PSA: Use all these images from the Met Museum for free!

Want to sprinkle a little Van Gogh into your life? How about Monet? Degas and his eternal fascination with ballet (girls)? Toulouse-Latrec?

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Waking Up, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has made 375,000 of its pieces available under a policy called Open Access, in collaboration with Creative Commons.

That’s a lot of links, but they’re important.

And it’s not only paintings, either. Costumes and armor grace this public-domain collection.

I for one find this dress remarkable. I’m glad I can look at it as much as I want without charge. Ah, for a 3D printer!

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Emile Pingat, Ball gown (ca. 1864)

Here’s how to do it:

“You can access the unrestricted images through the Met’s website. As you search its collection, all you need to do is check off the “Public Domain Artworks” option under “Show Only.” You can also browse the selected works by selecting the “Metropolitan Museum of Art” filter on the Creative Commons site.” – My Modern Met

By checking only “Public Domain Artworks” and selecting no other criteria, the very first thing I see is this Annular Brooch from the 9th century. That’ll come in handy!

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Irish Annular Brooch, 9th century, copper alloy

And by idly picking Anonymous, Italian, 16th century, I found these three gossips:

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“Three Warriors After Raphael,” Anonymous, Italian, 16th century

I then climbed out of the 16th century and headed straight for Louis Comfort Tiffany. “Pen Rack,” the title says. That rapturous green! That intricate design! My pens should be so lucky.

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Pen rack with a whole lot more things that I suddenly need, by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

Happy searching!

All This Twitter Account Does Is Tweet Art, And That’s Pretty Neat

There’s a name and even a face.

There are over 13,000 followers.

And all this Twitter account seems to do is tweet and retweet art pictures from other Twitter accounts.

Here’s one:

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by Patrick William Adam, R.S.A, from Edinburgh, Scotland (1852-1929)

 

It’s particularly nice because some of these artists can’t very well tweet it themselves.

But you know what’s grand about this? Erin Harris, who first brought this account to my attention, put it thusly: “It’s like making my Twitter profile into Pinterest without having to go to Pinterest. I can look at my feed when I need to see some beauty.”

It’s true for the rest of us, too. If you follow this account, you will see beauty in your newsfeed–and new discoveries.

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Childe Hassam, Apple Trees in Bloom, Old Lyme, 1904

 

Read: A New Way to See Art

“Georgia Krantz is the creator of the Mind’s Eye series at the Guggenheim, in New York, which provides “sensory experience workshops” for museumgoers who are blind or have low vision”

That’s pretty cool.

“We see through our brains, not our eyes,” Krantz explained. “The eye is just one of the channels through which sensory information is passed to the brain for processing.”

Here you go: A New Way to See Art.

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