Cleveland Museum of Art — Open Access Art Scraper

Scrape the Cleveland Museum of Art's Open Access API. Retrieve rich metadata for all 68,000+ artworks in the collection — titles, creator biographies, provenance, exhibition history, CC0 image URLs, and more. No API key required.

What you get

Every record includes:

Field	Description
id	CMA internal numeric ID
accession_number	Museum accession number (e.g. 1958.39)
title	Artwork title
creators	JSON string — creator objects with name, role, and birth/death years
creation_date	Human-readable creation date string
creation_date_earliest / creation_date_latest	Year bounds for date-range filtering
type	Classification: Painting, Drawing, Print, Photograph, Sculpture, etc.
technique	Medium/technique description
department	Museum department (e.g. European Paintings, Prints)
culture	JSON string — culture tags
measurements	Dimensions string
share_license_status	CC0 (public domain) or Copyrighted
tombstone	Full canonical citation string
did_you_know	Short curatorial fact from CMA
provenance	JSON string — provenance records array
exhibitions	JSON string — exhibition history array
current_location	Gallery location within the museum
image_url	Web-resolution image URL (CC0 images only)
cma_artwork_url	Canonical CMA webpage URL for the artwork

Input options

Parameter	Type	Description
maxItems	integer	Maximum number of artworks to retrieve (default: 10)
searchQuery	string	Full-text search (e.g. Monet, landscape, Cleveland)
artworkType	string	Filter by type: Painting, Drawing, Print, Photograph, Sculpture
department	string	Filter by department (e.g. European Paintings, Prints)
has_image	boolean	Return only artworks that have an image
cc0_only	boolean	Return only CC0 (public domain) artworks
created_after	integer	Filter to artworks created on or after this year (e.g. 1800)
created_before	integer	Filter to artworks created on or before this year (e.g. 1900)

Example inputs

Walk all CC0 artworks with images:

{
  "has_image": true,
  "cc0_only": true,
  "maxItems": 1000
}

Impressionist paintings:

{
  "artworkType": "Painting",
  "created_after": 1860,
  "created_before": 1910,
  "maxItems": 500
}

Search for a specific artist:

{
  "searchQuery": "Monet",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Notes

• creators, culture, provenance, and exhibitions are serialized as JSON strings. Use JSON.parse() to access the underlying arrays.
• The collection contains approximately 68,700 artworks. A full walk with default page size completes in a few minutes.
• All open-access image URLs serve from CMA's CDN and are freely usable under CC0.
• The API imposes no authentication requirements and no published rate limit. This actor uses a conservative 300ms delay between pages to be a polite client.

Source

Cleveland Museum of Art Open Access API: https://openaccess-api.clevelandart.org

The CMA was one of the first major museums to adopt CC0 licensing for its open access collection, making this one of the richest freely available museum datasets.