About this site

Painting of the Day shows one landscape or marine painting every 24 hours, chosen automatically at midnight. The idea is a small daily pause — a single painting to actually look at, rather than an endless scroll of them.

Why landscapes and marine scenes

The focus is narrow on purpose. Rotating through every genre and period at random tends to produce a jarring mix. Staying with coastlines, harbors, rivers, and open horizons keeps the daily painting feeling like part of one ongoing collection, even though it's drawn from many different artists, countries, and centuries.

Where the paintings come from

Every painting shown here is in the public domain, sourced from two museums' official open-access programs: the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Nothing is scraped from around the web — both museums publish official APIs that clearly mark which works are free of copyright restrictions, along with the artwork and artist information shown alongside each painting here.

How a painting is chosen

A candidate pool of public-domain landscape and marine paintings is kept on hand, filtered to actual paintings with a usable image. Once a day, one is chosen at random from the paintings not yet shown and locked in for that date — it won't change if you refresh the page, and it's saved permanently in the archive below the day's painting.

About the archive

Every previously shown painting stays browsable. It's a slowly growing, unordered collection rather than a curated “best of” — some days will land better than others, which feels true to how any real gallery visit goes.

A note on accuracy

Artist names, dates, and short biographies come directly from the museums' own records. Genre matching (landscape vs. marine vs. something else entirely) is done automatically, so on rare occasions a painting may appear that's a looser fit than intended.