Virginia is such a lovely place. I'm sure that this time of year it is especially beautiful. This online exhibit, featuring, among many others, the painting shown to the left, Child Under Tree - The Virginia Landscape - Virginia Historical Society, suggests a peaceful and happy time. It can't dim the horror of what happened in Blacksburg yesterday, however.
The Virginia Historical Society has digitized a portion of a collection of landscape paintings that were exhibited in 2000, mounted them in a simple, "one-after-the-other" format, carefully described each one with an emphasis on information about the artists (on a separate screen one clicks through to from the exhibit main page), and loaded each image up with so much rights information that it was astonishing to read through. It would be very interesting to see some figures on the revenue that this project brings in. One would think there must be a very high demand for reproductions of these images, based on the elaborate rights policies and procedures for requesting permission to use or order reprints, etc. Corbis has nothing on this Historical Society.
The original exhibit consisted of 240 paintings and drawings. The online exhibit shows just 12 of them. There is no explanation for why these were chosen. There is no metadata concerning the digitization process. The images are thumbnails that expand to slightly larger versions when one clicks on them. The audience is, I suppose, the general public.
No comments:
Post a Comment