Inspiration
A grid of public-domain art from The Met's Open Access collection. No account required — pick a department (and an optional search), and the grid fills with works from the museum.
The Met's Open Access collection holds hundreds of thousands of public-domain artworks — paintings, photographs, prints, antiquities — free to view and use. The Inspiration widget points at one department, pulls a pool of its works, and renders a random subset every new tab — so the dashboard feels alive without burning API calls. Free, no sign-in, no account.
Add it to your dashboard
Press E for edit mode, A to add, and pick Inspiration. It lands at eight columns wide, four rows tall — comfortable for a 4×3 grid of twelve blocks. Open its settings (gear icon) to choose a different department, add a search, or resize the grid.
Picking a department
The settings dropdown lists fifteen Met departments — European Paintings, Photographs, Asian Art, Egyptian Art, and more. Pick one and the widget reloads with public-domain works from that department.
To narrow it down, type a theme into the Search box —
portrait, landscape, ceramics,
textile — and the grid draws only from works in that
department matching the term. Leave it blank for the whole department.
How the grid fills
The grid always fills the widget. Every supported block count maps to a fixed (cols × rows) rectangle that uses the available space exactly:
1= 1×1 — single hero block, fills the whole card2/3= 2×1 / 3×1 — horizontal strip4= 2×2 grid6= 3×2,8= 4×2,9= 3×312= 4×3 (the default),16= 4×420= 5×4,24= 6×4 — dense mosaic
Resizing the widget on the dashboard changes the cell shape (more landscape vs. more portrait) — the block count and grid template stay the same. Match the count to the size: 24 blocks in a 4×3 widget is too dense; 4 blocks in a 12×6 widget feels empty.
Settings
| Setting | Type | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Department Pick a Met department from the dropdown — European Paintings, Modern Art, Photographs, Drawings & Prints, Asian Art, Egyptian Art, Greek & Roman Art, Islamic Art, Medieval Art, Africa / Oceania & the Americas, Costume Institute, European Sculpture, American Decorative Arts, Arms & Armor, or Musical Instruments. The grid fills with public-domain works from that department. | dropdown | European Paintings |
| Search Optional — narrow the department to a theme (e.g. portrait, landscape, ceramics). Leave it blank to draw from the whole department. Press Enter or click Apply to commit. | text | empty |
| Blocks Discrete grid sizes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 12, 16, 20, or 24. Each value packs into a perfect rectangle (e.g. 12 = 4×3, 16 = 4×4, 24 = 6×4) so the grid fills the widget without leftover whitespace at any height. | dropdown | 12 (4×3) |
| Show title + artist on hover When on, hovering a tile reveals a soft gradient overlay with the artwork's title and artist. Off keeps the grid clean — pure imagery. | toggle | on |
Small things you might miss
- Click any tile to open the artwork. Clicking a tile opens that work's page on metmuseum.org in a new tab — with full catalogue detail, provenance, and a zoomable image.
- Public-domain works only. The widget draws from The Met's Open Access collection, which carries freely usable images. Works still under copyright (no open image) never appear — the API filters to objects with images and the widget drops any that slip through without one.
- Every department has a different character. A department is the silhouette of the grid — European Paintings reads like a gallery wall, Photographs like a contact sheet, Egyptian Art like a dig. Switch departments to change the whole mood.
Heads up
- Cache is six hours; the slice is per tab. The Met's collection is effectively static, so the widget pulls a pool of works once and caches it for six hours, then picks a random subset on every new tab — the tiles change every time you open a tab without an API call. Hit the refresh button in the toolbar to pull a fresh pool right away.
- Shared cache across widgets. If you have several Inspiration widgets on the same department and search, they share one cache entry — no duplicate requests.
- Museum collection, broadly SFW. The Met's collection spans the history of art, including classical nudes and anatomical studies. There's no explicit filter — it's a museum, not a feed.