez donc y faire un tour...
See the site of Sylvain Lhuillier (mostly in French, with some pages in English). A huge collection of language curiosities, enigmas, pictures, jokes, maxims. Serious stuff as well, all worth a visit. This is a new link (URL has moved).
For good American satirical news, see The Onion. You should visit their site once a week, to have a look at US news from a different perspective.

Tintin Tintin
Tintin is part of our culture. When searching the web, I was surprised to discover many sites about the famous reporter. I was even more surprised to see that more than half of the sites were not in French. Note: a search with Google made on 12 April 2003 on the single keyword "Tintin" gave a total of about 85000 pages...!

tintin.com, a graphic-intensive (Flash), beautiful site (in French), with essential information. This is the official Tintin site, owned by "Les Editions Moulinsart" and the "Fondation Hergé".
Le monde de Tintin, also in French. A "non-official" site with excellent layout, good navigation, and tons of information and details. For instance: all the "secondary characters" of Tintin albums are listed and described with a small picture. Made by Guillaume Belloncle.
Objectif Tintin, a very comprehensive Belgian site (in French) with all you want to know about Tintin, and tons of further links.
Tintin links platform (in Dutch) maintained by Etienne Chevalier. Although not everybody understands this language, it contains a wealth of links to other Tintin pages.
If you want to learn the Syldavian language and grammar, visit this instructive page, now available in English as well as in French.
See my own page on Tintin's cars, also available in French (little text, many pictures...).
Tintin's aeroplanes, in French, nice if you except the obligatory music (insupportable), and slow connection.
Histoire de l'automobile, toujours en français, des origines à 1900, extraite de "Tintin raconte". Instructif et divertissant, illustré de "chromos" d'Hergé (ou plus probablement des studios Hergé), publiés à l'époque sous le titre générique "Voir et savoir". De là, liens sur l'histoire de l'aviation etc. le tout sous la direction de Jacques Martin.
Tintina' bulles, simple et rafraîchissant, par l'excellent Yves de B.
See a long list of errors and inconsistencies discovered by many enthusiasts in Tintin's albums and collected by Jim Bella.
See also a curious series of Citroën catalogues, with the famous 2CV, DS and SM, by Olivier Gayet. He should also remove the obligatory (bad) music.
Another page (in Dutch) shows the covers of all Tintin albums, with dates of publishing and a few words about variants.
The album covers in English. Interestingly, Tintin in the Congo is missing here. There must be some obscure reason...
Tintin pour toujours. In French. Lots of information, but the navigation via Flash graphics is a little too complicated (and you will hardly find your way unless you understand French very well).
En français: Sur les traces de Tintin en Suisse et en France voisine.
Tintin est vivant by Prad and Luc Van Dong. The texts are in French. Many resources, pastiches, parodies.
Hergé 1000 anys (en catalán).

Metro Paris

Want to know the weather forecast? Go to Météo-France, look at the map and read the last news.
How about traffic conditions in and around Paris, in real time? Sytadin gives you maps that are permanently updated, and the time you need to reach the airports.
Les pages de Paris will give you very comprehensive information about what's happening in the French capital. English text available. You'll find temporary exhibitions, and all expected info on museums, public transportation and much more. A good site indeed.
And if you want to have a look at Mediaeval Paris (in French), pay a visit to the site of Marie-Christine Milot: she reconstructed Paris as it was in the XIIth century. (URL updated March 2000).

Pencil Ray tracing

You can make virtual images using geometric modelling. The best - free of charge! program is Persistence of Vision. It requires a little understanding of three-dimensional constructive geometry, and a fast Macintosh, or Unix machine, or even Intel-based PC. You can produce photo-realistic scenes of completely irrealistic situations. Unfold your creative power!
A master: Gilles Tran. His pages in English or French are full of poetry and imagination, and have a very strong technical basis at the same time. Incredible results.
Another master: Friedrich Lohmüller (German and English). Many examples, with some focus on architecture. Also, excellent tutorial pages (DE, EN, FR, IT) on POV.
The Internet Ray-Tracing Competition page with incredible still and animated images. Not all pictures are made with POV, many are using other 3 D rendering software.
Reynald of Switzerland has very useful pages explaining the intricacies of light in POV.
Les pages en français de Louis Bel, élégantes malgré une orthographe désastreuse, offrent de bons exemples et des explications pour les débutants.
See my own Raytracing page (viel bescheidener).

Apple logo Apple
You must be blind if you have not yet noticed that I am a Mac fan. Here a few useful links for the serious Macintosh user:

For excellent pages revolving around the (now monochrome, but going stronger than ever) Apple, see Pomme à jour a (Swiss) site in French.
Mac OS X software.
VersionTracker provides plenty of useful software.
One of the very best pieces of shareware for the Mac is Thorsten Lemke's Graphic Converter. If you don't have it (I can't imagine you don't), or if you have not paid the modest shareware fee, visit Thorsten's site.
And of course, here is the direct access to Apple itself.

