Museums and open art
Museum collections and public-domain art you can browse, and often reuse. 6 resources; API, key, license and embedding quoted from each site's own pages, checked Oct 23, 2026.
The Met Open Access
Five thousand years of art in one open API: you can pull a Van Gogh's full record and high-res image with a single unauthenticated request.
API, no keyDownloadCommercial OK
Rijksmuseum Open Data
You get Dutch Golden Age masterpieces and hundreds of thousands of lesser-known objects as open, linked data with zoomable images, most of it free even for commercial use.
API, no keyDownloadCommercial OK
Google Arts & Culture
Gigapixel zooms let you get closer to the brushstrokes than you could standing in the gallery, and you can walk through museums you may never visit.
License unclear
WikiArt
Its tagging by style, genre and movement lets you trace how art changed across centuries, from well-known masters to artists few people have heard of.
APINon-commercial
The Public Domain Review
Every post is a rabbit hole into forgotten prints, diagrams and oddities from old libraries, each traced back to the institution that holds the scan.
Commercial: conditions
Open Culture
It is a curated map of free culture: one list can lead you from a lecture series to a silent film to a recorded poetry reading.
License unclear
Side by side
| Resource | API | Key | Data download | Commercial use | Embed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Met Open Access The Met's free, keyless JSON API and CC0 CSV dataset with object records for more than 470,000 artworks, including image URLs for public-domain works. |
Official API · Free | No | Yes (csv) | Commercial use OK | Embedding unclear |
| Rijksmuseum Open Data The Rijksmuseum's open data portal: metadata for 800,000 collection objects, high-resolution photos of 600,000 of them, library records and vocabularies, served by keyless APIs, IIIF and bulk downloads. |
Official API · Free | No | Yes (n-triples (tar.gz)) | Commercial use OK | Can be embedded |
| Google Arts & Culture Google's website and app showing artworks, archive items, online exhibitions and Street View museum tours published by more than 3,000 cultural institutions in over 80 countries. |
API unclear | — | — | Commercial use unclear | Embedding unclear |
| WikiArt A volunteer-edited visual art encyclopedia with about 250,000 artworks, browsable by movement, style, genre and period, plus a read-only JSON API. |
Official API · Free tier | Yes | — | Non-commercial only | Embedding unclear |
| The Public Domain Review An online journal that digs up strange and beautiful out-of-copyright art, books, films and audio, with curated collection posts and long essays that link to the source archives. |
No official API | — | — | Commercial use with conditions | Embedding unclear |
| Open Culture A blog and set of hand-made directories, running since 2006, that point to free online courses, films, audiobooks, ebooks and language lessons hosted elsewhere on the web. |
No official API | — | — | Commercial use unclear | Embedding unclear |