Every museum, one search
Search more than 500,000 open-access museum records at once. By name, or by describing what you want.
Featured discovery
A Bridge in the Rain
In 1887 Van Gogh copied a Hiroshige print brushstroke for brushstroke. He made three that year. Degas collected over a hundred prints without ever imitating one, Cassatt changed medium after seeing seven hundred in a single room, and Toulouse-Lautrec borrowed not the pictures but the signature underneath them. One encounter, four answers, across three collections here.
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Rijksmuseum
- Minneapolis Institute of Art
Things to try
Each of these runs a real search across every collection at once.
Illuminated manuscriptsCuttings and leaves, searched across every collection at once.
Illuminated Manuscript Leaf, Italian · Art Institute of Chicago
Describe it insteadA phrase, not a catalog term. Two of the top three are found by what the picture shows.Le Nuit, from Les Quatre Heures du Jour, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg II · Minneapolis Institute of Art
Ancient EgyptFunerary objects, coffins and fragments.
Head From an Anthropoid Sarcophagus Lid, Egyptian · Art Institute of Chicago
One subject, two museumsThree Hiroshige prints of the same bird, held at the Met and the Art Institute.Blue Bird, Utagawa Hiroshige · The Met
Stained glassWindows, panels and the drawings made to plan them.Stained glass window, Switzerland, 16th century · Minneapolis Institute of Art
GoldWorked gold, from ancient fragments to complete sets.Set of Gold Jewelry · Cleveland Museum of Art
Search an ideaNot a material and not a name. The search still has somewhere to go.
Freedom from Labor, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen · Art Institute of Chicago
MourningDress and objects made for grief, and the pictures of it.Mourning dress · The Met
Other ways in
TopicsClusters the collection fell into on its own, then labelled and edited by hand.
PeopleOne page per maker, pulling together records that each museum catalogs differently.
AtlasPlaces the records knew about without ever recording a coordinate.
Galaxy↗The whole collection as a map of meaning, zoomable down to single objects.
ResearchPapers and working notes on what the collection turns out to contain.
VideosShort narrated pieces on single objects.
Discoveries from the collection
All research →- Mapping 5,525 places museums never recorded as coordinates.Museum records often know where they are without saying so: a caption in period French, a spelling nobody uses anymore, an excavation hierarchy. Turning 5,525 of those into map points, and the places the process went wrong.
- The Blue Bird probe.A Jean Paul Gaultier dress from Paris Musées revealed that multilingual embedding and cross-lingual retrieval are not the same thing. This is how that finding changed LinkedCulture.
- Same artist, cataloged differently at every museumA review queue for merging duplicate artist records across museums when the match is a name, not a shared authority ID.
For museums
Try this on your own collection
A pilot turns collection data you already have into a working search prototype. No change to your collection management system, no metadata rewrite, no new website.