Tag Archives: European art

New Images Available in Artstor

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Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Young Girl Reading, ca. 1770, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Young Girl Reading, ca. 1770, National Gallery of Art, Washington

This month, new images have been added to the following collections in the Artstor Digital Library:

Images from the National Gallery, London in ARTstor

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Diego Velázquez, The Toilet of Venus ("The Rokeby Venus"), 1647-1651, National Gallery, London

Diego Velázquez, The Toilet of Venus (“The Rokeby Venus”), 1647-1651, National Gallery, London

In one of its most significant additions in recent years, ARTstor has just released images of every painting in the collection of the National Gallery, London. With works ranging from the 13th to the early 20th century, the National Gallery has one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of European painting. Among the more than 2300 images from the National Gallery now available in ARTstor are such masterpieces as Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus (left), Gainsborough’s Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, and Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières.

You can read more about the National Gallery’s collection in ARTstor here.

Getty Open Content Program

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Greek, Victorious Youth, 300-100 BCE, Getty Villa, Malibu

Greek, Victorious Youth, 300-100 BCE, Getty Villa, Malibu (Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program)

This week the J. Paul Getty Museum joins a growing list of institutions that have decided to remove all restrictions to the use of images of art works in their collections. The Getty’s Open Content Program was announced on Monday, making available an initial group of nearly 4,700 high-resolution digital images of objects from its locations in Los Angeles and Malibu, California. More images, including ones from the Getty Research Institute and the Getty Conservation Institute, will eventually also be added.

You can browse all Open Content images here, or search for particular works on the Getty’s website. A download button will appear under the thumbnail of any images that are part of the Program. You will be asked to provide some very generic information about who you are and what you’ll be using the image for (more specific information is required if you plan to publish it). But aside from that, you are generally free to use the image for any purpose, as long as you simply credit the Getty as the source of the image, as in the caption at left. And all of these images are made available free of charge. You can read more about the Getty’s Open Content Program at the following links:

The J. Paul Getty Museum holds outstanding collections of Greek and Roman antiquities, Medieval manuscripts, European paintings and drawings, decorative arts, and photographs.

Note: Please do not confuse the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Open Content images with Getty Images, a for-profit stock photo company with no connection to the Museum or any other part of the Getty Trust.

New Image Sources: Rijksmuseum, Statens Museum for Kunst

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The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has just released Rijksstudio, its new online collection of 125,000 images. You have to register (for free) in order to do much with the site, but it does then allow you to download excellent images of works from the Rijksmuseum’s peerless collection of Dutch art. The site’s Terms and Conditions do permit personal use of its images (e.g., in a Powerpoint presentation) without requiring a fee or special permission, but for commercial or professional use (including publications), you still have to apply to the Rijksmuseum by filling out an online form.

Christen Købke, A View from Dosseringen near Sortedam Lake Looking Towards Nørrebro (detail), 1838

Christen Købke, A View from Dosseringen near Sortedam Lake Looking Towards Nørrebro (detail), 1838, Statens Museum for Kunst/National Gallery of Denmark, www.smk.dk

Not quite so new, but more generous in their terms of use, are the 158 collection highlights released earlier this year as part of a pilot project by the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark) in Copenhagen. These images are made available for download and unrestricted use under a Creative Commons license. That means all you have to do is credit the Museum and its website as your image source, and you are free to use these images for any purpose, commercial or not.

You can read more about Rijksstudio here and about the Statens Museum for Kunst’s pilot project here.

The Rembrandt Database

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Rembrandt, "Tronie" of a Man with a Feathered Beret, mid- to late 1630s, Mauritshuis, The Hague

Rembrandt, “Tronie” of a Man with a Feathered Beret, mid- to late 1630s, Mauritshuis, The Hague (http://www.rembrandtdatabase.org)

A new website on Rembrandt has just been released by the RKD (Netherlands Institute for Art History) in The Hague. Although this beta version includes only a few of his paintings so far, it looks like it will become an important online resource for scholars and students of the Dutch master.

 

Here’s the announcement:

As of today, The Rembrandt Database is online at www.rembrandtdatabase.org.

The Rembrandt Database is a freely accessible English-language website containing research material – texts, images and other research data – on paintings by Rembrandt or attributed to him, either now or in the past, from multiple institutions The Rembrandt Database aims to become the first port of call for those researching Rembrandt’s paintings. The Rembrandt Database focuses in particular on making available the body of visual and textual material that has arisen from the technical analysis and treatment of the paintings.

After a long period of behind-the-scenes work on cataloguing, digitizing and describing documentation, entering art-historical data and developing the database and the user interface, the website can now be seen by everyone for the first time. It is still in the beta stage, but will continue to be developed and will be expanded to include new functions. Much more content is already in preparation!

We want to thank The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its generous support, all of our partners for their collaboration and all participants in the user tests for their feedback! We look forward to continuing our collaboration with (more) partners and to improve and expand this website in the next months and years.

We hope that this will be a useful tool for research on Rembrandt and that you will enjoy working with it. We appreciate your feedback.

New Collections in ARTstor

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Four new image collections drawn from university museums are now available in ARTstor. Click on the links below for ARTstor’s description of each collection: