Canvas Prints For The History Lover

Our goal with our blog is to inspire you to produce photographs or works of art that will make your walls look amazing, and this week we’re going to turn our attention to the history lovers out there.

Occasionally we’re asked the copyright law regarding downloading and using images from the internet to print to canvas. The golden rule is to always ask permission from the artist, but there is a way to access free images and revel in some good old nostalgia. 

We thought that might grab your attention! Yes, there’s a huge selection of public domain images – that’s images that are now so old that they’re no longer under copyright law – available in archives throughout the world. Once you become aware of this as a fan of history or old photography you’ll lose hours combing through the available photos to find your favourites.

Our favourite archives are places like The Library of Congress, The Smithsonian, the Commons on Flickr, and www.publicdomainarchive.com. We’re sure that a Google search will bring up countless more (including the great museums of the world), but as you can see, there are literally hundreds of thousands of free images to choose from.

Yes, it’s true that sometimes too much choice is as challenging as too little, but if you focus on a few ideas we think you’ll soon have a good idea how to make your decisions. Think about:

Your hobbies – You could find old images of your favourite sports team, football ground, golf courses, or even old heroes; maybe old images of famous record fish and fishermen, or for the artists amongst you, old masters at work or venues they made famous.

Architecture – Try to find pictures of your hometown or even your own street; maybe famous landmarks being constructed or early in their life.

Inventions – How about the first planes, cars and trains? Interested in tech? Look for early photos of mechanical oddities and outlandish inventions.

People – You’ll find thousands of images of famous people from history, but it can also be really interesting to look for unknown characters with style and charisma.

We hope that you have fun searching the archives and come up with some images that you think would look good on canvas. We think that historical photos make great additions to your home or office design – especially with a little imagination!