The full upstream README, mirrored here for reference. Install config, tool schemas, adoption signals, and an original overview live on the Phillips listing page.
Realized auction prices from Phillips — look up an artist or maker and get their recent past lots with the price actually paid (hammer plus buyer's premium), the estimate range it sold against, currency, lot and sale number, saleroom, department and sale date; pull full detail for any single lot.
Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1683+ live data sources.
phillips_results_search(artist?, artist_id?, category?, include_upcoming?, limit?)
— realized prices for one maker. Resolves the name against Phillips' own
artist index, then reads that maker's artist page. category is a free-text
filter matched against department, saleroom, sale number and lot title (e.g.
"jewels", "watches", "editions", "photographs", "design", "London"). Pass
artist_id from a previous result to skip name resolution entirely.phillips_lot_details(lot_id, slug?) — full detail for one lot, keyed by the
lot_id a phillips_results_search result carries. Adds the hammer price
(before premium) and the full sale name.Tool names are house-prefixed on purpose. Bonhams shipped first with bare
results_search/lot_details; with three art houses live those two names
would collide across packs and ask_pipeworx routing would have nothing to
disambiguate on. New house packs should keep the {house}_ prefix.
Keyless. Public pages, no login required.
Phillips' keyword search is closed to crawlers — robots.txt (checked
2026-09-05) disallows /Search, /search AND /SEARCH, so all three case
variants of the obvious path are out, along with /bin/, /phillips/otis and
/*/filter/. This pack therefore does not search at all; it goes by maker,
through three paths robots.txt leaves open:
https://www.phillips.com/sitemap.xml — 13,031 /artist/{makerId}/{name}
URLs. This is the artist-name → makerId index names are resolved against.
Fetched at most once per isolate. The names in it are percent-encoded AND
HTML-escaped (Jennifer%20&%20Kevin%20McCoy); take both layers off
before you use one, or the URL you build goes out double-encoded and 404s.https://www.phillips.com/artist/{makerId}/{slug} — the artist landing page.
Realized prices are server-rendered here, and the same rows also ship as JSON
in the React.createElement(PhillipsReact.ArtistLanding, {...}) hydration
props: the maker prop is a JSON string holding
pastLots {currentPage, totalPages, totalCount, resultsPerPage, data[]}.
Each row carries hammerPlusBP (the realized price), lowEstimate,
highEstimate, currencySign, saleNumber, lotNumber, objectNumber
(the lot id) and auctionStartDateTimeOffset. hammerPlusBP is 0 for a
lot that did not sell, which is an absent price, not a price of zero.https://www.phillips.com/detail/{slug}/{objectNumber} — the lot page.The {slug} segment of both /artist/ and /detail/ URLs is decorative — any
non-empty value resolves the same record, only the numeric id is read.
The artist page serves one page of past lots — 24 rows. Page 2 onward is
fetched by the browser from a different host (api.phillips.com), and there is
no query parameter that pages the HTML page itself (?page=2, ?p=2 and
?pastLotsPage=2 were each tried and all return page 1). So
phillips_results_search returns the 24 most recent past lots and reports
total_past_lots alongside them, so a caller can see how much archive it is
not seeing — Banksy returns 24 of 272, Patek Philippe 24 of 3,728.
The lot page is a different stack from the rest of the site (Remix; the state blob is a flattened key-then-value array, not an addressable object), so this pack reads it from three places and prefers the rendered HTML:
Product — title, maker, image, currency, sold/unsold. Note
offers.price is the low estimate, not a realized price; do not treat it
as one.Sold For {cur}{amount} and Estimate {cur}{low}–{high}.
The estimate MUST come from here: the only lowEstimate/highEstimate pair
in the state blob belongs to the page's currency-conversion table, so reading
it returns a plausible number in the wrong currency (HK$622,000–830,000 for a
lot whose real estimate is £60,000–80,000).hammerPrice and
auctionStartDateTime. Because key-to-value adjacency in a flattened array
is not guaranteed, the hammer price is dropped rather than returned if it
exceeds the realized price.A sale number is {2-letter saleroom}{2-digit department}{2-digit sequence}{2-digit year}
— UK010526 is London, department 01, sale 05, 2026. The department mapping
below was derived from, and agreed with, all 892 past auctions listed on
/auctions/past (2026-09-05): 01 Modern & Contemporary Art, 03 Editions &
Works on Paper, 04 Photographs, 05 Design, 06 Jewels, 07 Editions,
Photographs and Design, 08 Watches. 00 and 09 are not departments —
they are sale formats (special/collaboration, and online) that run across
departments — and are labelled as such rather than guessed at. Salerooms seen:
NY New York, UK London, HK Hong Kong, CH/GE Geneva.
@pipeworx/bonhams and @pipeworx/sothebys cover the same question at the
other two houses. Christie's is out of scope (closed, internal API).
Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):
tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/phillips/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:
Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1683+ data sources. The
only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx
reaches all of them from either one.
No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/phillips_results_search. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.
This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:
Or run it directly to confirm it starts:
It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call
for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway
connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.
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:
The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.
MIT