The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Online Library Contains Nearly Half a Million Works of Art That Can Be Downloaded for Free.
If you’re looking for art, and I mean high art with a capital “H,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the place to find it. Not only can you visit the museum while in New York (to see the works), but you can also download nearly half a million digital images of authentic, snob-approved works from the museum’s online archive for free.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has 492,000 high-resolution images, most of which are in the public domain, so you can use them for any non-commercial purpose, from printing a T-shirt of James Johnston of Straiton to hanging a poster of The Repentance of St. Jerome on your wall as a reminder of the importance of self-torture (I’m not a fan of perverts).
How to Download Artworks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Online Collection
It’s easy to get in touch with this sweet, sweet art:
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Click on this link in the Met collection .
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Browse through the different sections to find the one that interests you.
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Click on the painting, sculpture or body jewelry you like.
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Note the ” OA Public Domain ” tag, as in the photo of Marie-Emilie Coignet de Courson with her dog below. This means the work is available through the Met’s Open Access initiative, and you can use it for free (as long as it’s non-commercial).
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Download it, frame it, worship it. Whatever. Just don’t sell it.
How the Law of the “Public Domain” Affects Paintings in Museums
Looking at the collections of the Met and other museums like the Getty , I found myself wondering who really owns the art. The answer is tricky: the physical objects (paintings, sculptures, lyres made from human skulls ) in the Met belong to the museum. The intellectual property (what the artwork displays) belongs first to its creator, and then to everyone: in the U.S., ownership of intellectual property goes into the public domain, meaning it belongs to no one/everyone, 95 years after the work was created, or 70 years after the artist’s death if the work was created before 1978.
The rights to an image based on a work of art (or anything else) are a separate issue: the author of the photograph owns it, of course, until 70 years after his death. You can go to the museum yourself, take a picture of a work in the public domain, and use it as you wish, but the rights to the images you download belong to the Met. They just decided to give those rights to anyone who isn’t going to pay for their work.