🖼 Cleveland Museum of Art Scraper

🚀 Pull CC0 open access artworks in seconds. Search 41,000+ image-backed works across 18 curatorial departments, each with a free-to-use image URL and a clean object record.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-06-05 · 📊 19 fields per record · 41,000+ image-backed artworks · full public domain (CC0) collection

The Cleveland Museum of Art Scraper turns the museum's Open Access API into a structured, ready-to-use dataset. Every record carries a CC0 image URL plus the catalog facts behind the object: title, artist, creation date, medium, dimensions, department, culture, and a link back to the museum page.

Coverage. The Cleveland Museum of Art has released tens of thousands of works under CC0 (Creative Commons Zero, public domain). This Actor reads the same Open Access API the museum publishes, so you get paintings, prints, drawings, textiles, photographs, sculpture, and more, filtered by keyword, department, or object type.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Researchers, educators, designers, data scientists, GLAM and digital humanities teams	Building art datasets, training image models on public domain art, populating galleries and apps, classroom resources, provenance and collection research

📋 What the Cleveland Museum of Art Scraper does

• Searches the museum's Open Access collection by free text keyword (artist, title, subject).
• Filters by curatorial department or by object type.
• Returns only artworks that carry a CC0 image when you ask for image-backed records.
• Flattens each artwork into a single record with the headline image URL first.
• Captures artist, creation date, medium, measurements, department, culture, credit line, and the canonical museum URL.
• Keeps the full creators list and a higher resolution print image URL for downstream use.

🎬 Full Demo (🚧 Coming soon)

⚙️ Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
query	string	No	Free text search across titles, artists, and descriptions. Leave empty to browse the whole collection.
department	string (select)	No	Limit to one curatorial department, for example Photography or Japanese Art.
type	string	No	Limit to one object type, for example Painting, Drawing, Print, Sculpture.
hasImage	boolean	No	When on, only artworks with a CC0 image are returned. Defaults to on.
maxItems	integer	No	How many records to collect. Free plan is capped at 10.

Example 1, browse image-backed works (default):

{
  "hasImage": true,
  "maxItems": 25
}

Example 2, keyword search inside a department:

{
  "query": "monet",
  "department": "Modern European Painting and Sculpture",
  "type": "Painting",
  "hasImage": true,
  "maxItems": 50
}

⚠️ Good to Know: A handful of departments have few or no CC0 images. If you select such a department with hasImage on, expect a small or empty result set. Turn hasImage off to browse catalog records without images.

📊 Output

Each artwork becomes one record. The headline image URL is always first, scrapedAt is second to last, and error is always last.

Field	Description
🖼 imageUrl	CC0 web image URL (falls back to print, then full).
📌 title	Artwork title.
🔗 url	Canonical museum page for the object.
🆔 id	Numeric object id.
🏷 accessionNumber	Museum accession number.
🎨 artist	Primary creator with nationality and life dates.
📅 creationDate	Display creation date as published.
🏛 type	Object type, for example Painting.
🧪 medium	Technique or medium.
📐 measurements	Framed and unframed dimensions.
🗂 department	Curatorial department.
📚 collection	Internal collection grouping.
🌍 culture	Culture and period tags.
🧾 creditLine	Credit line for the acquisition.
📜 shareLicenseStatus	License status, typically CC0.
📍 currentLocation	Current gallery or location.
👥 creators	Full creators list with roles and life years.
🖨 printImageUrl	Higher resolution print image URL.
🕒 scrapedAt	Timestamp when the record was collected.
❌ error	Null on success, message on failure.

Real sample records from a live run:

