Public domain paintings database

Question

I'm looking for an API that would allow me to get a lot of painting on the public domain. For example, Google's art project contains a lot of what I am looking for, but you can't easily download paintings (I will need something like 1000 of them).

tl;dr : Is there a way to run get-paintings --painter "Claude Monet" and get an archive?

What do you need for each painting? Only metadata, or also an image of the painting itself? — Nicolas Raoul, Oct 13 '17 at 06:18

score 8 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 01 '15 at 15:56

8

Check out the Walters Art Museum Collections API:

https://github.com/WaltersArtMuseum/walters-api

Might give you access to what you are looking for...

answered Jan 01 '15 at 15:56

Mark Headd

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score 6 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:37

6

The Art section of Datahub.io has several good candidates -

For example, the Wikimedia Paintings page. It's not an API, but you can download all image files from this page by a command like this:

wget -r -P /save/location -A jpeg,jpg,bmp,gif,png http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Paintings

(at the moment, this command doesn't work for me, but it should be possible - details)

Another option might be the Victoria and Albert Museum API - http://www.vam.ac.uk/api/

Also consider Freebase (which is being transferred to Wikidata). An example of Monet's paintings is

http://www.freebase.com/user/skud/default_domain/views/artworks_by_monet

And the same query can be made via the API.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:37

Community

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answered Jan 01 '15 at 18:27

philshem

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http://how-to.wikia.com/wiki/How_to_download_all_image_files_in_a_Wikimedia_Commons_page_or_directory This helped my a bit, the command you supplied seems not to work (i only get the robots.txt file) – Rogue Jan 02 '15 at 13:57
The asker wants public domain. Most files on Commons are not. – Nicolas Raoul Oct 13 '17 at 06:18

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 11 '15 at 10:59

4

have you tried Tate's collection? It has quite straightforward JSON (each artist has its own JSON file) and CSV formats and no OAuth key needed I think: https://github.com/tategallery/collection

or try Rijksmuseum: http://rijksmuseum.github.io/

answered Feb 11 '15 at 10:59

marcodemutiis

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score 3 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 07 '15 at 10:34

flickr public domain search for cc images of Paintings....you'll probably want to fine tune the search terms, because these results aren't all paintings, but this is what flickr commons have yet to fail me:
https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=Paintings&l=cc&ss=2&ct=6&mt=photos&w=commons&adv=1

Public domain paintings database

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