6 Best Free Sites for Public Domain Paintings in 2026

A painting is in the public domain when its copyright has run out, or when it never had one. From then on, anyone can copy it, print it, change it or sell it without asking. In the United States in 2026, that covers every work published before January 1, 1931. In the European Union and the United Kingdom, the clock starts when the artist dies. Both rules free the Mona Lisa, The Starry Night and the other famous paintings in this guide. Here you will learn how public domain paintings work, but this isn't legal advice. If you plan to sell something, check with a copyright lawyer first. Further down, a chart puts six free museum sites side by side and says what each one lets you do with its files.

What makes a painting public domain in the United States

The U.S. Copyright Office gives the cutoff in its guide to how long copyright lasts. It says that "all works published in the United States before January 1, 1931, are in the public domain." That date comes from an old system with two terms. Before 1978, a copyright lasted 28 years, and the owner could renew it once. Later laws made the second term 67 years long. That gives a top limit of 95 years, counted to the end of the year. So in 2026, anything published in 1930 or earlier is free to use. Cornell University draws the same 1931 line for works first published in other countries.

For a painting, the hard word is "published." The law asks if the art was shared with the public. It counts if the painting was shown with no rules against copying it. It also counts if it was printed with permission in a magazine or offered for sale. But a canvas that stayed in the studio, or that only a few people saw, wasn't published. With older art, it is often hard to tell when that first happened.

Paintings that were never published follow a different clock. Some works were made before 1978 but never published or signed up with the Copyright Office. They are usually protected for the artist's life plus 70 years. But none of them could lose that protection before the end of 2002. In 2026 that gives a simple rule: an unpublished painting is free if its painter died before 1956. So an old painting that never left a private collection is just as free as one that hung in a public show.

Two more details settle close cases. American artists had to follow two steps to keep the full term. First they had to put a copyright notice on the work when it was published. Then they had to renew it after 28 years. If an American artist never sent in the renewal, the painting became public domain early. Artists from other countries are treated differently, because a 1996 rule gave copyright back to some foreign works. That is why painters like Mondrian and Klee keep the full term without a notice or a renewal.

Grant Wood's American Gothic shows how this works. It dates from 1930, but it didn't become free on January 1, 2026. Duke University's law school explains why it was left off the 2026 list. Wood was American, and no one renewed the copyright on his painting. So it became public domain long before, back in 1958. Our story of the real Iowa house behind American Gothic tells the rest.

US copyright terms at a glance

The rule in the EU, the UK and other countries

Most of the rest of the world counts from the artist's death, not from the date a work came out. A European Union law protects art for the artist's life and 70 more years. It doesn't matter when the public first saw the work. The UK also gives art 70 years after the artist's death. In both places, the 70 years start at the end of the year the artist died. So in 2026, the work of every painter who died in 1955 or earlier is free there. Around the world, the lowest limit comes from a treaty called the Berne Convention. It asks for at least the artist's life plus 50 years.

That is why one picture can be free in one country and protected in another. Picasso died in 1973, so his paintings stay protected in the EU and the UK through 2043. That includes the ones published before 1931, even though those are free in the United States. Our article on whether you can legally copy Picasso's paintings looks at his case in detail.

Famous paintings in the public domain, and where their official images are

All six artists below died in the 1800s or earlier. So under the U.S., EU and UK rules, none of these works has a copyright. What changes from place to place is the photo. Each museum sets its own rules for the image file it puts online. Some let you use it for free in any way, and others make you pay a photo agency.

Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci (1503–1519)

Leonardo had started the Mona Lisa by October 1503. We know that because a man named Agostino Vespucci wrote about it that month in the margin of a book. The book is now in Heidelberg, Germany, where the note was found in 2005. Leonardo kept the portrait to work on until he died, and it was still unfinished then. Even so, the king of France, Francis I, very probably got it in 1518. You can order a Mona Lisa painted by hand in oil from our studio.

The Louvre lets you download its photo of the painting from its website. But you may only reuse it for free for private use, teaching or research. Any business use, from products to most printed books, needs a written request and a fee. That fee goes to the photo agency of the Rmn-Grand Palais.

The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh (1889)

Van Gogh painted The Starry Night in June 1889 at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, a hospital in the French town of Saint-Rémy. He worked on it over several sittings in the daytime. The village below the hills, though, couldn't be seen from his window. The Museum of Modern Art in New York got the painting in 1941.

MoMA's page for it has no download button. To print a picture of it, the museum sends you to one of two photo agencies. In North America it is Art Resource, and everywhere else it is Scala Archives. Van Gogh's own copyright ended long ago, as our article on whether Van Gogh's paintings are free to use explains. You can also order The Starry Night as a hand-painted canvas.

The original and our hand-painted copy

The original

Our reproduction, painted by hand in oil

Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer (about 1665)

Girl with a Pearl Earring isn't a portrait of a real person. It is a tronie, which is a picture of a made-up type of person. Here it is a girl in clothes from far away, with a turban and a pearl that is almost too big to be real. Our studio can paint a copy of her by hand for you.

The Mauritshuis in The Hague takes a middle path with its photos. You can download every image on its website in high quality, as long as you don't make money from it. That covers study, teaching, personal blogs and social media. Businesses are asked to contact the museum's marketing team first.

