The following case study describes the process I undertook to identify with certainty the full name—whose surname and only first initial were provided—of a collector listed in a provenance. Two of Giambattista Tiepolo’s Punchinello drawings (one currently in the Morgan Library, pictured here, ...
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 ...
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...