PainterPalette

The most extensive public dataset of painters

<div align="center"> <img src="https://github.com/me9hanics/ArtProjects/assets/82604073/7690b7fc-b46e-4e27-ae98-7aa8bc046dc5" width=70% alt="Painter Network"> </div> <hr> <h2><a href="https://github.com/me9hanics/PainterPalette/releases/download/v1.0.2/PainterPalette.csv">Download Here (CSV)</a></h2>

If you are interested in creating a network of painters, by connecting the painters in this dataset, definitely check painter-network-exploration project which connects painters based on time and location, and runs an extensive analysis of the network (including detecting communities). This is the latest and most professional work using the dataset. The e-flux web scraping repo is also relevant, it connects painters based on co-exhibitions according to the e-flux website.<br> ArtProjects collects bunch of my works on analysis of various painter networks (and movements, styles), including dynamic network development analysis too.

If you've come here via the NetSci 2025 conference slides, thank you for attending my talk! Here are links to the works:

• PainterPalette dataset of 10000 painters (.csv file), download csv/Excel/SQL here
• Network of 3000 painters: Download graphml file from the same link.
  • The implementation of creating the network, based on estimating which pair of artists likely lived at the same place at the same time (for long enough), is available in the painter-network-exploration repository.
• Using Wikidata to gather extensive information bout historical people
• NetSci 2025 presentation
• Coexhibition network of artists using PainterPalette and web scraped data from e-flux.com - technical solution described in great depth
• Collection of art analyses I was involved in ArtProjects
• A SQL script for creating a database of painters, paintings, painting styles, art movements and institutions
• Graph DB data warehouse: Painter coexhibition network in Neo4j with analyses. The pipeline is designed in KNIME, data is stored in a Neo4j graph database.
• Website under construction

For any questions on how you could take ideas and use them in your project, just contact me on my personal e-mail.

Datasets for SQL and NoSQL databases:

<div><details> <summary>Relational (MySQL) and graph (Neo4j)</summary> <a href="https://github.com/me9hanics/DataEngineering-SQL/blob/main/Term1/pipeline.sql">This SQL script</a> constructs a relational database of painters, paintings, painting schools, movements and styles, using data from <a href="https://github.com/me9hanics/DataEngineering-SQL/tree/main/Term1/datasets">this folder</a>.

<br> A painter data warehouse in a graph database: <a href="https://github.com/me9hanics/DataEngineering-SQL/tree/main/Term2#painter-coexhibition-network-creation-and-analytics-using-neo4j-and-knime">Neo4j KNIME painter coexhibition network</a> project, where the coexhibition network is created from PainterPalette and e-flux coexhibition data, and uploaded to a Neo4j database.

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Introduction

The aim of this project is to create a dataset of painters from sources such as WikiArt and Art500k, combining features, substituting missing data of painters via the Wikipedia API and make corrections/additions both automated and manually. After finding mappings between painters in the two sources + Wikidata, and heavy cleaning, the dataset includes around 10000 painters with many attributes.

Currently, the dataset includes 29 attributes:

• Biography data: Nationality/citizenship, name, birth and death years and places, gender
• Artistic style data
• Locations of activity (sometimes with years)
• Occupations (e.g. painter, sculptor, litographer, etc.)
• Influences: on painters, and from painters, pupils, teachers
• Friends, coworkers (limited data)
• Quantities of paintings, in styles, etc.

The dataset is intended to be used for various purposes, including data analysis, machine learning, and visualization projects.<br> One long-term goal would be to create a JSON file that contains all combined hierarchically. A level in the structure could be art movement, inside it, are artists with some base bio data, an even lower layer could be the paintings of the painter (even better could be eras of painters in their substructure, and inside them the paintings).

We have created multiple networks of painters (based on being at the same places at the same time + nationality, additionally style similarity, or who influenced whom networks) in another project (see: ArtProjects). A network of styles and movements were also created.

Resulting dataset/file

Download the latest version (1.0.2) here

• CSV
• SQL (just a dump of the CSV)
  • For a relational dataset of painters, paintings, painting schools, movements and styles, download this SQL script with the data folder
  • A KNIME pipeline to create a coexhibition network with e-flux data: Neo4j KNIME painter coexhibition network,
• Excel

In any case, the final ("compiled") dataset is stored in the artists.csv file (raw file here: raw, often this is better import / look at as it doesn't have the commit ID in the URL so this gives back always the freshest version).<br>

Some instances in the file:

Don't forget to scroll<br> | artist name | Nationality | citizenship | gender | styles | movement (Wiki) | Movements (Art500k) | birth place | death place | birth year | death_year | FirstYear | LastYear | wikiart_pictures_count | locations | locations_with_years | styles_extended | StylesCount | StylesYears | occupations | PaintingsExhibitedAt | PaintingsExhibitedAtCount | PaintingSchool | Influencedby | Influencedon | Pupils | Teachers | FriendsandCoworkers | Contemporary | ArtMovement | Type | |---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---| | Bracha L. Ettinger | French,Jewish,Israeli | Israel | female | New European Painting | New European Painting | {New European Painting:21} | Tel Aviv | NaN | 1948 | NaN | 1991 | 2009 | 21 | [] | [] | {New European Painting:21} | {New European Painting:21} | New European Painting:1991-2009 | philosopher, psychoanalyst, painter, photographer | NaN | NaN | NaN | NaN | NaN | NaN | NaN | Yes | NaN | NaN | | Friedrich Schroder-Sonnenstern | German | Germany | male | Art Brut | Outsider art (Art brut) | {Outsider art (Art brut):10} | Sovetsk | Berlin | 1892 | 1982 | 1948 | 1965 | 10 | ['Berlin'] | ['Berlin:1949-1982'] | {Art Brut:10} | {Art Brut:10} | Art Brut:1948-1965 | painter, drawer | NaN | NaN | NaN | NaN | NaN | NaN | NaN | No | NaN | NaN | | Nuno Gonçalves | Portuguese | Kingdom of Portugal | male | Early Renaissance | Early Renaissance | {Early Renaissance:10} | NaN | NaN | 1425 | 1492 | 1450 | 1490 | 10 | [] | [] | {Early Renaissance:10} | {Early Renaissance:10} | Early Renaissance:1450-1490 | portraitist, painter, musician, researcher | Lisbon, Portugal | {Lisbon:1},{Portugal:1} | NaN | National Museum of Ancient Art (MNAA), Lisbon,... | NaN | NaN | NaN | NaN | No | NaN | NaN | | Jose Ferraz de Almeida Junior | Brazilian | Brazil | male | Academicism, Realism | Realism | {Realism:64} | Itu | Piracicaba | 1850 | 1899 | 1850 |