The Rembrandt Database

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Derek Churchill

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.

Images from the National Portrait Gallery, London

Posted on August 21, 2012 by Derek Churchill

Attributed to John Taylor, William Shakespeare, ca. 1610, National Portrait Gallery, London

Attributed to John Taylor, William Shakespeare, ca. 1610, (Photo © National Portrait Gallery, London)

The National Portrait Gallery in London joins the growing list of museums making images of the works in their collections available for academic use without charge. But please note that these terms–at least for the largest images they provide–are more restrictive than those in some recent releases (such as the LACMA Image Library or NGA Images). While there is no fee for academic or non-commercial use of their images, you must still apply to the Gallery for permission to use them. Commercial use of their images still requires both a fee and permission.

You can read the full press release below:

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY PROVIDES FREE IMAGE DOWNLOADS FOR ACADEMIC AND NON-COMMERCIAL USE

The National Portrait Gallery now provides free downloads of a large range of images from its Collection for academic and non-commercial projects through a new web-site facility. Over 53,000 low-resolution images will now be available free of charge to non-commercial users through a standard ‘Creative Commons’ licence and over 87,000 high-resolution images will also be available free of charge for academic use through the Gallery’s own licences.

Since 1997 over 100,000 portraits from the Gallery’s Collection, including paintings, photographs, drawings, prints and sculptures have been digitised. The Gallery was among the first UK institutions to publish images online in a searchable database, and licensing of these images has raised some £5.5 million which has been re-invested in the Gallery’s work. Digitisation of the Collection is part of realising the Gallery’s mission ‘to promote through the medium of portraits the appreciation and understanding of the men and women who have made and are making British history and culture, and … to promote the appreciation and understanding of portraiture in all media’.

The new licensing process has been automated through the Gallery’s website but each transaction is individually agreed or denied by Gallery staff, to prevent potential abuse of the system and preserve the important revenue achieved from commercial image licensing. In order to help cover the cost and to highlight the value for beneficiaries of this new facility, users are invited to donate in support of the Gallery’s work. Not all of the portraits in the Collections have yet been scanned, and some are subject to copyright restrictions, so charges and restrictions will continue to apply to accessing some images, as well as to the commercial use of all images. Funds raised by image licensing activity will continue to contribute towards further digitisation.

National Portrait Gallery, St Martin’s Place, WC2H 0HE opening hours: Saturday-Wednesday: 10am – 6pm (Gallery closure commences at 5.50pm) Late Opening: Thursday, Fridays:10am – 9pm (Gallery closure commences at 8.50pm) Recorded information: 020 7312 2463 General information: 020 7306 0055 Website: www.npg.org.uk

The First Photo on the Web

Posted on July 18, 2012 by Derek Churchill

WWW logo Did you know that today is the 20th anniversary of the first photographic image ever uploaded to the World Wide Web? It happened at the CERN lab near Geneva, Switzerland, where Tim Berners-Lee created the Web in the early 1990s. And wow, what an image! I like to think that our Photoshop abilities have come a long way since 1992.

Anyway, there’s an interesting story here about that momentous day in technological history.

New Online Image Sources

Posted on June 26, 2012 by Derek Churchill

Several interesting and potentially useful online image collections have launched recently, including:

War Art in the National Archives (UK): World War II-era art and propaganda from Britain, now available in Wikimedia Commons.
Farm Security Administration Photograph Collection: Rare FSA photographs from the 1930s and 1940s, recently rediscovered in the New York Public Library.
Machiel Kiel Photographic Archive: The Dutch scholar’s photos of Islamic and Christian architectural monuments in the former Ottoman Empire (modern-day Turkey and the Balkans).

Guggenheim Foundation in ARTstor

Posted on May 23, 2012 by Derek Churchill

Over 750 images from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation are now available in ARTstor. The collection will eventually include about 7,000 images, with works of art at the Foundation’s five museums (including the flagship museum in New York and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice), installation views of Guggenheim exhibitions, and architectural views of its world-famous museum buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright in Manhattan and by Frank Gehry in Bilbao, Spain. The strength of the Guggenheim’s collections is in modern art, so copyright restrictions prevent some works from being included in this release (perhaps most notably those of Picasso).

