Masterpieces for everyone: how museums opened their collections
The Met, the Cleveland Museum of Art and Denmark’s SMK have released public-domain artworks for anyone to use. Here is why, and what it means.
A few years ago, using a high-quality image of a famous painting usually meant paying a licensing fee or settling for a blurry copy. Today many of the world's great museums publish their public-domain collections online in high resolution, free for anyone to download and reuse. Our Fine Art collection exists because of this movement.
Open Access in a sentence
When a museum adopts an “Open Access” policy, it releases its digital images of public-domain works, usually under the CC0 public domain dedication. That means anyone can use them for any purpose, including commercially, without asking or paying.
Some of the pioneers
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York launched its Open Access programme in 2017. It released hundreds of thousands of images of public-domain works under CC0, from Egyptian antiquities to European paintings.
- The Cleveland Museum of Art followed in 2019, releasing tens of thousands of high-resolution images, many at sizes large enough to print or to use on a 4K screen.
- SMK, the National Gallery of Denmark, publishes its public-domain paintings and prints openly, including a rich collection of Danish Golden Age landscapes.
Many other institutions, from national libraries to natural history museums, have adopted similar policies.
Why would a museum give its images away?
Museums exist to share culture. Charging for images of works whose copyright expired long ago made them harder to study, teach and enjoy. Open images now appear in classrooms, research papers, books, websites and, yes, on desktops. Many museums find that openness raises their profile and brings more visitors, both online and through the door.
What “public domain” means for art
A painting enters the public domain when its copyright expires. In many countries that happens 70 years after the artist's death, so the work of artists who died long ago is free. Courts in the United States have held that a faithful photograph of a two-dimensional artwork doesn't create a new copyright. The European Union adopted a similar rule in 2019 for reproductions of public-domain visual art. A museum's photograph of a public-domain painting is therefore free as well.
Works by modern artists who died more recently are a different matter. Their copyright usually still applies, which is why our Fine Art collection focuses on older works and only includes images that the museum itself marks as public domain.
Why paintings make wonderful wallpapers
Painters composed their landscapes deliberately: a strong horizon, light falling from one side, calm areas of sky. Those are exactly the qualities that make a good wallpaper. On a large screen you can see brushstrokes and canvas texture you would miss in a book. We present each work with its artist, museum and date, and link to the museum's own record so you can learn more.
Explore our Fine Art collection, or read how we handle image licensing across the whole site.
