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