Finnish National Gallery releases over 12,000 artworks to free Public Domain
The Finnish National Gallery has made twelve thousand works of art to the Public Domain for free use. The images are licensed and distributed under the CC0 license, which means they can be used for teaching as well as research, as well as commercial use.
The Finnish National Gallery that Includes the Ateneum, Kiasma and Sinebrychoff art galleries and the collection management department, is changing it's material sharing policy. The images made available in the Public Domain are now available for download from the online collection maintained by the FNG.
The collection owned by the state of Finland includes some 40,000 works of art as well as archival material and objects. 12,000 of them have been made available under the CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) license.
Images with a CC0 logo can be shared and modified without restriction. The license permits use in education, research and commercial use. The license is a global one, granting access to anyone in the world.
Works of Art from Finnish and International masters
Art pieces from 1144 artists are included in the material released by the Finnish National Gallery. There are many Finnish artists like Helene Schjerfbeck, Albert Edelfelt ja Hugo Simberg, but the availability is not limited to domestic pieces.
Pieces from well renowned international artists like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch are also featured. The new licensing is possible because the copyrights span 70 years from the death of the artist.
The images will also be made available through the European cultural heritage digital platform Europeana. This platform provides access to over 50 million digitized, or originally digital pieces. Europeana shares all kind of material significant to cultural heritage for use in education, research and creative areas.
The Finnish National Gallery has earlier released som tens of pieces of arts to the public domain. These high resolution are still available on the FNG Flickr page. The full online collection can be browsed through the search interface in the art collection application.
Metadata of art collection available as Open Data
In addition to the pieces themselves, the organization as accumulated a lot of data on it's collection. The FNG shares this Open Data, and has made this metadata available through open APIs that allow access to this data. Metadata is also licensed as CC0, allowing any purpose, including for profit commercial work. Credit and a link to the license must be given and along with note if any changes are made.
The Art Collection API provides access to metadata to the complete collection of more than 40,000 artworks in the FNG collections. The dataset comes from the organization's Muusa master Database and can be downloaded as a single file.
To get access to this data developers will need to sign up for a free API key. Information on API usage is available here: The Art Collections API Documentation
In addition to the Art Collection API, there is another one. The Finnish State Art API is similar to the abovementioned one, but it allows access to the Finnish State Art Deposit Collection. This is a separate collection with some 13,600 works, with more acquisitions being done with around 1 Million euro annually. The collection is placed in various public buildings.
Both APIs are encouraged to be used for building websites, mobile applications and any type of mash-ups imaginable.
Source: Kansallisgalleria avasi yli 12 000 taideteoskuvaa vapaaseen käyttöön
Main artwork image: Eero Järnefelt: Under the Yoke (Burning the Brushwood), 1893