Rijksmuseum MCP server

@pipeworx/rijksmuseum

The Rijksmuseum's ~800,000-object collection — Dutch Golden Age paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, Delftware and Asian art — from the museum's open Data Services API, with IIIF images and mostly public-domain rights.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1679+ live data sources.

Tools

• rijks_search(...) — search by title, creator, type, material, technique, object number or image availability; returns hydrated records, not bare ids.
• rijksobject(id | objectnumber) — one object in full, including the museum's own curatorial description.
• rijksobjectimage(id, width) — IIIF service, full-resolution dimensions, full/scaled/thumbnail JPEG URLs and the rights statement.

Auth

Keyless.

There are two Rijksmuseum APIs and only this one is open. The legacy www.rijksmuseum.nl/api needs a key issued per Rijksstudio account; data.rijksmuseum.nl (used here) needs no credential.

Data sources

• — field-scoped search, returns identifiers only.
• — Dublin Core record (~4 KB).
• — full Linked Art JSON-LD (~95 KB).

Notes the next person would otherwise rediscover:

strings plus a total — no titles, no images. rijks_search hydrates each returned hit with one extra fetch, which is why limit is capped at 25.

• Search returns bare URIs. A page is 100 https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/

title three levels inside identifiedby and the image behind a shows → VisualItem → digitallyshown_by → DigitalObject chain (three more fetches). Dublin Core has all of it flat, including the IIIF URL in relation, at ~1/20th the size.

• Use profile=dc, not the default Linked Art.** Linked Art buries the

query parameter: q"}). There is no free-text q. Verified accepted: title, creator, type, material, technique, objectNumber, imageAvailable. subject is NOT accepted, despite subject existing as a field on the record.

• Unknown query parameters are rejected by name ({"detail":"Unsupported

title=Night Watch does not.

• Titles are catalogued in Dutch. title=Nachtwacht finds The Night Watch;

accepts a museum object number and resolves it through search.

• objectNumber resolves exactly (SK-C-5 → 200107928), so rijks_object

region/size/rotation is requestable from iiif_service.

• Images are IIIF Image API 3, level 2, served from iiif.micr.io — any

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "rijksmuseum": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/rijksmuseum/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/rijksmuseum/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — askpipeworx, discovertools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.