- Renaissance
- Baroque
- Romanticism
- Impressionism
- Post-Impressionism
- Cubism
- Ukiyo-e
- Chinese Landscape Painting
- Chinese Bird-and-Flower Painting
- Chinese Figure Painting
- Chinese Freehand Ink Painting (Xieyi)
- Abstract Art
- Sculpture
- AI-Generated Art
- Blockchain & NFT Art
Renaissance
14th-16th century Europe rediscovered classical proportion, perspective and human anatomy — the foundation every later movement reacts to.
Mona Lisa
Leonardo spent years refining sfumato — the soft, smoke-like blending of tone that gives her expression its famous ambiguity. Imagine your own work described with that kind of care.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
The Birth of Venus
Painted on canvas rather than the wood panel typical of its era, this is one of the first large-scale mythological subjects in Western art since antiquity. We'd love to help tell the story behind your own work just as vividly.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
The School of Athens
A fresco crowded with history's great philosophers, each given the likeness of a Renaissance contemporary — Raphael's way of placing his own era inside the ancient one. A page like this can place your work inside a story too.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Arnolfini Portrait
Look closely at the convex mirror on the back wall — it reflects the whole room, including two figures standing where the viewer stands. That kind of hidden detail rewards a visitor who lingers, exactly what a well-built page invites.
Public domain · Wikimedia CommonsBaroque
Dramatic light, movement and emotional intensity, from Rome's churches to Amsterdam's guild halls.
Girl with a Pearl Earring
Often called the "Mona Lisa of the North," it isn't a portrait of a real person but a "tronie" — a study of an imagined face and expression. Sometimes the most compelling image is evocative, not literal; that's a choice worth making for your own gallery too.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
The Night Watch
The painting's real title is simply "The Militia Company of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq" — centuries of darkened varnish earned it the nickname "Night Watch" before a 20th-century cleaning revealed a bright daytime scene. Even a masterpiece needs the right presentation to be seen as it should be.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
The Calling of Saint Matthew
Caravaggio's signature "tenebrism" — figures emerging from near-total darkness into a single shaft of light — turned a quiet religious scene into real drama. Strong contrast and a clear focal point can do the same for how your own work is presented online.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Las Meninas
Velázquez painted himself into the scene, brush in hand, working on a canvas we can't see — and the mirror on the back wall reflects the King and Queen, standing exactly where we, the viewers, stand. A painting this aware of its own audience is a good reminder that presentation shapes how work is experienced.
Public domain · Wikimedia CommonsRomanticism
A reaction against Enlightenment order — nature, emotion and the individual imagination take centre stage.
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
The figure's face is turned away, so the viewer sees exactly what he sees — the painting invites you into the moment rather than just showing it to you. That's the same feeling we try to give visitors browsing a well-designed gallery page.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Liberty Leading the People
Painted the same year as the revolution it depicts, this became one of the most reproduced images of political struggle in Western art — proof that timing and a striking central figure can carry a whole story. Your own work deserves that same immediacy online.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
The Third of May 1808
Goya lit the doomed man in white almost like a spotlight, arms raised in a pose later echoed by countless anti-war images — an early example of a single figure becoming a universal symbol. Good composition still does that work today, on a screen instead of a canvas.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
The Fighting Temeraire
A veteran warship that helped win the Battle of Trafalgar is shown being towed to the scrapyard by a small, sooty steam tug — Turner's elegy for a fading age of sail, painted as industrialization was reshaping Britain. Even a farewell can be beautifully told, if the presentation is right.
Public domain · Wikimedia CommonsImpressionism
Painted quickly, outdoors, chasing shifting light rather than exact detail — and named, famously, as an insult.
