Paris is often referred to as the 'City of Light' (La Ville Lumière), because of its leading role during the Age of Enlightenment, and also because Paris was one of the first large European cities to use gas street lighting on a grand scale on its boulevards and monuments.
This makes the city full of history.
And here, as part of its Open Content initiative, Paris Musées, which is a consortium of 14 Parisian museums, announced that it has uploaded more than 150,000 high-resolution images of historic arts to the internet.
The many images are available for use entirely free of charge. The institution said that the images are the digital reproductions of art works from its collections.
The images include pieces from great names like Eugène Atget, Étienne Carjat, Rembrandt and Anthony van Dyck, as well as many others.
The institution said on its web page that:
"Making this data available guarantees that our digital files can be freely accessed and reused by anyone or everyone, without any technical, legal or financial restraints, whether for commercial use or not."
People on the internet can access it by visiting the collection portal at http://parismuseescollections.paris.fr/fr.
Here, the images can be downloaded either directly from the file that contains the work in question, or via the home page, from a page dedicated to images free of copyright.
Or, they can visit the API at http://apicollections.parismusees.paris.fr/.
What’s particularly useful is that users can filter the Open Content collection by author, genre, date, and even color.
Paris Musées hopes that its initiative can make it easier for teachers, lecturers and students to conduct research.
