One real painting, uncovering itself over a week. There is nothing to press. It will be further along tomorrow whether you come back or not.
The picture is real, public domain, and chosen by the museum's own flag. It comes from
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open
Access API, which needs no key, filtered on isPublicDomain=true,
hasImages=true and medium=Paintings. The plaque prints the Met's own title, attribution, date, medium
and credit line — nothing on it is written here.
It uncovers over seven real days, and nothing can hurry it. What is showing is worked out from the clock: the squares are uncovered in a fixed order settled when the work was chosen, and how many of them have gone is simply how far through the week you are. Closing the tab does not pause it. Leaving it open does not speed it up. There is no button here that reveals more, because a button like that would be the end of the only idea this drawer has.
The mask is a cover, not a filter. The image sits underneath as an ordinary
<img> and a canvas over the top is painted opaque and then has squares
cleared out of it. That is deliberate: the Met's image host sends no
Access-Control-Allow-Origin, so reading the picture's pixels into a canvas would
taint it and fail. Covering it up needs no access to it at all.
The title is blurred until the picture is mostly there, so the plaque does not give away what you are still waiting to see.