Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum has put over 700,000 digitised copies of its huge art collection online, and is making them available to reuse as public domain
It’s not a new feature, but it’s not that well known, and it was revamped last November. The images are being released under Creative Commons 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication – which is essentially copyright and royalty free.
City Walls in Winter, Willem Schellinks, c. 1650 – c. 1670
The Rijksstudio, as the online gallery is called was funded by the BankGiro Lottery, the Netherlands culture lottery that provides long-term support for institutions.
You can browse and search the Rijksstudio by genrea, dates or artists, and even if you’re just browsing for pleasure, the website photos are of a high resolution quality.
The collection contains more than 2,000 paintings from the Dutch Golden Age by notable painters such as Jacob van Ruisdael, Frans Hals, Johannes Vermeer, Jan Steen, Rembrandt, and Rembrandt’s pupils.
Each of the paintings, photographs, and drawings they’ve scanned has detailed information about the subject and the artist, along with some history such as when and where it was acquired.
The Rijksmuseum requires you to open an account on their website to download anything, but in exchange, the downloaded graphics are high resolution jpegs. You can even see brush strokes in some of the images I downloaded to test this.
Zoomed in to full size – Portrait of a Girl Dressed in Blue, Johannes Cornelisz. Verspronck, 1641
In addition, professionals have an option to request a free TIFF file with colour reference and tailored advice.
The Rijksstudio, in English, is here.
The British Museum also released nearly 2 million images from their archive online last year.
Straat in Londen, The London Stereoscopic Company, 1895 – 1900
Woah, that’s cool!
Brilliant!
Well done!
And thanks!