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Over 700k paintings from the Rijksmuseum online copyright free

434 points by edward 6y ago

Naac 6y ago
The list of images can be found here: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio?ii=0&p=0&from=2021-01-21T17%3A59%3A52.4101331Z https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio?ii=0&p=0&from=2021... Apparently the images cannot be downloaded off the website without an account. That's disappointing.
- yorwba 6y ago
  However, the license means that someone can reupload the images to another platform, like the Internet Archive. I checked, and while there doesn't seem to be a collection for the Rijksmuseum, a certain "NL_Archivist" has been busy uploading images from Het Utrechts Archief the past few days: https://archive.org/details/@nl_archivist https://archive.org/details/@nl_archivist I wouldn't be surprised if they continued with the Rijksmuseum collection afterwards.
helipad 6y ago
I've seen this kind of thing from other museums too. Can anyone recommend a way of a layperson getting them printed in decent quality, say on canvas, for hanging in the home? Is there a good online service that does this where I can upload one of these hi-res images? The ones I've seen are mostly glossy photo paper for family portraits, rather than the use case of replicating oil paintings.
- wussboy 6y ago
  I’d be very interested in this too. The museum should set up a service and take a share of the profits
  - eythian 6y ago
    They did, you can do this from the page viewing the artwork itself, put onto a poster, canvas, aluminium, or a gallery print.
- blacksmith_tb 6y ago
  The Rijksmuseum will let you order prints on canvas for what seems like a reasonable price to me: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio/works-of-art/still-lifes/objects#/SK-A-268,1 https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio/works-of-art/still... If you hover the 'Scissors' icon in the lower right while viewing a work of art, you can choose 'Order' and then you have some choices of crop, orientation, poster or canvas etc.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    Unfortunately you need an account to see pricing. It is cool that they eventually will be able to serve US customers (currently EU only).
    - SahAssar 6y ago
      I see prices without needing an account.
- jandrese 6y ago
  I've used Shutterfly to order canvas prints. It's still ink and not oil paints, but it is on canvas. The result isn't glossy like a photo print, but it also doesn't show brushstrokes like a real oil painting, although I guess you would still see some if you sent a picture of an oil painting. They love sending out coupons that make it reasonably affordable. The canvas comes mounted on an internal wooden frame. You'll probably get copyright questions if you submit an professional artwork, but if you can show it is in the public domain they might do it. I've never tried.
StreamBright 6y ago
Is this museum the one with the basement where there is an exhibition with giant painting and low lights? I got lost there once. It was amazing.
- mcguire 6y ago
  It's the museum with The Night Watch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Watch) which is a giant painting, but the two times I've been there it has been pretty well lit. And not in the basement. But yeah, it's an amazing museum.
  - StreamBright 6y ago
    Thanks, I think I have mixed it up with the Van Gogh Museum. I should check out the Night Watch next time.
  - sneeuwpopsneeuw 6y ago
    My grandma who lives near Amsterdam always told me most people who live in Amsterdam know the museum more from the biking lane that goes through it then the art that is inside it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjgyL6aUOcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjgyL6aUOcc this is a video of the Rijksmuseum and the bike line through it.
randmeerkat 6y ago
I wish there was a quality color e-ink offering, that was just a display that displayed art. I’m thinking of something like Netgear’s Meural but with a higher quality display. Sure I could hack it together myself with an raspberry pi or something, but it would be great to have something that “just worked” that I could put in different rooms around the home.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  Agreed. In previous epaper discussions here on HN, people complained that epaper doesn't have enough contrast ratio to make sense as a market. But lower contrast ratios are perfect for things that should not stand out any more than an actual physical paper or canvas would. Ambient artwork and ambient displays are perfect applications for epaper/e-ink.
adembudak 6y ago
> The images are being released under Creative Commons 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication – which is essentially copyright and royalty free. So can I use them on my game?
- mkl 6y ago
  You can use them on anything. That's the point of the license.
gusbremm 6y ago
I lived 2 years in amsterdam and I cant spell Rijksmuseum properly
laGrenouille 6y ago
There is also an API available that allows bulk access to the collection's metadata and images [0]. [0] https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/object-metadata/harvest/ https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/object-metadata/harvest/
- tmalsburg2 6y ago
  Can someone please write an Emacs command that shows me a random painting from this data set?
er4hn 6y ago
