Meme Generator › Art Memes: Renaissance & Old Paintings

Art Memes: Renaissance & Old Paintings

Side-eyes, sighs and suspicious glances, painted hundreds of years ago. Every picture here is in the public domain. 32 templates.

Why old paintings make great memes

Painters spent weeks on a single expression, so the faces are unusually readable: the bored saint, the doubtful merchant, the woman giving the side-eye across the card table. Put a modern caption under that seriousness and the contrast does the work.

Describe what you see — “old painting man disappointed”, “lady judging” — and the search finds it even if you don't know the artist.

Where the paintings come from

These images come from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access collection, the Rijksmuseum and Wikimedia Commons, which mark them as public domain or CC0 — free for anyone to reuse. Each template's source is listed on our template credits page.

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