Art Institute of Chicago

Gotchas & limits

• ?limit=101 on the collection listing doesn't clamp or 400 — a live GET this run against /artworks?limit=101 returned HTTP 403 with {"status":403,"error":"Invalid limit","detail":"You have requested too many resources per page. Please set a smaller limit."}. Keep limit at 100 or below.
• A nonexistent artwork id 404s with a structured body, not an empty one — a live GET this run against /artworks/999999999 returned HTTP 404 {"status":404,"error":"Not found","detail":"The item you requested cannot be found."}.
• /artworks/search results are lean hits, not full records — a live GET this run against /artworks/search?q=seurat&limit=1 returned only {"_score":...,"id":27992,"api_model":"artworks","api_link":"...","title":"...","thumbnail":{...},"timestamp":"..."} per result, with none of the sparse-fieldset fields (artist_display, date_display, image_id) present. A full record needs either ?fields= on the search itself or a follow-up /artworks/{id} fetch.
• The image is never inline — image_id is a bare UUID with no extension or host; you must combine it with config.iiif_url yourself using IIIF Image API path syntax (see the example note) rather than expecting a direct URL field.
• You cannot paginate past 10,000 results in the search endpoints, and the ceiling is a hard error rather than an empty page — a live GET this run against /artworks/search?q=painting&limit=10&page=1001 (result 10,010) returned HTTP 403 {"status":403,"error":"Invalid number of results","detail":"You have requested too many results. Please refine your parameters."}, while the same query at page=100 returned 200. Artic's docs direct anyone needing a larger result set to its nightly data dumps instead.