---
license: cc-by-4.0
language:
  - en
  - zh
tags:
  - art
  - museums
  - cultural-heritage
  - multilingual
pretty_name: Artable
size_categories:
  - 10M<n<100M
configs:
  - config_name: artwork
    data_files: artwork.parquet
    default: true
  - config_name: artist
    data_files: artist.parquet
---

# Artable

Artwork records digitally published by museums and cultural institutions across the
**UK, Europe, the Americas and Asia**, harvested from each institution's own API or
open-data endpoint and normalised into one schema.

## Scope of this release

**Every row in this release has a picture.** The working catalogue holds 23,010,062 records;
the 5,604,792 with no image reference are held back for a later release rather than shipped
as rows a reader cannot look at. Nothing was deleted — they return when they have pictures.

## Configs

Two configs, because the two tables have different schemas. Without this file Hugging Face
concatenates both Parquet files into a single split, and the schema conflict breaks the
search API.

| config | rows | one row is |
|---|---|---|
| `artwork` (default) | 17,405,270 | an artwork, with an image reference |
| `artist` | 56,989 | an artist, with a biography |

Join on `artwork.artist` = `artist.name`.

## artwork

`id`, `title`, `title_lang`, `title_zh`, `title_alt`, `artist`, `artist_zh`, `year_start`,
`year_end`, `date_display`, `medium`, `category`, `institution`, `institution_zh`, `city`,
`country`, `region`, `accession`, `image_url`, `thumb_url`, `iiif`, `image_commons`,
`image_commons_credit`, `license`, `source_url`, `description`, `description_zh`, `history`,
`story`, `story_zh`.

## artist

`name`, `name_zh`, `story`, `story_zh`, `story_lang`, `story_url`, `born`, `died`, `works`.

`story_lang` matters: 11,952 biographies exist only in French, German, Italian or Japanese.
The column says which language the text is actually in, so a French article is never
presented as though it were written or translated for this dataset.

## Honest limits

Stated plainly, because a catalogue that overstates itself is worse than a smaller one.

- **Unknown is `null`.** No accession number, licence, language tag or date is ever inferred.
- **Chinese titles are marked by provenance.** A title in `title_zh` is one the museum itself
  published. Machine-translated titles are held in a separate column and labelled in the app;
  they are never merged into `title_zh`.
- **40.2% of works carry a Traditional Chinese title**, almost all machine-translated through
  a judged pipeline (each batch is graded by an independent reader and written only on a
  pass). The remainder are untranslated, not silently left in their source language under a
  Chinese label.
- **"Story" is three different things.** 7,812,526 works carry the museum's own description or
  curator's comment, 2,398,011 more reach a biography of their artist — but only **4,256**
  have a narrative about that specific object. Do not read the aggregate as the last number.
- **1,301,017 rows had an artist value that named nobody** — "Okänd", "Ingen uppgift",
  "Onbekend / Unknown (Fotograaf)", "vermeld op object" — in 22 languages. These are now
  `null` so that "unknown" is not presented as a person's name. Values carrying a real
  attribution ("Anonymous British", "Unbekannt (Stecher)" where a nationality or role adds
  information) were kept.
- **192,623 rows carry a raw URI in the `artist` column** instead of a name
  (`http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q…`). These are unresolved identifiers, a known defect,
  not names. Do not treat them as artist labels.
- **Coverage is uneven by source, not by harvest.** Several institutions cap paging while
  reporting success; where a page could not be retrieved it is recorded as a gap rather than
  silently dropped.

## Images

**Not included, and must not be mirrored.** Rows carry `image_url` / `iiif` pointing at the
holding institution, which is both the licensing position and why this dataset is ~1.1 GB
rather than terabytes.

## Attribution

Attribution obligations travel with the data — Europeana, Joconde and Palissy require it.
Every row carries `institution` and `license`; keep those columns.