Craquelure: Art Jigsaw Puzzle

About Craquelure: Art Jigsaw Puzzle

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.

NEW IN 2.0

· Put a board down whenever you like. Every board is saved exactly as you left it, every seated piece, loose piece and joined block, and several can be in progress at once. They wait for you on the home screen.
· A daily puzzle: one work a day, the same for everyone, with a streak to keep. Gentle on Monday, bigger at the weekend.
· Deco, a third cut: stepped, square-cornered tabs with far less to go on.
· Table tools: lay out the edges, the corners or a colour family onto the table around the board, gather stray pieces back into view, or return them all to the tray.
· "Where?" shows where a piece you are holding belongs.
· Rotation boards: tap a piece to turn it, or twist it with two fingers.
· Six table colours and three tray piece sizes, a pause button, and a reference picture you can move and resize.
· Search all 730 works by title, artist, subject or place, and browse collections by subject, artist and century. Every room now has a gallery note.
· "Play today's Craquelure puzzle" with Siri and Shortcuts.
· VoiceOver labels throughout, larger text support, and keyboard shortcuts on iPad.

NOT STOCK PHOTOGRAPHS

Not AI images either. These are the Museum's own scans of real objects, each bundled at full working resolution with its real catalogue record: artist, date, medium, collection, accession number.

TWELVE ROOMS

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. Hudson River School landscapes. Silver prints from the first century of photography. And a whole room of textile and ornament plates with no horizon and no focal point, for people who think they are good at this.

THE CUT

Anything from a twelve-piece warm-up to a two-thousand-piece afternoon, in three cut families: Classic knob-and-socket, Organic hand-cut lobes, and the new Deco.

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 drag as one. Sort the tray by edges, corners or colour, toggle the outline, pinch to zoom right into the brushwork.

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 why the app has its name.

WHAT YOU GET FOR FINISHING

Every completed work joins a personal museum you arrange yourself: choose the frame, choose the wall colour, hang them where you want. And its label unlocks: the Museum's own record for the object, plus a measured reading of the picture itself.

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. Forty-one awards, twelve curator ranks from Visitor to Director, a themed weekly acquisition of six works, and the daily puzzle.

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 network connection: the app never goes online
· 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.