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!

Visualizations of Impressionist artists – color palette comparisons (part 1)

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.

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!

Here are some examples of what can be found.

In English

Modern art and living artists

The Art journal

The art of painting

Works of art and artists in England

The art of drawing in perspective

Colour, as a means of art

Precepts and observations on the art of colouring in landscape painting

British galleries of art

Catalogue / American Art Association, Anderson Galleries, inc., New York

The Italian schools of painting

The Picture Collector’s Manual: Alphabetical arrangement of scholars and masters and classification of subjects

A biographical history of the fine arts

En français

Gazette des beaux-arts

Le trésor de la curiosité 1

Le trésor de la curiosité 2

Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles: école Flamande

Catalogue de la galerie des tableaux

REVUE UNIVERSELLE DES ARTS

ARTS

Do look in the “Related Books” recommendations at the bottom of each page to find further works of interest. And remember that archive.org often has works available for download that Google Books doesn’t, so searching on Google Books and downloading from archive.org can be a good strategy.

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!

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.