Paris museums are home to some of the world’s most influential works of art, and if you live outside France, you no longer need a passport to see them. As Smithsonian According to reports, Paris Musées, the organization behind 14 of the city’s iconic museums, has digitized more than 100,000 paintings and other works of art and made them available to the public for free.
Institutions under the umbrella of Paris Musées include the Petit Palais, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Maison de Balzac. She began sharing the work on her online inventory in 2016 and has since uploaded more than 320,000 photographs.
About a third of the images in that digital collection were published in January 2020. This recent update was part of Paris Musées’ initiative to embrace open access art. Each of the more than 100,000 images uploaded this month are under the Creative Commons Zero license, meaning they are completely in the public domain. Works such as Gustave Courbet’s “Young Girls on the Banks of the Seine”, Claude Monet’s “Sunset on the Seine at Lavacourt” and Paul Cézanne’s “Portrait of Ambroise Vollard” can now not only be viewed for free, but can also be downloaded for free.
Paris Musées hopes to eventually transition all elements of its royalty-free collection, which comprises approximately 1 million works, to a Creative Commons Zero license. The most recent image dump is just the first round, and other artworks will become available gradually as the institution carefully evaluates the copyright status of each piece. Someday he plans to expand his public domain artworks to external platforms like Wikimedia Commons, but for now, you can find them on the Paris Musées website.
(h/t Smithsonian)