Impression, Sunrise
A hostile critic mocking this painting's loose, sketch-like brushwork coined the word "Impressionism" as an insult — the movement wore it as a badge of honor ever since. Sometimes the boldest choice is the one that gets criticized first.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Luncheon of the Boating Party
Renoir painted this outdoor gathering of his own friends over several sittings across an entire summer, capturing the specific play of dappled light through a striped awning. Real relationships and real light are what make a scene feel alive, on canvas or on a page.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
The Dance Class
Degas was obsessed with unposed, in-between moments — dancers stretching, adjusting a slipper, caught mid-motion rather than performing for the viewer. That candid, behind-the-scenes feel is exactly what makes an artist's own studio or process page compelling to visitors.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Water Lily Pond
This is one of roughly 250 water-lily paintings Monet made in his own garden at Giverny over three decades — a body of work built around returning to the same subject and seeing it differently each time. A gallery organized by theme, like this one, is built on exactly that idea.
Public domain · Wikimedia CommonsPost-Impressionism
Impressionism's colour and spontaneity, pushed toward structure, symbolism and raw personal expression.
The Starry Night
Painted from memory and imagination inside an asylum, not from direct observation — the swirling sky reflects van Gogh's inner state as much as any night sky he actually saw. The most memorable work often comes from what an artist feels, not just what they observe.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
The Basket of Apples
Look closely and the table's edge doesn't quite line up — Cézanne deliberately painted the same still life from several slightly different viewpoints at once, an idea Picasso and Braque later pushed into Cubism. Small deliberate choices like that separate a memorable piece from a merely accurate one.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
Up close, the entire scene dissolves into thousands of individual dots of pure color — "pointillism" relies on the viewer's own eye to blend them into form and light from a distance. It's a reminder that how close, or far, someone views your work changes what they see.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Café Terrace at Night
Van Gogh used almost no black in this night scene, building the darkness instead from deep blues and greens — believed to be the first painting he signed with just his location and no date, treating the place itself as part of the work's identity. Where and how a piece is shown is never neutral.
Public domain · Wikimedia CommonsCubism
Multiple viewpoints collapsed into a single flattened plane — painting stops trying to look like a window.
Portrait of Pablo Picasso
Gris painted this tribute to his friend and fellow Cubist using the same fractured, multi-angle style Picasso himself pioneered — one artist honoring another by speaking in his own visual language. A good gallery page does something similar: it speaks in the artist's own visual language, not a generic template.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Landscape at Meudon
Gleizes co-wrote one of Cubism's first theoretical manifestos, and this landscape shows the idea in practice — a real place broken into geometric planes seen from several angles at once, rather than one fixed vantage point. Showing a body of work from more than one angle is exactly what a genre-organized gallery like this one is for.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Eiffel Tower
Delaunay painted the Eiffel Tower more than 30 times across his career, using fractured perspective and bold color to capture the sensation of a modern landmark rather than its exact geometry. Repetition with variation is a legitimate creative strategy — one your own gallery page could showcase too.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Still Life with Checked Tablecloth
Gris was known as the most methodical of the Cubists — friends called his precise, almost architectural approach "Cubism with a ruler." Careful, deliberate structure behind the scenes is what makes even a seemingly casual arrangement feel right.
Public domain · Wikimedia CommonsUkiyo-e
Japanese woodblock prints of everyday life and landscape that later reshaped European painting itself.
The Great Wave off Kanagawa
Part of Hokusai's series "Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji" — Fuji itself appears small in the background, dwarfed by the wave, which was the whole point: showing one subject through many different, sometimes surprising, framings. That's exactly the idea behind a movement gallery like this one.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Fine Wind, Clear Morning (Red Fuji)
Also from the "36 Views" series, this print shows Mount Fuji at a rare moment — dawn light turning its slopes red — using flat blocks of color that would later directly influence Van Gogh and other Western painters. Great work travels; a well-built page helps yours travel further.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge
The diagonal streaks of rain were carved as fine, separate printing lines — technically demanding work for the block-carvers, not just the artist — and this exact print is said to have directly inspired Van Gogh's own painted copy of it. That's the kind of reach good presentation can help any artist's work achieve.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Three Beauties of the Present Day
Utamaro was a master of "ōkubi-e" — large-head portraits zoomed in on subtle facial expression and mood rather than a full figure, an innovative close-up framing for its time. Choosing what to show close-up, and what to leave out, is a real editorial skill — one we help apply to how your own work is presented.
