The Finnish National Gallery has made twelve thousand works of art available in the Public Domain. Free to use, they are licensed and distributed under the CC0 license.
Not all of the Finnish national holdings have been released, but this substantial artistic trove can be deployed for teaching, as well as research and for commercial use.
This featured image, entitled Sarjasta Suites francaises 2 (1999): Léscapade á bicyclette, by Elina Brotherus is an example of the contemporary works that can be found on-line. See more here…
You can search the Finnish National Gallery archives by artist/creator, date, theme and technique using the search pages here.
Finnish artists like Helene Schjerfbeck, Albert Edelfelt and Hugo Simberg represent home land creativity. However, you can also find internationally famous artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch.
The Finnish National Gallery also makes the collection meta-data freely available as an API, so that you can add standardised biographical data to your web installation or application, if using the API. See more details here…
We like the international flavour, and the wide variety of images, contained within such a flexible license, immensely. We know that we will be using this resource in our creative projects in the future.
Other freely licensed image collections are available. We have added a flavour of the resources below.
Bravo Finland and its artistic freedom!
Other Public Domain Art resources:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York Public Library – Digital Collections
Getty Museum – Open Collection
A Euoropean art resource to be savoured can be found on the web pages of Europeana – see https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en/collections/art
Europeana also offers its readers a very sound Public Domain Charter – helping users of Public Domain works to better understand and deploy items in their own works. We recommend it.
See more at… https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en/rights/public-domain-charter.html
