About Jogak Museum

They say we spend at most a few dozen seconds in front of a painting in a museum. Put the same painting together as a puzzle, though, and you end up looking at it for tens of minutes. Jogak Museum started from that difference.

Jogak is Korean for a piece, and also for a sculpture: this is a museum where you take paintings apart and put them back together. We have made 380 masterpieces and artifacts, released into the public domain by major museums around the world, into jigsaw puzzles.

What makes it different

• No sign-up. Just come in and start. Your progress is saved in your browser so you can pick up where you left off.
• Everything is free. We use only public-domain (CC0) images, so you can enjoy them without worrying about copyright.
• Only curated works. This is not a place where any photo gets uploaded; we chose works from museum collections.
• The works you finish add up. Each puzzle you complete is hung in My gallery, with your best time on each difficulty. You can also send a friend your time and challenge them on the same painting.

What is in the collection

• European Paintings — 119
• Korean Paintings — 18
• Japanese Prints & Paintings — 3
• Egyptian Art — 39
• Islamic Costume — 38
• Robert Lehman Collection — 40
• Drawings & Prints — 40
• European Embroidery & Costume — 40
• Medieval Art — 32
• American Paintings — 11

Where the works come from

Every image was released into the public domain (CC0) by the museums below. Each puzzle page links to the original record at the museum that holds the work. Legally, credit is not required, but we always give it out of respect for the artists who made the works and for the museums that released them for free.

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art — 336
• The Art Institute of Chicago — 17
• Rijksmuseum — 16
• National Gallery of Art — 11

How we write the commentary and stories

The commentary on each puzzle and the posts in Stories are drafted by the site's operator with AI tools, then checked against the principles below before they are published.

• Facts about a work follow the museum's records. The artist, date, materials, dimensions and provenance are based on the collection data the holding museum has released and on each work's collection page. Where the commentary and the record disagree, the record wins.
• What is uncertain is described as uncertain. Interpretations or estimates that are not in the record say how strong the evidence is ("appears to", "has been interpreted as"), and we do not use figures we cannot source.
• Work titles use established forms only. On the Korean edition, a title is given in Korean only when there is an accepted Korean title or the English title can be translated directly; otherwise the original title is kept. The English edition uses the museum's own title.
• Instructions for using the site are based on how it actually works. Descriptions of site features such as piece counts, difficulty levels and saved progress have been checked against the actual screens and behavior.

If you spot a factual error or an awkward translation, please let us know through the contact page (in Korean). We will check it and fix it, and posts that are substantially revised show the date of the revision.

Ads and running costs

Jogak Museum is a free service run by one person, and server and domain costs are covered by ads shown on the pages. Ads are placed only where they do not cover the screen you solve puzzles on, and nothing ever requires you to click an ad to continue. Information about advertising cookies is in the privacy policy (in Korean).

Stories about the paintings, and puzzle tips

Stories about the works and the artists, along with how to pick a difficulty, what order to sort pieces in and habits that cut your solving time, are collected in Stories.