Understanding Provenance

Provenance is the history of an object's ownership, so far as it can be established. In our fields it is unusually important, because paper-based material is portable, frequently unsigned, and often survives in multiple copies. What distinguishes one copy from another is very often its history.

The two things provenance does

Provenance answers two separate questions, and it is worth keeping them apart.

The first is a question of legitimacy: may this object lawfully be sold? A clear chain of ownership is the principal evidence that property was not stolen, looted, illicitly exported or improperly removed from an institution or an archive.

The second is a question of interest: whose hands has it passed through, and does that add to its meaning? A book from the library of a significant scholar, a photograph retained by the sitter's family, or a manuscript with an unbroken descent in one family is a more interesting object than an identical copy without a history.

The physical evidence

Much of the evidence is on the object itself:

• Bookplates and armorials, which can often be identified precisely.
• Ownership inscriptions, signatures and dates on flyleaves and title pages.
• Shelfmarks, stamps and labels, particularly institutional ones, which require care: a library stamp may indicate a lawful de-accession, or it may not.
• Bindings, which can be attributed to a workshop or a period and place a book in a collection.
• Annotations, which occasionally identify a reader and are sometimes the most valuable feature of a copy.
• Mounts, backing boards and frames, which carry framers' and dealers' labels.
• Studio, estate and printer's stamps on the verso of photographs.

The documentary evidence

Alongside the object sit the papers: earlier auction catalogues with the lot marked, dealers' invoices and catalogues, exhibition records, published references and citations in a catalogue raisonné, insurance schedules, wills and deeds of gift, and correspondence.

An entry in a nineteenth-century sale catalogue that matches the copy in hand — in measurement, in binding, in the particular defects — is strong evidence. Provenance is built from such matches.

How a catalogue describes it

Provenance is normally given as a descending list of owners with dates where known, and the source of each attribution. Read the connecting words closely, because they are not decorative. "Purchased from" and "acquired by descent" are assertions of fact. "Possibly from the library of" is an opinion, honestly flagged as such. Where a period is not accounted for, a careful catalogue says so rather than eliding it.

We do not represent a provenance as established when the evidence is circumstantial, and we say when a chain is incomplete.

Gaps in the record

A gap is not in itself a problem: most objects that have existed for centuries pass through periods that were never documented. What matters is which period is missing, and why.

Particular scrutiny attaches to material that may have changed hands in Europe between 1933 and 1945, to items that may have been removed from institutional or ecclesiastical collections, to archives that may include public records, and to material exported from countries with restrictions on cultural property. Where such a question arises, we investigate, we consult the appropriate registers, and where doubt remains we decline the property. That is the only defensible position.

What an owner should do

Keep everything. The receipt that seems trivial today is the provenance of tomorrow, and a collection that arrives with its papers intact is worth demonstrably more than the same collection without them. Store documentation with the object but not inside it, and record what you know while you still know it: family knowledge is lost in a single generation.