museum-art: Public-Domain Artwork for Visuals

museum-art: Public-Domain Artwork for Visuals

Standing rule (adopted 2026-07-24, from Eric Li's post on museum open-access): whenever a visual needs a real image with aesthetic weight, source public-domain museum artwork first - over AI-generated imagery and over generic stock. Curated, historically significant art reads as credible and sophisticated; AI-gen reads as slop. This stacks with, and reinforces, the no-ai-slop skill and your house image style. It does NOT replace the generative editorial-illustrations skill (that owns claim-driven diagrams/figures) or your house chart style - use museum art for photographic/hero/decorative/mood imagery, generative figures for data and concept diagrams.

When to reach for this

• Blog post hero images, section breaks, mood imagery (the blog-publish image step).
• Deck/slide backgrounds and section dividers, social cards, essay figures, spec cover art.
• Any time the instinct is "generate an image" for something decorative or evocative. Stop and pull a real painting instead.
• NOT for: product screenshots, UI mockups, data charts, logos, or claim-driven explanatory diagrams (those are editorial-illustrations / real captures).

Decision: which source

1. Met -> Cleveland -> SMK first. All keyless, one JSON hop, CC0/PD, broad collections. Fastest path to a hi-res image.
2. Need Dutch/Flemish masters or decorative arts? Rijksmuseum (keyless, 3 hops).
3. Need European antiquities/photography and keyword isn't essential? Getty (keyless, SPARQL).
4. Nothing fits, or you want a cross-museum search? Wikimedia Commons API (keyless aggregator, normalized license metadata) is the best general fallback.
5. "Historical illustration/engraving/old photo" rather than fine-art painting? Go straight to Internet Archive or Wikimedia Commons.
6. Science/health/medical essay figure? Wellcome Collection (keyless, CC0/PD).

How to fetch in THIS environment

• Use WebFetch to hit the JSON search endpoint, then WebFetch/download the returned image URL. These APIs are server-side reachable; no browser needed.
• Exception - Art Institute of Chicago images: the JSON API (api.artic.edu) is fine, but the image host www.artic.edu/iiif/... 403s scripted/curl fetches via a Cloudflare bot challenge. Use the JSON metadata from AIC, but download the actual image through a real/headless browser (browser-harness) or prefer a different museum for the image bytes.
• Always filter for public domain in the query AND spot-check the per-image license flag before shipping (see Licensing).

Freshness over caching (mandatory)

Fetch fresh per need. Do NOT build a reusable local pool of downloaded images to draw from. A small cached set gets reused everywhere and becomes the new "same stock photo on every post" - sameness is a form of slop, and the variety of a huge open collection is the entire point. Fetching is keyless and sub-second, so there is no cost reason to cache pixels.

• Cache recipes/metadata, not images - that is what this skill's references/ already are.
• Commit an image only into the specific artifact that uses it (a post's assets/, a deck's media) once chosen - for provenance and offline builds. That is an artifact asset, never a shared library other artifacts pull from.
• Each new visual = a fresh query. Vary the search terms and the source museum so consecutive posts do not converge on the same few crowd-pleasers.

Verified keyless recipes (2026-07-24, all live-tested)

1. The Met - best all-around default

• Base: https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/public/collection/v1/ - no key, 80 req/s, CC0 where isPublicDomain:true.
• Search: GET /search?q=<term>&hasImages=true&isPublicDomain=true -> {total, objectIDs[]}
• Object: GET /objects/{id} -> read primaryImage (full-res JPEG, static, no IIIF hop) or primaryImageSmall (web-large).
• Example: https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/public/collection/v1/search?q=sunflowers&hasImages=true&isPublicDomain=true

2. Cleveland Museum of Art - only one with archival TIFF

• Base: https://openaccess-api.clevelandart.org/api/artworks/ - no key, CC0.
• Search: GET /api/artworks/?cc0=1&has_image=1&limit=10 (add &q=monet, &skip=10).