Cleveland Museum of Art Scraper — Open Access Artworks

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Extract structured artwork data from the Cleveland Museum of Art Open Access API — one of the most comprehensive public collections of fine art data available anywhere. This Actor queries the museum's free, publicly accessible REST API and returns clean, structured records ready for research, visualization, AI enrichment, or RAG pipelines.

The Cleveland Museum of Art holds over 68,000 open-access artworks spanning 5,000+ years of human creativity, from ancient Egyptian artifacts to contemporary American paintings. All records are released under CC0 (no rights reserved), making this dataset ideal for academic research, machine learning training datasets, art history analysis, and commercial applications.

Key Features

• 68,000+ open-access artwork records — One of the largest freely accessible museum datasets in the world
• Keyword search — Query by artist name, medium, title, or any text found in artwork metadata
• Department and type filtering — Narrow to Paintings, Prints, Photography, Sculpture, Drawing, and more
• Image filter — Optionally restrict results to artworks with available images
• Paginated extraction — Handles the full collection in batches of 100 for reliable, complete extraction
• No authentication required — Cleveland Museum of Art's public Open Access API, no API key needed
• CC0 licensed data — All extracted data is released under Creative Commons Zero (public domain dedication)
• Clean, structured output — Normalized JSON with 11 fields per artwork, missing values coerced to empty strings

Output Data Fields

How to Scrape Cleveland Museum of Art Data

Follow these steps to extract artwork records from the Cleveland Museum of Art Open Access collection:

1. Open the Actor — Find "Cleveland Museum of Art Scraper" in the Apify Store and click Try for free.

2. Configure your search — In the input form, set your filters:

   • Leave Search Query empty to retrieve all artworks
   • Set Department to "Paintings" to target only paintings
   • Set Type to "Painting", "Print", "Sculpture", etc. for type-level filtering
   • Enable Has Image Only if you need artworks with downloadable images
   • Set Max Results to control how many records to extract (default: 100, max: 5000)

3. Run the Actor — Click Start. The Actor connects directly to the Cleveland Museum's public API. No authentication, no proxies required.

4. Review results — When the run completes, click Results to browse extracted artwork records in the dataset viewer.

5. Export your data — Download as JSON, CSV, XLSX, or XML. Use the Apify API to integrate directly with your pipeline.

Input Example

{
"q":"portrait",
"department":"American Painting and Sculpture",
"type":"Painting",
"hasImage":true,
"maxResults":500
}

Output Example

{
"id":94979,
"accessionNumber":"1915.534",
"title":"Nathaniel Hurd",
"creationDate":"c. 1765",
"type":"Painting",
"department":"American Painting and Sculpture",
"culture":"America",
"technique":"oil on canvas",
"creator":"John Singleton Copley (American, 1738–1815)",
"imageUrl":"https://openaccess-api.clevelandart.org/api/artworks/94979/images/web",
"webUrl":"https://clevelandart.org/art/1915.534"
}

Pricing

This Actor uses Apify's per-result pricing model. Costs are low because the Cleveland Museum of Art API is fast and requires no browser rendering or proxy infrastructure.

You also pay for Apify compute time (typically under $0.01 for a standard run).

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FAQ

Q: Is scraping the Cleveland Museum of Art legal? A: Yes. The Cleveland Museum of Art explicitly makes this data available via their Open Access API under CC0 (Creative Commons Zero). The data is intended for public use with no restrictions.

Q: Do I need an API key or account? A: No. The Cleveland Museum of Art Open Access API is completely free and requires no authentication or API key.

Q: How many artworks are available? A: Over 68,000 artworks as of 2026. The total grows as the museum digitizes additional works.

Q: Can I get artworks currently on view only? A: The API supports a currently_on_view filter. Contact support if you need this feature enabled in the Actor.

Q: What image sizes are available? A: The API provides web (small), print (medium), and full (large) resolution images. This Actor returns the web-resolution URL by default.

Q: Why are some imageUrl fields empty? A: Not all artworks have digitized images. Enable the Has Image Only filter to exclude records without images.

Legal Disclaimer

This Actor accesses only publicly available data from the Cleveland Museum of Art's official Open Access API (openaccess-api.clevelandart.org). All data extracted is released under the CC0 Public Domain Dedication by the Cleveland Museum of Art. This Actor does not bypass any authentication, circumvent any access controls, or collect personal data. Use of extracted data is subject to Cleveland Museum of Art's Open Access Policy. The Actor author is not affiliated with the Cleveland Museum of Art. For support, contact the Apify Store listing.