Thanks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 394,000 art images are now publicly available for high-resolution download and non-commercial reuse. The initiative, dubbed Open Access for Scholarly Content, launched last week.
“Through this new, open-access policy, we join a growing number of museums that provide free access to images of art in the public domain,” Met director Thomas P. Campbell said in a statement. “I am delighted that digital technology can open the doors to this trove of images from our encyclopedic collection.”
The Met’s decision comes amidst a wave of public institutions making their collections available online: last month, the New York Public Library offered its collection of 20,000 vintage maps up for free download, and in January, London’s Wellcome Library did the same with its collection of 100,000 medical history images.
That’s Paul Klee’s 1919 piece Black Columns in a Landscape above. Like it? Download it. Along with 115 other works from the Swiss German painter, it’s yours now.
