A standalone service
Provenance research
Provenance research is offered on its own. It requires neither an appraisal nor a visit, and is undertaken for clients anywhere.
Who commissions it
Six reasons to call
- Collectors, before a major purchase
- Dealers, preparing a work for sale or for a fair’s vetting committee
- Families, before a donation, where provenance affects both deductibility and acceptance
- Anyone with a title, restitution or export question
- Attorneys, in authenticity and title disputes
- Institutions, filling gaps in their own records
The limits of a search
Where the record is not online
AI is trained on the public web. Most of what settles a provenance question has never been on it.
Auction records before the 1990s exist as printed catalogues and dealer stock books. Gallery ledgers and consignment files are private. Museum curatorial and registrar files are closed. Presidential and university collections publish finding aids rather than documents, so one can learn that a box exists without learning what is in it. Catalogues raisonnés are in copyright and in print. Period trade press is largely unscanned. The subscription databases professionals price from are closed to crawlers. And the label on the back of a picture is in no database until someone turns the picture over.
The Houdon busts make the point twice. The attribution came from a record in the Frick Art Reference Library; the ownership chain from purchase agreements at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, filed in the buyer’s papers rather than anywhere connected to the sculptor. Neither was catalogued under Houdon, and no search beginning with the artist’s name would have reached either.
Knowing which archive is likely to hold the answer, what it will be filed under, whom to write to and what to ask is most of the work. It is learned by doing it, and it is done here every week.
Authentication
AI has never handled the object
Authentication turns on what a photograph cannot carry: canvas weave and stretcher construction, the ground layer, the pattern of craquelure, pigments that did or did not exist in the stated year, casting seams and file marks, the depth and wear of a hallmark, and whether the back of an object is as old as the front. It requires raking light, magnification, ultraviolet and the object in hand.
AI image search will return an answer regardless, in the same confident sentence whether right or wrong, and will sometimes supply an exhibition history or catalogue reference that does not exist. In this field a fabricated citation travels with the object into a filing or a sale, and someone has to sign for it.
For many artists only a designated committee, foundation or catalogue raisonné author can pronounce on authenticity, and what they require is documentation assembled by a person who can be named and held to it. The IRS takes the same view: a qualified appraisal is signed by a qualified appraiser who certifies it personally. No AI meets that definition, and none carries the liability that gives a signature its weight.
About the tools
They are used, and they are good at reading a difficult hand, translating a foreign catalogue entry, or sorting a long list into a shorter one. They are never allowed to decide what an object is, and every citation they produce is checked against the source.
What is searched
Where the answers live
Auction and dealer archives. Catalogues raisonnés. Exhibition and loan records. Museum and institutional archives. The Frick Art Reference Library and comparable photo archives. Period press and trade publications. Estate and probate records. Shipping and customs documentation. The Art Loss Register and looted-art databases where the period requires it.
Which of these matter depends entirely on the object, and knowing which to open first is most of the work. Many are within reach of Rochester: the George Eastman Museum, the Memorial Art Gallery, university special collections at Rochester, Cornell and Syracuse, the county historical societies of the Finger Lakes, and the Frick, a train ride away in New York City.
What you get
Including what could not be found
A written provenance report with the chain of ownership documented as far as the record allows, cited sources, reproductions of key documents, an assessment of the gaps and what they mean, and a candid statement of what could not be established.
Gaps are reported as gaps. A report that says “the ownership between 1938 and 1952 cannot presently be traced, and here is why that matters” is more useful than one that papers over it, and considerably safer if the work is later sold.
Why this practice
The Houdon busts came out of exactly this work
A pair of marble busts recorded as copies in an earlier estate appraisal were identified as signed Houdons through a record in the Frick that no one had connected to them, and their ownership was traced through purchase agreements in the buyer’s papers at the Hoover Library. Neither archive was indexed under Houdon. The pair sold for $1.475 million. The full account, with two other cases, is in the casebook.
This is the training the practice was built on, and it is the part of the field where the gap between competent and excellent is widest.
Common questions
Can provenance research prove authenticity?
How long does it take?
Is the object needed?
Can the practice research a work before you buy it?
Rate
$175 per hour
Research rate. No project minimum. Fees are never based on the value of the property. Full fee schedule