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About InspiredBy

InspiredBy is a way to wander through public-domain masterpieces by colour, theme, artist and period. Every palette, colour name, similarity and chart on the site is measured from the images by this site.

Where the art comes from

• Art Institute of Chicago: 2751 works, from the museum's public API. Images of works the museum marks is_public_domain are released under Creative Commons Zero (CC0); so is the API data we use (we do not use the museum's CC BY description texts).
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art: 704 works, from the Met Collection API. Works with isPublicDomain: true are part of the Met's Open Access programme, released under CC0.
• Cleveland Museum of Art: 248 works, from its Open Access API; works with share_license_status: CC0 are released under CC0.
• SMK – National Gallery of Denmark: 141 works, from the SMK Open API; works marked public_domain are released under the Public Domain Mark. Where SMK gives no English title, we translated the Danish one and show the original too.
• Library of Congress: 235 posters, most from the Work Projects Administration Poster Collection, made by the WPA's Federal Art Project and other federal programmes, so US government works; the rest are artists' posters published before 1931 by artists who died before 1956. For every poster the Library states no known restrictions on publication.
• Wikimedia Commons: 276 photographs of public-domain paintings held by museums worldwide (each page names the holder). We take a file only when it carries both an EU and a US public-domain template, as set out in the licence rules.
• National Gallery of Art, Washington: 505 works, from the gallery's open data (CC0); we take only works whose image is marked open access (openaccess = 1), which the gallery releases under CC0.
• Rijksmuseum: 80 works, from the museum's open data APIs; images of public-domain works are released under CC0.
• Smithsonian Institution: 64 works from Smithsonian Open Access, only records marked CC0.
• Wikidata (CC0): artists' birth and death dates and places, matched by the Getty ULAN identifier or Wikidata link the museums give, or else by exact name together with both birth and death years, never by name alone.

Each work's page names its museum and credit line and links to the source's own record, as the museums ask. InspiredBy is independent: none of these institutions endorses or sponsors it.

How works are chosen

• Paintings first: every public-domain painting with an image at least 900 px on its short side at the Art Institute, and every public-domain painting among the Met's highlighted works.
• Prints, photographs and drawings: these collections run to tens of thousands of sheets, so we take them from a fixed list of artists whose work in these media is widely studied (Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utamaro, Rembrandt, Dürer, Goya, Whistler, Cassatt, Julia Margaret Cameron, Stieglitz, Fox Talbot, Winslow Homer, Sargent, Degas and others), at most 14–18 per artist.
• Decorative arts and sculpture: the Met's public-domain highlights in the American Wing and Asian Art.
• Colour rounds (added October 2026): about 1957 works: first late 19th and early 20th century art, from Fauvism and Expressionism to early abstraction and the WPA posters; then a second round of strongly coloured paintings, posters, Japanese woodblock prints and textile designs, chosen with our palette measurements to bring blues, reds, yellows, purples and other strong colours into a collection that was mostly varnish-brown and paper-cream. Each must be public domain in both the US and the EU (the artist died before 1956), CC0, or a US government work; see the licence rules.
• A work is published only while its museum flags it public domain. The flag is read when the record is fetched and re-checked every day, about 60 records a day, so the whole set is re-checked about every six weeks. A work that loses the flag is removed at the next build.

Browse by type: painting (2868), print (1296), photograph (163), drawing & watercolour (446), decorative arts & sculpture (231).

What changes every day

At 01:30 each night the site re-checks part of the collection with the museums, picks a new artwork of the day, updates on this day, and rebuilds every page.

Images

Images are downloaded once from the museums, re-encoded on our server at 1280 px and 500 px, and served from this site, so your browser never contacts a third party. For the full-resolution image, follow the link to the museum on each work's page.