Art Provenance Research

The Directory helps researchers locate primary source material about American art collectors, dealers, agents and advisors, and the repositories that hold these records. Scope of archives: the Colonial period to the present; fine and decorative arts, antiquities, and non-Western art. The Directory also lists primary source materials about dealers, galleries, and auction houses.

​The Archives of American Art is dedicated to collecting, preserving, and providing access to primary sources that document the history of the visual arts in America. Their vast holdings are a vital resource to anyone interested in American culture over the past 200 years and consist of more than 20 million letters, diaries, scrapbooks, manuscripts, financial records, photographs, films, and audiovisual recordings of artists, dealers, collectors, critics, scholars, museums, galleries, associations, and other art world figures. The Archives also houses the largest collection of oral histories anywhere on the subject of art.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library Digital Collections, the digitized material from the Brummer Gallery Records primarily contains information on objects acquired through their New York and Paris galleries and sold in New York through the mid-20th century. The Brummer brothers were major art dealers who collected widely from classical antiquity to modern art.

Included in the Getty Provenance Index are more than 43,700 records transcribed from the 15 stock books of Goupil & Cie/Boussod, Valadon & Cie in Paris (1846–1919) as well as over 40,300 records transcribed from the 11 painting stock books and enhanced with information from the 21 paintings and watercolors sales books of M. Knoedler & Co. in New York (1872–1970).

Includes the following databases: Collectors Files, Payments to Artists, Public Collections.

The Netherlands Institute for Art History or RKD, previously Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, is located in The Hague. The center specializes in documentation, archives, and books on Western art from the late Middle Ages to the present.

The ZADIK | Central Archive for German and International Art Market Studies is an academic institute of the University of Cologne.The Central Archive comprises over 170 holdings of gallery owners, art dealers, auction houses, art critics, curators, specialist photographers, and other protagonists in the art market, focusing on the period from the early 20th century to the present.