Reproductions & Copyright

Every work sold by The Old Masters is a reproduction of an artwork that is in the public domain in the United States. What you are buying is a newly produced, archival-quality PRINT of that public-domain image — a physical object made to order by us, on stock and with inks we choose, at the size and format you select. We do not claim any copyright over the underlying artwork itself.

The U.S. public-domain rule we use

A work is public domain in the United States if it was first published in 1930 or earlier (the U.S. term is 95 years from publication, and that window advances by one year each January). We list a work only when it meets this test. Every piece on the site is a 15th- to early-20th-century work published well before this cutoff.

We deliberately do not rely on the “the artist died more than 70 years ago” rule that appears in much of the press. That is the European / UK standard (life of the author plus 70 years); it is not the U.S. rule, and following it would put works on sale that are still under copyright in the United States.

Works we will not reproduce

Some famous artists feel free because they have been dead for decades, but their work — and especially anything created after 1930 — remains under U.S. copyright. We maintain an explicit do-not-reproduce denylist (Frida Kahlo, Henri Matisse, Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Georgia O’Keeffe, Andy Warhol, and others) that our content check enforces at build time: a piece by any of them cannot be published, by construction. When a work’s status is uncertain, we block it and review rather than sell on a guess.

Image sources

The high-resolution images we print from are sourced from open-access releases by the holding institutions and from Wikimedia Commons, whose faithful photographic reproductions of public-domain two-dimensional artworks are themselves in the public domain under the Bridgeman doctrine. Where a specific source scan carries a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) photograph license, we credit the institution visibly on that piece’s page, alongside its “Held by” line.

Every piece on the site names its holding institution and links to its public source record. A piece is never listed for sale until its public-domain status, its source institution, and its source link are all verified.

This note explains our practice; it is not legal advice. A founder should have counsel review this page, and re-verify any individual work’s status, before launch.