Keep the provenance.
Every work points home. The source museum record is the authority for credit, rights, and object history.
The keeper of the vault
He recovers what the web forgets.
Lupin began as an art scraper. The mission became larger: give recovered works memory, context, and a beautiful place to be found again.
The image is free. The trail back to it is sacred.
Vault de Lupin is a museum built from open-access collections. Its current catalogue holds 1,899 works: 1,171 from Cleveland Museum of Art, 376 from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and 352 from Statens Museum for Kunst.
Each record keeps the source institution, object identifier, original record link, image dimensions, and 12 provisional thematic paths. Museum APIs supply creators, dates, materials, cultural attributions, and object-level rights markers where available. Lupin’s visual index adds searchable descriptions to 1,755 works.
The inference is a doorway—not scholarship. Museum-authored text, Lupin-authored curation, and machine-assisted visual notes are labelled separately so visitors can tell what kind of knowledge they are reading.
The site is intentionally serverless. The catalogue is rebuilt from Lupin’s corpus, then indexed into a compact static search engine. No visitor tracking is required. No paid database stands between the public and the art.
House rules
How the vault behaves.
Never fake certainty.
Machine-made tags stay visibly provisional. Unknown culture, date, artist, or rights data remains unknown until verified.
Make looking feel alive.
An archive should provoke curiosity, not resemble a storage bucket. Performance and atmosphere belong together.
A living museum
The walls keep moving.
New recoveries enter through Lupin’s source engines. Museum metadata can be refreshed without rewriting the experience. Editorial notes live separately from generated records, so curation survives every catalogue rebuild.
The next layer is deeper authored curation: more short histories, cultural trails, verified rights notes, and recoveries from additional open institutions.