LibGuides: Art Provenance Research: Artists, Dealers, Collectors, & Object Resources

Internet Archive
Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. Some museums have been uploading digitized exhibition catalogues.
Internet Archive: Saint Louis Art Museum Exhibition Catalogues
Getty Provenance Index
Open access to millions of resources from dealer stock books, sales catalogs, and archival inventories, revealing information on the ownership and market histories of artworks.
Archives Portal Europe
Provides access to fine, browse, and discover information about Europe held by thousands of cultural heritage institutions from more than 30 countries.
Archives of American Art
Consists of more than 2 million letters, diaries, scrapbooks, manuscripts, financial records, photographs, films, and audiovisual recordings of artists, dealers, critics, scholars, museums, galleries, associations, and other art world figures.
Wildenstein Plattner Institute Digital Archives
The Wildenstein Plattner Institute produces digitized catalogue raisoneeé projects, archival material, and related cultural programming as an open public resource.
Art Sales Catalogues Online (ASCO)
The Art Sales Catalogues Online (ASCO) publication offers easy access to scanned historical art sales catalogues for the period 1600 to 1900.
Art Inventories Catalog
References over 400,000 artworks in public and private collections worldwide. Over 21,000 and nearly 15,000 sculptors are represented in the database.
Women Art Dealers Digital Archive (WADDA)
WADDA aims to provide a centralized resource and digital lab space where traditional research may be conducted, and innovative approaches to analyzing conventional data may be tested and applied.

Museum of Looted Antiquities
MOLA is a collaborative effort to preserve, display, and study provenance information in a virtual museum.
Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)
This final rule revises and replaces definitions and procedures for lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, Native Hawaiian organizations, museums, and Federal agencies to implement the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. These regulations clarify and improve upon the systematic processes for the disposition or repatriation of Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony.
National Park Service - NAGPRA
Provides guidance for NAGPRA compliance
The Antiquities Coalition
The Antiquities Coalition is leading the international campaign against cultural racketeering, the illicit trade in ancient art and artifacts, to protect shared heritage and global security.
International Council of Museums (ICOM) Red List Database
Freely available, Red Lists present the categories of cultural objects subject to possible theft and trafficking. They help identify objects at risk and prevent them from being illegally sold or exported. The cultural items depicted on the lists are inventoried objects within the collections of recognized institutions.
Census of Antique Art and Architecture Known to the Renaissance
The Census offers systematic documentation of antique works of art known to artists during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Open Art Data
An aggregate that links databases to detect Nazi looted art. Focused on network analysis, pattern detection, and text analysis to expand on WWII provenance research.
**Note: Aggregates CANNOT clear the provenance for a work of art and should not be used alone.
Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project
The Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project Foundation is creating a cross-searchable digital platform for archival documentation, research, and education on the looting of Jewish-owned cultural property by the Nazis, their allies, and collaborators.
**Note: Aggregates CANNOT clear the provenance for a work of art and should not be used alone.
Cultural Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg [ERR]: Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume
Database of Nazi registration cards and photographs of the more than 20,000 art objects taken from Jews in France and Belgium.
The Central Registry of Information on Looted Cultural Property 1933-1945
The Central Registry has two fully searchable databases, an Information and an Object Database.
The Documentation Project
Contains information relating to works of art, archives, and other types of cultural property displaced as a consequence of war. The primary focus is the period of WWII. Research projects are related to Jeu de Paume, looting in Latin American and neutral countries, and Russian trophy art.
Lost Art-Datenbank
German database of property expropriated during WWII. Includes lists of lost objects and found object reports.
ZDK (Zentral Depot Karteien) Online
Catalog of works gathered at the 'Central Depot for Seized Collections' at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria.
Holocaust-Related Records at the National Archives
NARA holds millions of records created or received by the U.S. Government during and after World War II that document Nazi war crimes, wartime refugee issues, and activities and investigations of U.S. Government agencies involved in the identification and recovery of looted assets (including gold, art, and cultural property).

Bernstein: The Memory of Paper
Provides various resources in the following areas: historical research on paper in Europe, expertise on paper documents, measurement of paper structural characteristics, support for the creation of new paper databases, and introduction to digital paper studies.
RKD Research: Marks on Art
The database includes a wide range of marks, such as maker's marks, guild hallmarks, positioning marks, and trade or transport marks.
Frits Lugt Les Marques de collections de dessins & d'estampes
Database of collectors' marks found on drawings and prints. Also includes sales information and index to names of collectors, artists, dealers, and publishers.
Dutch University Institute For Art History Florence: Watermark Database
The goal of this Watermark Database is to store, process, and provide watermark data of sources such as books, drawings, letters, prints, etc.