Cleveland Museum of Art Scraper

Scrape open-access artwork data from the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) — one of the largest free, public-domain art collections in the world. Get structured records with title, artist, date, medium, department, culture, description and high-resolution image URLs. No API key, no login, no browser required.

Built on the official CMA Open Access API, this Actor is datacenter-proxy friendly and cheap to run — ideal for building art datasets, education tools, machine-learning training sets and cultural research at scale.

Features

• 🎨 Rich artwork metadata — title, artist/creators, creation date, technique, department, culture, measurements, description and fun facts.
• 🖼️ High-resolution image URLs — direct links to CMA's open-access image CDN.
• 🔎 Two modes — search (scrape specific queries like an artist or keyword) or browse (paginate the entire collection).
• 🔑 No API key — uses the public CMA Open Access API.
• ⚡ Fast & cheap — clean JSON API, datacenter-proxy friendly.
• 🧱 Permissive schema — every record is safe to ingest downstream; missing fields are null.

Pricing

This Actor is intentionally cheap: roughly $0.5 per 1,000 artworks depending on run size. You only pay for the Apify platform usage it consumes.

Input

Field	Type	Description
mode	select	search scrapes your queries; browse paginates the whole open-access collection. Default search.
queries	array	Search terms (used in search mode). Prefilled with ["monet", "japanese"].
hasImage	boolean	Only return artworks that have an image. Default true.
maxItems	integer	Max artworks to scrape in total. Default 100, hard cap 1000.

Example input

{
  "mode": "search",
  "queries": ["monet", "japanese", "sculpture"],
  "hasImage": true,
  "maxItems": 200
}

Output

Each dataset item is one artwork:

{
  "id": 135382,
  "accession_number": "1958.39",
  "title": "The Red Kerchief",
  "artist": "Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926)",
  "creators": ["Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926)"],
  "date": "c. 1868–73",
  "sortable_date": 1868,
  "type": "Painting",
  "technique": "oil on fabric",
  "department": "Modern European Painting and Sculpture",
  "culture": ["France, 19th century"],
  "measurements": "Framed: 128.3 x 105.7 x 14.6 cm",
  "description": "The Red Kerchief, c. 1868–73. Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926)...",
  "fun_fact": null,
  "image_url": "https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/1958.39/1958.39_web.jpg",
  "url": "https://clevelandart.org/art/1958.39",
  "source": "cleveland_art",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-20T12:00:00+00:00"
}

Use cases

• Art datasets — assemble curated, license-clear collections for apps and galleries.
• Education — power classroom tools, quizzes and interactive art-history lessons.
• ML training — build image + caption datasets for computer-vision and multimodal models using public-domain works.
• Cultural research — analyze collection trends across departments, cultures and eras.

Related Actors

• Art Institute of Chicago Scraper
• Met Museum Scraper
• Openverse Media Scraper
• Wikimedia Commons Scraper

Keywords

cleveland museum of art, CMA, open access art, public domain artwork, art API scraper, museum data, art dataset, artwork metadata, art images, art history, ML training data, cultural heritage, fine art scraper, painting scraper, open access museum.

Notes

Data is served by the Cleveland Museum of Art Open Access API. Many works are released under CC0 (public domain); always confirm the individual license/rights before commercial reuse.