It's always fantastic to see these get released into the public domain. I am not someone who is trained to appreciate art, but I find it relaxing to take a break from coding to look at landscape paintings from time to time. I should also plug Google's Arts & Culture Chrome extension. It can show you a new piece of artwork on the "new tab" splash page, rotating either every 24 hours or every tab. It's been a great way for me to get exposed to artwork and artists that I may not have found otherwise. My only complaint is that the set of works is somewhat small and after a year of use (with 24 hour rotations) you will start to notice repeats.
amatecha 6y ago
Link to the browseable collection: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio
- notJim 6y ago
  Is it just me, or is this site not retina/high DPI-aware? All the images look kind of blurry to me. Edit: here's a screenshot https://i.imgur.com/xTmYLgv.jpg https://i.imgur.com/xTmYLgv.jpg. The left-hand side is the online viewer, while the right is the downloaded image viewed in the mac preview app. The download is obviously much higher quality. It kind of bugs me that they can't get this right.
  - amatecha 6y ago
    Yeah, I think the default view on the page is of average quality. Not sure why, but it seems to be a completely intentional choice. I think to download high-dpi they want you to register an account. /shrug
  - disillusion 6y ago
    If you're talking about thumbnails, I think they made the right choice. Just the top part of the homepage already contains 5MB of image assets. Scrolling down a few times quickly ups that to 15MB and more. I'd rather have reasonably sized and optimized images throughout the site - with high resolutions ones as downloads - and a very speedy browsing experience, then the other way around. However, I would expect the online tiled image viewer to show the full, high quality image - at least, when zoomed in.
safog 6y ago
Are these downloadable? Just clicking through didn't seem to have any download links available. For context, I've been trying to learn color theory and put it into practice in photography. One of the things you could do to train yourself is to look at how the great artists of the past used color - of course if you have a great eye, maybe this comes naturally to you, but for me, I'd have to upload it to some site like color.adobe.com and have it extract the color scheme manually. Ever since I started, I've been having so much trouble downloading photographs of the art work that I just started taking screenshots and using those instead. Kind of sad that what is our collective cultural history cannot be widely used because the photographer who took a photo of the art work didn't chose to make their high-res photo widely available.
- xingyzt 6y ago
  On clicking through (ex. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/RP-P-OB-697 https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/RP-P-OB-697), there's a download button, but it requires you to register an account.
- muhammadusman 6y ago
  yeah, there's a scissor icon when viewing an artwork and clicking that will give you an option to download (you'll need an account created first). Also, give it like a good 3 seconds after you click it, I noticed it took a while to start the download :/
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  You can almost always find the file in browser's developer tools (the network tab). Screenshots are terrible for this purpose because you end up with either huge PNGs of JPEGs, or JPEGs with an extra layer of compression artefacts.
  - safog 6y ago
    Oh the engage in a lot of trickery including chopping the image up into bits and loading it as part of a thousand different <img> tags. More pain than it's worth.
andrewla 6y ago
I'm surprised that nobody has implemented a google-maps style overlay for things like this. I would love to see the whole collection on a 2d grid that I can zoom in to see the images themselves -- maybe some organization tools to reposition the images on virtual grid for different aspects (by time, by artist, by colors) but the interface seems like such a natural fit, with dragging and zooming, rather than the page navigation they have here.
clarkmoody 6y ago
> 700k paintings This figure immediately reminded me of a very interesting EconTalk episode[0] on the management of art museums. The premises from the discussion (as I recall): - Art museums have more than 10x the number of pieces in their archives as they do on display. Some of this art will never be seen by the pubic. - When art galleries charge admission, patrons feel the need to "get their money's worth" so they rush to see as much of the exhibits as possible, without taking time to thoroughly enjoy anything. - The purpose of art is to be enjoyed. The above two points make this goal much harder. The conclusions: - Museums should be free admission and funded by selling pieces from the archive (really interesting discussion on how this is taboo for curators) The second-order effects: - Patrons can sit and enjoy a very small section of the museum instead of rushing through, since they can simply come back for more later - More people get to see fine art - Second- and third-tier museums start to gain access to better art, since they can simply buy it instead of waiting for estate donations (which go to larger museums) I think it's worth a listen. [0]: https://www.econtalk.org/michael-ohare-on-art-museums/ https://www.econtalk.org/michael-ohare-on-art-museums/
- trianglem 6y ago
  But how does the first tier museum acquire stuff for its archives and where does the money for that come from?
  - IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
