[HN Gopher] Over 700k paintings from the Rijksmuseum online copy...
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Over 700k paintings from the Rijksmuseum online copyright free
Author : edward
Score : 189 points
Date : 2021-01-21 15:14 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ianvisits.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ianvisits.co.uk)
| gusbremm wrote:
| I lived 2 years in amsterdam and I cant spell Rijksmuseum
| properly
| StreamBright wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's the museum with 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.
| sneeuwpopsneeuw wrote:
| 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 this is a
| video of the Rijksmuseum and the bike line through it.
| StreamBright wrote:
| Thanks, I think I have mixed it up with the Van Gogh Museum.
| I should check out the Night Watch next time.
| mcguire wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| laGrenouille wrote:
| 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/
| tmalsburg2 wrote:
| Can someone please write an Emacs command that shows me a
| random painting from this data set?
| clarkmoody wrote:
| > 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/
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| I find this to be such an arbitrary standard.
|
| It's a form of visual entertainment no different from visiting
| the cinema or a theatre; of course one is to pay for it.
|
| They make expenses housing these paintings just as a cinema
| does, and have the right to charge to recuperate this.
|
| In fact, I see no reason why musea should even be allowed to be
| non-profit. -- is a cinema ever non profit?
|
| There seems to be a rather arbitrary mentality that some
| entertainment should be free, in particular whatever
| entertainment "the cultural establishment" has arbitrarily
| declared to be "intellectual", often for no other reason than
| that it's old.
|
| Wishing to see a famous painting with one's own eyes is no
| different from wanting to see a famous singer perform live. --
| a man should pay for it if he wish to do so.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| _Museums should be free admission_
|
| Museums are free in the UK (apart from special events). They
| are funded by the state.
| erk__ wrote:
| *Mostly free. Most larger museums are free admission, and
| many smaller museums are not.
| ghaff wrote:
| And (I find this annoying) the big museums are "free"--it
| often says so in big letters on the outside--but you're
| very clearly expected to "donate" an amount when you enter.
| prox wrote:
| Reminds me of the time that I read in a book about the Louvre
| it would take 3 days to see it all. So I booked for 3 days and
| it's true : together with the book it took me exactly three
| days.
|
| It's important you always choose what to see, otherwise it
| becomes a blur.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'd probably still hit overload even if I had 3 days to
| devote to seeing the Louvre. I find I can handle 3 or 4 hours
| of a museum and I have to get out and do something else.
|
| Of course, it really helps if you've been to a place before
| and will probably go back again. When I go to the
| Metropolitan Museum of Art I basically have a mental plan for
| what I'm going to see.
|
| A museum membership is really nice if you're in a place a
| lot. At a time when I was visiting NYC frequently and MOMA
| had just reopened after a major renovation and tickets were
| hard to get, I bought a membership. It was really nice to be
| able to pop in for an hour when I was in town and see some
| things I especially liked.
| madhadron wrote:
| > A museum membership is really nice if you're in a place a
| lot.
|
| This. One of the reasons to live in a major city is regular
| access to first tier museums. I used to go hang out in the
| scholars court at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as an
| escape from the city for a while, then take a stroll
| through a gallery on my way back out as a use for my
| lunchtime.
| ghaff wrote:
| That doesn't immediately ring a bell but I'm sure I've
| been there. I lean towards the American Wing courtyard.
| dmitriid wrote:
| In the USSR central museums (think The Hermitage or The Pushkin
| Museum) would distribute a lot of art from their archives to
| regional museums, even to museums in small villages. So you
| wouldn't be surprised to see good quality art (sometimes by
| famous artists) even in small towns.
|
| This is something that can be encouraged more, especially
| across borders. For example, British museums definitely don't
| know what to do with their vast caverns filled with plunder
| .... ahem, vast archives of art, but even a small fraction of a
| fraction of that would be a great addition to a museum in, say,
| Moldova (my country), or Serbia, or ...
| njharman wrote:
| > 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
|
| They can do this now. But if museum sells collection the can't
| "simply come back for more later" cause it will be gone forever
| into private hands.
|
| > More people get to see fine art
|
| until it's all been sold.
|
| > 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)
|
| There is no way 2nd and 3rd teir museums are going to be able
| to compete with private buyers on price. Also where will they
| get money to buy this if they have to sell art to raise money.
|
| This sounds like typical "privatize everything cause free
| markets!" privileged people spew because they'll benefit more
| than when they have to share public services with the "dirty"
| masses.
