Beautify Your Desktop With Art

There’s millions of beautiful photos and subtle textures out there, enough to keep your desktop wallpaper fresh for years to come. I’ve always been partial to fiftyfootshadows’ wallpapers, and that along with Simple Desktops’ pattern and color based wallpapers and Kuvva’s more artistic shots could keep me happy.

But then, the Metropolitan Museum of Art released several hundred thousand high-quality scans of the art in their collections, for free download. OS X used to ship with several art wallpapers, but nothing can compare to this library. There’s paintings, textiles, photographs, and more, all ready to download in high resolution—and perfect for desktop wallpapers.

They’re for academic purposes, first and foremost, so while Apple couldn’t bundle these images with OS X without licensing them, you’re perfectly free to download them to use as your desktop wallpaper or perhaps as a slideshow on your TV. You can even subscribe to an RSS feed of the art of the day, perhaps for creative inspiration or to get something new for your desktop. All you’ll have to do is download the images, and then perhaps crop them to your desktop aspect ratio so they’ll be centered and show the section of the art you want—and then be inspired by the works of the masters as you do your own creative work.

Google already has put together quite a collection of extremely high resolution scans of art and 3D walkthroughs of museums in their Cultural Institute, but you can merely browse those images online. The Met’s collection is great to browse online, but that one added bonus of downloadable images makes it especially nice.

So go find some new-to-you artwork to spice up your desktop from the Metropolitan Museum’s collection, and enjoy. I’ve got a cropped version of Paul Klee’s May Picture as my wallpaper right now; it was rare (and low quality) enough online before now that Google Images can’t even locate it from a snippet of the picture, and now it’s gracing my Mac. Modern art suddenly makes perfect sense as desktop wallpaper.

Thoughts? @reply me on Twitter.