What Artworks and Museums Does The Last Museum Cover?

The Last Museum indexes millions of artworks from major museums worldwide, spanning paintings, prints, and other media across many periods and cultures. Its own description says it covers "5.8 million artworks from the world's great museums," and the live search page reports a current index of 6,308,174 artworks. Coverage is not limited to paintings: the examples on the site include Japanese woodblock prints, Old Master panels, and 19th-century European painting, and the search tool is built to match any theme, style, subject, or free-text description you enter.

What the site says about its scope

Two statements on the site define the collection:

• Site description: a semantic search engine for 5.8 million artworks from the world's great museums.
• Search page heading: "Search across 6,308,174 artworks."

The gap between the two figures is best read as growth over time rather than a contradiction: the description is a general claim, while the heading reflects the index at the time the page was captured. For practical purposes, treat the collection as several million works and growing.

Which museums and collections are represented

The site does not publish a museum-by-museum list in the material available, so the reliable way to judge coverage is through the works it surfaces. The featured examples point to several of the world's best-known collections:

These names are associated with institutions such as the Rijksmuseum, the Musée d'Orsay, the National Gallery (London), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The site's framing—"the world's great museums"—signals an aggregator model: it draws records from multiple museum collections rather than hosting a single institution's catalog.

What periods and cultures appear

The examples alone cover roughly five centuries and several regions:

• Renaissance and Northern Renaissance: Van Eyck (1432–1441), Hans Memling (1480–1483), Rogier van der Weyden (1438), Holbein (1533).
• Baroque and Dutch Golden Age: Rembrandt (1642, 1651), Vermeer (1660, 1665, 1672), Orazio Gentileschi (1622).
• 18th and 19th century European: Turner (1812), Constable (1826), Ingres (1814, 1851–1853), Manet (1882), Seurat (1887–1888), Millais (1851), Van Gogh (1889), Munch (1893).
• Early 20th century: Albert Gleizes (1912–1913).
• East Asian works: Hokusai (1830–1833), Utagawa Hiroshige (1853), Yoshida Hiroshi (1927), and Qiu Ying (1700–1709).
• Medieval and manuscript material: the Vita beatae Hedwigis (1353) and Dürer's Melencolia I (1514).

This spread suggests the index is not restricted to Western oil painting. It includes prints, panel paintings, and illustrated manuscripts, and it reaches into Chinese and Japanese traditions.

Is it only paintings?

No. The featured works include woodblock prints (Hokusai, Hiroshige, Yoshida), engravings (Dürer's The Rhinoceros, 1515), and manuscript illumination (Vita beatae Hedwigis). The site describes itself as covering "artworks," not paintings, and its semantic search is designed to work across media. If your interest is prints, drawings, or decorative works, the collection is likely to include them—though the exact media mix is not published, so verify with a specific search.

What metadata you can expect per artwork

Each record shown on the site pairs an image with at least:

• Title (including alternate or descriptive titles, e.g., "The Kitchen Maid" for Rembrandt's work)
• Artist (with attributions such as "Nicolaus of Prussia" or "Workshop of…" style naming where relevant)
• Date (a range where scholarship gives one, e.g., 1830–1833)

This is the minimum needed to identify and cite a work. Richer fields—medium, dimensions, current location—may exist in the underlying museum records but are not demonstrated in the material available, so do not assume them without checking an individual result.

How to confirm coverage for your own topic

Because the museum list and media breakdown are not published, test the index directly:

1. Go to lastmuseum.com and use the search box.
2. Enter a theme, style, subject, or plain description—for example, "Dutch still life with lemons" or "Japanese bridge at night."
3. Check whether results include the museum, period, and medium you need.
4. If results are thin, try a broader phrasing; semantic search rewards descriptive language over exact titles.

The practical answer: The Last Museum covers millions of works from major museums across many cultures and media, with at least title, artist, and date per record. For any specific collection question, a test search is more reliable than the site's general claim.