Images from the National Gallery, London in ARTstor

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.

New Online Image Sources

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

BBC’s Your Paintings

John Constable, The Cornfield, 1826

John Constable, The Cornfield, 1826 (Photo © The National Gallery, London)

The BBC has teamed up with the Public Catalogue Foundation to launch Your Paintings, a digital library of paintings owned by national museums in Britain. Over the next two years, they expect to build a collection of 200,000 paintings (63,000 are available so far) from 3000 British collections. This includes major London museums like the National Gallery, Tate, and V&A, but the majority are smaller regional and municipal institutions.

At 944 pixels on the long dimension, the digital images on this site are more or less the right size for use in a Powerpoint presentation (vertical images are fine, but horizontal images are a little smaller than one would like).

You can read a BBC article about the Your Paintings project here.

For easy access anytime, I have placed a link to the BBC’s Your Paintings website on the VRC’s Online Resources page.