What is art provenance? A Getty Research Institute case study looking at papers collected in the Getty Provenance Index concerning Jean-Léon Gérôme, Lion on the Watch, c. 1885, oil on wood panel, 72.3 x 100.5 cm (The Cleveland Museum of Art)

speakers: Dr. Sandra van Ginhoven, Head, Getty Provenance Index, Getty Research Institute and Dr. Steven Zucker, Smarthistory

The Getty Provenance Index
The Getty Provenance Index® provides open access to millions of resources from dealer stock books, sales catalogs, and archival inventories that provide essential information for tracing the history of ownership, circulation and display of artworks, and identifying the different individuals and institutions shaping those histories.

Included in the Getty Provenance Index are the 40,300 line items transcribed from the 11 painting stock books of the New York dealership M. Knoedler & Co., successors of the Parisian-based gallery Goupil & Cie, covering the period between 1872 and 1970.

A brief history of M. Knoedler & Co.
Goupil & Cie was a leading French art dealership and print-publishing house founded in Paris in 1827. In addition to selling paintings, the gallery was extremely successful in the worldwide dissemination of print reproductions of fine art works by leading artists such as Jean-Léon Gérôme. With branches in London, Berlin, Brussels, and The Hague, the gallery further expanded their market reach by establishing an office in New York in 1848.

In 1857, Michael Knoedler, manager of the Goupil New York office, bought out the interests in the firm’s branch and conducted business under his own name, M. Knoedler & Co. His son Roland later established branches in London and Paris.

M. Knoedler & Co. played a central role in transforming the United States into a major player in the global art market. Through their transatlantic operations and relationships with collectors, they shaped many private art collections that form the backbone of several of the American museum collections that we know and enjoy today.

Why are dealer stock books so valuable for provenance research?
In their stock books, dealers recorded crucial information about the artworks they purchased and sold. For example, in addition to the title, creator and dimensions of the artwork, sometimes they kept track of past owners, changes in the artistic attribution, and monetary values. Furthermore, they typically indicated the date of acquisition, the name and address of the seller, as well as the name of the purchaser, date of sale, and the selling price. All this information is key for reconstructing the trajectories of objects, as they changed hands and travelled across time and geographies.

Check out Gérôme’s Lion on the Watch in the Getty Provenance Index (see link below), and explore Knoedler’s acquisition of the painting and its sale to F.W. Gehring. You can also discover other paintings that F.W. Gehring acquired from Knoedler, and explore what happened to them.

Dealer archives at the Getty Research Institute
The Getty Research Institute holds incredible archival collections documenting the history of taste, collecting and the art markets, art patronage and display, and artists and artworks represented and exhibited by galleries over time. The archives of art dealers such as M. Knoelder & Co. constitute a treasure trove in the form of letters, business documentation, account books, inventory lists, exhibition and sales catalogs, photographic material, and research files.

The Getty Research Institute holds the complete archive of this gallery, detailing the full scale and scope of their operations. Important portions of the archive such as the copy letter books have been digitized (see link below) and can be used by anyone interested in this chapter of the history of art and collections.

Links
Gérôme’s Lion on the Watch in the Getty Provenance Index:
https://provenance.production.getty.fargeo.com/research/provenance/report/d0c2f5a5-682a-34de-ab97-45dbe8b9ca8e

Copy letter books:
https://primo.getty.edu/primo-explore/search?query=any,exact,2012.M.54&tab=all_gri&search_scope=DIGITAL&sortby=title&vid=GRI&lang=en_US&offset=0