Sothebys MCP server

@pipeworx/sothebys

Realized auction prices from Sotheby's — search the past-lot archive by artist or maker across every sale, and get the price including buyer's premium, the winning (hammer) bid, the estimate range and the sale's name/date/location; pull full catalogue detail (description, provenance, literature, exhibition history, images) for one lot.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1576+ live data sources.

Tools

— search the archive by artist/maker/keyword. category is a free-text filter matched against the lot's department names (e.g. "prints", "photographs"). saletype is "timed" (default), "live" or "any" — see What is and isn't public** below, it is the single most important argument here.

• sothebysresultssearch(query, category?, saletype?, page?, limit?, includeunpriced?)

the lotid a sothebysresults_search result carries.

• sothebyslotdetails(lot_id) — full catalogue detail for one lot, keyed by

Tools are prefixed with the house name deliberately: three art-house packs (Bonhams, Sotheby's, Phillips) expose the same two shapes, so bare resultssearch would collide across them and make askpipeworx routing ambiguous.

Auth

Keyless. Both upstreams serve anonymous callers; the Algolia search key is minted on demand by Sotheby's own public GraphQL and cached for 5 minutes.

Data sources

Sotheby's is not the Bonhams shape. Its lot pages are a Next.js app fed by a separate GraphQL backend, so there is no server-rendered search page to read. Two public, keyless endpoints carry everything, and neither is /bsp-api/*:

API. Unauthenticated POST works. Introspection is disabled by its Cosmo Router, but the operation documents ship in the site's own JS bundles under /buy/_next/static/chunks/. Three operations are used:

• https://clientapi.prod.sothelabs.com/graphql — Sotheby's own public bidding

filters yields a key scoped to the whole index, not one auction.

• AlgoliaSearchKeyQuery → a search key for the index below. Requesting no

per-auction batch price lookup. bidState.currentBidV2 is the winning (hammer) bid; bidState.sold.premiums.finalPriceV2 is the realized price including buyer's premium. Amounts arrive as decimal strings. auction.testRecord flags Sotheby's QA sales, which are in the index.

• LotCardsQuery(id, lotIds, language) → auction.lotCardsFromIds, the

returns the Lottable interface, so the selection needs ... on LotV2 { … }; condition is an object, not a string.

• lotV2(lotId, language, countryOfOrigin) → full catalogue detail. It

index the site itself queries (window.ALGOLIAAPPID / window.ALGOLIAINDEXNAME in the page source). This is the only cross-auction search path. It carries creators, departments, estimates, auctionType, auctionDate and the site-relative lot slug — but no prices at all: price is null on every record, which is why every search costs a second, per-auction GraphQL round trip.

• https://KAR1UEUPJD-dsn.algolia.net/1/indexes/prod_lots/query — the search

Neither host is www.sothebys.com, so the Crawl-delay: 15 and the Disallow: /bsp-api/ in (checked 2026-09-05) do not cover them; clientapi.prod.sothelabs.com serves no robots.txt at all (404). This pack makes no request to www.sothebys.com** — it only builds www URLs for a human to click.

What is and isn't public

The realized price comes from the GraphQL bidState.sold union, which is either ResultVisible or ResultHidden depending on whether Sotheby's publishes that sale's results through this platform. Measured 2026-09-05 across the 44 distinct sales in a 100-hit "Pablo Picasso" sample, the split is a clean rule rather than noise:

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.