    To a certain degree, it's not impossible that museums are either competent enough to recognise talented artists early, or so powerful that their buying itself is the signal that makes an artist. Either way, it's at least theoretically possible that they could finance themselves by, essentially, savvy investment in artworks.
  - clarkmoody 6y ago
    Often it's a donation from an estate. I believe they discuss this in the podcast episode (though it has been years since I listened to it).
  - dmitriid 6y ago
DonHopkins 6y ago
FWIW, the Netherlands is now under curfew: "Further, one person will be allowed to walk their dog on a leash at a time. However, Rutte asked that people not try to skirt the rules by arranging for a "loaner dog" if Parliament approves the curfew. " "If you're going to pass around your dog among the whole family so everyone can go out late into the night, that's just really stupid." https://nltimes.nl/2021/01/20/rutte-curfew-undesirable-needed-netherlands-ban-flights-uk https://nltimes.nl/2021/01/20/rutte-curfew-undesirable-neede...
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  What is the danger of a single person walking by themselves, sans dog, outside at night? It seems like half the government reactions to lock down is a good idea based on the understanding of virus transmission, and the other half is just security theater. Does this hurt the government's own efforts? Any reasonable person will understand that they aren't hurting anyone by walking outside near no one. Or two people from the same household walking their dog at night near no one. This may make people generally less likely to follow all the rules, because they see that half the rules are just made up nonsense.
  - IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
    I have similar misgivings about this policy. One possibly reasoning that I've seen, and that isn't entirely implausible, is that there is still significant transmission going on in private gatherings, which tend to happen in the evenings. These curfews would then be attempts to curb such behaviour.
  - bluesign 6y ago
    Enforcement. You need to be able to set rules, you can enforce easily. If you allow single person walking, what will you do if you see 2 people close to each other. People will always try to avoid the rules, so in this kind of stuff enforcement is really hard. Better to have hard but short lived restrictions.
  - gpvos 6y ago
    The idea of a curfew is that there are as few possible people outside, so there is some chance that the police has the capacity to check on those who are there. Yes, it's very unpleasant, but may be necessary in some cases.
kaesve 6y ago
I've actually been building a [jigsaw puzzle app](https://kaesve.nl/projects/masterpieces https://kaesve.nl/projects/masterpieces) because wanted to do something with their online collection. They not only put paintings and other artworks online for free, but also their meta data, through an api or bulk download (see https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/ https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/).
- slig 6y ago
  Just FIY, the puzzle doesn't load here. I tried disabling uBlock, but still it looks like some .JS is missing.
mcguire 6y ago
Here's an IP question: Under what legal arguments can the Rijksmuseum do this? Or, alternatively, how can those museums that do so prevent copies of their works? Copyright? Wouldn't that have expired long ago? Edit: I understand the reasoning behind preventing flash photography of the paintings---it damages them. But that's not really what I'm asking about.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  Many works in museums are still under copyright. Art isn't equivalent with "ancient". For photographs of out-of-copyright works, the question if the photo is itself a creative work protected by copyright is answered differently depending on jurisdiction. In the US and, by extension, for Wikimedia Commons, it generally isn't. In some European countries, it is. I would generally subscribe to the idea that such photos are not protected. But it isn't quite as obvious as one might think. Taking high-quality photos of these artworks does involve a lot of work and, on occasion, maybe even creativity. What if I edit the photo afterwards to bring out the details? What if I chose special lighting conditions that interact with the pigments of the specific materials used?
julienchastang 6y ago
The City Walls painting on the front page is captivating (e.g., what are the kids doing with the sled, playing, chores?). I spent a while admiring it. But I am having trouble finding any information on it.
frereubu 6y ago
People in the UK should know that the Tate Gallery, being a publicly-funded museum, are required to make any items in their collection available for you to see on request. When studying sculpture I was really interested in a 1972 piece by Marcel Broothaers called Tractatus Logico-Catalogicus and noticed that the Tate had it in their collection. I emailed them and set up a time to visit a warehouse in SE London, and they brought it out for me to look at it. It's so much better than seeing things in a packed gallery, let alone a packed Tate, and you get a real sense of what the work is like in the flesh, stripped of all the spectacle and didactic trash that generally surrounds works in somewhere like the Tate.
- kingosticks 6y ago
  I understand that to be true if you are studying/researching the item but is that true for any old member of the public?
  - jl6 6y ago
    I don’t know about museums but I do know that many public bodies in the UK will take enquiries from any member of the public, and will not automatically turn down requests - although such requests may go to the bottom of the priority queue if there are other requests of greater public interest.
