More than 100.000 works of art available for free download. Yes, as you are reading, fourteen museums in Paris offer anyone who is interested in them the option of being able to download them completely legally. So if you are an art lover, you are in luck.
Free, high-resolution artwork
One of the great achievements of the internet has been that, bring culture to millions of users no matter where you are and your social class. It is enough to have an interest and an internet connection to be able to learn about art or anything else that occurs to you.
Even so, there is not always content that you can download freely and legally. At least, not of some very specific topics. Art is one of them for obvious copyright reasons. But several Parisian museums do allow you to download a good number of his works of art, which have been and continue to be digitized.
Fourteen French museums They have created a website where you can consult a large number of works of art available in their museums and which they themselves have commissioned to digitize. This not only gives the option of consulting them online, it is also a good way to ensure that they will continue to exist even in the worst case (destruction or irreparable deterioration of the same).
Through a search system that allows you to filter the works by author, date, material used for its elaboration, including the range of colors used, themes or periods, this website gives the option of downloading those that are already cataloged as Creative Commons. Thus, when you download it you can print them if you want and are interested in order to create your own copy.
Si you access the web You will see that there are many other works, but as we said, only those with a CC license can be downloaded. Among them there are all kinds of material, although personally I find those that belong to the category of photographs very attractive. You have to search, but you can find very old images of Paris in the 1800s.
Art within everyone's reach
This Paris initiative is not the first nor the only. The MET has already created a similar collection that you can see from here and that also allows access and download of a large catalog of works that are already owned by everyone. You simply have to search through their collections and if they indicate that they are in the public domain, you can download it.
As we say, there are many more sites from which you can download works of art and other related content. If you want to dive among any of these sites, here is a list and approximate number of works available.
- Google Art Project (250.000)
- LA County Museum (20.000)
- New York Public Library-Historic Maps (20.000)
- Norway National Museum (30.000)
- SFMoMA Rauschenberg Collection
- Stanford University's Cantor Art Center (45.000)
- Stanford University's French Revolution Collection (14.000)
- British Library (100.000)
- The British Museum (4.200)
- The Getty (100.000)
- The Guggenheim (1.600)
- The Met (400.000)
- The Morgan Library Rembrandt Sketches (300)
- The Museum of Modern Art/MoMA (65.000)
- The Museum of New Zealand (30.000)
- The National Gallery (35.000)
- The New York Public Library: Photos, Maps, Letters (180.000)
- The rijksmuseum (210.000)
- The Smithsonian (40.000)
- The Tate (70.000)
- The whitney (21.000)
- The van gogh museum (3.500)
- Yale Center for British Art
- Yale's Great Depression Photo Collection (170.000)
Now only with the first you have to entertain yourself for a while searching. Although it will depend on your interests to go to one or the other before. Still, it's a matter of research.