
Van Gogh Museum's High-Quality Reproductions - cwmoore
https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/search/collection?q=&artist=Vincent%20van%20Gogh
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DOsinga
This is very nice. On the other hand Van Gogh died in 1890 so his work should
really be in the public domain. Here the Van Gogh Museum is claiming copyright
on the reproductions as a separate work of art and using that to restrict what
you can and cannot do with these images.

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Animats
In the US, they can't. See Bridgeman vs. Corel. Despite whining from the
museum community, nobody has successfully enforced a copyright on a public
domain work in the US since then. This follows the Supreme Court decision in
Feist vs. Rural Telephone, which wiped out copyright in telephone books as not
being creative works. Bridgeman was followed by Meshwerks vs Toyota, which
ruled that 3D scans of an object are not new works.

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frgewut
But the Statue of Liberty in Las Vegas apparently is a creative replica.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/arts/statue-of-liberty-
st...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/arts/statue-of-liberty-stamp-
copyright-las-vegas.html)

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noir-york
Fantastic resource but rendering (post-)impressionist paintings onto a 2d
canvas removes a vital element from any such painting - the brushstrokes. I
still remember the goose bumps I got when I first saw a Van Gogh for the first
time; the paining felt alive.

Having said all that, I cannot afford an original Van Gogh so occasional
visits to the Musee D'Orsay and Amsterdam will have to do :/

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jjeaff
Don't you think your perception of the painting was perhaps colored by the
fact that you knew it was an original Van Gogh?

I have seen some Van Gogh paintings in person and I definitely wouldn't have
known they were originals unless someone told me.

It kind of reminds me of people who claim you will never really have truly
good sushi unless you get it from an old master in Tokyo. Or how people tend
to like wine better if they are told it was very expensive.

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jpmattia
> _Don 't you think your perception of the painting was perhaps colored by the
> fact that you knew it was an original Van Gogh?_

Not OP, but I doubt it. The originals I've seen have a thick layer of paint on
the surface which adds visible texture to the work. Van Gogh paintings are
really a 3D experience, which just happen to also look great in 2D.

~~~
ObsoleteNerd
I agree. I'm not an art buff, but we live near some decent museums, and seeing
any original oil painting has such an incredible depth and texture to it that
it truly blew my mind, and actually made me appreciate and enjoy art a lot
more than before seeing them in person.

Van Gogh was exceptionally good at using the texture and layers too, making
them even more special when you see them AFK.

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kough
If you zoom in on the image all the way with the controls (to load the highest
detail tiles), and then zoom your browser window out all the way, the full-
detail image will be rendered at full size and can be saved by right-clicking
the canvas and asking to view the image in a new window, then saving that
image. I’m currently enjoying a beautiful new desktop background :)

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diego898
This is fantastic. Does anyone know of a tool to download the pictures,
titles, and description to display as desktop backgrounds (for this and other
museum sites)?

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ilisp
* ArtPip - mac and windows * City Art Search - windows * City Art Search Preview - Windows

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anarchitect
I’ve worked on dozens of these “print on demand” programs over the last 10+
years for museums and galleries like Tate, MoMA, The National Gallery etc.
They are a fairly standard part of most museum’s retail operations, but this
is a particularly nice example.

Licensing for fine art reproductions in museum retail can work in very strange
ways, even if the work is out of copyright. For example, if a work is not part
of the gallery’s collection, permission may be sought from the owner who may
or may not own the high res, as well as the estate of the artist. I many cases
this is not required as the work is not in copyright, but nobody wants to step
out of line.

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pcurve
Art major in me made me giggle when I saw this site. I'm fortunate to live in
area with relatively easy access to his paintings, but with such high quality
reproduction, it's 'almost' as good as going to museum.

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zerkten
I'm amazed that this is online, but the Van Gogh museum experience was really
fantastic. I got back from Amsterdam a little over a week ago and was
impressed at how innovative it felt compared to US art museums I've visited.
We happened to enter the The Van Gogh Dreams installation
([https://vangoghmuseum.nl/en/whats-on/exhibitions/van-gogh-
dr...](https://vangoghmuseum.nl/en/whats-on/exhibitions/van-gogh-dreams))
ahead of the main museum and I found it a very helpful experience before
seeing the art.

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bloodorange
May I recommend the movie "Loving Vincent". Do note that the tale is not a
happy one.

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TheAdamist
Doctor who's "Vincent and the doctor" is great as well, but a tearjerker of an
ending.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_and_the_Doctor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_and_the_Doctor)

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buzz27
This is great. Can you point to any other similar sites, where I can download
printable high res images of significant or interesting artwork? I found some
at the Library of Congress, for example.

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emmelaich
The neighbouring Rijksmuseum has digitised most (all?) of their collection
with CC-0.

Including Rembrandt's Night Watch:
[https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-C-5](https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-C-5)

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cwmoore
I certainly hope anyone who gets the idea to print these out will take a
moment (or a year) to find the originals and appreciate the quality of the
paint used before they try to get this impact out of a dot-matrix++ printer.

Also, note the rights:

[https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/organisation/conditions-
use-...](https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/organisation/conditions-use-and-
permissions-of-images)

Edit: removed irrelevant anecdata

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kjullien
On a very related note I'd recommend watching a documentary about replicas :
China's Van Goghs a 2016 documentary about a Chinese painter that has made it
his life to sell replicas for ~5 bucks a piece that get sold for 500 once in
the Netherlands...

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jimmcslim
Seems like Van Gogh makes fairly frequent appearances on these pages. Anyone
care to venture why he resonates with the Hacker News crowd so much?