Polar bear Animal Photography

Many good pictures of tigers, lynx, giraffes, apes, birds and more, taken by Ralf Schmode of Germany.

Quizzzs

Vous trouverez sur ce site différents types de quizzs, réalisés principalement sous Excel, qui vous permettront de tester votre culture audiovisuelle et générale.
Les quizzs de ce site incorporent un contrôleur de syntaxe qui vous permet de savoir si vous êtes proche ou non de la solution. Vous n'avez donc plus à craindre les erreurs d'orthographe.

Artificial intelligence

Amazing : you think of an object, and the 20Q AI programme begins asking questions. In usually less than 20 questions, the programme finds your object. You can play in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Chinese and in 14 more languages...

Talbot Classic cars
I searched (again) the web for classic cars, there are now many sites most of them being commercial pages selling American cars. A few better suggestions below.

Phil Seed's virtual car museum with scans of brochures of various makes and models of cars (1950 - 1970), photographs and a variety of automobilaria. Good quality pictures. Mostly European cars. Well written, concise legends or explanations.
Les belles d'antan: une collection impressionnante de voitures d'entre-deux-guerres. Pas trouvé le nom de l'auteur... A splendid collection with first class photographs of vintage cars, mostly 1920 to 1950. Good comments in French and English.
I also created my small museum from Hergé's albums : Tintin's cars.
Nationale 7 in French. This is the road that linked Paris with the French Riviera before the motorway (autoroute du sud, aka A6) was built.
I like especially Thierry Dubois. Ckick on the yellow car as an example before you go to his site.
Automobiles de collection: annuaire européen (surtout français) des sites. Très complet.
Voitures populaires françaises des années 1950 et 60.
Citroën Traction Avant.
Les voitures européennes d'autrefois, pages from Québec in English and French, although there is hardly any text, but many reasonably good pictures..
Old Classic Cars photo-archives (90 % British cars) many pictures, no text.
The Classic and Vintage Car pages many pictures, little text.
Hundreds of mostly American cars, but many of them "customised", i.e. altered, chopped, painted with flames, fitted with stainless steel modern wheels etc. With some patience, also a few originals. A few European automobiles as well, usually not well characterised, all pictures taken in America. The site is useful if you want to check a particular model. Goto index of pics.

Note: if any of the above links doesn't work any more, be kind enough to send me an e-mail, so I can correct this page.

