The Cycle of Creativity – Competition

The digital treasury of the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands announces a creative competition

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the national museum of the Netherlands, is slowly becoming a work of art in itself, so much that is beautiful can be said about it. It houses the world's most outstanding Rembrandt collection, but lovers of Dutch painting can also immerse themselves in other works from Rembrandt's era, the “Golden Age”, or pause before the paintings of, for example, Frans Hals, Vermeer or van Gogh. Besides Dutch and foreign painting, a rich collection of sculpture and applied arts also awaits visitors. Because of the historical background of colonisation, a large number of objects of Asian origin are also on view in the museum.

The Rijksmuseum decided to make this magnificent collection in its possession available in digital form too. So even those who never travel to Amsterdam can admire the most beautiful creations of human culture. At the end of 2012 a website called Rijksstudio became available, which is an interactive electronic gallery. At this moment images of 579,636 artefacts can be seen on it. Thanks to the high resolution of the images and excellent IT solutions, we can zoom without any problem into the smallest details of the pictures, which we would probably not see even if we were standing in the museum in front of the object.

Rijksstudio works on an interface and a logic similar to Pinterest. The images that are uploaded are available in thematic groups, from which visitors can also create their own collections. In this way we can find collections spanning centuries under headings such as “self-portrait”, “the crucifixion of Jesus”, “angels”, “animals” or even “splendid dishes”. There are currently more than 300,000 thematic collections on the site, the overwhelming majority of which were created by its visitors. There is no lack of interest...

But visitors can browse not only in the groups that have already been created; they can also use the search function. If I search for the word “anatomy”, for example, the site offers 661 works and 21 selections. Interestingly, the results also include works that have not been put on the site for copyright reasons, or have not yet been digitised. Copyright problems naturally affect works made in the second half of the 20th century. For these we cannot see the image, but we still learn of the existence of the artefact itself and also gain access to metadata about it. The description of the artefact is in many cases very useful and informative: a medal depicting an 18th-century professor of surgery, for example, was found by the search because the description attached to the image states that the person also worked on anatomy.

Visitors can bookmark the images, crop them and save them for themselves. Or they can order reproductions of them (as a poster, on canvas, on an aluminium plate, etc.) if they want a high-quality physical copy. What is more, if they have used the saved images in a creative way (for example, decorated an object with a detail of a van Gogh painting), they can upload the finished work to Rijksstudio as well.

To stir creative energies even more, this year the Rijksmuseum is holding the Rijksstudio Award design competition for the 3rd time.

Anyone who would like to enter should first look at the Rijksstudio images. Let yourself be enchanted and let your creativity spark at the sight of the pictures. Then download an image or several images and use them to create your own work.

Design, decorative art, applied art, fashion design, photography, video... It makes no difference which artistic form and technique is chosen by someone in whom what they have seen has set something in motion – the only condition is that the source of inspiration be one or more images from Rijksstudio, and that the images actually be used in the work.

The members of the international jury will be leading professionals from recognised institutions of the applied and fine arts. The prizes of the competition are very generous. The finalist works will be exhibited for 10 weeks in one of the museum's galleries.

The competition is open to everyone.

The deadline for entries is 15 January 2017!

More information about the competition: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio-award

Rijksstudio can be found at this address: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio