Art lives in real places

The V1 launch collection

PaintingLocations connects famous paintings to the real places behind them — the exact spot an artist stood, the landmark a picture shows, the landscape it depicts — and keeps that separate from where the original hangs today.

The V1 collection

Mapped painting locations: 210
Artwork pages in all: 301
Documented exact viewpoints: 17
Real places depicted: 172
Museums & collections: 121
Artists: 110

How the real-world link is described

Exact viewpoint — a documented standpoint. Where independent evidence supports it, you can stand where the artist stood.

The real place in the painting — a specific, identifiable building, street or landmark shown in the work. The exact artist standpoint is not necessarily known.

The landscape depicted — a real place is shown, but the precise viewpoint may be unknown.

Real-world connection — famous works such as The Starry Night or Guernica, and history / religious / mythological scenes, have a real-world connection but no single exact viewpoint. They get a page, never an exact-location map marker.

Sources

Identity and relations come from Wikidata; artist and place authority from the Getty vocabularies (ULAN / TGN); museum building locations from OpenStreetMap; image licences from Wikimedia Commons and museum open-access APIs (The Met, Art Institute of Chicago, Louvre). Every location claim on a painting page links back to its source.

“On view” is only shown when a live museum source has confirmed it with a timestamp. A modern-day “then & now” comparison appears only when the present-day viewpoint has been verified — none are shown in V1.