← Current Rothko

The Collection

Every Rothko currently in the matching system — — paintings, each hand-tagged with a colour register, brightness, temperature and mood so the engine can match it to a moment. Below: the shape of what we have, and how the set can grow.

How the collection can grow

Images · near the ceiling

WikiArt & Wikimedia

The current 89 images come from WikiArt and Wikimedia Commons — the two sources that actually host usable, hotlink-safe reproductions. WikiArt has a handful more works that were probed but not yet curated, so there's modest room (≈40 candidates) before this well runs dry.

Metadata · huge upside

~1,130NGA open data

The National Gallery received the Rothko Foundation gift in 1986 and documents roughly 1,130 works in its open (CC0) data and online catalogue raisonné. The images are capped at 900px fair-use previews, but the metadata — titles, years, mediums, dimensions — could deepen every record we have.

Metadata · supplementary

Met · Tate · MoMA

The Met, Tate and MoMA all publish CC0 collection metadata and hold Rothkos (Tate has the Seagram murals). Useful for cross-referencing and enriching tags — though, like everyone, they withhold high-resolution Rothko images.

Tagging · do this first

Fill the register gaps

The coverage bars above show the set leans dark and warm. The fastest quality win isn't more paintings — it's better balance: more luminous, cool, and bright-day works so sunny mornings and clear skies get a true match instead of the nearest dark canvas.

A note on why images are capped: Rothko died in 1970, so his paintings remain under copyright (managed by the artist's estate / Artists Rights Society) until roughly 2040. Museums' "open access" programmes apply only to their public-domain holdings — never to Rothko. So the realistic path to a bigger, richer collection runs through metadata and curation, not high-resolution downloads.