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Home

	Fine arts There are many sites. I will give you a few. The remarkable Web Gallery of Art is a Hungarian site (in English) with European painting and sculpture of the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque periods (1100-1850), currently containing over 15400 reproductions. Good comments, excellent quality of the pictures. Plus music files as a bonus, from many composers of the same period. The Mark Harden's Artchive offers works from about 300 artists, with very good pictures. Best site of this kind so far. A huge site: The Art Renewal Center with mostly realistic, classic works (style pompier) with 2600 artists and 25000 first quality pictures, from Aagard to Zurbarán, including Michelangelo, Dürer and of course Ingres. An absolute must, but slow-loading... And don't read their "Philosophy" pages. From the Web Museum in Paris, you can access lots of museum sites around the world. I suggest you start with the Très riches heures du duc de Berry, which is an absolute master work of the French Middle Ages. The Web Museum also has an artist index with some 200 painters listed, from Pieter Aertsen to Francisco de Zurbarán. The Vincent van Gogh Gallery is well presented, in 15 languages...
	Literature This is in French only, sorry. Littérature française has been prepared by Daniel Blériot. This is a good anthology of French literature, with works from 24 of the most famous writers. The link has been changed again (March 2007). Un site entier dédié à Jean de La Fontaine, l'œuvre complète en ligne.
	Music I have now a dedicated page of music links, listing sites with classical MIDI files and particular focus on JSB.
	Tapisserie de Bayeux La première BD de l'histoire ! Version panoramique de la célèbre tapisserie de la reine Mathilde. This 230 ft long tapestry is the ancestor of comic strips. More seriously, it is a most delightful and moving chronicle of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. This site gives a description in English (and French) of this masterwork and provides a striking panoramic view. Interestingly, a small section of the tapestry shows the comet of Halley.
	Languages See my language page. At the bottom of said page, you will find several "linkguistics". Do you want to translate a text from or to Afrikaans, Esperanto, Frisian, Latin, Turkish ? Just connect to TravLang. Of course, more usual languages are also covered. Useful to get a quick tranlation of a not too abstruse word. I made a test with the French-German dictionary. Out of 10 not very current words in my mother tongue, the dictionary supplied only 2 answers... For fun, visit the official Europanto site. If you know a little of French, English and a few words of German, you can probably be fluent in Europanto. Une mine d'informations les plus diverses sur le français, par Desiderio. The LEO dictionaries (German-English, German-French and German-Spanish) with corresponding discussion groups are a fantastic source of enjoyment for all those mastering German as well as one of the three other languages.
	Satiric page in German See the Schandmännchen page. Punchlines, sports, cartoons. You must be reasonably acquainted with German and international politics to enjoy it fully...
	Learning or Teaching German ? See the DeutschAktiv page of Caroline Burnand, who offers unusual tools to teach the language. Examples can be downloaded.
	Reading ? If you know anybody who cannot read, I warmly recommend a method developed in South Africa: Teach any child or adult to read. You will find their address and order form on their site. I purchased the method to teach a young Indian who had not had the chance to go to school.
	Philosophy ? See the web site of Felix Voirol and specifically his Taboo-Breaker pages. Several of his ideas seem to be consistent with mine. Among many things ranging from biology to flying a plane, he has interesting language pages (see also my own language section).
	Fair Trade / Commerce équitable Some of products we are consuming, coffee, cocoa, bananas, oranges, are purchased at ridiculously low prices from poor countries. When commodity prices fall dramatically, global international trade has a catastrophic impact on the lives of millions of small scale producers, forcing many into crippling debt and countless others to lose their land and their homes. Fair Trade (UK) Trans Fair (USA) Max Havelaar France, in French. From now on, look for this coffee in your supermarket. Max Havelaar in Dutch Association Commerce Équitable (France) Réseau Solidarité, in French Ingénieurs sans Frontières, in French Artisans du Monde, in French ATTAC, in French (Association pour une Taxation des Transactions financières pour l'Aide aux Citoyens), con una versión en español and with a version in English (a bit thin, this one)
	Jean-Louis von Dardel, a Swedish artist His web site shows a few of his productions. No comments, but good pictures, some inspired by surrealism: Painting Sculpture Models Scenography
	Humour The Computer Stupidities offers a vast collection of mishaps discovered by computer support people. Murphy's law: here a page in French. Si vous ignorez la loi de Murphy, allez donc y faire un tour... See the site of Sylvain Lhuillier (mostly in French, with some pages in English). A huge collection of language curiosities, enigmas, pictures, jokes, maxims. Serious stuff as well, all worth a visit. This is a new link (URL has moved). For good American satirical news, see The Onion. You should visit their site once a week, to have a look at US news from a different perspective.
	Tintin Tintin is part of our culture. When searching the web, I was surprised to discover many sites about the famous reporter. I was even more surprised to see that more than half of the sites were not in French. Note: a search with Google made on 12 April 2003 on the single keyword "Tintin" gave a total of about 85000 pages...! tintin.com, a graphic-intensive (Flash), beautiful site (in French), with essential information. This is the official Tintin site, owned by "Les Editions Moulinsart" and the "Fondation Hergé". Le monde de Tintin, also in French. A "non-official" site with excellent layout, good navigation, and tons of information and details. For instance: all the "secondary characters" of Tintin albums are listed and described with a small picture. Made by Guillaume Belloncle. Objectif Tintin, a very comprehensive Belgian site (in French) with all you want to know about Tintin, and tons of further links. Tintin links platform (in Dutch) maintained by Etienne Chevalier. Although not everybody understands this language, it contains a wealth of links to other Tintin pages. If you want to learn the