Which museums and artwork types are available on Semantic Art Search?

Semantic Art Search aggregates works from six museums and covers more than a dozen artwork types, with a combined index of roughly 182,000 works at the time of writing. You can filter by a single museum or work type, or leave both set to "All" to search everything at once. The counts below come from the site's own filter panel and shift as each museum updates its public data.

Museums available

The platform draws from these collections:

The "All Museums" figure is the sum of the six, so it is the default scope for any search. If you only care about one collection — say, Dutch masters in the Rijksmuseum — select that museum before searching so results stay within it.

Artwork types available

Work types are listed alongside their counts:

• Drawings — 83,719
• Prints — 72,900
• Paintings — 24,576
• Designs — 7,294
• Watercolors — 4,239
• Miniatures — 1,467
• Gouaches — 634
• Aquatints — 588
• Busts — 567
• Pastels — 248

Note that drawings and prints together account for the large majority of the index, while paintings are a much smaller slice. If your interest is specifically in paintings, expect a narrower pool than the headline 182,093 suggests.

How to filter by museum or type

1. Open the map/filter panel.
2. Under All Museums, either keep "Select All" or check the specific museums you want.
3. Under All Work Types, either keep "Select All" or check types such as Paintings or Prints.
4. Enter a natural-language query (for example, "winter landscape," "mourning," or "Persian carpet") or use Visual Search / Title Search.
5. Review results, then use Find similar on any work or Tell me about this artwork to generate a description.

The expected result is a result set constrained to your chosen museums and types, ranked by semantic relevance rather than exact keyword matches.

What to watch for

• Counts are snapshots. They reflect what each museum has exposed at a given time, so they will drift.
• Selecting a narrow type plus a narrow museum can shrink results sharply — for instance, Pastels (248) within a single small collection.
• The site does not publish pricing or login requirements in the material reviewed here, so treat access terms as unconfirmed rather than assuming it is free or open.

If your goal is simply to know whether a specific collection is searchable, check the museum list above first; if it is not there, the work will not appear in results.