I'm pleased to announce that I have finished uploading 10,424 public domain paintings to the Wikimedia Commons. They are from the DVD "10,000 Meisterwerke der Malerei" (10,000 masterpieces of painting) by "The Yorck Project" and were donated to the public by Directmedia Publishing GmbH (of German Wikipedia DVD fame). Directmedia put the collection itself under the GFDL so there are no lingering copyright concerns.
See the translated original announcement at:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:10%2C000_paintings_from_Directmedi...
Besides the paintings themselves, as permitted and encouraged by Directmedia, I have added the metadata from the DVD, which includes basic data about the individual artists as well as the paintings (much of it is in German, I've made an attempt to automatically translate date-related abbreviations). I have also tried to translate the German style data into English categories.
Credit goes to Tim 'Avatar' Bartel for providing the metadata as a MySQL dump, as well as the Commons community that was always there to help when I needed them. Special thanks to Arnomane for creating [[Template:Information]] and suggesting its usage here. Thanks also to everyone who provided constructive feedback during and after the process.
You can view all the paintings at:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:The_Yorck_Project
Or individual categories, e.g.:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Baroque_paintings http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Post-Impressionist_paintings http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Cubist_paintings http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Classicist_paintings
Or individual artists, e.g.:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Christian_Gottlieb_Schick http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:El_Greco http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Peter_Paul_Rubens
Note that the "next 200" link on the main Yorck Project category didn't work until a few minutes ago. The bug that caused this to happen should now be fixed. However, some individual artist categories with more than 200 images will still have this problem (caused by a second category-related bug), and it will probably take a few weeks to sort this out. Meanwhile, there's a workaround:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:The_Yorck_Project&am...
This will show all the images from the Yorck Project starting with filenames that begin with "Leonardo" (the filename is always of the form "Firstname Lastname Number"). This way, you can view all the images by any particular artist, no matter how many.
While all the images are high resolution, the quality of reproduction is not always the best. Some images have visible compression artifacts at full resolution, and others are too dark or too bright, for example. (In fairness, even in these cases, many of the repros you will find on the web are of still lower quality.) Bdk has started a list of images that should be replaced with better reproductions:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:10%2C000_paintings_from_Directmedi...
I hope you enjoy these works of art, and will help to add the best ones to the relevant Wikipedia articles. It may make sense to translate the gist of this announcement into other languages for this reason.
All best,
Erik