Paintings as covers

Yesterday I ended up working for a few hours on covers for a few stories that I want to make available through Smashwords. As you may know, photographs of paintings whose copyright has expired are in the Public Domain. In the US, this means that any painting before 1923 is considered Public Domain.

And then we find ourselves with the next dilemma. Where to find a database of such photographs? Of course, if you know the name of the painting, you can search for a good quality photograph on the internet. As I said earlier, if the photograph is an accurate depiction of the painting, meaning that there’s no other element in it, it can be safely used.

But if you don’t know, and you just want to use something that will fit your general idea about what your cover should convey (you have a certain landscape, or setting in mind for your cover) than you would most likely want to use The Web Gallery of Art. It’s a very cool website, and you can browse through a list of all the artists that have works featured there. It’s a very extensive database, with works of art from as back as Italian Renaissance to Modernist works of art.

Another great site is this one. There are thousands of paintings to choose from, and it covers a period of eight century. Then there’s Art Renewal Center, where you can find paintings by more than two thousand different painters. And then, of course, there’s the York project on Wikimedia, where you can find over ten thousand paintings.

What I do advise you is to make sure the painting is in the Public Domain. Check the dates for the paintings you want to use, because Copyright Infringement isn’t the very least funny.

As a bonus, I leave you with the cover for my next short story, Crossroads, which doesn’t contain any painting and has no relevance to this post, other than the fact that it is, undoubtedly, a cover (sort of.)