About Random Artwork
Random Artwork is a free website for finding art by chance. Press the big button and you see one painting, sculpture, photograph, print, piece of decorative art or famous building, picked at random from the open collections of museums around the world. Each piece comes with a short story, the key facts (who made it, when, from what) and a link to the museum's own page so you can keep exploring.
Why it exists
Museums now share millions of images of their collections for anyone to use, but most of them sit unseen behind search boxes. Searching only helps when you already know what you are looking for. Random Artwork is for the opposite situation: you have a spare minute and want to be surprised by something you would never have searched for.
Where the art comes from
Everything is loaded live from the open-access programmes of these institutions. Each piece shows its source and licence underneath.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (public domain, CC0 images only)
- Art Institute of Chicago (public domain images only)
- Cleveland Museum of Art (CC0)
- Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (only works marked Public Domain Mark or CC0; works still in copyright are skipped)
- SMK, the National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (public domain works only)
- Wellcome Collection, London (public domain and CC0 prints, drawings and manuscripts)
- Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, for famous works and buildings. Only photos marked public domain or CC0 on Wikimedia Commons are used. The licence is shown on each piece.
How the stories are written
In the shuffle, the short story under each piece is taken from the museum's own description or from Wikipedia, and we say which. We do not use AI to write those. If a piece has no real description we skip it and show another.
Curated artworks and guides
Alongside the shuffle there is a set of curated pages: 80 artworks with their own write-ups and 10 guides. This is an art and AI project, and these pages are written with AI assistance. The site itself was built the same way, by describing what we wanted to an AI model and refining the result (vibe coding). The AI does not decide the facts. Each write-up starts from the museum's own record (title, artist, date, materials, size, credit line) and, where the museum has one, its own description, and each page is checked against those sources before it is published. Each page links to the museum record. Where scholars disagree, we say so, and where we are not sure, we leave it out.
The site is run by one independent creator, working under the name Random Artwork. The curated pages use only works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art that are public domain or CC0. Read more in our guide to public domain and CC0.
How to use the shuffle
- Choose a type (painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, decorative arts, prints and drawings) to stay within one kind of art.
- Click the image to zoom in.
- Save pieces you love to your favourites. They are stored only in your own browser.
- Every piece has a link you can share.
Spotted a mistake? See the contact page.