Despite being publicly funded bodies, national museums and art galleries have traditionally been resistant to making high resolution digital versions of their art collections available to the public.
So it's a bold move by The Metropolitan Museum of Art to make almost 400,000 works of art available for anyone to download, free of charge, from its website.
You can sort images - which include paintings from Monet, Van Gogh, Degas and Picasso, as well as Greek sculpture, and Chinese calligraphy - by artist, medium, location, and era.
Works that are covered by the new policy are identified on the website with the acronym OASC (Open Access for Scholarly Content).
The images are intended for students, educators, researchers, and creators of non-commercial content - so if you want to use them for commercial reasons you'll still have to license them from the museum. You can find out exactly what the restrictions are here.
