While this work is almost always funded by private grants, anyway, that's still not bad. You have to consider the other work that goes into this sort of thing.

While this work is almost always funded by private grants, anyway, that's still not bad. You have to consider the other work that goes into this sort of thing. They don't have a flat bed scanner with some intern popping pdfs onto a network drive or bringing a stack down to the copy shop— there's cataloging, preservation, metadata analysis and recording (this was probably still all on paper with a lot of it handwritten,) storage, etc. Even a basic scanning setup to take perfectly even, color-accurate pictures of 140 year old paper... Plus people to manage the workers, manage the money, etc etc etc plus space to do it, storage of huuuuuge tiff images... $40 per painting is not bad.