Art Institute Painting Catalog - Object Metadata

The Art Institute of Chicago's painting catalogue as clean, per-object metadata - one record per painting. Title, artist attribution, date, medium, dimensions, department, place of origin, classification and the public-domain flag, released under CC0, with no images and no free-text description.

What one record represents

The source is the Art Institute of Chicago public API (api.artic.edu), filtered to artwork type Painting (artwork_type_id=1). Each record is one painting: its object id, title, the artist_display historical attribution line, the display date, medium, dimensions, artwork type, classification, department, place of origin, and the is_public_domain flag as a real boolean.

Sample output

Real rows from a live run of this actor (first 5 rows, selected columns).

One full record from the same run, exactly as delivered:

{
  "object_id": 129884,
  "title": "Starry Night and the Astronauts",
  "artist_display": "Alma Thomas\nAmerican, 1891–1978",
  "date_display": "1972",
  "medium_display": "Acrylic on canvas",
  "dimensions": "152.4 × 134.6 cm (60 × 53 in.)",
  "artwork_type": "Painting",
  "classification": "painting",
  "department": "Contemporary Art",
  "place_of_origin": "United States",
  "is_public_domain": false,
  "record_id": "129884",
  "source": "Art Institute of Chicago (api.artic.edu)",
  "source_dataset": "artworks/search",
  "licence": "Art Institute of Chicago (api.artic.edu). Artwork metadata released under CC0 (public-domain dedication). The free-text description field and all images/IIIF identifiers are excluded; no image, image URL or IIIF id is delivered.",
  "attribution": "Art Institute of Chicago (api.artic.edu)",
  "caveat": "Painting catalogue metadata (artwork type Painting, type id 1): title, artist_display, date, medium, dimensions, department, place of origin, classification and the is_public_domain flag. The full painting set is about 3,904 objects - under the source's 10,000-result cap, so the whole set is accessible in one query. artist_display is a historical attribution line; credit-line, provenance and all image/IIIF fields are excluded (CC0 covers metadata only).",
  "observed_at": "2026-09-25T17:17:46Z"
}

Coverage and volume

The live painting set is 3,904 objects (measured at build time from the API's pagination total). The source caps a single query at 10,000 accessible results, and the painting set sits comfortably under that cap, so the whole catalogue is accessible in one paged run - no partitioning is needed.

Sol's Wave-3 index put this door at 3,904 records; measured live at build time the painting set is 3,904 - matching the index exactly.

The Actor pages the search API and stops as soon as your Maximum records cap is met.

Licence and attribution

The Art Institute releases its artwork metadata under CC0 (a public-domain dedication). The full notice travels on every record:

Art Institute of Chicago (api.artic.edu). Artwork metadata released under CC0 (public-domain dedication). The free-text description field and all images/IIIF identifiers are excluded; no image, image URL or IIIF id is delivered.

Attribution to the Art Institute of Chicago is stamped on every record. CC0 covers the metadata; images and IIIF identifiers are a separate matter and are excluded entirely.

Person-data policy

artist_display is a historical artist-attribution line (e.g. "Alma Thomas, American, 1891-1978") - a catalogue attribution on the artwork, kept per the fleet's museum-metadata policy. Every other person-type field is excluded: credit-line (donors), provenance and cataloguer fields are never selected, and no image, image URL or IIIF identifier is ever delivered (the free-text description, which carries a separate licence, is also excluded). A per-record assertion rejects any credit-line, provenance, donor, image or IIIF field (verified with a planted-field test).

Interpretation caveat

Painting catalogue metadata (artwork type Painting, type id 1): title, artist_display, date, medium, dimensions, department, place of origin, classification and the is_public_domain flag. The full painting set is ~3,904 objects - under the source's 10,000-result cap, so the whole set is accessible in one query. artist_display is a historical attribution line; credit-line, provenance and all image/IIIF fields are excluded.

Values are reproduced verbatim from the API; the Actor never rewrites a field. is_public_domain reflects whether the museum considers the object itself in the public domain (distinct from the CC0 licence on the metadata). artist_display is a display string, not a normalised artist record.