[
  {
    "imageUrl": "https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/1915.534/1915.534_web.jpg",
    "title": "Nathaniel Hurd",
    "url": "https://clevelandart.org/art/1915.534",
    "id": 94979,
    "accessionNumber": "1915.534",
    "artist": "John Singleton Copley (American, 1738–1815)",
    "creationDate": "c. 1765",
    "type": "Painting",
    "medium": "oil on canvas",
    "department": "American Painting and Sculpture",
    "culture": ["America"],
    "shareLicenseStatus": "CC0",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-06-05T17:42:59.000Z",
    "error": null
  },
  {
    "imageUrl": "https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/1922.1133/1922.1133_web.jpg",
    "title": "Stag at Sharkey's",
    "url": "https://clevelandart.org/art/1922.1133",
    "id": 94980,
    "accessionNumber": "1922.1133",
    "artist": "George Bellows (American, 1882–1925)",
    "creationDate": "1909",
    "type": "Painting",
    "medium": "oil on canvas",
    "department": "American Painting and Sculpture",
    "culture": ["America"],
    "shareLicenseStatus": "CC0",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-06-05T17:42:59.000Z",
    "error": null
  },
  {
    "imageUrl": "https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/1927.1984/1927.1984_web.jpg",
    "title": "The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake",
    "url": "https://clevelandart.org/art/1927.1984",
    "id": 94981,
    "accessionNumber": "1927.1984",
    "artist": "Thomas Eakins (American, 1844–1916)",
    "creationDate": "1873",
    "type": "Painting",
    "medium": "oil on canvas",
    "department": "American Painting and Sculpture",
    "culture": ["America"],
    "shareLicenseStatus": "CC0",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-06-05T17:42:59.000Z",
    "error": null
  }
]

✨ Why choose this Actor

• Built directly on the museum's official Open Access API, so the data is first party.
• Image first records, ready to drop into a gallery, model pipeline, or catalog.
• CC0 means the images are public domain and free to reuse.
• Clean flat fields plus the full creators list when you need more detail.
• Sensible defaults, so a single run returns image-backed works out of the box.

📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Image URLs	Structured fields	Setup effort	Public domain clarity
This Actor	Yes, CC0 web and print	19 fields per record	Point and run	CC0 surfaced per record
Manual API calls	Yes	You parse it yourself	High	You check each object
Web scraping the site	Fragile	Inconsistent	High	Unclear
Screenshotting pages	No clean URL	None	Very high	Unclear

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account with our sign-up link.
2. Open the Cleveland Museum of Art Scraper.
3. Set a query, pick a department or type, or leave everything empty to browse.
4. Set maxItems and click Start.
5. Download your results or connect them to the integrations below.

💼 Business use cases

Product and design teams

Need	How this helps
Royalty free imagery	CC0 image URLs ready for products and decks
Mood boards and themes	Filter by department or culture for curated sets

Data and machine learning

Need	How this helps
Training data	Public domain art with labeled medium, type, and date
Metadata enrichment	Map accession numbers to clean structured records

Education and publishing

Need	How this helps
Course materials	Pull works by artist or period for lessons
Catalog content	Populate articles and guides with sourced facts

Research and GLAM

Need	How this helps
Collection analysis	Slice the collection by department, culture, or type
Provenance work	Keep credit line, accession number, and museum URL together

🔌 Automating Cleveland Museum of Art Scraper

Connect runs to the tools you already use:

• Make and Zapier for no code workflows.
• Slack to post new finds to a channel.
• Airbyte to load records into a warehouse.
• GitHub to trigger runs from a repository action.
• Google Drive to archive results.

🌟 Beyond business use cases

• Research: study an artist or period across the open collection.
• Personal: build a wallpaper or print set from public domain art.
• Non-profit: source imagery for community and museum projects.
• Experimentation: prototype art search, tagging, or recommendation tools.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant

Paste your results into ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Microsoft Copilot and ask it to summarize trends, group works by theme, or draft captions.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Is the data really free to use? The records flagged CC0 are released into the public domain by the museum. Always confirm the shareLicenseStatus on each record before reuse.

Where does the data come from? From the Cleveland Museum of Art Open Access API, the museum's own published endpoint.

Do I need an API key? No. The Open Access API is keyless.

Can I get only artworks with images? Yes. Keep hasImage on, which is the default.

How do I filter by department? Use the department select field. Each value maps to a real curatorial department.

Can I search by artist? Yes. Put the artist name in query, for example monet or eakins.

What image resolutions are available? The web image is in imageUrl and a larger print image is in printImageUrl.

How many records can I get? Free runs return up to 10. Paid plans go far higher, up to the collection size.

What if an artwork has no image? With hasImage off, image fields may be null for catalog only objects.

Is this affiliated with the museum? No. It is an independent tool that reads publicly available open access data.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Every run produces a structured dataset you can pull through the Apify API or push to Make, Zapier, Airbyte, Slack, Google Drive, and more.

🔗 Recommended Actors

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection.

🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form

⚠️ Disclaimer: independent tool, not affiliated with the Cleveland Museum of Art. Only publicly available open access data is collected.