  - frereubu 6y ago
    Yes, it can be personal study. You don't need to be affiliated with an institution. Perhaps if you're asking to look at a Monet they might want a bit more information (Marcel Broodthaers isn't exactly a household name!), but if your hobby is painting and you want to study the brushstrokes I don't think they'd be able to turn you down - the whole point of these institutions is that they're paid for by the state, and by extension the taxes of its citizens.
    - kingosticks 6y ago
      Yeh that makes sense I guess. Conversely, a family of 4 turning up to get a private viewing doesn't seem in the spirit, even if it's their home-schooling art class. I was curious with respect to places like the Tate that are really only partly state funded (30%) so I'd consider it reasonable for them to approve the most "worthy" 30% of requests.
irrational 6y ago
Is there a list somewhere of all the museums that have their artwork online?
fjfaase 6y ago
Not all 700k works of art have a copyright free image because there are also modern works that are still copyrighted.
Erwin 6y ago
I'd also like to recommend the rest of Ian's site, as it has lots of periodic, often geeky, information about London, especially Underground. Like his weekly review of alleys: https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/category/alleys/ https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/category/alleys/
dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
Does anyone know of an "awesome" list of such resources? I've seen dozens of such announcements, but I never really have the time to explore and wish they were collected somewhere so that I could look later.
WalterBright 6y ago
I enjoy cycling through art as wallpaper on my monitor. There are a couple wallpaper apps for the Roku of great pictures, but they are just a few dozen images which just get really old after a while and I go back to the clock screensaver. The same with the Comcast cable box. A screensaver with 10,000 pictures of great art, randomly selected and displayed, would be wonderful.
jhallenworld 6y ago
Interesting way to decorate your house: print the free art on canvas and frame it to decorate your house.. https://www.arttoframe.com/canvas_wraps/ https://www.arttoframe.com/canvas_wraps/ Considering that this option is available, it's odd that people buy, to pick a divisive example, Thomas Kinkade prints: https://thomaskinkade.com/shop/ https://thomaskinkade.com/shop/
SpyKiIIer 6y ago
Is there anyway to just download the highest quality versions of all the art? I would love to just get a dump of all the art and put it on a photo display on my wall...
arunc 6y ago
I may not have the eyes of a connoisseur, but I don't find anything exciting about these paintings when compared to the real structures like these [1] constructed 1000 years ago. [1] https://twitter.com/truejainology/status/1352458920011284484/photo/2 https://twitter.com/truejainology/status/1352458920011284484...
- mssundaram 6y ago
  I agree! You might be interested to hear about the Iraivan temple of Kaua'i which is under construction now
Jach 6y ago
Some years ago they also released a bunch of images, a kind person made the effort to put them into a torrent: http://matthewlincoln.net/2015/10/19/the-rijksmuseum-as-bittorrent.html http://matthewlincoln.net/2015/10/19/the-rijksmuseum-as-bitt... It'd be nice if museums could do that work themselves, when they can do the work to make an API. No I won't make an account.
flas9sd 6y ago
having checked some images - they offer 4500x4500 variants at ~4.5MB .. so roughly 3TB of data. Maybe artvee.com will import them into their collection?
prionassembly 6y ago
I've used the embeddings (obtained by lopping off the final densely connected layers leading up to a classifier) from Alexnet and Imagenet, as distributed by Pytorch to try and cluster samples of art with HDBSCAN and didn't get great results. The graph generated by Mapper also doesn't make much sense. Maybe there's a whole literature on this subject, but I'm way too thinly spread among interests and would love to know if there's something that's already done with standard parts to address this problem.
- lmcinnes 6y ago
  Density based clustering with high dimensional data will tend to struggle. This is because, in high enough dimensions, you need a lot of samples to see any density. Also distances start to look very similar (from the curse of dimensionality). To get any traction on such things you need some form of dimension reduction. For something like this non-linear techniques are going to be better. If you want a pipeline of standard parts then something like: Pretrained-CNN --> UMAP --> HDBSCAN can turn out relatively reasonable results, especially if the UMAP you use for the clustering is to more than 2 or 3 dimensions (often 5 to 20 is good, depending on the data). You can, of course, still use a 2D UMAP to visualize the results. If you want such a pipeline packaged up then consider the PixPlot package, designed for exactly this use case, from the Yale Digital Humanities Lab: https://github.com/YaleDHLab/pix-plot https://github.com/YaleDHLab/pix-plot * Disclaimer: I am highly biased, as an author of both HDBSCAN and UMAP implementations.
ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago
Aren't such archives (~3TB as mentioned here) a perfect fit for IPFS? Are there any initiatives to put this and similar content there (or some other decentralized networks) and made it easily available to the public?