You can read ARTstor’s announcement here.

Opening of the New Barnes Foundation

Posted on May 21, 2012 by Derek Churchill

This weekend the Barnes Foundation reopened in its new building on Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia. The collection has been closed for nearly a year in order to move to Center City from its longtime home in suburban Merion, Pennsylvania (I posted a story on its closure last summer here).

Controversy is no stranger to the Barnes, never more so than in the years leading up to this relocation. Court battles continue over whether the move was even legal. For its part, the new museum building tries to recreate the experience of visiting the collection in its old home, although not everyone has been impressed with the result.

The Barnes Foundation will be open for 56 consecutive hours during the upcoming Memorial Day weekend. For more information on this and other events surrounding the opening, click here.

Walters Art Museum in Wikimedia

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Derek Churchill

Édouard Manet, At the Café, ca. 1879, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Édouard Manet, At the Café, ca. 1879 (photo: Walters Art Museum)

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore has made more than 19,000 images of works in its collection, along with all of their associated information, freely available to the public through Wikimedia Commons.

Wikimedia Commons, part of the Wikimedia Foundation (which also oversees Wikipedia), is an online repository of free-access images and other media files. All such images donated to Wikimedia by an institution like the Walters are considered to be in the public domain, and are intended for free and unrestricted use for any purpose.

Since last year, the Walters’ newly redesigned website has also allowed visitors to download high-resolution images of its works.

Apply for our 2012 Summer Internship

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Derek Churchill

The Visual Resources Collection is pleased to announce its 2012 Summer Internship in Visual Resources Management.

Undergraduate interns have to be enrolled and in residence in Newark during the summer, and will devote about 10 hours a week to their projects from the beginning of June to the end of August. Your exact schedule is flexible. There is no pay for the internship, but you will receive 3 credits at the completion of your project. You do not have to be an Art History major to apply.

Applying is easy: all you need to send are a cover letter and résumé. Click here to learn more about the internship and how to apply for it. And please feel free to contact me at visualresources@udel.edu if you would like to discuss possibilities for the internship in person.

All applications must be received by Monday, April 30, 2012.

NGA Images

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Derek Churchill

Johannes Vermeer, Girl with the Red Hat, Dutch, 1632 - 1675, c. 1665/1666, oil on panel, Andrew W. Mellon Collection

Johannes Vermeer, Girl with the Red Hat, ca. 1665-1666 (photo: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington)

BIG NEWS! The National Gallery of Art in Washington has just launched the NGA Images website. There you can download any of their images of works in the public domain (which means almost all of their pre-1900 art). You can read the full press release here.

The images that you can download are 1200 pixels on their long dimension, which is perfect for use in Powerpoint or OIV (see an example here). In addition, if you register on the site, you also get access to 2000-pixel and 3000-pixel images, which are suitable for scholarly publications. And it’s all free of charge!

But what makes this site truly remarkable is that you’re also free to use any of the images you download for any purpose you want, without even having to seek the museum’s permission. It’s all part of the National Gallery of Art’s Open Access policy. This follows the recent news that Yale University and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art would similarly open their image collections for unrestricted public use. The stature of the National Gallery of Art’s collection makes this an even bigger announcement . . . and another important milestone on the road towards greater public access to online image collections.

New Website for the Ghent Altarpiece

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Derek Churchill

Detail of the Ghent Altarpiece (http://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be)

Last summer I announced a preview for a new website on Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Polyptych of the Mystic Lamb, commonly called the Ghent Altarpiece. The completed site, called “Closer to Van Eyck: Rediscovering the Ghent Altarpiece,” is now online. Created by the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage in Brussels, Belgium, and funded by a grant from the Getty Foundation, this site lets you explore this Early Netherlandish masterpiece up close. In addition to high-resolution macrophotography that allows you to zoom in on minute details, there are also x-rays and infrared images that allow you to look beneath the surface of the paint. The Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage has been one of the pioneers in such technical examinations of works of art since the 1950s.

You can visit the site here, and read the Getty’s press release here.

VRC@UD

The news blog of the Visual Resources Center at the University of Delaware