Art, Music, Poetry and Inspiration (hearts-ease.org)

Member Name: lucycstanford

Product:	hearts-ease.org
Date:	01/03/02 (26 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Beautiful site, Huge amount of information, Inspiring

Disadvantages: I don't have the time to read all of it!

Hearts Ease is a lovely looking website. It’s wonderfully easy to navigate and the pages are all simply and elegantly designed, with beautiful and appropriate pictures, and above all superb content.
According to the site it has over 15,000 pages (I must admit to not having looked at them all!) and is accessed by nearly a million visitors a month. I can readily believe it. It is an invaluable resource both for people looking up specific facts about a composer, artist or poet, and to those who just want to browse to find inspiring new poems or pictures.

It is more than just a dry list of facts though. To quote the writers vision “Through this site, I hope to encourage appreciation of the arts - to show the poets, artists, and composers in the context of their times, and to increase understanding of their works by sharing their lives with you.”

The site is well organised and excellently indexed (so, for example you can find look for artists alphabetically, by nationality, chronologically, or find them listed in the paintings by theme section.)
It has three main sections on composers, artists, poets, as well as a a page of quotes involving the word stuff and an archive of the discontinued monthly 'featured works'.

The information on each person is detailed, with a brief biography and links to suggested reading, a timeline of the events of their life, selected works (by name and first line), a time line showing when they were working in context with the other literary or musical works, and additional resources, recommended recordings and quotes (both by them and about them) where available.

This really is a great site to explore history, art, culture and the links between all three.

Summary: