Tukuk-OSThe Free Art Gallery
Public-domain masterpieces · straight from The Met’s open collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has placed hundreds of thousands of its works into the public domain — 5,000 years of art from a dozen curatorial departments, photographed in high resolution and free to view, study and download. This gallery reads straight from the museum’s open-collection API: ten curated doors below, each a living wall of real objects.
10 collections, door by door
🌻 Post-Impressionism
The years after Impressionism when painters kept its light but added structure, symbol and raw emotion — Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat and Cézanne.
🌊 Japanese Woodblock Prints
Ukiyo-e — floating-world prints of the Edo period: landscapes, actors and tales cut in cherry wood and pulled by hand, one colour block at a time.
🪦 Ancient Egypt
Five thousand years along the Nile — painted reliefs, jewellery, sculpture and daily objects from tombs and temples.
🏛️ Greek & Roman Antiquities
Marble and terracotta from the classical world: vases with black-figure painting, portrait busts, bronzes and grave markers.
🎨 Impressionism
Plein-air light and broken brushwork — the 1860s–1880s revolution that taught the eye to paint rather than the memory.
🌙 Dutch Masters
The 17th-century Golden Age: Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro, Vermeer’s quiet interiors, portraits and still lives of a new merchant republic.
🕌 Art of the Islamic World
Calligraphy, metalwork, ceramics and carpet design from Spain to India — geometry and writing as the highest decorative arts.
📷 Photographs
The Met’s photography department from the 1840s to today — pictorialism, street, documentary and concept.
⚔️ Knights: Arms & Armor
Field armour, tournament gear and blades — engineering you can wear, decorated like jewellery.
🟥 Modern Art
Cubism, Fauvism and abstraction — the early-1900s break from resemblance that split art history open.
Why “open access” matters
A public-domain artwork belongs to everyone: no licence to read, no watermarked thumbnail, no permission email. Seeing a Vermeer at full resolution — brush hairs, canvas weave, the exact lead-white of a collar — is the difference between reading about art and meeting it. The Met switched this on in 2017 and has kept widening it; every image here is served from their own servers.