Search artworks
search_artworksSearch museum collections worldwide for artworks by artist, title, culture, or period. Returns compact results with source and id for further use.
Instructions
Search museum collections for artworks. Returns compact results including a source and id used with get_artwork or get_artwork_image.
IMPORTANT — this matches keywords against catalog metadata; it is not semantic search. Artist names, titles, cultures, and periods work well. Descriptions of subject matter work badly: a query like 'man crossing a bridge' matches any record containing 'man', 'bridge', or names like 'Bridges' and 'Cross', and buries the relevant results.
So translate the user's intent into catalog vocabulary before calling. If you can name a likely artist, school, or title from your own knowledge, search for that instead — e.g. prefer 'Hokusai' or 'Hiroshige Tokaido' over 'japanese painting of a bridge'. Searching a subject phrase directly is a last resort; if you must, use one or two distinctive nouns rather than a sentence.
Results are ordered by each museum's own relevance ranking, which is often weak — scan the whole list rather than assuming the first hit is best.
CHOOSING A SOURCE. 'all' is a fine default, but naming a source is much better when the work has an obvious home. Five of the ten sources hold mostly Western art (met, artic, cleveland, harvard, rijksmuseum); for anything else, reach for these first:
Japanese art and objects → 'japansearch' (Japan's national aggregator), then 'vam', 'met'
Chinese, Korean, South and Southeast Asian, Islamic → 'vam', then 'smithsonian'
African art → 'smithsonian' with
unit_code:NMAfAin the query, then 'vam'Indigenous Americas and pre-Columbian → 'smithsonian' with
unit_code:NMAIMāori and Pacific → 'tepapa'
Latin American art, and anywhere else with no museum API → 'wikidata'
Source-specific quirks worth knowing:
'smithsonian' accepts field filters in the query, so
unit_code:NMAfAorunit_code:FSG(Asian art) narrows 21 museums to one. Write it as a plain AND term — 'Nasca AND unit_code:NMAI' — and do not parenthesise it, which makes the filter silently drop. Note thatunit_code:NMAIreturns metadata but essentially never images, so use it to find and read about Indigenous American works, not to display them.'japansearch' catalogs in Japanese and has no English titles — query it in Japanese ('北斎', '浮世絵') for good recall, and expect titles to come back in Japanese with a
languagefield marking them; that is correct output, not a failure.'tepapa' images are mostly 'All Rights Reserved' under Te Papa's cultural protocols for taonga Māori. They can still be fetched and viewed, but check
licensefrom get_artwork before suggesting a work can be reused.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| limit | No | Max results per source (default 10). | |
| query | Yes | Catalog keywords — ideally an artist name, title, culture, or period, e.g. 'Katsushika Hokusai' or 'Edo period landscape'. Avoid full sentences and subject descriptions. | |
| source | No | A specific museum source, or 'all' (default) to search every available source. An all-source search costs several seconds — 'rijksmuseum' has no free-text search, and 'wikidata' runs a SPARQL query — so name a source when you know which one holds the work. |