Syldavian language and grammar, visit this instructive page, now available in English as well as in French. See my own page on Tintin's cars, also available in French (little text, many pictures...). Tintin's aeroplanes, in French, nice if you except the obligatory music (insupportable), and slow connection. Histoire de l'automobile, toujours en français, des origines à 1900, extraite de "Tintin raconte". Instructif et divertissant, illustré de "chromos" d'Hergé (ou plus probablement des studios Hergé), publiés à l'époque sous le titre générique "Voir et savoir". De là, liens sur l'histoire de l'aviation etc. le tout sous la direction de Jacques Martin. Tintina' bulles, simple et rafraîchissant, par l'excellent Yves de B. See a long list of errors and inconsistencies discovered by many enthusiasts in Tintin's albums and collected by Jim Bella. See also a curious series of Citroën catalogues, with the famous 2CV, DS and SM, by Olivier Gayet. He should also remove the obligatory (bad) music. Another page (in Dutch) shows the covers of all Tintin albums, with dates of publishing and a few words about variants. The album covers in English. Interestingly, Tintin in the Congo is missing here. There must be some obscure reason... Tintin pour toujours. In French. Lots of information, but the navigation via Flash graphics is a little too complicated (and you will hardly find your way unless you understand French very well). En français: Sur les traces de Tintin en Suisse et en France voisine. Tintin est vivant by Prad and Luc Van Dong. The texts are in French. Many resources, pastiches, parodies. Hergé 1000 anys (en catalán).
	Paris Want to know the weather forecast? Go to Météo-France, look at the map and read the last news. How about traffic conditions in and around Paris, in real time? Sytadin gives you maps that are permanently updated, and the time you need to reach the airports. Les pages de Paris will give you very comprehensive information about what's happening in the French capital. English text available. You'll find temporary exhibitions, and all expected info on museums, public transportation and much more. A good site indeed. And if you want to have a look at Mediaeval Paris (in French), pay a visit to the site of Marie-Christine Milot: she reconstructed Paris as it was in the XIIth century. (URL updated March 2000).
	Ray tracing You can make virtual images using geometric modelling. The best - free of charge! program is Persistence of Vision. It requires a little understanding of three-dimensional constructive geometry, and a fast Macintosh, or Unix machine, or even Intel-based PC. You can produce photo-realistic scenes of completely irrealistic situations. Unfold your creative power! A master: Gilles Tran. His pages in English or French are full of poetry and imagination, and have a very strong technical basis at the same time. Incredible results. Another master: Friedrich Lohmüller (German and English). Many examples, with some focus on architecture. Also, excellent tutorial pages (DE, EN, FR, IT) on POV. The Internet Ray-Tracing Competition page with incredible still and animated images. Not all pictures are made with POV, many are using other 3 D rendering software. Reynald of Switzerland has very useful pages explaining the intricacies of light in POV. Les pages en français de Louis Bel, élégantes malgré une orthographe désastreuse, offrent de bons exemples et des explications pour les débutants. See my own Raytracing page (viel bescheidener).
	Apple You must be blind if you have not yet noticed that I am a Mac fan. Here a few useful links for the serious Macintosh user: For excellent pages revolving around the (now monochrome, but going stronger than ever) Apple, see Pomme à jour a (Swiss) site in French. Mac OS X software. VersionTracker provides plenty of useful software. One of the very best pieces of shareware for the Mac is Thorsten Lemke's Graphic Converter. If you don't have it (I can't imagine you don't), or if you have not paid the modest shareware fee, visit Thorsten's site. And of course, here is the direct access to Apple itself.
	Animal Photography Many good pictures of tigers, lynx, giraffes, apes, birds and more, taken by Ralf Schmode of Germany.
	Quizzzs Vous trouverez sur ce site différents types de quizzs, réalisés principalement sous Excel, qui vous permettront de tester votre culture audiovisuelle et générale. Les quizzs de ce site incorporent un contrôleur de syntaxe qui vous permet de savoir si vous êtes proche ou non de la solution. Vous n'avez donc plus à craindre les erreurs d'orthographe.
	Artificial intelligence Amazing : you think of an object, and the 20Q AI programme begins asking questions. In usually less than 20 questions, the programme finds your object. You can play in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Chinese and in 14 more languages...
	Classic cars I searched (again) the web for classic cars, there are now many sites most of them being commercial pages selling American cars. A few better suggestions below. Phil Seed's virtual car museum with scans of brochures of various makes and models of cars (1950 - 1970), photographs and a variety of automobilaria. Good quality pictures. Mostly European cars. Well written, concise legends or explanations. Les belles d'antan: une collection impressionnante de voitures d'entre-deux-guerres. Pas trouvé le nom de l'auteur... A splendid collection with first class photographs of vintage cars, mostly 1920 to 1950. Good comments in French and English. I also created my small museum from Hergé's albums : Tintin's cars. Nationale 7 in French. This is the road that linked Paris with the French Riviera before the motorway (autoroute du sud, aka A6) was built. I like especially Thierry Dubois. Ckick on the yellow car as an example before you go to his site. Automobiles de collection: annuaire européen (surtout français) des sites. Très complet. Voitures populaires françaises des années 1950 et 60. Citroën Traction Avant. Les voitures européennes d'autrefois, pages from Québec in English and French, although there is hardly any text, but many reasonably good pictures.. Old Classic Cars photo-archives (90 % British cars) many pictures, no text. The Classic and Vintage Car pages many pictures, little text. Hundreds of mostly American cars, but many of them "customised", i.e. altered, chopped, painted with flames, fitted with stainless steel modern wheels etc. With some patience, also a few originals. A few European automobiles as well, usually not well characterised, all pictures taken in America. The site is useful if you want to check a particular model. Goto index of pics.

François de Dardel's favourite links

François de Dardel's
favourite links