Free to download public domain art, posters and illustrations

Check out the Public Domain Review [0]. They have an excellent collection of free and public domain resources as well as a print shop with loads of really interesting art.

Also, as a shameless plug, I sell high-quality giclee prints of a small but growing amount of public domain art on Etsy [1].

[0] https://publicdomainreview.org

[1] https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/TheDoveAndTheSeagull

aor215• 6 years ago

I used to work at a company called Meural that has a solution. I left after they were acquired and it looks like they've been pretty corporatized since then, but I suspect the frames themselves still look great.

https://www.netgear.com/home/digital-art-canvas

robin_reala2• 6 years ago

This was posted a couple of months ago, and I still stand by my comment I made at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24745789 . The biggest problem with Artvee is that they don’t link to the source of the image (and even claim that they themselves are licensing the image to you), which means you need to take them on their word that it’s public domain. For most scenarios that’s not good enough, and means a bunch more discovery.

app4soft• 6 years ago

The biggest problem with Artvee is that they don’t link to the source of the image

That is why Open Clip Art[0] is much better place to get Public Domain vector art.

[0] https://openclipart.org

rectang• 6 years ago

Documenting provenance is hard.

I'm considering releasing some projects under CC0, and I would like users to feel highly confident about using the material, which for anything I'm the sole author of would be fine because I have a decent reputation (past ASF board member). However, accepting contributions from others would require assessing their right to contribute and documenting it.

Any patches which show up from a previously unknown author are potentially a curse rather than a blessing. At the least, I have to vet the author. If I can't do that, or don't want to spend the effort, then not only can I not use the contribution, if I want to write my own patch I have to do in such a way to avoid creating a derivative work. I'd rather just get a feature request, it's less trouble!

I'd like to put the CC0 projects on Github for the convenience of users, but the problem is that Github's culture of contribution doesn't meet my requirements and you can't turn off pull requests short of "archiving" the repo. I might do something like maintain the project elsewhere and put an archived mirror on Github, running a script once per day which unarchives the repo, pushes changes, and rearchives the repo...

Public domain art aggregator sites like Artvee aren't ever going to be able to offer a level of care like this. Users who are serious about copyright need to be able to verify provenance to high degree of confidence, and Artvee can't vet uploads to that standard or they wouldn't have any inventory.

robin_reala2• 6 years ago

For what it’s worth, the project I contribute to produces CC0 work on Github,[1] but the source material goes through a PD vetting process, and it is (should be?) obvious to contributors given the overall licence that contributions will also be CC0 licensed.

[1] https://github.com/standardebooks/

chrisweekly2• 6 years ago

Your points about provenance are valid, but regarding publishing, if you don't want contributions couldn't you maintain a -_private_ repo, and publish the assets as a static website? I guess I don't understand the coupling of "how the 'source' assets are managed (in git)" with "how the assets are made available to the public".

exolymph• 6 years ago

Came here to say the same thing, that I'm still irritated by the lack of sourcing.

swyx4• 6 years ago

i collect sites like these - here are some more https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy/blob/master/README.md#sto... feel free to add to my list

chrisweekly2• 6 years ago

Thanks! Bookmarked.

Also, I just read https://www.swyx.io/time-management-randy-pausch/ which was fantastic. Looking fwd to more of your excellent writing.

swyx4• 6 years ago

thank you!

jonathanlb• 6 years ago

Awesome! I like your site as well, but the brightly-colored border makes me think that my screen is being shared (thanks to Zoom, Teams, and Meet).

swyx4• 6 years ago

ha thats unfortunate. i'll redesign in the holidays, stay tuned. thanks for feedback

x1798DE• 6 years ago

FYI, some of the sites on there that bill themselves (or have billed themselves) as "public domain" actually use proprietary licenses that are not compatible with public domain declarations. I find it very frustrating that "public domain photos" turns up unsplash, pexels, pixabay and a bunch of other sites that have licenses with terms like, "cannot be used to make the model look bad" and "cannot be used to create a competitor to our site".

For many use cases, these licenses are perfectly fine, but they aren't compatible with actual CC-0 declarations (or even CC-BY), so if you are trying to create permissively licensed derivatives, you must avoid them. It may be worth marking those ones with an asterisk or something to avoid misunderstandings.

swyx4• 6 years ago

yeah i hear you. not something i have bandwidth to track right now, but i would accept a PR to add disclaimers (could turn the whole thing into a table form).

i agree your concern is impt, its just not the level at which i operate this list right now

thraway123• 6 years ago

"unsplash . . . of course" lol!

0xbkt• 6 years ago

That's what I have been looking for since a long time. I really like having these classical paintings as my desktop background. Nice work!

codpiece2• 6 years ago

How is this possible? I saw a painting owned by a former client.

I was there when their collection was photographed and licensed to the Bettmann Archives, and you can be sure that they did NOT release the images.

colejohnson66• 6 years ago

Is it possible that someone stole it and uploaded it to a site like Flickr claiming it was public domain? I don’t know how this site’s images were collected.

racingmars• 6 years ago

If the painting itself is old enough to be out of copyright, then a photograph of it that is just a photograph of the work itself is not eligible for copyright protection. At least that's my understanding. It hasn't crossed the threshold of being a new creative work. But IANAL.

thraway123• 6 years ago

this is why i own a CANON PIXMA printer.

thraway123• 6 years ago

I was on M.I.T.'s campus a bunch. Are these the posters that are in the, um, main building you see on your way from the undergrad campus to the law school on your right? https://artvee.com/collection/dietmar-winklers-mit-posters/

Free to download public domain art, posters and illustrations

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