434 points by edward 6y ago

Naac 6y ago

The list of images can be found here: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio?ii=0&p=0&from=2021-01-21T17%3A59%3A52.4101331Z https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio?ii=0&p=0&from=2021... Apparently the images cannot be downloaded off the website without an account. That's disappointing.

yorwba 6y ago
However, the license means that someone can reupload the images to another platform, like the Internet Archive. I checked, and while there doesn't seem to be a collection for the Rijksmuseum, a certain "NL_Archivist" has been busy uploading images from Het Utrechts Archief the past few days: https://archive.org/details/@nl_archivist https://archive.org/details/@nl_archivist I wouldn't be surprised if they continued with the Rijksmuseum collection afterwards.

helipad 6y ago

I've seen this kind of thing from other museums too. Can anyone recommend a way of a layperson getting them printed in decent quality, say on canvas, for hanging in the home? Is there a good online service that does this where I can upload one of these hi-res images? The ones I've seen are mostly glossy photo paper for family portraits, rather than the use case of replicating oil paintings.

wussboy 6y ago
I’d be very interested in this too. The museum should set up a service and take a share of the profits
- eythian 6y ago
  They did, you can do this from the page viewing the artwork itself, put onto a poster, canvas, aluminium, or a gallery print.
blacksmith_tb 6y ago
The Rijksmuseum will let you order prints on canvas for what seems like a reasonable price to me: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio/works-of-art/still-lifes/objects#/SK-A-268,1 https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio/works-of-art/still... If you hover the 'Scissors' icon in the lower right while viewing a work of art, you can choose 'Order' and then you have some choices of crop, orientation, poster or canvas etc.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  Unfortunately you need an account to see pricing. It is cool that they eventually will be able to serve US customers (currently EU only).
  - SahAssar 6y ago
    I see prices without needing an account.
jandrese 6y ago
I've used Shutterfly to order canvas prints. It's still ink and not oil paints, but it is on canvas. The result isn't glossy like a photo print, but it also doesn't show brushstrokes like a real oil painting, although I guess you would still see some if you sent a picture of an oil painting. They love sending out coupons that make it reasonably affordable. The canvas comes mounted on an internal wooden frame. You'll probably get copyright questions if you submit an professional artwork, but if you can show it is in the public domain they might do it. I've never tried.

StreamBright 6y ago

Is this museum the one with the basement where there is an exhibition with giant painting and low lights? I got lost there once. It was amazing.

mcguire 6y ago
It's the museum with The Night Watch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Watch) which is a giant painting, but the two times I've been there it has been pretty well lit. And not in the basement. But yeah, it's an amazing museum.
- StreamBright 6y ago
  Thanks, I think I have mixed it up with the Van Gogh Museum. I should check out the Night Watch next time.
- sneeuwpopsneeuw 6y ago
  My grandma who lives near Amsterdam always told me most people who live in Amsterdam know the museum more from the biking lane that goes through it then the art that is inside it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjgyL6aUOcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjgyL6aUOcc this is a video of the Rijksmuseum and the bike line through it.

randmeerkat 6y ago

I wish there was a quality color e-ink offering, that was just a display that displayed art. I’m thinking of something like Netgear’s Meural but with a higher quality display. Sure I could hack it together myself with an raspberry pi or something, but it would be great to have something that “just worked” that I could put in different rooms around the home.

nitrogen 6y ago
Agreed. In previous epaper discussions here on HN, people complained that epaper doesn't have enough contrast ratio to make sense as a market. But lower contrast ratios are perfect for things that should not stand out any more than an actual physical paper or canvas would. Ambient artwork and ambient displays are perfect applications for epaper/e-ink.

adembudak 6y ago

> The images are being released under Creative Commons 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication – which is essentially copyright and royalty free. So can I use them on my game?

mkl 6y ago
You can use them on anything. That's the point of the license.

gusbremm 6y ago

I lived 2 years in amsterdam and I cant spell Rijksmuseum properly

laGrenouille 6y ago

There is also an API available that allows bulk access to the collection's metadata and images [0]. [0] https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/object-metadata/harvest/ https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/object-metadata/harvest/

tmalsburg2 6y ago
Can someone please write an Emacs command that shows me a random painting from this data set?

