copyright

copyright

copying of old paintings

I have copyied a number of paintings from an old book, academy pictures1890-1893 in pen and ink with watercolour wash can I exhibit them and maybe sell them if I am lucky ,will they fall foil of copyright laws charlesR
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Comments

both comments received are most helpfull and answers my question thank you both chasrob

I actually think for artistic works the rule is that if the artist is unknown then 70 years have to elapsed since the work was first created. If the artist is known, then copyright stays in force until the 70th year after the death of the artist. You would need to know who created the paintings and when they died so be sure that you can exhibit or sell your copies.

Short answer is no, they'll almost certainly all be out of copyright. Longer answer............ I have occasionally (shhhh!) worked from photographs that were in copyright (probably) - but have changed them very significantly, or taken elements from them: I'm not sure this is strictly ethical, and so haven't done it often - in fact, very rarely - and seriously wouldn't encourage it. (Nothing on POL that I've posted is based on anything other than my own sketches, photographs, or on the photographs that close friends of mine have taken who have given me explicit permission to work from them. I'm fairly significantly disabled, and can't work en plein air or generally from life, so am dependent on my own or other close friends' photographs - without them, I couldn't work at all.) Provided you work carefully within guidelines such as these, and never simply copy other people's work, you're generally going to be safe from the charge of copyright infringement. Honestly, the problems that arise tend to be centred on registered logos, or very obvious copies of classic photographs - more the former than the latter. There was a spate of paintings on POL recently of Sir Winston Churchill, based on a very famous photographic study by Youssuf Karsh: I felt that some of these, inevitably the better ones, were taking a bit of a risk - Karsh is dead, but someone still owns the copyright. Even so - while I wouldn't do that myself (not least because I'm not keen on slavish copying) I think you'd be in a lot more trouble if you painted from stills of, say, Guns N' Roses than you'd be from making paintings based on photos of Churchill, Hitler, or Groucho Marx - partly because there are tens of thousands of the last three, partly because the photographers are no longer with us: the risk diminishes to some extent with familiarity. Paint from any known image, and you run a risk: the extent of that risk is related to the profitability of exploiting the image - you make the calculation, you take the risk. But if the image is more than 50 years old, as yours are - you're nearly always safe. If in doubt, acknowledge the source.