WikiArt Scraper

Scrape WikiArt — the visual art encyclopedia with hundreds of thousands of catalogued paintings spanning every major movement. Browse by art style across 30 movements from Early Renaissance to Pop Art, search the catalog by keyword, or pull an artist's complete body of work, and get titles, artist attribution, year, style, genre, medium, the gallery holding the piece, tags, and a full-resolution image URL. HTTP-only via WikiArt's public JSON endpoints. No auth, no proxy.

What this actor does

• Three modes: byStyle, search, byArtist
• 30 art styles exposed as a dropdown — Impressionism, Surrealism, Cubism, Baroque, Bauhaus-era movements and more
• Full artist catalogs: point byArtist at a WikiArt slug or URL to page through every catalogued work
• Image-ready: every painting carries a directly usable image URL, plus pixel dimensions when published
• Empty fields are omitted

Output per painting

• paintingId — WikiArt painting identifier
• title — painting title
• artistName — attributed artist
• year — year or date range as catalogued
• style — art movement, e.g. Impressionism
• genre — e.g. landscape, portrait, still life
• medium — technique / materials, e.g. oil on canvas
• period — artist's period the work belongs to
• location — museum or gallery holding the work
• tags — subject keywords
• widthPx, heightPx — image dimensions, when published
• imageUrl — painting image
• artistUrl — artist page on WikiArt
• sourceUrl — painting page on WikiArt
• wikiartId — WikiArt content ID, when no canonical page URL is available
• recordType: "painting", scrapedAt

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	byStyle	byStyle / search / byArtist
style	string	Impressionism	Art movement to browse (mode=byStyle)
searchQuery	string	Monet water lily	Keyword to search for (mode=search)
artistUrl	string	claude-monet	WikiArt artist slug or full URL (mode=byArtist)
maxItems	int	50	Hard cap (1–500)

Example: browse a movement

{
  "mode": "byStyle",
  "style": "Impressionism",
  "maxItems": 200
}

Example: an artist's complete works

{
  "mode": "byArtist",
  "artistUrl": "claude-monet",
  "maxItems": 500
}

Example: keyword search

{
  "mode": "search",
  "searchQuery": "water lily",
  "maxItems": 100
}

Example: a narrower movement

{
  "mode": "byStyle",
  "style": "Hudson River School",
  "maxItems": 150
}

Use cases

• Art education — build illustrated movement-by-movement teaching collections
• Museum and gallery apps — enrich collection entries with style, genre, and medium metadata
• Print-on-demand and licensing research — survey an artist's catalog and where works are held
• Machine learning — assemble style-labelled painting datasets for classification or generation research
• Design and moodboarding — pull large themed image sets by movement or subject tag
• Data journalism — analyse how genres and media shift across art movements

FAQ

What is WikiArt? A user-built online encyclopedia of visual art, cataloguing paintings by artist, movement, genre, and period. See wikiart.org.

Is this affiliated with WikiArt? No. This is a third-party actor using WikiArt's public JSON endpoints.

Do I need an account or API key? No. The endpoints used are open.

Can I reuse the images? Not automatically. WikiArt catalogs both public-domain works and works still in copyright, and its own terms govern reuse of the reproductions. Check the rights of each specific work before publishing it.

Where do I find an artist slug? It's the last path segment of a WikiArt artist URL — wikiart.org/en/claude-monet gives claude-monet. You can pass either the full URL or just the slug.

Why is year a string rather than a number? Art catalogs record dates as ranges and approximations (c. 1890, 1888-1889). Keeping the field as published avoids inventing precision that isn't there.

Why do search results carry less metadata than style browsing? WikiArt's search response is a lighter payload than its style and artist listings. Titles, artists, and images are always present; genre, medium, and gallery are more consistently populated in byStyle and byArtist.

Why did a style return fewer paintings than maxItems? Narrow movements like Precisionism or Luminism have far smaller catalogs than Impressionism. The run stops when WikiArt reports no more pages.

Are the style names case- and punctuation-sensitive? Use the dropdown values as written — parenthetical forms like Art Nouveau (Modern) are converted to the right URL slug automatically.

How fresh is the data? Live at query time. WikiArt's catalog is community-maintained and grows continuously.