er4hn 6y ago

It's always fantastic to see these get released into the public domain. I am not someone who is trained to appreciate art, but I find it relaxing to take a break from coding to look at landscape paintings from time to time. I should also plug Google's Arts & Culture Chrome extension. It can show you a new piece of artwork on the "new tab" splash page, rotating either every 24 hours or every tab. It's been a great way for me to get exposed to artwork and artists that I may not have found otherwise. My only complaint is that the set of works is somewhat small and after a year of use (with 24 hour rotations) you will start to notice repeats.

amatecha 6y ago

Link to the browseable collection: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio

notJim 6y ago
Is it just me, or is this site not retina/high DPI-aware? All the images look kind of blurry to me. Edit: here's a screenshot https://i.imgur.com/xTmYLgv.jpg https://i.imgur.com/xTmYLgv.jpg. The left-hand side is the online viewer, while the right is the downloaded image viewed in the mac preview app. The download is obviously much higher quality. It kind of bugs me that they can't get this right.
- amatecha 6y ago
  Yeah, I think the default view on the page is of average quality. Not sure why, but it seems to be a completely intentional choice. I think to download high-dpi they want you to register an account. /shrug
- disillusion 6y ago
  If you're talking about thumbnails, I think they made the right choice. Just the top part of the homepage already contains 5MB of image assets. Scrolling down a few times quickly ups that to 15MB and more. I'd rather have reasonably sized and optimized images throughout the site - with high resolutions ones as downloads - and a very speedy browsing experience, then the other way around. However, I would expect the online tiled image viewer to show the full, high quality image - at least, when zoomed in.

safog 6y ago

Are these downloadable? Just clicking through didn't seem to have any download links available. For context, I've been trying to learn color theory and put it into practice in photography. One of the things you could do to train yourself is to look at how the great artists of the past used color - of course if you have a great eye, maybe this comes naturally to you, but for me, I'd have to upload it to some site like color.adobe.com and have it extract the color scheme manually. Ever since I started, I've been having so much trouble downloading photographs of the art work that I just started taking screenshots and using those instead. Kind of sad that what is our collective cultural history cannot be widely used because the photographer who took a photo of the art work didn't chose to make their high-res photo widely available.

xingyzt 6y ago
On clicking through (ex. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/RP-P-OB-697 https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/RP-P-OB-697), there's a download button, but it requires you to register an account.
muhammadusman 6y ago
yeah, there's a scissor icon when viewing an artwork and clicking that will give you an option to download (you'll need an account created first). Also, give it like a good 3 seconds after you click it, I noticed it took a while to start the download :/
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
You can almost always find the file in browser's developer tools (the network tab). Screenshots are terrible for this purpose because you end up with either huge PNGs of JPEGs, or JPEGs with an extra layer of compression artefacts.
- safog 6y ago
  Oh the engage in a lot of trickery including chopping the image up into bits and loading it as part of a thousand different <img> tags. More pain than it's worth.

andrewla 6y ago

I'm surprised that nobody has implemented a google-maps style overlay for things like this. I would love to see the whole collection on a 2d grid that I can zoom in to see the images themselves -- maybe some organization tools to reposition the images on virtual grid for different aspects (by time, by artist, by colors) but the interface seems like such a natural fit, with dragging and zooming, rather than the page navigation they have here.

clarkmoody 6y ago

> 700k paintings This figure immediately reminded me of a very interesting EconTalk episode[0] on the management of art museums. The premises from the discussion (as I recall): - Art museums have more than 10x the number of pieces in their archives as they do on display. Some of this art will never be seen by the pubic. - When art galleries charge admission, patrons feel the need to "get their money's worth" so they rush to see as much of the exhibits as possible, without taking time to thoroughly enjoy anything. - The purpose of art is to be enjoyed. The above two points make this goal much harder. The conclusions: - Museums should be free admission and funded by selling pieces from the archive (really interesting discussion on how this is taboo for curators) The second-order effects: - Patrons can sit and enjoy a very small section of the museum instead of rushing through, since they can simply come back for more later - More people get to see fine art - Second- and third-tier museums start to gain access to better art, since they can simply buy it instead of waiting for estate donations (which go to larger museums) I think it's worth a listen. [0]: https://www.econtalk.org/michael-ohare-on-art-museums/ https://www.econtalk.org/michael-ohare-on-art-museums/

trianglem 6y ago
But how does the first tier museum acquire stuff for its archives and where does the money for that come from?
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  To a certain degree, it's not impossible that museums are either competent enough to recognise talented artists early, or so powerful that their buying itself is the signal that makes an artist. Either way, it's at least theoretically possible that they could finance themselves by, essentially, savvy investment in artworks.
- clarkmoody 6y ago
  Often it's a donation from an estate. I believe they discuss this in the podcast episode (though it has been years since I listened to it).
- dmitriid 6y ago

