Articles

Short articles about public domain pictures you can download and use.

• The Great Wave off Kanagawa

  Hokusai’s famous ukiyo-e woodblock print, why so many different versions exist, and how to download the public-domain photos from the Art Institute of Chicago.

  

• Monet’s water lilies

  Monet spent twenty-five years painting the pond at Giverny. These public-domain canvases show the change from the footbridge to the late water lilies, including the years his cataracts changed his color.

  

• Edvard Munch’s The Scream

  The sky, the diary, and the difference between the 1893 painting in Oslo and the 1895 lithograph you can download here.

  

• Four pictures by Vincent van Gogh

  Two cut sunflowers from Paris in 1887, Wheat Field with Cypresses, Green Wheat Fields at Auvers, and the 1885 Potato Eaters lithograph.

  

• Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake

  Hiroshige’s 1857 rain print from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Cleveland has two CC0 impressions. Van Gogh painted his own version in 1887.

  

• Repeating patterns by Jones, Voysey, and Furuya Kōrin

  A Greek plate from Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament, an 1893 Essex & Co. wallpaper border, and a vine from Furuya Kōrin’s Shin bijutsukai.

  

• Three NASA pictures of Earth

  Khurdopin Glacier from orbit, Mount Unzen from the shuttle Atlantis, and a bee in the wildflowers at Kennedy Space Center.

  

• Mary Cassatt: The Boating Party and The Bath

  An 1893–94 oil of a woman, a baby, and a boatman, and a color print from Cassatt’s 1891 set of ten. Both are free to download.

  

• How to use these pictures

  What public domain and CC0 mean here, why a print is not the same as a painting, and how to use these images in personal or commercial work.