Where to get free art for The Frame, in 4K and legally

The Art Store is a subscription. The personal album is not: uploading your own files to The Frame costs nothing, has never been gated, and there is no limit on how often you do it. Which means the only question is where good art comes from, and the answer is that several of the world's great museums have spent a decade putting their collections online at resolutions far beyond what a 4K panel needs, for free, with no strings.

This is the best art available for The Frame, and it happens to cost nothing.

Museum open access collections

These are public domain works released with explicit permission to download, use and modify. Look for a "Public Domain", "CC0" or "Open Access" mark on the individual work, because every collection also holds items that are still in copyright.

The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Rijksstudio offers enormous scans, some of them gigapixel. The Dutch Golden Age still lifes and interiors are made for a large panel in a dim room.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Around half a million open access works, filterable by "Open Access" on the collection search.
The Art Institute of Chicago. A clean site, a genuinely good API, and strong Impressionist and Japanese print holdings.
The National Gallery of Art, Washington. Open access downloads at print resolution.
The Cleveland Museum of Art. Creative Commons Zero on its open works, with an easy download button.
The Smithsonian. Millions of CC0 items across its museums, including illustration, natural history plates and photography.
The Getty. Open Content for the works it holds rights to, including its photography collection.
The Library of Congress and the New York Public Library digital collections. Maps, posters, botanical plates and historical photography, much of it public domain.
Europeana. An aggregator across European institutions; filter by reusable licence.

Botanical and zoological plates, antique maps, Japanese woodblock prints and mid century travel posters all work particularly well on a Frame, because they were designed to be read as flat, graphic images from a distance.

Photography

Unsplash and Pexels both offer free, high resolution photography under permissive licences. Quality varies; the landscape and architecture sections are the strong ones.
NASA image libraries are public domain and include Hubble and Webb releases at very large sizes. They look extraordinary on a large panel and are the one category where a near black image is worth the exception.
Flickr Commons holds institutional archives with no known copyright restrictions.
Wikimedia Commons is enormous and inconsistent. Check the licence on each file rather than assuming, and prefer the original resolution link.

What to check before you download

Resolution. You want at least 3840 pixels on the long edge. Museum scans are usually far larger, which is ideal, because downscaling is safe and upscaling is not. Always take the largest available file, then prepare it.

The licence on the work, not the site. An open access museum still hosts copyrighted material. The mark is on the individual object page.

Whether a scan includes the frame. Some museum photography includes the physical frame and a strip of gallery wall. Crop it out unless you want it, which occasionally you do.

Aspect ratio. Most paintings are nowhere near 16:9. Portrait format paintings will be matted, which is the right presentation for them. Landscape paintings often crop to 16:9 beautifully. Details of large works are the underrated move: a 16:9 crop of one corner of a Bruegel is a better wall piece than the whole painting shrunk to fit.

Preparing them

Museum files are big, often 50 MB and up, in TIFF or high quality JPEG, and sometimes in Adobe RGB. Before uploading: crop to 16:9, resize to exactly 3840 by 2160, and export sRGB JPEG. The full recipe is in the size and format guide.

Doing that to sixty paintings by hand is a long evening. TV Art Manager does it as part of sending: drop the downloads into a collection, and each file is prepared to the panel size and sent edge to edge with the matte off, with your originals left where they are. Pro sends the whole collection at once and can rotate it daily, which is how a museum collection turns into a wall that changes every morning.

Where free art ends

Two honest limits.

The Art Store's value is curation and licensing of contemporary work, and the open access collections cannot give you that: living artists are in copyright, and rightly so. If you want new work on your wall, buy it, from the Art Store or directly from the artist.

And public domain is not automatically commercial-use safe in every jurisdiction, because some countries recognise a separate right in the reproduction photograph. For a wall in your home this is irrelevant. For a hotel lobby, read the terms of the institution you downloaded from.