Nearly 1,000 Paintings/Drawings By Vincent Van Gogh Now Digitized, Released Online (openculture.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Open Culture: Every artist explores dimensions of space and place, orienting themselves and their works in the world, and orienting their audiences. Then there are artists like Vincent van Gogh, who make space and place a primary subject. [...] The opportunity to see all of Van Gogh's bedroom paintings in one place may have passed us by for now -- an exhibit in Chicago brought them together in 2016. But we can see the original bedroom at the yellow house in Arles in a virtual space, along with almost 1,000 more Van Gogh paintings and drawings, at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam's site. The digitized collection showcases a vast amount of Van Gogh's work -- including not only landscapes, but also his many portraits, self-portraits, drawings, city scenes, and still-lifes.

The Van Gogh Museum houses the largest collection of the artist's work in the world. On their website you can read essays about his life and work, plan a visit, or shop at the online store. But most importantly, you can experience the stunning breadth of his art through your screen -- no replacement for the physical spaces of galleries, but a worthy means nonetheless of communing with Van Gogh's vision.

Comments

Digitising isn't enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Living in the Netherlands I've been at the Van Gogh museum a couple times. Just like any museum visit, enjoyable little outings with family, looking at the art and ddiscussing, well, often the art and stuff around it, sometimes entirely different topics.

Some painters produce positively 3d work, like some of Rietveld's works have definite height differences in them, done in wood. Others do the same thing in blobs of paint. Van Gogh, not so much, but the work isn't quite entirely flat either. Meaning that just putting a digitiser in front and measuring hue for every pixel isn't enough. And that's just the straight cold physical measurement part of it. A good artist produces work with a certain je ne sais quoi that can be very noticeable in its absence when dealing with a reproduction.

So, good work digitising this stuff, actually, but it is no substitute for the real thing, because it cannot be.

Re:Digitising isn't enough

[PeopleAquarium]

Frankly, I would have expected it to be there years ago... meh.

I also would have expected it before now, but draconian copyright laws and other factors prohibited it. Shouldn't we celebrate the dawning of an era in which those without the means can appreciate the work of a Grand Master in his peak?

Seeing, and being influenced by this simple thing, may be the root cause of the next Van Gogh's emergence. It is a good thing, and more publicity only makes it a better thing.

Finally a good

[AHuxley]

use of the internet. Art and culture.

Re:License?

[tonique]

When you go to the zooming page for each painting and click the download button, you get a link to the terms and conditions (hope the link works).

1. Images of the Van Gogh Museum collection up to and including A4 size in TIF format may be downloaded and distributed for non-commercial use, with the exception of images of works by artists in our collection that are still subject to copyright, in other words by artists who have been dead for less than 70 years. These include Pierre Bonnard, Charles-Louis Houdard, Artistide Maillol (died 27 September 1944), Henri Rivière and Kees van Dongen.

They prohibit commercial use. That isn't defined, though. And the download link goes to a jpg.