DonHopkins 6y ago

FWIW, the Netherlands is now under curfew: "Further, one person will be allowed to walk their dog on a leash at a time. However, Rutte asked that people not try to skirt the rules by arranging for a "loaner dog" if Parliament approves the curfew. " "If you're going to pass around your dog among the whole family so everyone can go out late into the night, that's just really stupid." https://nltimes.nl/2021/01/20/rutte-curfew-undesirable-needed-netherlands-ban-flights-uk https://nltimes.nl/2021/01/20/rutte-curfew-undesirable-neede...

oh_sigh 6y ago
What is the danger of a single person walking by themselves, sans dog, outside at night? It seems like half the government reactions to lock down is a good idea based on the understanding of virus transmission, and the other half is just security theater. Does this hurt the government's own efforts? Any reasonable person will understand that they aren't hurting anyone by walking outside near no one. Or two people from the same household walking their dog at night near no one. This may make people generally less likely to follow all the rules, because they see that half the rules are just made up nonsense.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  I have similar misgivings about this policy. One possibly reasoning that I've seen, and that isn't entirely implausible, is that there is still significant transmission going on in private gatherings, which tend to happen in the evenings. These curfews would then be attempts to curb such behaviour.
- bluesign 6y ago
  Enforcement. You need to be able to set rules, you can enforce easily. If you allow single person walking, what will you do if you see 2 people close to each other. People will always try to avoid the rules, so in this kind of stuff enforcement is really hard. Better to have hard but short lived restrictions.
- gpvos 6y ago
  The idea of a curfew is that there are as few possible people outside, so there is some chance that the police has the capacity to check on those who are there. Yes, it's very unpleasant, but may be necessary in some cases.

kaesve 6y ago

I've actually been building a [jigsaw puzzle app](https://kaesve.nl/projects/masterpieces https://kaesve.nl/projects/masterpieces) because wanted to do something with their online collection. They not only put paintings and other artworks online for free, but also their meta data, through an api or bulk download (see https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/ https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/).

slig 6y ago
Just FIY, the puzzle doesn't load here. I tried disabling uBlock, but still it looks like some .JS is missing.

mcguire 6y ago

Here's an IP question: Under what legal arguments can the Rijksmuseum do this? Or, alternatively, how can those museums that do so prevent copies of their works? Copyright? Wouldn't that have expired long ago? Edit: I understand the reasoning behind preventing flash photography of the paintings---it damages them. But that's not really what I'm asking about.

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
Many works in museums are still under copyright. Art isn't equivalent with "ancient". For photographs of out-of-copyright works, the question if the photo is itself a creative work protected by copyright is answered differently depending on jurisdiction. In the US and, by extension, for Wikimedia Commons, it generally isn't. In some European countries, it is. I would generally subscribe to the idea that such photos are not protected. But it isn't quite as obvious as one might think. Taking high-quality photos of these artworks does involve a lot of work and, on occasion, maybe even creativity. What if I edit the photo afterwards to bring out the details? What if I chose special lighting conditions that interact with the pigments of the specific materials used?

julienchastang 6y ago

The City Walls painting on the front page is captivating (e.g., what are the kids doing with the sled, playing, chores?). I spent a while admiring it. But I am having trouble finding any information on it.

frereubu 6y ago

People in the UK should know that the Tate Gallery, being a publicly-funded museum, are required to make any items in their collection available for you to see on request. When studying sculpture I was really interested in a 1972 piece by Marcel Broothaers called Tractatus Logico-Catalogicus and noticed that the Tate had it in their collection. I emailed them and set up a time to visit a warehouse in SE London, and they brought it out for me to look at it. It's so much better than seeing things in a packed gallery, let alone a packed Tate, and you get a real sense of what the work is like in the flesh, stripped of all the spectacle and didactic trash that generally surrounds works in somewhere like the Tate.

kingosticks 6y ago
I understand that to be true if you are studying/researching the item but is that true for any old member of the public?
- jl6 6y ago
  I don’t know about museums but I do know that many public bodies in the UK will take enquiries from any member of the public, and will not automatically turn down requests - although such requests may go to the bottom of the priority queue if there are other requests of greater public interest.
- frereubu 6y ago
  Yes, it can be personal study. You don't need to be affiliated with an institution. Perhaps if you're asking to look at a Monet they might want a bit more information (Marcel Broodthaers isn't exactly a household name!), but if your hobby is painting and you want to study the brushstrokes I don't think they'd be able to turn you down - the whole point of these institutions is that they're paid for by the state, and by extension the taxes of its citizens.
  - kingosticks 6y ago
    Yeh that makes sense I guess. Conversely, a family of 4 turning up to get a private viewing doesn't seem in the spirit, even if it's their home-schooling art class. I was curious with respect to places like the Tate that are really only partly state funded (30%) so I'd consider it reasonable for them to approve the most "worthy" 30% of requests.

