Sometimes when doing provenance research you find yourself at a dead end. All the typical resources have been consulted and all usual avenues of research have been exhausted. So what do you do in that case? Let me give you an example of one instance I’ve come across in my research that left ...
Over the course of approximately thirty years, from the late 1720s through the early 1760s, Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) Tiepolo, the preeminent Venetian fresco painter of his day and an extremely prolific draftsman, executed at least thirty-six drawings of Punchinello, the long-nosed, tall-hatt...
So what exactly is “provenance research?” Most simply, it is research into the ownership history of a work of art (or decorative object, antiquity, book, etc.). The term “provenance” derives from the French provenire, meaning “to originate.” A provenance comprises the historical re...
In graduate school, my art historical interests shifted once again; this time from England and France to Italy, and from the nineteenth century to the eighteenth. I decided to write my doctoral dissertation on Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s Punchinello drawings (more on those in a future post). A...
How and why did I decide to study art history? I didn’t have the opportunity to study art history in high school, although my mom was always getting me art books from the library when I was young; my absolute favorite was Marc Brown and Laurene Krasny Brown’s Visiting the Art Museum, with ...