The Getty Provenance Index® has added 138,000 database records of art sales from the 1600s and 1700s

New Sales Data Trace the First Hundred Years
of the British Auction Market

The Getty Provenance Index has, for three decades, been a leading resource for scholarship on the history of collecting. Founded in the early 1980s by Burton Fredericksen, the first curator of paintings for the Getty Museum, the Provenance Index has evolved into a collection of online databases with 1.75 million records indexing the works of art described in source documents such as auction catalogs, archival inventories, and dealer stock books. This data can be used to trace the ownership of works of art and to examine patterns in collecting and art markets.

Read Eric Hormell’s full announcement about the exciting addition of 138,000 database records on ‘the Getty iris’.