Paris Museums Released More Than 300,000 Works of Art Online for Free

You can even download your own high-res Monet

paris musees
Claude Monet's "Soleil couchant à Lavacourt," among the images now available for download.
Paris Musées

Some of Paris’s most renowned artistic masterworks are now only a click away — and we’re not talking about a Google image search.

Paris Musées, a public institution incorporating the city’s 14 museums, recently announced it has uploaded 321,178 works of art, available to viewers for free online. The vast collection makes available a diverse range of works including paintings, photographs and coins from the likes of Francisco Goya, Paul Cézanne and Claude Monet, among numerous other well and lesser-known artists.

Thanks to their public domain status, more than 150,000 of the images are available for free high-definition download, Vice reported. The other works can be viewed, but aren’t available for high-res download. Designed to aid researchers, scholars and educators, the downloaded images will also include a document with details about the selected works as well as a guide for using and citing the sources of the image. Paris Musées also announced the works will be included in virtual exhibitions on the website.

“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,” Paris Musées said in a press release. “We are ensuring they can easily, enduringly, freely and instantly use High Definition images to support their research, their teaching and their publications, thereby improving their physical and digital cultural mediation tools.”

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