The Night Watch, Rembrandt (1642)

Rembrandt made The Night Watch for the hall of a group of Amsterdam's citizen guards. It is his biggest and most famous canvas, and it was once even bigger. In 1715 four pieces were cut off it. Rembrandt was also the first painter to show the people in a group portrait actually doing something. Here a captain is telling his lieutenant to start the men marching.

The Rijksmuseum's page for the painting has a download button. The image is marked Public Domain, so anyone can reuse the file freely. A painted copy has to be made smaller, because the original is more than four and a half meters wide. Ours is listed as The Nightwatch.

The original and our hand-painted copy

The original

Our reproduction, painted by hand in oil

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat (1884–86)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Seurat painted A Sunday on La Grande Jatte from 1884 to 1886. Then he added its painted border in 1888 and 1889. The canvas is more than three meters wide, and it hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago. Our studio paints copies of it by hand in oil.

The museum marks the painting as public domain, and it shares the photo under CC0. That is a free license, and it lets anyone use the file from the painting's page for any purpose at all.

The Great Wave off Kanagawa, Katsushika Hokusai (about 1830–32)

The Great Wave is a woodblock print, not a painting. It is made of ink and color on paper, and the Met's copy came to the museum in 1929. Hokusai played with distance in this print. Mount Fuji, the grandest mountain in Japan, becomes a small triangle inside the curve of the wave. His landscapes also became famous for their blues, which came from indigo and from Prussian blue brought in from abroad. The Met's page marks the print Public Domain, and you can download it right there.

Six free sites for public domain paintings, compared

Each total is what the site says about itself, as quoted in this guide. The Smithsonian's figure counts 3D items and archives as well as art, and the Rijksmuseum gives no total.

Three of the six also own a painting from this guide. The Met has The Great Wave off Kanagawa, the Art Institute has A Sunday on La Grande Jatte and the Rijksmuseum has The Night Watch.

Several big museums give away images of public domain paintings, with no fee and no need to ask. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York began its open access program in February 2017. Today it shares more than 492,000 images under CC0. In its online collection, look for the "OA" sign at the lower left of an image. The Art Institute of Chicago shares over 50,000 images under CC0 too. To find them, type "public domain" or "CC0" into its search, or tick the public domain box.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington offers more than 60,000 images. You can download them right from each artwork's page, and there are no fees of any kind. The Rijksmuseum puts a Public Domain or CC0 note under the copyright line of much of its online collection. Its rules let you use those files for business without asking.

Smithsonian Open Access started in February 2020 with 2.8 million items. Now it offers more than 5.2 million 2D and 3D items from its museums, libraries, archives and the National Zoo. The Getty started its own program in 2013. Since then it has given away more than 160,000 images of public domain art and archives.

Whichever site you use, download from the museum's own page for the artwork, not from an image search. Keep the page's web address with the file, because that page holds the rights note for that image. The Art Institute of Chicago even lets computer programs search its collection. On October 16, 2026, its tool for programs listed 62,119 artworks marked as public domain. The data it sends back is free to use too, except for the description field.

Can a museum own the photo of a public domain painting?

In the United States, the answer is usually no. A faithful photo of a flat public domain painting generally gets no new copyright. In 1999 Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, a federal judge in New York, ruled in Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. He decided that exact photos of public domain art can't have a copyright, because they aren't original. In his ruling, he put it this way:

“But ‘slavish copying,’ although doubtless requiring technical skill and effort, does not qualify.”

"Slavish copying" means copying something exactly, without adding anything new. But the ruling came from a single trial court in New York. That is worth knowing before you count on it somewhere else.

The European Union later wrote the same idea into law. Under a 2019 rule, once the copyright on a work of art has run out, a copy of it isn't protected either. The only exception is a copy that is creative on its own, or in the law's words, "the author's own intellectual creation." Museums still post their own terms for the files on their websites. So read the rules on the page you download from. For hand-painted copies, our guides on whether replica paintings are legal and whether you can sell a replica painting go further.

From a museum file to a canvas on the wall

A free download is the right tool for a screen, a slide or a study print, but it is still a photo of paint. A copy painted by hand in oil on canvas has real brushstrokes. Five of the paintings above link to their hand-painted versions. These pictures show up in games too. Our guide to the art in Animal Crossing matches each painting in the game's museum to the real masterpiece behind it. Another guide tells the stories behind nine famous French paintings.

Sources

• U.S. Copyright Office, Circular 15A: Duration of Copyright (revised April 2026)
• Cornell University Library, Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States
• Duke Law, Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Public Domain Day 2026
• EUR-Lex, Directive 2006/116/EC on the term of protection of copyright
• GOV.UK, How long copyright lasts
• legislation.gov.uk, Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, section 12
• WIPO, Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works
• The Met, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)
• Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., 36 F. Supp. 2d 191 (S.D.N.Y. 1999), on CourtListener
• EUR-Lex, Directive (EU) 2019/790 on copyright in the Digital Single Market (Article 14)
• Musée du Louvre, Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, known as the Mona Lisa
• Musée du Louvre, Collections website Terms of Use
• MoMA, Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night
• Mauritshuis, Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring
• Rijksmuseum, The Night Watch (SK-C-5)
• Art Institute of Chicago, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884 (collection API record)
• The Met, Katsushika Hokusai, Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave)
• The Met, Open Access
• Art Institute of Chicago, Open Access Images
• Art Institute of Chicago, Public API documentation
• National Gallery of Art, Free Images and Open Access
• Rijksmuseum, Information and Data Policy
• Smithsonian Open Access
• Smithsonian Open Access, FAQ
• Getty, Open Content Program