irrational 6y ago

Is there a list somewhere of all the museums that have their artwork online?

fjfaase 6y ago

Not all 700k works of art have a copyright free image because there are also modern works that are still copyrighted.

Erwin 6y ago

I'd also like to recommend the rest of Ian's site, as it has lots of periodic, often geeky, information about London, especially Underground. Like his weekly review of alleys: https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/category/alleys/ https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/category/alleys/

dmitryminkovsky 6y ago

Does anyone know of an "awesome" list of such resources? I've seen dozens of such announcements, but I never really have the time to explore and wish they were collected somewhere so that I could look later.

WalterBright 6y ago

I enjoy cycling through art as wallpaper on my monitor. There are a couple wallpaper apps for the Roku of great pictures, but they are just a few dozen images which just get really old after a while and I go back to the clock screensaver. The same with the Comcast cable box. A screensaver with 10,000 pictures of great art, randomly selected and displayed, would be wonderful.

jhallenworld 6y ago

Interesting way to decorate your house: print the free art on canvas and frame it to decorate your house.. https://www.arttoframe.com/canvas_wraps/ https://www.arttoframe.com/canvas_wraps/ Considering that this option is available, it's odd that people buy, to pick a divisive example, Thomas Kinkade prints: https://thomaskinkade.com/shop/ https://thomaskinkade.com/shop/

SpyKiIIer 6y ago

Is there anyway to just download the highest quality versions of all the art? I would love to just get a dump of all the art and put it on a photo display on my wall...

arunc 6y ago

I may not have the eyes of a connoisseur, but I don't find anything exciting about these paintings when compared to the real structures like these [1] constructed 1000 years ago. [1] https://twitter.com/truejainology/status/1352458920011284484/photo/2 https://twitter.com/truejainology/status/1352458920011284484...

mssundaram 6y ago
I agree! You might be interested to hear about the Iraivan temple of Kaua'i which is under construction now

Jach 6y ago

Some years ago they also released a bunch of images, a kind person made the effort to put them into a torrent: http://matthewlincoln.net/2015/10/19/the-rijksmuseum-as-bittorrent.html http://matthewlincoln.net/2015/10/19/the-rijksmuseum-as-bitt... It'd be nice if museums could do that work themselves, when they can do the work to make an API. No I won't make an account.

flas9sd 6y ago

having checked some images - they offer 4500x4500 variants at ~4.5MB .. so roughly 3TB of data. Maybe artvee.com will import them into their collection?

prionassembly 6y ago

I've used the embeddings (obtained by lopping off the final densely connected layers leading up to a classifier) from Alexnet and Imagenet, as distributed by Pytorch to try and cluster samples of art with HDBSCAN and didn't get great results. The graph generated by Mapper also doesn't make much sense. Maybe there's a whole literature on this subject, but I'm way too thinly spread among interests and would love to know if there's something that's already done with standard parts to address this problem.

lmcinnes 6y ago
Density based clustering with high dimensional data will tend to struggle. This is because, in high enough dimensions, you need a lot of samples to see any density. Also distances start to look very similar (from the curse of dimensionality). To get any traction on such things you need some form of dimension reduction. For something like this non-linear techniques are going to be better. If you want a pipeline of standard parts then something like: Pretrained-CNN --> UMAP --> HDBSCAN can turn out relatively reasonable results, especially if the UMAP you use for the clustering is to more than 2 or 3 dimensions (often 5 to 20 is good, depending on the data). You can, of course, still use a 2D UMAP to visualize the results. If you want such a pipeline packaged up then consider the PixPlot package, designed for exactly this use case, from the Yale Digital Humanities Lab: https://github.com/YaleDHLab/pix-plot https://github.com/YaleDHLab/pix-plot * Disclaimer: I am highly biased, as an author of both HDBSCAN and UMAP implementations.

ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago

Aren't such archives (~3TB as mentioned here) a perfect fit for IPFS? Are there any initiatives to put this and similar content there (or some other decentralized networks) and made it easily available to the public?