Art History S3010 - Evaluating the Evidence of Authenticity: Auction and Provenance
Auction Sales
- Graves, A. Art Sales. 3 vols. (1918)
Avery-Fine Arts Reference N8680 G78
English paintings, 18th to early 20th cent.
- H. Lancour. American Art Auction Catalogues 1785-1942. (1944)
Avery-Fine Arts N3000 AL2
- Art Sales Index
Back to the 1920s.
Online version held at the Frick Museum Art Reference Library.
- Artfact
Back to the 1980s.
Available online in the libraries of the Frick Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art (Watson Library), and on CD-ROM at the New York Public Library.
- Artsy. (Online)
Artsy features the world's leading galleries, museum collections, foundations, artist estates, art fairs, and benefit auctions, all in one place. Our growing database of 200,000 images of art, architecture, and design by 25,000 artists spans historical, modern, and contemporary works, and includes the largest online database of contemporary art. Artsy is used by art lovers, museum-goers, patrons, collectors, students, and educators to discover, learn about, and collect art.
- Gordon's Print Price Annual.
Prints back to 1985, photographs back to 1970.
Online version held at the Frick Museum Art Reference Library and the New York Public Library.
- Auction Houses (non-library resources)
- Invaluable can be used to find out where an item was sold, which can be used to track down the auction record through the individual auction house.
- Christie's
- Sotheby's
- AskART academic This link opens in a new windowA database of information about American artists, including names, birth and death dates, state or local affiliation, fields in which artist worked, book and periodical references to artist, dealers and museums where works may be viewed, auction prices of works, some biographical details, etc. Aims at being an unbiased source of information about the commercial value of each artist's work through a comprehensive system of comparables.
- Art sales catalogues online. This link opens in a new window"The Art Sales Catalogues Online database presents the online edition of the Répetoire des Catalogues de Ventes Publiques by Frits Lugt combined with the possibility to view complete art sales catalogues. This database provides a multitude of search options. Many recently discovered catalogues have been added and corrections to the original Répertoire have been made." Coverage: catalogs from 1600-1900.
- Artnet price database. This link opens in a new window"Over 12 million color-illustrated art auction records dating back to 1985. We cover more than 1,800 auction houses and 340,000 artists [...] The Fine Art and Design database includes fine art objects such as paintings, photographs, prints, and sculpture ranging from the Old Masters to present-day contemporary artists. The Decorative Art database contains antiques, antiquities, and collectibles. Design objects can be found in both databases. In the Fine Art and Design database, users can conveniently search for post-19th century design items with an attributed artist, designer, or maker"--Artnet WWW site, 1 December 2020.
- Bloomsbury art markets / edited by Johannes Nathan. This link opens in a new windowBloomsbury Art Markets brings together over 4000 peer-reviewed articles to provide a comprehensive guide to art galleries, auction houses, art fairs, and agents from multiple national and historical contexts. It is an essential resource for scholars and researchers, as well as art world professionals, and is specially designed to serve the expanding research areas of art market studies, art historiography and provenance research.
Provenance Resources
- Getty Provenance Research
Website at the J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Santa Monica includes: Getty Provenance Index Database, Provenance Research Resources, Guide to Holocaust-era Research Resources, Project for the Study of Collecting and Provenance. These databases contain indexed transcriptions of materials from auction catalogs and archival inventories of western European works of art, and contain nearly 1,000,000 records that cover the periods from late 16th century to the early 20th century.
- Provenance Research Guides
Lugt, F. Les Marques de Collections de Dessins et d'Estampes. (1921) (Online)
Classic dictionary of collectors' marks. Good for provenance studies.