Pinax gives you several ways into the archive. Keyword searches the museum records: titles, artists, mediums and classifications. Use it when you know the words: rembrandt, woodblock print, bronze.
Meaning searches the images themselves. Describe what you want to see: a storm at sea, a woman reading a letter, geometric pattern in blue and white. Works are ranked by how closely they match the idea, whatever their titles say.
Search by image when you already have something to look from. Drop an image onto the search box and Pinax will find works that look or feel similar across the archive.
Search by color when the palette is your focus. Type a color name or enter a hex code to find works with similar dominant colors.
The filters beneath the search bar let you narrow by source, license, department and year. They stack, so you can combine them with keyword, meaning, image or color search.
Once you find something interesting, Find its kin shows its nearest visual relatives across the archive. Gather a few works to steer the search toward those examples, or choose Wander from here to follow the visual trail from a single work.
You can refine what you find with words such as “more geometric”, “older” or “only prints”. Every path has its own shareable address, so a discovery can become something you return to or send on.
Download original saves the full file with its rights statement. Copy license and copy attribution give you the credit lines ready to paste. Copy image URL gives a permanent public link; it works anywhere a URL does, including as a reference image in generative tools. Find its kin shows visually similar works across all institutions.
Some works are marked US-PD: their holding institution states no known United States copyright is known. Pinax admits these only when they predate 1900 as an additional safeguard. Reuse outside the United States is your responsibility to verify; the source rights statement is reproduced on each record.
The standard definitions are Creative Commons' own (creativecommons.org/cc-licenses).
Every work is public domain, CC0, or CC BY 4.0 at its source institution, with the license shown verbatim on each record. CC BY 4.0 works require attribution; the Copy attribution button gives you the line to use. Otherwise, free for any use, personal or commercial, no permission needed. Attribution isn't legally required, but crediting the museum is good practice, and the Copy attribution button writes the line for you.