Open Data API & MCP

Every record in this archive is public-domain and free to reuse. This is a free, read-only API over the whole corpus — for researchers, applications and AI assistants. No key required. Please be reasonable with request rates and credit the original source (each record includes it).

REST API

GET /api/v1/search

Params: q, medium, source, century, country, rights, page, page_size (≤100).

https://publicdomainplates.com/api/v1/search?q=botanical+illustration&century=19&page_size=5

GET /api/v1/artwork/{id} — one full record.

GET /api/v1/facets — available mediums, countries, centuries and sources with counts.

GET /api/v1/export.jsonl — bulk newline-delimited JSON. Params: page, page_size (≤1000), source.

MCP server (for AI assistants)

A Model Context Protocol server is available at https://publicdomainplates.com/mcp (Streamable HTTP, JSON-RPC 2.0). Tools: search_public_domain and get_artwork. Add it to any MCP client to let it search and cite public-domain art directly.

{ "mcpServers": { "publicdomainplates": { "url": "https://publicdomainplates.com/mcp" } } }

Data aggregated from open-access programmes of the world's museums and libraries; see each record's source and rights. Served by Westcountry Hosting Ltd.