Public domain · Wikimedia CommonsChinese Landscape Painting
Classical Chinese ink and brush painting — landscapes, mountains and rivers rendered with a scholar's restraint, spanning the Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties.
Travelers Among Mountains and Streams
Look for the tiny travelers and pack mules on the path at the bottom — barely visible against the towering mountain, they set a scale so overwhelming the mountain feels almost alive. Fan Kuan reportedly lived in the mountains himself for years to study how light and mist behaved on rock. Direct observation, sustained over time, is what makes work like this endure.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Early Spring
Guo Xi wrote his own treatise on landscape painting, describing mountains as having a "front" and "back" like a living body — this painting puts that idea into practice, inviting the eye to travel through the scene as if walking a real path. A gallery, like a good landscape, should give a visitor somewhere to go, not just something to look at.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (detail)
This detail comes from a handscroll originally over six meters long, meant to be unrolled section by section rather than viewed all at once — painted by Huang Gongwang in his 70s over several years, revisiting it whenever inspiration struck. Great work doesn't always arrive on a deadline; a portfolio should be able to hold pieces made at very different paces.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Lofty Mount Lu
Shen Zhou painted this not from life, but as a tribute for his teacher's 70th birthday — the towering mountain is a visual metaphor for the teacher's moral stature, a tradition of painting-as-gift common in Chinese literati art. A piece can carry a story beyond just what's visible on the surface — worth telling that story alongside the image itself.
Public domain · Wikimedia CommonsChinese Bird-and-Flower Painting
A dedicated genre unto itself for over a thousand years — flowers, birds and small creatures observed with a naturalist's precision and a poet's restraint.
The Five-Color Parakeet
Painted by an emperor who ruled an empire yet found time to study a single bird's plumage feather by feather — Huizong founded the Imperial Painting Academy and set its standard: get the living creature exactly right, or don't paint it at all. That same standard — get the real thing right, not just presentable — is what separates a gallery visitors trust from one they scroll past.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Magpies and Hare
Two magpies scold a hare frozen mid-turn, startled by a sudden gust bending the grass sideways — Cui Bai broke with a century of stiff, static court convention to paint a single unrepeatable moment of weather and motion. Capturing the instant that will never happen quite that way again is what makes a piece feel alive instead of merely decorative.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Peonies
Yun Shouping revived the centuries-old "boneless" (没骨) technique — building a flower entirely from washes of color with no ink outline at all, so the petals seem to hold their own light. He turned to flower painting after deciding he couldn't out-paint the landscape masters of his own family circle; sometimes the strongest work comes from finding the arena where no one else is already better than you.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Snow Plum and Twin Cranes
Bian Jingzhao worked inside the Ming imperial court, where bird-and-flower painting doubled as visual language: cranes for longevity, plum blossom for endurance through winter — a whole message conveyed without a single word. A well-designed page can carry that same kind of meaning in its imagery alone, before a visitor reads a word of text.
Public domain · Wikimedia CommonsChinese Figure Painting
Court scenes, street life and mythic history — figures and faces used to tell a story, centuries before photography could.
Admonitions Scroll
Attributed to Gu Kaizhi, though the surviving scroll is now widely believed to be a later copy of his lost original — even so, it's one of the oldest paintings on silk to survive from China at all, illustrating a Confucian text on court etiquette scene by scene. A copy made with real care can carry nearly all the weight of the original; craftsmanship, not just novelty, is what makes something worth preserving.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Along the River During the Qingming Festival (detail)
The full scroll runs over 5 meters and includes more than 800 individually rendered people — merchants, boatmen, fortune tellers — each going about an ordinary day in the Song-dynasty capital. It rewards exactly the kind of visitor who lingers over small details, which is precisely who a well-built page is trying to hold onto.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Thirteen Emperors Scroll
Yan Liben painted rulers he never met, from dynasties centuries before his own, sizing each figure not by physical stature but by his own judgment of their historical importance — the more consequential the emperor, the larger he's drawn. Deciding what deserves the most visual weight on a page is exactly this kind of editorial judgment call.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Night Revels of Han Xizai
This copy preserves a composition whose original — reportedly commissioned so the emperor could secretly observe a suspect minister's private banquet — no longer survives at all. The commission itself was a kind of surveillance: painting as documentation of a real, specific evening, not an idealized scene. Sometimes the most valuable record of a place or event is simply an honest one.
