David notes that a coalition of French museums have released images of their paintings — 150,000 paintings — into the public domain. He’s concerned that they didn’t make it easier to bulk download the images, which I suppose I can sympathise with a little bit. But as an impecunious academic researcher who has recently published an essay that involved the appearance of paintings and drawings, but which couldn’t reproduce any image that wasn’t in the public domain, I am over the moon about the opportunity for low-budget scholars to write, make presentations, analyse, teach, and so on with these remarkable images.
AKMA, you may also (if not aware already) find useful the collections of Europeana, which provides an index of metada / images of artefacts from musea across the EU. See https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en
The Rijksmuseum Amsterdam has published re-usable high res images of most of their artwork (and are in the process of digitising the rest). Available through Rijksstudio. See https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/
Both sites provide permalinks for citing/referencing artefacts as well.
Thank you! I have long imagined setting an assignment for one of my experimental classes, of selecting and arranging an exhibition of paintings on a given biblical theme; your links, and the Parisian links, would make a fantastic resource from which to choose images.