Museum paintings you can stitch for free
You can stitch a famous painting without infringing anyone's rights — if the painting is in the public domain and the image is shared under an open licence. Here's how to check.
The public domain
Copyright doesn't last forever. When it runs out, the work is in the public domain and anyone can use it. How long it lasts depends on the country, so check the rules where you live. Hokusai, Hiroshige and Van Gogh died more than a century ago, and their paintings are in the public domain.
A painting and a photo of it are different things
The painting may be free while the photograph you make a chart from was taken by a museum. So use images from museums that explicitly allow free use. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, for example, shares images of public-domain works under CC0, with no conditions (the Met's policy).
This isn't true of every painting, even by the same artist. The Met doesn't mark Monet's Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies as open access, and there's no open image of it. Check the label on each work.
What changes when a painting becomes a chart
- Size. The painting shrinks to a grid of a couple of hundred squares or fewer. Fine detail goes, large areas of colour stay. Each of our charts shows its size on its page.
- Colours. Thousands of shades become a few dozen thread colours, sometimes fewer. Thread codes are matched by colour approximately, so check them against the maker's shade card.
- Full coverage. The background is stitched too, so these are big pieces: more than ten thousand stitches. How many hours that is — see "How long does a cross stitch take?".
How to credit your piece
Name the artist and the painting, and if the chart is someone else's, the chart's author and licence. For our charts:
Stitched from the Crossette chart "Irises" (crossette.org), licensed CC BY 4.0. After the painting by Vincent van Gogh, public domain.
About the author
This article was written by the Crossette team. Our charts after paintings from The Met's open collection are free, with a printable PDF, in Patterns. We're building Crossette, a cross stitch tracker for iPhone and iPad. It's in development; to join the beta, email [email protected].