Yale University has an Open Access Policy that allows the fully free use of many of its reproductions of public domain art.
You can read the policy here.
To quote the policy:
The Open Access Policy applies to digital images of works in Yale University’s museum, archive and library collections that are believed to be in the public domain and free of other restrictions, available through Yale’s electronic interfaces. The policy does not apply to works protected by copyright, by privacy rights, or that are otherwise restricted. Visit the links toward the end of this document for more information about copyright.
You can discover Yale’s open access digital images through the Discover Yale Digital Content or through individual collection websites.
The Yale Center For British Art in particular marks public domain work and provides download links for high-resolution scans of artworks.
Yale’s policy is clear, reflects best practice, and creates a major resource for Open Art History. Have a browse and see what you can find!
This is a great visualization of colour data for paintings by Impressionist artists, using those paintings as data point markers:
The visualization was created by UCSD undergraduate student Megan O’Rourke in Lev Manovich’s Winter 2012 class “data visualization and computational art history”. Open Art History does not have to be about data or the digital humanities, but data visualization is a useful tool and opening up art historical resources supports this kind of investigation.
Due to the length of copyright on visual images, Impressionism is the last major Western art movement that this kind of visualization can easily be created for. Hopefully future artists and lawmakers will recognize the value of this kind of scholarship and support art as Open Knowledge.
The Data Hub is the Open Knowledge Foundation’s directory of datasets. It’s a great resource for art history, especially in the Digital Humanities. Over the last few years more and more art and art history-related datasets and APIs have been listed: sets of images, geodata for public art, museum collection metadata, and databases of facts about all of art history.
A good way to get started with the Data Hub is to search for items mentioning “art”:
http://thedatahub.org/dataset?q=art
This will list every resource that mentions art in its description.
Not every item listed on the Data Hub is free and open, you can tell which are by the “Open Knowledge” tag next to them. If you see an item that isn’t and you’d like to help make it free and open, you can ask about it using isitopendata.org .
If you know of any resources that should be added to the Data Hub, it’s easy to register and add it, or let us know about it in the comments here. And if you know of anyone making good use of any of the data or APIs listed at the Data Hub let us know, we’d love to hear about it!
Mass digitization of library collections means that art historical written materials are more easily available in reproduction than ever before. Google Books is easier for searching for them, but archive.org is better for downloading them. Journals, magazines, catalogues and books can all be found, although what is available is of course skewed by what libraries have historically chosen to collect. Do be wary of later editions as these may only be out of copyright in the US.
Here are some examples of what can be found.
Journals and Catalogues
The Yellow Book
The Magazine Of Art
The Illustrated Magazine Of Art
The Burlington Magazine
ArtNews Annual
Art In America
Studio International
Special Numbers 1897-8
Royal Academy Illustrated and Catalogues
The Print Connoisseur
Art Prices Current
Various Exhibition Catalogues
The Armory Show Catalogue
Reference works mentioned by the V&A
Le trésor de la curiosité, tiré des catalogues de ventes de tableaux, etc … avec diverses notes & notices historiques & biographiques.
Les ventes de tableaux, dessins estampes et objets d’art aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (1611-1800). Essai de bibliographie.
Dictionnaire des ventes d’art faites en France et a l’étranger pendant les XVIIIe et XIXe siècles.
Treasures of Art in Great Britain: being an account of the chief collections of paintings, sculptures, illuminated mss. …
Galleries and cabinets of art in Great Britain: being an account of more than forty collections of paintings, drawings, sculptures …
Other Catalogues, some from Wikipedia’s article on the history of art auction sales
Painters and Their Works: A Dictionary of Great Artists who are Not Now Alive
Memorials of Christie’s; a record of art sales from 1766 to 1896
Provisional Catalogue of the Oil Paintings and Water Colours in the Wallace Collection
Memoirs Of Painting
The Year’s Art
The Connoisseur
Some general searches that give good results
Victoria & Albert Museum
Painting Catalogue
Art History
Art Exhibition
Art Gallery
Artists
Modern Art
If you know of any other material of art historical interest digitized at archive.org do share them in the comments!
Saturday, December 31, 2011
I have written a script to download a dataset containing collection information from the UK Government Art Collection site and save it in tab-seperated-value files and an sqlite database for easy access. As the data is from a UK government agency it’s under the OGL.
You don’t need to run the script, a downloaded dataset is included in the project archive:
https://gitorious.org/robmyers/government-art-collection/
https://gitorious.org/robmyers/government-art-collection/trees/master/2011-12-11
The dataset doesn’t feature as many collections as the GAC website claims to feature, but the script does omit many duplicates. This project was inspired by Kasabi‘s scraper, adding the ability to download code and data in an easy-to-use format.
The Goverment Art Collection is an example of a collection gathered over more than a century in order to represent and promote a nation’s art. Analysing it can provide an insight into shifting official tastes, and correlating this with other historical materials both from the artworld and from political history could provide interesting new insights.
Algernon Graves (1845 – 1922) documented British art exhibitions and sales. You can read about him on Wikipedia here.
His three part magnum opus “Art Sales from Early in the Eighteenth Century to Early in the Twentieth Century ” was published in three volumes between 1918 and 1921.
I have now scanned the first volume. You can download it from archive.org here.
I’ve digitized some data from Volume I using optical character recognition software and the UNIX shell ready to be processed in software. You can read about this here, here and here.
I will scan and upload volumes II and III soon.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Welcome to Open Art History. More details coming soon!