Craquelure
730 masterworks, in pieces
$0.99 · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.
Open-access museum art, cut from 12 to 2,000 pieces. Finish each work to unlock its curatorial label. No ads or forced timers. Just the picture and your hands.
Craquelure is a jigsaw puzzle built around 730 genuine works of art, every one of
them released to the public domain by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Not stock photographs. Not AI images. Actual museum scans of actual objects, each
one bundled at full working resolution and each one carrying its real catalogue
record — artist, date, medium, collection, accession number.
TWELVE ROOMS
The collection is arranged the way a museum is, by room:
Dutch Golden Age · Ukiyo-e · Botanical Plates · Maps & Views · Mughal & Persian ·
Ink & Scroll · Impressionism & After · The American Wing · Old Masters · Master
Drawings · Early Photographs · Pattern & Ornament
Seventeenth-century Dutch interiors. Hokusai and Hiroshige. Engraved flora from
the great herbals. Sea charts drawn before anyone had seen the coast from above.
Jewelled folios from Persian manuscripts. Hudson River School landscapes. Silver
prints from the first century of photography. And an entire room of textile and
ornament plates with no horizon and no focal point, for people who think they are
good at this.
THE CUT
Choose anything from a twelve-piece warm-up to a two-thousand-piece afternoon.
Two cut families: Classic, the traditional knob-and-socket die cut, and Organic,
hand-cut lobes with no repeated shape, where you have to read the picture instead
of the outline.
Pieces have weight. They lag a little under your finger, carry momentum when you
flick them, and land with a wooden knock when they seat. Two loose pieces that
belong together snap into a block you can then drag as one — the way a real
jigsaw actually works.
Sort the tray by edges, by corners, or by colour. Toggle the ghost outline. Pinch
to zoom right into the brushwork. Take a hint when you are stuck.
THE CRAQUELURE
As the picture comes together, the varnish crack network resolves across the
seams. It is a real shader driven by your progress, and it is the reason the app
is called what it is called.
WHAT YOU GET FOR FINISHING
Every completed work is acquired for a personal museum you arrange yourself —
choose the frame, choose the wall colour, hang them where you want.
And the label unlocks. Not marketing copy: the Museum's own record for that
object, plus a measured reading of the picture itself — where its colour
intensity sits against the rest of the collection, where its local contrast sits,
the five commonest colours in the scan, and the subject terms the Museum files it
under. It is the only jigsaw that leaves you knowing something.
DEPTH, IF YOU WANT IT
Five opt-in conditions raise the difficulty and the payout: rotation, no outline,
monochrome preview, a par time, or no reference image at all. Thirty-seven awards
across scale, volume, craft and curation. Twelve curator ranks from Visitor to
Director. And a new themed acquisition of six works every week, chosen by the
calendar, identical for everyone, with no server involved.
HOW IT IS BUILT
One purchase. That is the whole transaction.
· No advertising, ever
· No in-app purchases
· No subscription
· No account, no sign-in, no email
· No network connection — the app never opens a socket
· No analytics, no tracking, no data collection of any kind
· Everything is on the device the moment you install it, including on a plane
Every image is public domain (CC0). Every sound, every piece of music, every
crack network, every piece shape and the icon itself were generated for this app.
Full source attribution ships with the game.
Ratings & Reviews
- This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
The developer, Robert Corbin, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Robert Corbin
- Size
- 195.6 MB
- Category
- Puzzle
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 17.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 17.0 or later. - iPad
Requires iPadOS 17.0 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 14.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
- English
- Age Rating
13+
- 13+
- Infrequent
Sexual Content or Nudity
- Copyright
- © 2026 Robert Corbin