Public domain · Wikimedia CommonsChinese Freehand Ink Painting (Xieyi)
"Sketching ideas," not copying appearances — loose, fast, expressive brushwork that prizes spirit and gesture over exact likeness.
Grapes
Xu Wei splashed and flicked ink across the paper fast enough that individual grapes barely hold a defined edge — he wrote his own poem onto the painting calling himself a pearl with nowhere to sell, a bitter joke about a brilliant, chaotic life that never found stable patronage. Not every good piece needs a polished backstory; some of the most honest work comes from real difficulty, told without dressing it up.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Lotus and Ducks
Bada Shanren was a Ming prince who survived the dynasty's collapse by disappearing into monkhood and, for a time, feigned madness rather than serve the conquering Qing — the birds and fish in his later paintings famously stare sideways out of the frame with a single sardonic eye. A body of work this personal couldn't come from anyone else; that kind of unmistakable voice is what makes a portfolio worth building a page around.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Bamboo and Rocks
Zheng Xie claimed to have painted bamboo for over sixty years before feeling he'd earned the right to leave anything out — his mature ink bamboo strips away every unnecessary leaf, keeping only the strokes that carry the plant's resilience. Restraint like that is a skill built over time, not a shortcut; knowing what to cut is often harder than knowing what to add.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Plum Blossoms
Jin Nong didn't pick up painting seriously until his fifties, after decades as a poet and seal-carver — deliberately keeping his brushwork blunt and "clumsy" by trained-painter standards, since he believed real character showed through more clearly than technical polish ever could. It's never too late to start showing your work, and an unpolished, honest style can be more compelling than a conventionally skillful one.
Public domain · Wikimedia CommonsAbstract Art
Colour, line and form released from depicting anything at all — the beginning of a century of abstraction.
Composition VIII
Kandinsky, one of the pioneers of pure abstraction, believed color and shape could carry emotion and meaning the way music does — without depicting any real object at all. If your own work is abstract, it deserves a page that trusts the viewer the same way.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow
Mondrian spent years reducing his painting down to only horizontal and vertical black lines and the three primary colors — a deliberate act of subtraction, in search of what he called pure visual harmony. Sometimes the most powerful design decision is what you choose to leave out.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Black Square
When first exhibited in 1915, Malevich hung this single black square high in the corner of the room — the traditional place for a religious icon in a Russian home — deliberately replacing devotional image with pure form. Where and how a piece is placed can be as meaningful as the piece itself.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Yellow-Red-Blue
Painted after Kandinsky returned to Germany to teach at the Bauhaus, this work reflects the school's disciplined, almost geometric turn — a shift from his earlier, more freeform abstraction. An artist's style can evolve across a career, and a well-organized gallery can show that whole arc, not just one moment of it.
Public domain · Wikimedia CommonsSculpture
Three-dimensional art across millennia — from ancient Greek marble to Rodin's bronze, sculpture makes the human and mythic form solid.
David
Michelangelo claimed he simply carved away everything that wasn't David, freeing the figure he said was already inside the marble block — a block two earlier sculptors had already rejected as flawed and unworkable. Sometimes the right eye sees potential in raw material everyone else has already given up on.
CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Venus de Milo
No one alive today knows for certain who carved this, or even what her arms were originally doing — both were lost before the statue's 1820 rediscovery on the Greek island of Milos, and centuries of scholars still debate the reconstruction. An unfinished mystery can be just as compelling as a fully documented masterpiece, if what remains is strong enough to carry it.
CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Winged Victory of Samothrace
She has no head and no arms, and still stops visitors at the top of the Louvre's grand staircase — the sculptor (whoever they were) carved the wind itself into the marble, wet drapery clinging to a body caught mid-flight. Sometimes what's missing matters less than what the piece still manages to say.
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
The Thinker
Rodin originally sculpted this figure smaller, as part of a much larger doorway piece — it was only later enlarged and cast on its own that it became one of the most recognized sculptures in the world. A single strong element, pulled out of a bigger project and given room to stand alone, can outgrow everything around it.
Public domain · Wikimedia CommonsAI-Generated Art
Text-to-image generation is barely a few years old — these are real, license-verified community creations, not art-historical masterworks. We include this genre to be upfront about what AI art actually looks like today: experimental, unsettled, made by hobbyists rather than named masters.
ChaoticHarmony Explosion in Post-Painter Abstraction
Generated by prompting an AI model to render an abstract explosion of color and geometric shapes — the prompt itself named specific historical painters as style references, the same way a design brief might say 'something like X, but for us.' The output is a genuine, if unsettled, artifact of how image generation works today: type a description, get an interpretation back.
CC0 · Wikimedia Commons
Sci-Hub Fan Art Using AI (Raven in Library)
A prompt describing cyborg ravens flying through an infinite digital library was enough to produce this moody, fully-formed scene — no photograph, no canvas, just a text description translated into an image in seconds. It's fan art for a research-access tool, made by someone with no formal art training, which is exactly the kind of creator this medium has opened the door to.
CC0 · Wikimedia Commons
Can do Urco
This depicts Can do Urco, a giant horned death-omen dog dragging chains from the sea in Galician and Asturian folklore — a regional legend most people outside northern Spain have never heard of, rendered instantly by an AI model instead of waiting for an illustrator who specializes in obscure folklore to take the commission. Niche stories can get a visual now without needing to find the one artist who already knows them.
CC0 · Wikimedia Commons
DALL-E 3 - Advanced Artificial Intelligence
A glowing neural-network interface, imagined entirely by an AI asked to depict artificial intelligence itself — a strange kind of self-portrait, made by a tool illustrating its own idea of what it is. Even a purely illustrative, tech-demo image can hold its own next to more painterly work, if the concept behind it is genuinely interesting.
CC0 · Wikimedia CommonsBlockchain & NFT Art
Digital art secured by blockchain ownership records — these four projects went further and put the artwork itself in the public domain (CC0), even while the tokens themselves are individually owned and traded.
Noun #0
Every Noun is generated by randomly combining traits — background, body, accessory, head, glasses — assembled entirely on-chain, with no company or server needed to keep the artwork alive as long as Ethereum exists. Noun #0 shown here was minted straight to the project's founders as the very first one, before daily public auctions began with Noun #1. The project put its own artwork under a public-domain license by design, choosing to make the art freely reusable rather than tightly controlled.
CC0 · Nouns DAO
Blitmap Collection
This mosaic shows hundreds of individual Blitmap and Blitnaut pieces at once — tiny 8-bit tiles that started as solo creations, then multiplied as anyone was free to combine two existing tiles into a new 'sibling' work. The project's creators voted, after launch, to release the entire collection into the public domain, turning what could have been a closed, tightly-licensed drop into something anyone can build on.
CC0 · Blitmap
mfer #1
mfers are simple, hand-drawn stick figures — no algorithm, no generative code, just a recognizable style repeated with small variations like headphones, glasses, or a particular pose. The project's own description is characteristically blunt: 'this project is in the public domain; feel free to use mfers any way you want.' Sometimes a simple, consistent style is more recognizable than a technically complex one.
CC0 · mfers
CrypToadz #1
Each CrypToadz combines a set of traits — a body type, headwear, an accessory — into one small pixel-art amphibian, permanently stored on Arweave's pay-once, designed-to-be-permanent network rather than a server that could go offline. Like mfers, the project's own words are plain: this artwork is in the public domain, free to use however anyone wants.
CC0 · CrypToadz