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  • Writer's picturePhillip Ratliff

Beautiful art from some of the world's great museums can be found online

No, digitized images of masterpieces aren't quite the same as the real things. But in the age of self-quarantine, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.


Writer and musician Josh Jones has painstakingly curated links to over 30 digital collections, each loaded with tens of thousands of images from some of the world's great museums. Jones has included links to the Art Institute of Chicago (44,000 images), the L.A. County Museum (20,000 images), the British Museum (4,200 images), the Getty (100,000 images) , the Guggenheim (1,600 images), the Met (400,000 images), MoMA (65,000 images), and more. All told, the digital collection tallies to about 1.8 million works of art, plus scads of additional images collected in art books.

In short, this list isn’t. Like Alice, you will have to go down the rabbit hole. Click on his article at Open Culture to see the complete list first. You’ll then click to an overview of each museum’s collections before going to the site itself. Though the navigation is palimpsestic, clicking through a layer at a time will better orient you to each site. At the end of your journey, beauty awaits.

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