About

Useum, the encyclopedia of art

Useum is a free, ad-free encyclopedia of art for teachers, parents and children all over the world.

It brings together the public domain works that museums publish online: paintings, drawings, prints and illuminated manuscripts, from Bruegel to Kandinsky, from Hokusai to Monet. Each work has its own page, with its English title when there is one, the title given to it by its museum, its date, its medium and the museum that holds it.

Carefully prepared images

Museum photographs often show the frame, the wall or the edges of the support. Useum carefully crops each work to show the work itself, and it is this cropped image that you will find everywhere: on the website, in albums, in downloads and in printable documents.

A different way to search

You can search for a work by artist, movement, date, museum or medium, and also by what it shows: type a keyword (“horse”, “snow”, “boat”), or choose a subject, figures, a place, a shape, a color or a mood from the “What are you looking for?” menus.

Search criteria add up: “Landscape + Snow + Diagonal” shows only the works that have all three. A preschool teacher can find circles, spirals or checkerboards in the paintings of the great masters in just a few seconds.

Your albums

With a free account, you can save your favorite works in albums, share them by email, and download or print them for the classroom.

Who are we?

Useum is created and run by the association Films pour enfants (a French non-profit association under the law of 1901), which also publishes the website films-pour-enfants.com. The website relies on donations: if you find Useum useful, you can make a donation.

The works and their rights

Useum only presents works that are in the public domain or that their museums have made freely available. Each work page states the museum that holds the work and links to its original page. To report an error or request a correction, write to us at contact@useum.art.