A painting a day
One great painting a day, in the order they were made.
The rest of this site is about what art costs. This corner is about why people pay. Every day a new painting appears at the top of the front page, in grey until you reach for it. Click it and you get its story, the details to look for, and one thing you probably did not know.
The list runs in date order, from 1434 to 1913. One step a day, then it starts again — so a week of visits is a week of art history, in order. Every reader sees the same painting on the same day.
The list
38 paintings · 1434–1913 · all in the public domain
| No. | Painting | Artist | Date | Where to see it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Arnolfini Portrait | Jan van Eyck | 1434 | The National Gallery, London |
| 2 | The Birth of Venus | Sandro Botticelli | c. 1484–1486 | Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
| 3 | The Garden of Earthly Delights | Hieronymus Bosch | c. 1490–1510 | Museo del Prado, Madrid |
| 4 | Mona Lisa | Leonardo da Vinci | c. 1503–1519 | Musée du Louvre, Paris |
| 5 | The Creation of Adam | Michelangelo | c. 1508–1512 | Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican City |
| 6 | The Ambassadors | Hans Holbein the Younger | 1533 | The National Gallery, London |
| 7 | The Hunters in the Snow | Pieter Bruegel the Elder | 1565 | Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
| 8 | The Calling of Saint Matthew | Caravaggio | 1599–1600 | Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome |
| 9 | Judith Slaying Holofernes | Artemisia Gentileschi | c. 1612–1613 | Museo di Capodimonte, Naples |
| 10 | The Night Watch | Rembrandt van Rijn | 1642 | Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
| 11 | Las Meninas | Diego Velázquez | 1656 | Museo del Prado, Madrid |
| 12 | The Milkmaid | Johannes Vermeer | c. 1658–1660 | Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
| 13 | Girl with a Pearl Earring today | Johannes Vermeer | c. 1665 | Mauritshuis, The Hague |
| 14 | Self-Portrait with Two Circles | Rembrandt van Rijn | c. 1665–1669 | Kenwood House, London |
| 15 | The Swing | Jean-Honoré Fragonard | c. 1767 | The Wallace Collection, London |
| 16 | The Third of May 1808 | Francisco Goya | 1814 | Museo del Prado, Madrid |
| 17 | Wanderer above the Sea of Fog | Caspar David Friedrich | c. 1818 | Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg |
| 18 | The Raft of the Medusa | Théodore Géricault | 1818–1819 | Musée du Louvre, Paris |
| 19 | The Hay Wain | John Constable | 1821 | The National Gallery, London |
| 20 | Liberty Leading the People | Eugène Delacroix | 1830 | Musée du Louvre, Paris |
| 21 | The Fighting Temeraire | J. M. W. Turner | 1839 | The National Gallery, London |
| 22 | Ophelia | John Everett Millais | 1851–1852 | Tate Britain, London |
| 23 | The Gleaners | Jean-François Millet | 1857 | Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
| 24 | Olympia | Édouard Manet | 1863 | Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
| 25 | Whistler's Mother (Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1) | James McNeill Whistler | 1871 | Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
| 26 | Impression, Sunrise | Claude Monet | 1872 | Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris |
| 27 | Bal du moulin de la Galette | Pierre-Auguste Renoir | 1876 | Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
| 28 | Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau) | John Singer Sargent | 1883–1884 | The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
| 29 | A Sunday on La Grande Jatte | Georges Seurat | 1884–1886 | Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago |
| 30 | Sunflowers | Vincent van Gogh | 1888 | The National Gallery, London |
| 31 | The Lady of Shalott | John William Waterhouse | 1888 | Tate Britain, London |
| 32 | The Starry Night | Vincent van Gogh | 1889 | Museum of Modern Art, New York |
| 33 | Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!) | Henri Rousseau | 1891 | The National Gallery, London |
| 34 | The Scream | Edvard Munch | 1893 | National Museum, Oslo |
| 35 | The Card Players | Paul Cézanne | c. 1894–1895 | Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
| 36 | Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? | Paul Gauguin | 1897–1898 | Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
| 37 | The Kiss | Gustav Klimt | 1907–1908 | Belvedere, Vienna |
| 38 | Composition VII | Wassily Kandinsky | 1913 | State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow |
Where they hang
Seeing one in the room is a different thing from seeing it on a screen. Every London painting on this list is free to visit: the National Gallery, Tate Britain, the Wallace Collection and Kenwood charge nothing.
London 10 · Paris 9 · Madrid 3 · Amsterdam 2 · New York 2 · Vienna 2 · Boston 1 · Chicago 1 · Florence 1 · Hamburg 1 · Moscow 1 · Naples 1 · Oslo 1 · Rome 1 · The Hague 1 · Vatican City 1
How to look at a painting
- Look before you read. Give the picture a full minute before the label. Most museum visitors give a painting less than thirty seconds.
- Find the light. Where does it come from, and what does it pick out? Painters use light to tell you what matters — Caravaggio’s beam, Goya’s lantern.
- Follow your eye. Notice where you look first, and where you go next. That path was planned.
- Check the corners. Painters hide things at the edges: Holbein’s crucifix, van Eyck’s signature, Gauguin’s title.
- Ask who paid. Most of these were made to order. Who wanted it, and what did they want it to say? A painting was a purchase before it was a masterpiece.
- Go and see it. Size changes everything. The Raft of the Medusa is about 5 by 7 metres; the Girl with a Pearl Earring is under half a metre tall.
Why we are allowed to show these
The painting. In the UK, copyright lasts for the artist’s life plus 70 years. Every artist here died long before that line — the most recent, in 1944 — so every painting is in the public domain. Each painting’s page shows the year it would be free under today’s rules.
The photograph. A faithful photo of a flat, old painting is a copy, not a new work, so it does not create a new copyright. US courts said so in 1999, EU law says so since 2019, and the UK IPO’s guidance agrees.
The file. Every image comes from Wikimedia Commons, where each file is marked public domain or CC0 (no rights reserved). Each painting’s page links to its file there.
We store none of it. The pictures are not saved on this site. When a page needs one, our server asks Commons for it and passes it straight through; the network keeps a cached copy for a while. The words are ours.
How free art got free
- 1999In Bridgeman v. Corel, a US court rules that a faithful photograph of a public-domain painting is not a new work, so it carries no copyright of its own.
- 2004Wikimedia Commons opens: a free library of images anyone may reuse. Every picture on these pages comes from it.
- 2011The Google Art Project starts photographing museum paintings at enormous resolution. That is why many of the file names say “Google Art Project”.
- 2012The Rijksmuseum opens Rijksstudio and invites the public to download, reuse and even remix its masterpieces.
- 2017The Metropolitan Museum releases more than 375,000 images with no restrictions at all (CC0).
- 2018The Art Institute of Chicago follows with over 50,000 images.
- 2019The European Union writes the rule into law (Directive 2019/790, Article 14): a copy of a public-domain artwork stays in the public domain.
- 2020The Smithsonian releases 2.8 million images. The UK Intellectual Property Office’s guidance takes the same line: a simple digital copy of an old painting is unlikely to be a new copyright work.