API Documentation

Getty Provenance Index
Millions of resources from the Getty Provenance Index
The Getty Provenance Index® provides open access to millions of resources from dealer stock books, sales catalogs, and archival inventories, revealing information on the ownership and market histories of artworks
Last updated: 2023-05-23
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This API Documentation is a work in progress.

The data available from this API is made available under CC0. Check the Usage Guidelines section of this document for more details.

Quick Reference

This API is based on the Linked.Art standard, and uses ActivityStreams to track changes. We also provide a SPARQL endpoint to allow for graph queries.

Getting Started

This API is currently designed to accommodate three tasks: getting records, tracking changes in records, and asking questions about the collection as a whole.

We currently don't provide a way to get a list of all of the objects or other entity types in the dataset. We know how useful this would be, and it's on our roadmap. We also don't provide a way to download all the data in the dataset; this is also on the roadmap. Stay tuned.

Getting Records

The first task is to access information about the records Getty has published, which are separated into types or "entities" in our dataset.

Records

The remodeled Getty Provenance Index provides open access to millions of resources from dealer stock books and sales catalogs. A typical type of record one might search for in this vast database is a sales Activity of an artwork or Object. A sales Activity then leads to other related entity types, like the Person or Group that purchased the artwork along with the Person or Group that produced the artwork. Each entity within our dataset has a URL where you can access the record as a JSON document, and the JSON contains links to other entities across the dataset.

For example:

You can learn more about the model we use on the Linked.Art website.

Tracking Changes

The second task is to be able to know when changes happen in records. What we've found is that many users cache our records and want the latest data — but they don't want to re-download the entire dataset looking for changes — particularly since our records don't change that often!

Instead of forcing users to do that, we use the ActivityStreams protocol to publish an API that lists every record that's been created, edited, or deleted in date order. This standard emerged from social media — think of it as a timeline. Each activity has information about what happened, who did it, when they did it, and what they did it to. It's like a post every time a record changes! For the Provenance Index, this feed is available at:

https://data.getty.edu/provenance/activity-stream

The API provides a list of pages of activities — you can access the first page at https://data.getty.edu/provenance/activity-stream/page/1, which are the very first changes made to the API. You could also access page 139855, recording some of the changes that happened in March 2021.

Each page lists activities — for example, this activity records a change to our record for the sale of the portrait of James Christie, showing that it was updated on March 2nd, 2025.

You can use the ActivityStream to get a list of every record we have in our system, by starting at the first page and crawling forward, keeping track of everything that's been created and deleted. If you already have a copy of our data, though, you can start at the last page and crawl backwards, only pulling the records that have changed since the last time you scanned!

Asking Questions

You might not want to look up a single record, or even pay attention to the entire dataset. There are so many interesting questions that we can't provide API endpoints that cover all of them. Instead, we provide a tool that lets you ask the API yourself.

Under the hood, our API is actually a knowledge graph that uses Linked Data standards JSON-LD and RDF. If you just want to use the API, you don't need to know that at all — just think of them as REST APIs that provide slightly unusual JSON.

However, if you're interested in taking advantage of those technologies and the graph nature of the data, you can use the SPARQL query language to write custom queries against our public SPARQL endpoint for the Provenance Index.

It's available at https://data.getty.edu/provenance/sparql, and we provide a web-based interface for it at https://data.getty.edu/provenance/sparql-ui.

SPARQL can be deep magic — it's incredibly powerful, but because of that power it takes an investment of time to understand how best to use it.

Usage Guidelines

We are providing this data without restrictions for all to enjoy. We've got a few guidelines, but we've worked hard to make this dataset as open and explorable as possible.

Licensing

This dataset is available under CC0: you can use this data however you like without asking for permission.

Attribution

We respectfully ask that you acknowledge Getty as a source wherever possible, especially with respect to research or publication, in order to preserve a link to the dataset. By providing acknowledgment or citation, you enable others to verify, replicate, and further explore your presentation and interpretation of our data.

Questions?

Please contact us if you have any questions.

Go explore the data!