Pic for victory! We team up with The National Archives to bring war art to public domain

  • June 18, 2012
Dig for Victory! by Peter Fraser (1888-1950)
Dig for Victory! by Peter Fraser (1888-1950)

We’ve recently been working with our friends from The National Archives to bring a collection of 2,000 or so war art images into the public domain. This is the result of a digitisation grant made by Wikimedia UK to enable these works to be shared online.

The first group of 350 or so images is available in this gallery on Wikimedia Commons and includes works from some 120 artists whose work may be freely available for the first time thanks to this project. The collection includes some of the most famous pieces of war art produced in the UK, including the famous Dig for Victory and Careless Talk Costs Lives campaigns.

We think this is a great step forward as these images can, for example, be used to illustrate an important period in world history as well as the biographies of these artists. This story has received some good press coverage too, in publications such as these articles in The Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Sun.

We’d like to see more galleries, libraries, archives and museums embarking on projects of this kind. If you represent a cultural institution and you’d like to find out more about working with Wikimedia UK, please drop an email to glam@wikimedia.org.uk or call our office on 020 7065 0990.

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