There are many ways to use the API but let’s start by requesting data directly through a web browser (like the one you’re using now).

The API lives at the web address https://api.smk.dk. This is the address that all queries to the API start with.

We’ll begin by asking the API to send us all data on the painting The Fall of the Titans from 1588-1590. Here’s what that looks like:

https://api.smk.dk/api/v1/art/?object_number=kms1&lang=en

The first part of this address simply states the location of the API. The snippet /art tells the API that we’re looking for data on an artwork (and not, say, a person). The snippet /?object_number= means that we want to ask for a specific artwork, in this case the artwork whose object_number (what we usually refer to as an inventory number) is kms1. And KMS1 is The Fall of the Titans. To get English version of data points we add the &lang=en (the API defaults to Danish).

If you click the link above, the API will send you everything we’ve registered about the painting. If you’re on a standard browser you’re likely to see a large blob of text which is very hard to make sense of. We strongly recommend installing a free browser plugin, which makes things more friendly (try JSONview for Google Chrome or JSON Peep for Safari). It may still look cryptic but readability should be instantly improved.

All data on The Fall of the Titans shown in the Safari browser

So far so good! Now we’ll ask the API for data on all artworks in the database:

https://api.smk.dk/api/v1/art/search/?keys=*&offset=0&rows=10 &lang=en

If you click this link, the API will send you data on each and every artwork in the database. We find all artworks since we’ve searched for “*” (try changing * for landscape or horse). However, because we’ve written rows=10, you’ll only get the first 10 to begin with.

To get the next 10 you could change the relevant part of the link to &offset=10&rows=10. In other words: Give me all artworks, starting at the 11th artwork, 10 at a time. If you don’t specify how many rows you want, you’ll get 10, and the biggest number of artworks you can ask for at one time is 2.000.

Here we’ve asked for data on all artworks in the collection.