Plate Archive

Open data, API & MCP

Every record in this archive is public domain (CC0) and free to reuse. The whole corpus of 1,071,411 catalogued works is available as open data: a bulk download, a REST API, and a Model Context Protocol server for AI assistants. No key, no sign-up. Please credit the original source where you can — each record carries it.

Bulk download

The full catalogue as gzipped newline-delimited JSON, one record per line. Each record has an id, title, creator, date, subjects, source, rights, and stable item and image URLs.

Download catalogue (94.5 MB)

Licence: CC0 1.0 / public domain. Suggested citation: “Public Domain Plates catalogue, https://publicdomainplates.com/data (CC0).”

REST API

A free, read-only JSON API over the whole corpus. Full reference at /api.

  • GET /api/v1/search — query by q, medium, source, century, country, rights.
  • GET /api/v1/artwork/{id} — one full record.
  • GET /api/v1/facets — mediums, countries, centuries and sources with counts.
  • GET /api/v1/export.jsonl — paginated newline-delimited JSON.
https://publicdomainplates.com/api/v1/search?q=botanical&century=19&page_size=5

Free API key

Anonymous use is free and open: up to 60 requests a minute and 2,000 a day per IP, no sign-up. A free key raises that to 5,000 a day. Send it as an X-API-Key header (or ?key=) — the same key works on the REST API and the MCP server.

The key appears on the next page and we email a copy. Over the limit you get HTTP 429 with a Retry-After header.

MCP server

A Model Context Protocol server lets an AI assistant search and cite public-domain art directly. Streamable HTTP, JSON-RPC 2.0, at https://publicdomainplates.com/mcp.

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

Embed a work

Drop a public-domain work onto your own page. The widget links back to the full record.

<iframe src="https://publicdomainplates.com/embed/random" width="360" height="420"
  style="border:0" loading="lazy" title="Public domain artwork"></iframe>

For a specific collection, use https://publicdomainplates.com/embed/collection/<slug>.

Sitemap

The full crawlable index is at /sitemap.xml.