Art Gallery

Art Collections

The data this week comes from the Tate Art Museum.

The dataset in this repository was last updated in October 2014. Tate has no plans to resume updating this repository, but we are keeping it available for the time being in case this snapshot of the Tate collection is a useful tool for researchers and developers.

Here we present the metadata for around 70,000 artworks that Tate owns or jointly owns with the National Galleries of Scotland as part of ARTIST ROOMS. Metadata for around 3,500 associated artists is also included.

The metadata here is released under the Creative Commons Public Domain CC0 licence. Images are not included and are not part of the dataset. Use of Tate images is covered on the Copyright and permissions page. You may also license images for commercial use.

Tate requests that you actively acknowledge and give attribution to Tate wherever possible. Attribution supports future efforts to release other data. It also reduces the amount of ‘orphaned data’, helping retain links to authoritative sources.

Here are some examples of Tate data usage in the wild. Please submit a pull request with your creation added to this list.

There are JSON files with additional metadata in the original GitHub.

Some recommendations

This is a dataset has lots of room for cleaning.

  • The place of birth/death can be converted to city/country
  • The medium has many distinct categories, and some of them can be collapsed by overlap
    You could also practice converting the text dates to the actual years of interest (although the already exist in the data).

Get the data here

# Get the Data

# Read in with tidytuesdayR package 
# Install from CRAN via: install.packages("tidytuesdayR")
# This loads the readme and all the datasets for the week of interest

# Either ISO-8601 date or year/week works!

tuesdata <- tidytuesdayR::tt_load('2021-01-12')
tuesdata <- tidytuesdayR::tt_load(2021, week = 3)

artwork <- tuesdata$artwork

# Or read in the data manually

artwork <- readr::read_csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/main/data/2021/2021-01-12/artwork.csv')
artists <- readr::read_csv("https://github.com/tategallery/collection/raw/master/artist_data.csv")

Data Dictionary

artwork.csv

variable class description
id double Unique ID
accession_number character Accession number
artist character Artist Name
artistRole character Artist or other attribution
artistId double Artist ID
title character Title of the piece of art
dateText character Date as raw text (pretty messy)
medium character Medium of art, quite a lot of overlap
creditLine character How acquired
year double Year of creation
acquisitionYear double Year acquired
dimensions character Dimensions as character
width double Width of art
height double Height of art
depth double Depth of art
units character units of measure
inscription character inscription if present
thumbnailCopyright logical Thumbnail copyright
thumbnailUrl character Thumbnail URL
url character art URL

artists.csv

variable class description
id double Artist ID
name character Artist Name
gender character Artist gender
dates character Date as a character
yearOfBirth double Year of birth
yearOfDeath double Year of death
placeOfBirth character Place of birth (typically city, country)
placeOfDeath character Place of death (typically city, country)
url character Artist URL

Cleaning Script

There is no cleaning script for today, the data is already “tame”.