What this is
Landscapes Directory is an independent, non-commercial project that aggregates over 2,600 historical landscape paintings from museum open-access programs into a single, browsable, downloadable archive. Every work in this directory is in the public domain — free to download, share, remix, and reuse for any purpose, including commercial use, without permission or attribution required.
The site is hand-curated for landscape art specifically: scenes of nature, countryside, mountains, seascapes, urban vistas, and skies, spanning from the 15th century to the early 20th century.
Why this exists
Public-domain art belongs to everyone, but it lives scattered across dozens of museum websites, each with its own interface, search system, and download conventions. Landscapes Directory was built to make this corner of the public commons easy to explore: one search, one filter, one click to download, and one consistent metadata format across institutions.
The intended audience is broad: students, educators, designers, researchers, writers, and anyone who loves landscape painting and wants to use it freely.
Where the works come from
Every painting here is sourced from an institutional open-access program:
- Wikimedia Commons — community-curated public-domain media.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art — over 490,000 images released under Creative Commons Zero.
- Cleveland Museum of Art — Open Access program with high-resolution images of public-domain works.
- Art Institute of Chicago — Open Access program for public-domain artworks.
All images are loaded directly from each museum's CDN. Landscapes Directory does not mirror or re-host the images themselves; we only aggregate and present the metadata.
License & reuse
Paintings: All works in this archive are in the public domain. You can download, print, share, modify, and use them commercially — no attribution required. We mark every work with the Public Domain Mark.
Site code and design: Copyright Drice Roland. The interface, typography, layout, and search engine are not in the public domain.
Museum metadata: Title, artist, date, and dimension fields are sourced from the institutions listed above and remain attributable to them.
Contact & takedown
Spotted a wrong attribution, a typo, or an image that shouldn't be here? Get in touch: hello@landscapes.directory.
Security issues: see security.txt for our responsible disclosure policy.
Press / partnership inquiries: same email.
For administrators of URL filtering services
If your organization's URL filter has categorized landscapes.directory
as anything other than Arts, Education, or Reference,
please consider this a recategorization request. The site is:
- A non-commercial educational resource.
- Hosting only public-domain content from museum open-access programs.
- Free to access without authentication.
- Compliant with general-audience content guidelines.
Technical contact for verification: hello@landscapes.directory.
Colophon
Built with vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. No framework, no tracker bloat. Catalog stored in Supabase. Hosted on Vercel. Download bundles served from Cloudflare R2. Icons by Phosphor.