Rijksmuseum Online

Increasingly the major museums are putting their treasures online, so that art lovers whose travel budgets are limited to the local Tesco can admire great art. The latest to do this is the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which boasts a fine collection of paintings from the Dutch Golden Age (CLICK). Gabriël Metsu's Het Zieke Kind (The Sick Child) from 1663 is a terrific example, depicting a mother caring for her sick daughter. The Rijksmuseum has digitized 125,000 works from its collection and produced high-resolution images which are copyright free. It has also launched Rijks Studio, an attempt to engage the public in creating its own versions of masterpieces and uploading them to the Rijksmuseum website. It tells you "To download this work you need a Rijksstudio account". Untrue. I clicked my right mouse button. One disadvantage: although there is an English translation, the titles of all the paintings I saw are in Dutch.