Data quality and freshness

is_public_domain is delivered as a real boolean; the object id is a real number. Delivery is keyed on the object id, so the dataset is safe to diff, deduplicate or upsert. Every run re-reads the live API, so the data is as fresh as the museum publishes, and each record's observed_at stamp dates the snapshot. The run's RUN_RECEIPT records how many records were delivered and charged.

Provenance and compliance

Every run reads api.artic.edu/robots.txt at runtime; the gate result (URL, status, byte length, SHA-256 of the policy) is written to the run's RUN_RECEIPT, and the artworks search path is confirmed crawlable before any data request. The API is keyless. The Actor never bypasses a block or fetches through a mirror.

Inputs

• Maximum records (maxRecords) - hard cap on painting records delivered and billed.

Output

Records land in the Actor's default dataset and export as JSON, CSV, Excel or via the Apify API. A tabular overview view surfaces object id, title, artist display, date, medium, department and the public-domain flag.

Fields in detail

The record leads with object_id and title, then artist_display, date_display, medium_display, dimensions, artwork_type, classification, department, place_of_origin and the boolean is_public_domain. The provenance block closes every record. Because the object id is the museum's stable key, the dataset joins cleanly onto any system that references Art Institute object ids.

Typical uses

Collection-data buyers and art-market teams use this cell to enrich painting inventories with clean, CC0 museum metadata - one flat table of the Art Institute's paintings, keyed on the object id, ready to join onto a catalogue or feed a collection-management model. Because the whole set is under the source cap, a single run captures every painting; a scheduled run keeps a downstream inventory current as the museum updates its records.

Scaling and limits

Set Maximum records low to sample cheaply or high to pull the whole ~3,900-painting set. The Actor pages the API and delivers incrementally, so memory stays flat and you are billed only for what is delivered. Because the painting set sits under the 10,000-result cap, no year-range partition is needed here (unlike the larger print catalogue). Re-run to pick up new acquisitions and catalogue updates.

Paintings vs the print catalogue

This cell and the fleet's Art Institute print-catalogue cell draw the same museum API through the same recipe, and stay distinct by artwork type: this one is artwork_type_id=1 (Painting), the other is prints. The practical difference is size - the print catalogue runs to tens of thousands of objects and needs a year-range partition to get past the source's 10,000-result cap, whereas the painting set is under 4,000 and comes whole in a single run. If you want the museum's full graphic-arts holdings you would run both and concatenate on the shared field set; if you want paintings specifically, this cell is the clean slice.

How the museum's fields map

title and artist_display are the museum's own catalogue values - artist_display is a single display line that folds the artist's name, nationality and dates together (for example "Alma Thomas, American, 1891-1978"), which is why it is kept as the historical attribution rather than parsed into a person record. date_display, medium_display and dimensions are likewise display strings, faithful to the catalogue. classification and department place the object within the museum's own taxonomy, and place_of_origin records geographic origin. is_public_domain is the museum's judgment on the artwork itself and is separate from the CC0 licence that covers this metadata.

Data engineering

The record is flat, typed and keyed on the museum object id, so it loads without transformation. Because the whole painting set fits under the source cap, a single run is complete and reproducible; a scheduled run diffs cleanly against the last, surfacing new acquisitions and catalogue edits by the object id. No images or IIIF identifiers are carried, so the rows stay small and the dataset stays purely textual metadata - fast to load, cheap to store, and safe to redistribute under CC0. For a collection-management system or an art-market model, that means the painting catalogue drops in as a ready reference table - no image handling, no licence ambiguity, no reconciliation - and stays current with a single scheduled run keyed on the museum's own id.

Sibling Actors

It sits beside the fleet's Art Institute print-catalogue cell (paintings vs prints, same door). It shares its engineering - the runtime robots gate, page/limit paging, push-then-charge billing and verbatim-value discipline - with the fleet's Art Institute print-catalogue cell, from which it stays distinct by artwork type (paintings vs prints).