How to Get a Famous Painting as Your Android Wallpaper Every Day

A painting on your lock screen is a small pleasure you see dozens of times a day. Most famous paintings are old enough to be in the public domain, and museums now share many of them freely. You can set one up by hand in a couple of minutes, or let an app bring you a new one each morning.

Can I use famous paintings as a wallpaper legally?

For most classic paintings, yes. Works by artists who died long ago, such as Van Gogh, Monet, Vermeer, Hokusai and Rembrandt, are generally in the public domain. Many large museums publish open access collections where you can download high resolution images of those works and reuse them freely.

Two cautions:

• Check the licence on each image. Museums mark which works are open access. A modern artist's work is usually still under copyright.
• Photos of paintings from random sites may be low quality, watermarked or recoloured. Going to the museum's own collection gets you the best file.

How do I set a painting as my wallpaper by hand?

1. Find the painting in a museum's open access collection and download the largest version offered.
2. Open the image in Google Photos or your phone's gallery.
3. Tap the three-dot menu and choose Use as or Set as wallpaper. The wording differs by app and phone.
4. Pan and zoom to frame the part you like. Portrait details often work better than a whole landscape painting.
5. Choose Home screen, Lock screen or both.

You can also go through Settings > Wallpaper (on Pixel, Wallpaper & style) and pick the image from your photos. Your phone's own wallpaper picker may include art collections or a daily rotation option. The names vary by phone maker and version, so it is worth a look.

Tips for a painting that looks good on a phone

• Choose tall works or tall crops. Portraits, still lifes and close details fit a narrow screen better than wide landscapes.
• Mind the clock and icons. A busy area at the top of the painting fights with the lock screen clock. A calm sky or dark background works well.
• Dark paintings suit OLED screens and dark mode. Dutch Golden Age interiors and night scenes look great.

Can I put a painting on the lock screen only?

Yes. When you apply a wallpaper, Android asks where it should go. Choose Lock screen and keep your current home screen, which is a nice way to keep app icons readable while the lock screen shows the full painting. Recent Pixel and Samsung versions also let you customise the lock screen separately, with clock styles and colours that pick up the wallpaper's tones. The exact options depend on your phone and Android version, so long-press the lock screen or open the wallpaper settings and look for a lock screen section.

How do I get a new painting every day automatically?

Doing this by hand once is pleasant. Doing it every morning is a chore. An art wallpaper app picks, crops and sets the painting for you on a schedule.

Tessera turns your home and lock screen into a museum wall. Every work in it is in the public domain, from open access museum collections.

A new painting every day. Pick a schedule and a new painting arrives on its own, chosen from a curated collection of classical art.

Browse the whole gallery. Filter by artist, era or style, from Impressionism and Baroque portraits to Japanese woodblock prints and Dutch Golden Age interiors. The Starry Night, Irises, Sunflowers and Almond Blossom are in there, alongside Monet, Vermeer, Hokusai, Klimt, Cassatt and more than 200 other artists.

Pixel perfect cropping. Pan and zoom each painting inside side by side Home and Lock previews. What you frame is exactly what lands on your screen.

Know what you are looking at. Every painting shows its artist, title, style, genre, medium and museum.

Light on your phone. Tessera is not a live wallpaper and runs no background service to animate your screen. Paintings are fetched when you ask, cached, and work offline once they are on the phone. Rotation runs as a scheduled job that respects your battery and Wi-Fi settings.

It has no ads and no account, needs Android 8.0 or newer, and uses the internet only to fetch new paintings.

What Pro adds

Pro is a one-time purchase with no subscription:

• HD masters at your screen's native pixel density
• The story behind each painting or its artist, from WikiArt and Wikipedia
• Six painterly style filters, such as Oil paint, Mosaic and Newsprint, and five colour grades
• Custom rotation schedules, including hourly
• Separate crops for Home and Lock screens
• Unlimited favourites

Are there other art wallpaper apps?

Yes. Muzei is a long-running open source live wallpaper that refreshes your home screen daily with famous art and blurs it behind your icons. It suits people who like a live wallpaper effect and want to plug in other sources. Tessera is a still wallpaper that sets the painting on both home and lock screen, with framing previews, filters by artist and era, and no background service.

Can I keep the painting off my notifications?

The lock screen is where an art wallpaper shines, and where notifications pile up on top of it. If you would rather keep the lock screen clean and still know when something arrives, a subtle light around the camera works well. AuraDisplay draws a glowing ring around the camera cutout for new notifications, and our guide on getting a notification light on Android explains the options. For the screen-off side, see what Always On Display can and cannot show.

If your phone is getting full of downloaded wallpapers and other images, our guide to freeing up storage on Android helps find duplicates. And to keep private photos out of the gallery you pick wallpapers from, see how to hide photos on Android.

Sources

• Muzei Live Wallpaper on Google Play
• Android developers: WallpaperManager