| clarkmoody wrote:
| Why don't you take some time to listen to the podcast before
| getting angry about the market or someone else's privilege?
|
| Also, maybe you missed the part where there is 10x-100x the
| amount of art sitting in the archive than on display?
| Bringing lots of new supply of art onto the market would
| necessarily lower prices. This would make it less profitable
| to buy up art privately in the hope that it appreciates. It
| would also make it more affordable for other museums.
|
| At the same time, there's nothing preventing a first-tier
| museum from only selling to other museums rather than to
| private collectors. They might even stipulate terms of the
| sale that the art must stay with the new owner for a minimum
| time frame.
| trianglem wrote:
| But how does the first tier museum acquire stuff for its
| archives and where does the money for that come from?
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Many museums started in the times of yore, and became first
| tier through donations by powerful and rich patrons (and/or
| by the state).
| legitster wrote:
| > 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
|
| I think this is interesting, but doesn't work when you are
| visiting from out of town. We did this very thing when we
| visited Rijksmuseum -we had half a day and wanted to see
| everything we could. But the point is taken that smaller
| museums would get nicer collections. We could enjoy our local
| Museum more if it had more Dutch masters!
|
| This is definitely true about visiting a local zoo or museum
| when you have a membership. Our son just want so see the lions?
| That's fine! We'll come back some other time and see the rest.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The basement of the Rijks Museum is nothing short of
| incredible. There is so much precious art there that I don't
| even want to think about what damage a fire could do. There are
| so many works that that had not seen the light of day in 50
| years or more that they had serious storage issues, never mind
| cataloguing what they actually had. I've been in there twice,
| once to look at a painting that had been damaged to help
| analyze the paint with a for the time very high tech
| chromatograph, once on invitation of the guy that ran the
| place.
|
| Super happy to see this effort resulting in such an amazing
| collection free for the world to enjoy. Your typical tourist in
| Amsterdam will visit the Rijks for one or maybe two paintings
| and they won't care about the rest (your guess which two), but
| there is a lot more there that is worth you time and some
| patience.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| I'm a bit of a philistine so please don't take this as more
| than cheap provocation, but would Rijks Museum basement
| burning down to cinders be such a loss if no one sees the
| collection anyway? Is art that's filed away (even for good
| reasons like future restorability) for lifetimes that
| precious?
| Naac wrote:
| The list of images can be found here:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if they continued with the Rijksmuseum
| collection afterwards.
| frereubu wrote:
| 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.
| er4hn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Link to the browseable collection:
| https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio
| notJim wrote:
| 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. 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 wrote:
| 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
| irrational wrote:
| Is there a list somewhere of all the museums that have their
| artwork online?
| helipad wrote:
| 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.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| 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...
| 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 wrote:
| Unfortunately you need an account to see pricing. It is cool
| that they eventually will be able to serve US customers
| (currently EU only).
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| wussboy wrote:
| I'd be very interested in this too. The museum should set up a
| service and take a share of the profits
| andrewla wrote:
| 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.
| randmeerkat wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fjfaase wrote:
| Not all 700k works of art have a copyright free image because
| there are also modern works that are still copyrighted.
| julienchastang wrote:
| 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.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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-neede...
| oh_sigh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And also: the dog has to be on a leash, which is a physical
| link between two objects, one of type 'dog' and one of type
| 'man' to avoid accidental one-to-many relationships between an
| instance of 'dog' and multiple instances of 'man' (as in
| 'mankind'). You are not allowed to put multiple leashes on the
| same dog. And you are also not allowed to claim that a dog that
| is sans leash is yours..
|
| Enterprising folks are already offering their dogs for rent.
|
| Insert rust joke about the borrow checker here...
|
| Even more enterprising folks are researching whether walking
| cats is permitted and whether small rodents can be typecast to
| the class of 'dog'.
| rory wrote:
| No need to typecast as long as you can teach the rodents to
| bark, since the police should be using Dog Typing anyhow.
| safog wrote:
| 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.
| muhammadusman wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| xingyzt wrote:
| On clicking through (ex.
| https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/RP-P-OB-697), there's
| a download button, but it requires you to register an account.
| adembudak wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| You can use them on anything. That's the point of the license.
| Erwin wrote:
| 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/
| kaesve wrote:
| I've actually been building a [jigsaw puzzle
| app](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/).
| slig wrote:
| Just FIY, the puzzle doesn't load here. I tried disabling
| uBlock, but still it looks like some .JS is missing.
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