About

Every painting is a view of somewhere. Here a painting from the public domain becomes a doorway: read closely, repainted stroke by stroke, and continued past its frame into a place that can be walked.

Inside the frame, the place keeps the painter's composition. Beyond it, the land is imagined in the painter's own hand: his colours, his strokes, his weather.

How it is made

Each painting is read first: its letters and records, its colours, the flow of its strokes, the shape of its land. From that reading a painting engine lays every mark, and the browser builds the place around the visitor. No image here was generated by a model. Each case study keeps the full record, numbers and missteps included.

The name

In the painters' French, the motif is the subject itself, painted in front of it, out of doors. In his last summer Cézanne wrote to his son of the motifs along the river near Aix. Each painting here is followed back out to its motif.

Credits

Paintings

In the public domain. Photographs from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access collection: Van Gogh, Wheat Field with Cypresses (1993.132), Cypresses (49.30) and Olive Trees (1998.325.1); Pissarro, The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning (60.174).

Terrain

EU-DEM v1.1, European Union's Copernicus Land Monitoring Service information, via OpenTopoData; resampled and reshaped here.

Places

© OpenStreetMap contributors.

Letters

Van Gogh's from Vincent van Gogh: The Letters (Van Gogh Museum and Huygens ING, 2009). Cézanne's from The Letters of Paul Cézanne, translated by Alex Danchev (2013).

Tools and type

libmypaint and the MyPaint brushes; three.js; Brygada 1918 and Apfel Grotezk. Their licences are in one file.

Licence

The code is MIT licensed. Apart from the photographs, quotations and data above, the worlds, images and texts are by On the Motif, under CC BY 4.0. When reusing them, please name the source painting too.

Privacy

No cookies and no tracking; visits are counted only as totals. The full notice is on the privacy page.