Art Institute of Chicago Scraper

Scrape artworks from the Art Institute of Chicago open collection — one of the largest, richest art datasets in the world — directly into clean, structured JSON. No API key, no login, no setup. Search by artist, title, style or keyword, or browse the entire public collection.

Perfect for art datasets, education, machine-learning / computer-vision training, and cultural-heritage research.

Pricing: roughly $0.5 per 1,000 artworks — one of the cheapest art-data actors on the store.

Features

• 🎨 Two modes — search (run any list of queries) or browse (walk the full collection).
• 🖼️ IIIF image URLs — ready-to-download high-resolution image links, built from the museum's IIIF server.
• 🏛️ Rich metadata — artist, date, medium, dimensions, department, classification, gallery, credit line, subject terms, public-domain and on-view flags.
• 🔑 No API key — uses the museum's public API.
• ⚡ Datacenter-friendly — no residential proxies required, so it runs cheap.
• 🧱 Robust — permissive schema, paginated collection, deduped results, graceful fallbacks.

Input

Field	Type	Description
mode	select	search (default) or browse.
queries	array	Search terms (e.g. ["monet", "van gogh"]). Used in search mode.
maxItems	integer	Max artworks to collect (default 100, max 1000).

Example input

{
  "mode": "search",
  "queries": ["monet", "van gogh"],
  "maxItems": 100
}

Output

Each dataset item is one artwork:

{
  "id": 16568,
  "title": "Water Lilies",
  "artist": "Claude Monet",
  "artist_display": "Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926)",
  "date": "1906",
  "medium": "Oil on canvas",
  "dimensions": "89.9 × 94.1 cm",
  "origin": "France",
  "department": "Painting and Sculpture of Europe",
  "classification": "painting",
  "gallery": "Gallery 240",
  "credit_line": "Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection",
  "is_public_domain": true,
  "is_on_view": false,
  "terms": ["oil on canvas", "Impressionism", "landscapes"],
  "image_url": "https://www.artic.edu/iiif/2/3c27b499-af56-f0d5-93b5-a7f2f1ad5813/full/843,/0/default.jpg",
  "url": "https://www.artic.edu/artworks/16568",
  "source": "artic",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-20T00:00:00+00:00"
}

image_url is null for artworks without a digitized image.

Use cases

• Art datasets — build labeled image/metadata datasets for analysis or apps.
• Education — power classroom tools, quizzes, and study material.
• ML / computer-vision training — public-domain imagery with clean labels.
• Cultural research — study collections, movements, mediums and provenance at scale.

Related actors

• Met Museum Scraper
• Cleveland Art Scraper
• Openverse Media Scraper
• Wikimedia Commons Scraper

Keywords

art institute of chicago, artic scraper, art api, museum scraper, artwork dataset, public domain art, iiif images, art metadata, painting dataset, ml training data, cultural heritage, open access art, fine art scraper, image dataset

Data & attribution

Data comes from the Art Institute of Chicago's public API. Many works are public domain (is_public_domain: true); always check each work's rights before reuse and credit the museum accordingly.