A native macOS menu bar app that sets your desktop wallpaper to a different impressionist painting each day, displayed on museum-style mats.
easelwall.com · $2.99 once on the Mac App Store · Free source-available builds
Mac App Store:
Get EaselWall for $2.99 — one-time purchase with automatic updates.
Homebrew:
brew install ntindle/easelwall/easelwall
Direct download: Latest DMG from GitHub Releases
- Museum-style mats — Each painting is presented on a soft cream mat with gallery-style spacing and a subtle shadow. Configurable color and padding.
- Orientation aware — Landscape paintings go on landscape monitors, portrait paintings on portrait monitors. Automatic detection on plug/unplug.
- Unique per display — Optionally show a different painting on each monitor.
- Daily rotation — Pseudo-random selection with no repeats within each display orientation pool until that cycle completes. Swaps at midnight (configurable).
- Set & forget — Lives in your menu bar. Launch at login via SMAppService. In direct-download and Homebrew builds, a launchd agent schedules rotation after reboot or sleep; the Mac App Store build uses in-process scheduling.
- Control Center widget — macOS Tahoe (26+) gets a native "Next Painting" button in Control Center.
- 53 paintings from Van Gogh, Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Degas, Cassatt, and Seurat. 30 bundled for offline use, more fetched at runtime.
- Expand the collection — Fetch more public-domain Van Gogh works from the Rijksmuseum Collection directly from Settings. No API key is required.
- Localized — English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), Portuguese (Brazil), Dutch.
Coming soon — see the website for a preview of the desk setup with 3 monitors.
Requirements: macOS 14+, Xcode 16+, XcodeGen
# Generate the Xcode project from project.yml
brew install xcodegen
xcodegen generate
# Build
make build
# Release build + DMG
make release
make dmgThe .xcodeproj is gitignored — it's generated from project.yml.
Sources/
EaselWall/
App/ — SwiftUI app entry point, AppDelegate
Models/ — Painting, AppSettings
Services/ — WallpaperManager, ScreenManager, MatRenderer,
PaintingStore, LaunchdScheduler
Views/ — MenuBarView, SettingsView (sidebar layout)
API/ — MuseumAPIClient (AIC, Met, Rijksmuseum)
Resources/ — Localizable.xcstrings
ControlWidget/ — macOS 26+ Control Center widget
Shared/ — AppIntents (shared between app + widget)
Resources/
Paintings/
catalog.json — 53 paintings with metadata + image URLs
images/ — 30 bundled JPEGs for offline use
The bundled catalogue features paintings by artists who died at least 100 years ago. EaselWall includes remote artwork only when the source institution marks its digital reproduction with CC0 1.0 or the Public Domain Mark 1.0. Copyright status can vary by jurisdiction, so EaselWall relies on the rights statement attached to each source record rather than making a blanket worldwide claim.
Featured artists include Vincent van Gogh (d. 1890), Claude Monet (d. 1926), Pierre-Auguste Renoir (d. 1919), Paul Cezanne (d. 1906), Edgar Degas (d. 1917), Mary Cassatt (d. 1926), and Georges Seurat (d. 1891).
Digital reproductions of two-dimensional public domain artworks do not create new copyrights under U.S. law. This principle was established in Bridgeman Art Library, Ltd. v. Corel Corp., 36 F. Supp. 2d 191 (S.D.N.Y. 1999), reinforced in Meshwerks, Inc. v. Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., Inc., 528 F.3d 1258 (10th Cir. 2008), and codified in Article 14 of EU Directive 2019/790 (DSM Directive).
Artwork images are obtained only from records marked CC0 1.0 Universal or Public Domain Mark 1.0:
| Institution | License | Attribution Required |
|---|---|---|
| Art Institute of Chicago | CC0 1.0 | No |
| The Metropolitan Museum of Art | CC0 1.0 | No |
| Rijksmuseum | CC0 1.0 / PDM 1.0 | No (but see API attribution below) |
EaselWall was developed using the Rijksmuseum API. The app uses the keyless Search API, framed EDM object records, and Rijksmuseum's IIIF image service. It accepts a result only when its record carries a CC0 or Public Domain Mark rights URI, and credits accepted images as "Rijksmuseum Collection."
This application is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any museum or cultural institution. If you believe any image has been included in error, please open an issue.
Business Source License 1.1 — Source-available. Converts to Apache 2.0 on 2030-04-13.
