The 30-second answer
An AI assistant answering questions about art prices from memory is like a guide describing a museum they visited years ago: fluent, charming, and not to be trusted on the details. There is now a simple remedy. TopImpressionists publishes its entire catalog — hundreds of thousands of artworks, artists, museums and articles, plus live reproduction prices — at one web address that AI assistants know how to read. We copy that address, paste it once into the settings of Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini, and from then on our assistant stops guessing and starts looking things up. The address is:
That single line is the whole secret. No download, no installation, no account, no payment. The rest of this article is simply where to paste it in each assistant, and what to ask afterwards.
1. What "connecting" actually means, in plain words
Behind the scenes this uses something called the Model Context Protocol, or MCP — but the name matters far less than the idea, and the idea is old. When we hand a hotel concierge the card of a restaurant, we are not teaching the concierge to cook; we are giving them a telephone number to call on our behalf. Connecting an assistant to the TopImpressionists catalog is exactly that. The assistant keeps its own manners and its own knowledge of art history; what it gains is a number to dial whenever a question needs a fact rather than a recollection — which paintings match, where a museum is, what a reproduction costs today, in our currency, at our size.
Three reassurances before we begin, because they are the questions everyone sensibly asks:
- It is free. The catalog answers without any account, key or fee. (The assistants themselves may require their own paid plans for this feature — that is their subscription, not ours.)
- It is narrow by design. The catalog can answer exactly seven kinds of question — search artworks, artists, museums or articles, search all four at once, quote a reproduction price, and, only if we choose to identify ourselves, list our own orders. It cannot see our files, our email, or anything else in our conversations.
- The prices are real. A quotation is computed by the same system that prices the website's own buy pages, so the number the assistant reads out is the number we would see on screen.
2. Connecting Claude
Claude (from Anthropic) calls these connections custom connectors. The feature is available on Claude's paid plans, on the web at claude.ai and in the desktop app.
- Open Settings — click our initials or name, lower left, and choose Settings.
- Choose Connectors.
- Click Add custom connector.
- Give it a name we will recognise — "TopImpressionists" — and paste the address:
https://direct.TopImpressionists.com/mcp/ - Click Add. When asked about signing in or authentication, none is needed — the catalog is public.
Now open a new conversation and ask an art question. The first time Claude wants to consult the catalog it will ask our permission on screen; we allow it, and the answer comes back with real titles, real links and real prices.
3. Connecting ChatGPT
ChatGPT (from OpenAI) keeps the same feature behind a switch called developer mode. The name is more forbidding than the reality — it is one toggle, available on paid plans.
- Open Settings — click our profile picture, lower left on the web.
- Choose Connectors.
- Open the Advanced section and turn on Developer mode. (This toggle merely reveals the next button; it changes nothing else.)
- Back in Connectors, choose Create (or Add custom connector).
- Name it "TopImpressionists", paste the address
https://direct.TopImpressionists.com/mcp/, and where it asks about authentication choose No authentication. - Save.
In a conversation, the connector can then be enabled from the tools menu (the sliders or "+" icon near the message box). ChatGPT shows a notice that custom connectors are not verified by OpenAI — a sensible general warning; it means OpenAI has not reviewed the catalog, not that anything is amiss with it.
4. Connecting Gemini
Gemini (from Google) calls these connected apps. At the time of writing, adding a custom one is available on the Gemini web app for personal Google accounts in the United States (with the "Keep Activity" setting turned on), and for organisations through Gemini Enterprise.
- Go to gemini.google.com and sign in.
- At the bottom left, open Settings & help.
- Choose Connected apps.
- Where it asks for an app's MCP server address, paste:
https://direct.TopImpressionists.com/mcp/ - Confirm. No sign-in or credentials are needed.
In Gemini Enterprise, an administrator does the equivalent under Manage team → Connected apps → Add MCP Server, and the catalog becomes available to the whole team.
5. What to ask, once connected
The pleasure of the thing is that we never mention the machinery again. We simply ask better questions than an assistant could previously answer, and it decides for itself when to consult the catalog. Some worth trying on the first evening:
| We ask | What happens behind the curtain |
|---|---|
| "Find Caillebotte's painting of a rainy Paris street." | A search of the artwork catalog; the answer carries the real title, the artist, and a link to the work's page. |
| "Which painters were active in Delft around 1660?" | An artist search narrowed by place and by a year the artist was alive — a question that defeats most search boxes. |
| "What would a hand-painted oil copy of Van Gogh's Starry Night, one metre wide, cost in Canadian dollars?" | A price quotation, computed by the same system as the website's buy page, in the currency we named. |
| "Now the same size as an art print — and which would you recommend for a bright hallway?" | A second quotation, and then the assistant's own judgment comparing the two — arithmetic on real prices, advice from its own knowledge. |
| "Where is the order I placed in March?" | This one question is private, so it needs the personal code from our profile's MCP / API page after signing in — and it will only ever show our own orders, never anyone else's. |
Sizes can be given in centimetres or inches, from 25 to 250 cm per side (about 10 to 98 inches) — the range the workshop can genuinely produce. And if we ask for something the catalog cannot honestly answer — a currency without a current exchange rate, a work not offered as a hand-painted oil — it says so plainly instead of improvising, and the assistant passes the honesty on to us.
Three questions worth asking before connecting
Does this cost anything, or require a TopImpressionists account?
No. The catalog connection is free and anonymous: searching and price quotations need no account, no key, no registration. The single exception is asking about our own orders — that answer includes a name and shipping address, so it requires the personal code from the profile page, available after signing in. The assistants themselves (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini) may reserve custom connections for their paid plans; that subscription is theirs, not the catalog's.
Is it safe?
The connection is deliberately narrow. The assistant gains exactly seven questions it can ask the catalog — the searches, the price quotation, and the private orders question — and nothing else. It cannot browse TopImpressionists's servers, and TopImpressionists learns nothing about us unless we choose to send the personal orders code. The warning ChatGPT displays about unverified connectors is general caution about all custom connections, and worth taking seriously as a habit: connect assistants only to organisations we would give our questions to anyway.
What if it does not work?
Three checks resolve nearly every case. First, the address must be exact — https://direct.TopImpressionists.com/mcp/, including the final slash. Second, the feature may need a paid plan on the assistant's side, or (for Gemini's personal accounts) a supported country and the Keep Activity setting turned on. Third, in a conversation the connector sometimes needs to be switched on in the tools menu before the assistant will use it. If the assistant answers vaguely, asking it directly — "use the TopImpressionists catalog to check" — reliably prompts it to make the call.
Related on TopImpressionists.com
- What the price quotations are actually pricing: giclée prints versus hand-painted oil masterpieces.
- How mediums, pricing and commissioning fit together: decoding art reproduction.
- Prefer to browse the old way? The artist catalog answers the same questions, one click at a time.
