BILDGEIST is a “visual journal of scientific illustrations, illuminated manuscripts, photographs, prints and artworks from the public domain”. The images are of various themes including astronomy, alchemy, mythology, cartography, anthropology, zoology, botany, and general curiosa. Users can filter the contents by period, categories and keyword tags.
Developed by The Open Knowledge Foundation, The Public Domain Review is “an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to promoting and celebrating the public domain in all its richness and variety”, as according to the website. Images in their collections are derived from a wide range of online archives, that are on public domain. The images are arranged by topics, where users can search or browse by time, style, genre, type, content and rights.
The Museu d’Art de Catalunya, or MNAC in short, is a national museum located in Barcelona, Spain. The museum is known for its outstanding collections of Romanesque mural paintings and Catalan Modernism. Their digital collection contains more than 8,500 images of artworks from their collections. Users can browse the collections, search and narrow the results by classification, themes and period.
LACMA houses more than 120,000 objects across different media, region and periods such as Greek, Roman and Etruscan art, Asian art, American and Latin American art, decorative arts and design, photography, and modern and contemporary art. The digital collections provide access to more than 53,000 images of artworks with more than 20,000 that LACMA believes to be in the public domain. Users can search and filter the results by artist, classification, curatorial area, periods and location.
Through the Open Content Program, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute provide access to more than 87,000 images from their collections. The images include more than 72,000 from the Research Institute’s Foto Arte Minore archive, which features photographs of the art and architecture of Italy over 30 years by German photographer and scholar Max Hutzel (1913–1988). Other images include paintings, drawings, manuscripts, photographs, antiquities, sculpture, decorative arts, artists’ sketchbooks, watercolors, rare prints from the 16th through the 18th century, and 19th-century architectural drawings of cultural landmarks. Over time, images from the Getty Conservation Institute will be added, as well as more images from the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute.
The National Gallery in London contains the national collection of Western European paintings from the 13th to the 19th centuries, with works by Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Renoir, Van Gogh and more. The collection can be filtered by subjects, themes, artists, styles and timeline. Subjects include Travel, Still Life & Objects, People & Costume, Land, Sea & City, Work & Leisure, Seasons & Weather, Religious & Biblical, Mythological, Plants & Animals and Historical.
The collection provides access to more than 125,000 paintings by Dutch artists, such as Rembrandt and Johannes Vermeer. Users can explore and search the entire collection, which is handily sorted by artist, subject, style and even by events in Dutch history. Each painting can be downloaded in high-resolution or view at close-up. The museum also provides an application, RijksStudio, to invite users to create their own masterpieces by downloading images of artworks or details of artworks in the Rijksmuseum collection and using them in a creative way.