Tukuk-OSThe Quiet Revolution in Museum Storage Rooms
In 2017 the Metropolitan Museum of Art made a decision that changed what "visiting a museum online" means: it placed its entire public-domain collection — over 400,000 works at last count — into Open Access. Photographs of Egyptian mummy cases, Dutch Golden Age portraits, Japanese woodblock prints and Assyrian palace reliefs, released under terms that require nothing of you. No permission. No attribution legally required. No fee, commercial or otherwise.
Other institutions followed: the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian (for much of its collection), the Rijksmuseum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The result is that some of the world's most famous images are now freer to use than a stock-photo site's licensed alternatives.
Public Domain Is Not a Licence — It Is the Absence of One
The key concept: these works are in the public domain, meaning copyright has expired or never applied. The museum's photograph of a 2,000-year-old Roman bust is a separate question from the bust itself. A faithful photograph of a flat, public-domain painting generally produces no new copyright in most countries, because there is no creative choice left to make — the lighting and angle are dictated by the object. That is why museums can afford to release these images under CC0 (the strongest "no rights reserved" tool): they are largely giving up claims that were weak anyway.
Three terms worth distinguishing precisely:
- Public domain: no copyright subsists in the work. You may do anything, including sell prints.
- CC0 / Open Access: the rights-holder explicitly waives all rights. Behaviourally identical to public domain for the user.
- CC BY / "non-commercial": still copyrighted; you may use it subject to conditions — usually attribution, sometimes no money. These are common in museum-adjacent collections and are the ones that catch people out.
The fine print that survives: museums may ask (not require) that you credit them, and they control on-site photography of three-dimensional or recently conserved works differently. "Asking nicely" and "legally enforcing" are not the same sentence, and Open Access museums have settled which one they mean.
Why a Painting's Date, Not Its Fame, Decides Everything
Copyright term is a calendar calculation. In most of the world, copyright runs for the author's life plus 50 or 70 years. A Vermeer (died 1675) has been free for centuries. A Mondrian (died 1944) entered the public domain in the EU on 1 January 2015. A Picasso (died 1973) will not be free in much of the world until 2044 or later. Fame tells you nothing; the death date tells you everything — which is why "it's old, so it's free" is a heuristic that fails exactly on the artists people most want to reuse.
And rules differ by country: the US keys off publication dates before 1978 and life-plus-70 after, which is why the same artwork can be free in the EU and still under copyright in the US (the "rule of the shorter term" and its exceptions make this genuinely messy). When in doubt, use works whose authors died before 1950 — long free under any rule.
What People Actually Do With It
The uses that were illegal-with-a-ceaseletter a generation ago are now routine: art-history students annotating slides at full resolution, designers building mood boards from 8,000-pixel originals rather than thumbnails, teachers printing murals for classroom walls, developers training image models on licensed-clean data, and small shops selling prints of Rembrandt drawings without owing anyone a cent. The Met's Open Access downloads passed 20 million in a few years — the demand was never the mystery; the supply was.
Where to Start Browsing
Tukuk's Free Art Gallery pulls directly from the Met's Open Access API — no key, no middleman — organised into collection walkthroughs like Ancient Egypt, Impressionism and Japanese Prints, with each object page carrying its accession number and terms so you can verify the licence yourself instead of trusting a repost. Every image on those pages is one you can download, remix, print or publish. Legally.