I have been noticing 'Getty Images' on the bottom of a lot of pictures turning up in the media, for example in the Financial Times and on Microsoft News. This morning I was moved to check.
It seems that the first big Getty was John Paul Getty, 1892-1976. He did very well out of oil, not least because of making a big deal with the Saudis in 1949. It probably helped that he spoke Arabic although I yet to run down how that came to be. See reference 1. Founded the Getty museum, which makes good quality digital images of its collection freely available, with a Cézanne sample included above. One-time owner of Sutton Place, probably the fanciest stately home in Surrey which is not open to the public. See also references 2 and 3.
His grandson, Mark Getty, born in Rome and presently living there, co-founded Getty Images which, according to Wikipedia 'is the world's leading supplier of imagery for the media, corporate, and advertising sectors'. Lately a banker. Lately the chairman of the trustees of the National Gallery. See reference 4.
And Getty Images, to judge by a quick foray into reference 5, is indeed a serious operation. Quite up for delivering good quality images of, for example, obscure vegetables like parsnips and chard. But while you can scrape quite a decent freebie off your screen if you don't mind a discrete Getty logo in the middle of it, you have to pay quite serious money if you want the real thing. And I dare say they are quite protective of their intellectual property rights or whatever it is you have of photographs.
PS: I wonder whether they have a special relationship with Google Images to facilitate customer searches of what looks to be a very large collection of images?
Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Paul_Getty.
Reference 2: https://www.getty.edu/museum/.
Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/06/mrs-seacole.html.
Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Getty.
Reference 5: https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/.
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