The National Gallery of Art in Washington has recently made available online, free of charge for download and use, more than 20,000 works of art of its collections:

NGA Images is a repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. On this website you can search, browse, share, and download images. A standards-based reproduction guide and a help section provide advice for both novices and experts. More than 20,000 open access digital images up to 3000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use. NGA Images is designed to facilitate learning, enrichment, enjoyment, and exploration.

It gives me the shivers to think of the effort it must have taken to shoot all those hi-res photographs (I presume as consistent as possible with the original colours), filing them, and uploading them in such a massive database.

Well, as an artist the word “database” alone kind of unsettles me already.

Anyway, all for free, for anyone to enjoy, as art should be. How cool is that?
It was even better noticing that they had quite a few pieces by John Sargent, a couple of which I didn’t know yet.

As usual, thanks to the awesome Lines and Colors for always being the first to share these amazing discoveries.

As a side note, why do I always get slightly depressed every time I see anything made by Sargent?:(