How many public-domain artworks are in the Artifact World Gallery archive?

The archive holds more than 193,000 public-domain (CC0) artworks from over 5,000 museums and venues worldwide, by more than 27,000 identified artists. Every work is free to view and download in high resolution.

What is the most-represented art movement in the collection?

Romanticism is the single most-represented movement, with more than 25,000 works, followed closely by Impressionism and Realism — each above 23,000 works.

Which century does the collection mostly come from?

The collection is overwhelmingly early-modern to modern. More than 60,000 dated works — more than a third of everything with a known date — were made in the 19th century, the single busiest hundred years in the archive.

Is the data free to use?

Yes. Every artwork is public domain (CC0) and free to download, and these collection statistics are published openly for anyone to read and cite.

Public Domain Art by the Numbers — 193,000 Works Analysed

Artifact World Gallery is an open archive of 193,155 public-domain artworks, gathered from the open-access collections of 481 museums and made by 27,569 identified artists. It is one of the largest free-to-download, fully-browsable collections of public-domain art anywhere — and because every work is catalogued by movement, colour, subject and date, the whole thing can be counted. Here is what an open archive of art at this scale actually contains.

The biggest art movements

Romanticism is the single most-represented movement, with 25,594 works — but it leads a crowded field. Impressionism and Realism follow close behind, each with more than twenty thousand works, and the archive runs to more than 224 movements in total once you reach the long tail of regional schools.

Most-represented art movements by number of works in the archive
Rank	Movement	Artists	Works	Share
1	Romanticism	5,341 artists	25,594	13.3%
2	Impressionism	4,545 artists	24,436	12.7%
3	Realism	4,353 artists	23,625	12.2%
4	Baroque	3,203 artists	15,170	7.9%
5	Renaissance	1,735 artists	10,489	5.4%
6	Rococo painting	1,447 artists	8,822	4.6%
7	Dutch Golden Age	1,063 artists	8,667	4.5%
8	Post-Impressionism	1,205 artists	5,716	3%
9	Early Baroque Italian	634 artists	4,484	2.3%
10	Flemish Baroque painting	448 artists	4,051	2.1%

See the full movement ranking →

The palette of public-domain art

Map every work onto colour families and the archive turns out to be overwhelmingly warm. The most common families are saffron, umber and ochre — the earth tones of pre-modern painting — while cool blues and greens are comparatively rare. It is a portrait of centuries of pigment economics as much as taste.

Read the full colour breakdown →

When the art was made

The collection has a clear centre of gravity. The 19th century alone accounts for 63,957 dated works — 35.5% of everything with a known date — making it the busiest hundred years in the archive. Coverage climbs steeply from the 1400s and falls away again after 1900, as works move out of the public domain.

Dated artworks by century of creation
Rank	Century	Years	Dated works	Share
1	19th century	1800s	63,957	35.5%
2	20th century	1900s	35,080	19.5%
3	17th century	1600s	30,000	16.7%
4	18th century	1700s	22,995	12.8%
5	16th century	1500s	15,695	8.7%
6	15th century	1400s	4,828	2.7%
7	21st century	2000s	2,861	1.6%
8	14th century	1300s	995	0.6%
9	13th century	1200s	506	0.3%
10	12th century	1100s	393	0.2%
11	11th century	1000s	93	0.1%

See the full timeline →

What the art is about

Catalogued subjects skew human and devotional: people, portraits and religious figures dominate, with the natural world — trees, flowers, landscape — close behind. These are the tags that power the archive's 2,812 browseable subjects.

Most-frequently depicted subjects across the archive
Rank	Subject	Works	Share
1	Man	5,557	2.9%
2	Woman	4,916	2.5%
3	Tree	3,217	1.7%
4	Portrait	2,217	1.1%
5	Mary	2,057	1.1%
6	Christ Child	1,979	1%
7	Womenswear	1,918	1%
8	Flower	1,728	0.9%
9	Jesus Christ	1,488	0.8%
10	Landscape	1,207	0.6%
11	Boat	1,150	0.6%
12	House	1,050	0.5%

The most-represented artists

Ranked by number of catalogued works — with one honest caveat. A single large institutional holding can lift an artist's count far above their art-historical footprint (the costume and print archives of a few museums are why some names sit near the top). And the largest single group of all is anonymous: 24,592 works are attributed simply to an unidentified hand, and are excluded from the ranking below.

Most-represented identified artists by number of works
Rank	Artist	Works
1	Honoré Daumier	2,419
2	Carven	1,939
3	Marie-Louise Carven	1,750
4	Jacques Callot	1,530
5	Edvard Munch	1,042
6	James McNeill Whistler	998
7	Alphonse Legros	962
8	Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin	852
9	Rembrandt	769
10	George Chinnery	708
11	Utagawa Hiroshige	656
12	Peter Paul Rubens	619

Where the art lives

The works come from museums on every continent. These are the institutions whose open-access collections contribute the most to the archive.

Museums contributing the most works to the archive
Rank	Museum	Location	Works
1	National Gallery of Art	Washington, D.C., United States	36,526
2	Victoria and Albert Museum	Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, United Kingdom	21,790
3	Cleveland Museum of Art	Cleveland, United States	19,107
4	Museum of Modern Art	Manhattan, United States	12,386
5	Metropolitan Museum of Art	Manhattan, United States	10,888
6	Statens Museum for Kunst	Copenhagen Municipality, Denmark	9,100
7	Rijksmuseum	Amsterdam, Netherlands	5,552
8	Palais Galliera - Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris	France	4,123
9	Bavarian State Painting Collections	Munich, Germany	3,620
10	Museo del Prado	Madrid, Spain	3,319

The shape of public-domain art is not neutral: it is warm, European, and densely 19th-century, because that is what entered museum collections and then aged out of copyright. Knowing the shape is the first step to reading against it — and every number here links straight into the works themselves.

How this was counted

Every figure on this page is computed directly from the Artifact World Gallery corpus (build 2026-06-19T05Z-d430bcd5b96b) — not estimated. The archive holds public-domain (CC0) artworks gathered from the open-access collections of museums worldwide; counts are recomputed each time the collection is rebuilt, so they reflect the archive as it stands today. Read our editorial standards for how the collection is sourced and reviewed.

Frequently asked

How many public-domain artworks are in the Artifact World Gallery archive?: The archive holds more than 193,000 public-domain (CC0) artworks from over 5,000 museums and venues worldwide, by more than 27,000 identified artists. Every work is free to view and download in high resolution.
What is the most-represented art movement in the collection?: Romanticism is the single most-represented movement, with more than 25,000 works, followed closely by Impressionism and Realism — each above 23,000 works.
Which century does the collection mostly come from?: The collection is overwhelmingly early-modern to modern. More than 60,000 dated works — more than a third of everything with a known date — were made in the 19th century, the single busiest hundred years in the archive.
Is the data free to use?: Yes. Every artwork is public domain (CC0) and free to download, and these collection statistics are published openly for anyone to read and cite.

Public domain art by the numbers