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 1866+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• sothebys_results_search(query, category?, sale_type?, page?, limit?, include_unpriced?) — search the archive by artist/maker/keyword. category is a free-text filter matched against the lot's department names (e.g. "prints", "photographs"). sale_type is "timed" (default), "live" or "any" — see What is and isn't public below, it is the single most important argument here.
• sothebys_lot_details(lot_id) — full catalogue detail for one lot, keyed by the lot_id a sothebys_results_search result carries.

Tools are prefixed with the house name deliberately: three art-house packs (Bonhams, Sotheby's, Phillips) expose the same two shapes, so bare results_search would collide across them and make ask_pipeworx 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/*:

• https://clientapi.prod.sothelabs.com/graphql — Sotheby's own public bidding 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:
  • AlgoliaSearchKeyQuery → a search key for the index below. Requesting no filters yields a key scoped to the whole index, not one auction.
  • LotCardsQuery(id, lotIds, language) → auction.lotCardsFromIds, the 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.
  • lotV2(lotId, language, countryOfOrigin) → full catalogue detail. It returns the Lottable interface, so the selection needs ... on LotV2 { … }; condition is an object, not a string.
• https://KAR1UEUPJD-dsn.algolia.net/1/indexes/prod_lots/query — the search index the site itself queries (window.ALGOLIA_APP_ID / window.ALGOLIA_INDEX_NAME 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.

Neither host is www.sothebys.com, so the Crawl-delay: 15 and the Disallow: /bsp-api/* in https://www.sothebys.com/robots.txt (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:

So sale_type defaults to timed: that is the slice of the archive where a realized price exists at all. Asking for live returns lots with null prices however famous they are — Sotheby's publishes live-saleroom results on its own results pages, not through this API — and the tool says so in note rather than letting it read as a parse failure.

Two consequences worth knowing when reading a response:

• sothebys_results_search scans a page of up to 100 search hits and returns the priced subset, so count is normally well below scanned, and total_hits (the whole archive match count) is far larger than both.
• Price lookups are spent newest sale first, not in relevance order. Relevance happily ranks 2019 sales top for "Pablo Picasso", and those can only answer "hidden"; output order is still relevance order.

Related

• bonhams — same two-tool shape for Bonhams, whose realized prices are plain server-rendered HTML.
• Phillips is the third house in this survey; Christie's is closed (internal API) and out of scope.

Quick Start

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

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

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/sothebys/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, 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"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1866+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/sothebys_results_search \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"query":"Pablo Picasso","limit":5}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/sothebys_results_search. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-sothebys is a local stdio bridge to the Pipeworx gateway: your MCP client starts it with npx, and it forwards every call to the same https://gateway.pipeworx.io/sothebys/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "sothebys": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-sothebys"]
    }
  }
}

Without a key it calls anonymously, capped at 50 calls a day. A free account raises that to 200 a day: get a key at https://pipeworx.io/signup and add "env": { "PIPEWORX_API_KEY": "<your key>" } to the server entry. The key is sent as a Bearer token, the same way a hosted connection sends it, so calls are metered and billed exactly as they are there.

It lists only this pack's tools by default. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 to also list ask_pipeworx and the other gateway-wide tools.

Behind an HTTPS proxy: Node's built-in fetch does not read HTTPS_PROXY by default. Newer Node releases honour it when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set; check your Node version's documentation.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Sothebys data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT