Finding curated public domain images

Xavier de Maistre in an armchair, displaying his “book of discoveries” (Veyssier, 1860) Every so often I like to include a public domain image in a blog post. I’m fond of the woodblock and lithographic illustrations of the late 1800s. I try to avoid indiscriminately (un-)splashing every post but the real reason for the infrequency isn’t radical self-control, it’s because dumpster diving for public domain images can be a chore. You can –of course– use Google or Bing to find public domain images but the volume, duplicates, and weighing the veracity of copyright attribution is overwhelming. The Library of Congress has Free to Use and Reuse sets, but their collections are nebulous noun buckets filled with a federally-mandated amount of Americana. On top of that, searching library sites is never a good experience to me. They tend to be slow and inaccurate with poor quality results and it’s a matter of time until you’re redirected to a smaller local library collection or database that’s…