Here is a selection of art museums and libraries that have particularly helpful websites, often showing high quality images from their collections with accompanying explanation and background.

Art Institute of Chicago--link to exhibit, Daoism and the Arts of China

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston--links to the Art of Asia, Oceana, and Africa page

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City-- Asian Art Database ; check out their Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

National Palace Museum, Taipei

New York Public Library Digital Image Site. Includes "Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan: More than 1,000 images encompassing 1,200 years of Japanese book art, including Buddhist sutras, painted manuscripts, portraits, landscapes, calligraphic verse, and photographic books, with related drawings and woodblock prints." Not much contextual explanation.

Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler Galleries.

Pages maintained by colleges and universities:

A Visual Sourcebook of Chinese Civilization, maintained at the University of Washington, Patricia Buckley Ebrey

Expanding East Asian Studies, a project at Columbia University. See their Image Links page.

Art History on the Web, maintained by Charles L.C. Whitcombe of Sweet Briar College.

Ideas Project--"The goal of the Image Database to Enhance Asian Studies [IDEAS] is to unify digitizing efforts already in progress at various campuses into a shared searchable database, open to anyone with access to the World Wide Web."