Glossary

The vocabulary of provenance, attribution and the saleroom, defined plainly. Each entry opens with the definition; the paragraph after it is why the term matters when you are reading a catalogue entry or a lot description.

Provenance

Provenance is the documented history of ownership of a work of art, from its making to the present day.

It matters for three separate reasons that are often confused: it supports or undermines the attribution, it establishes legal title, and it is itself part of the object's history. A chain with gaps is normal for an old object; a chain presented as complete when it is not is the problem.

Documented, disputed, unknown

These are the three grades this site applies to every link in a provenance chain: documented means a contemporary record supports it, disputed means sources conflict, unknown means no record has been found.

The grade travels with the claim everywhere it appears, including in our llms.txt. Quoting a provenance link from this site without its grade misrepresents it, because an ungraded chain reads as a documented one.

Due diligence

Due diligence is the research a buyer, dealer or museum carries out before acquiring a work, to establish that the seller has good title and that the object was not looted, stolen or illegally exported.

Standards have tightened sharply since the 1998 Washington Principles and the 1970 UNESCO Convention became reference points. What counted as adequate enquiry in 1960 does not count now, which is why acquisition date matters when judging a museum's conduct.

Restitution

Restitution is the return of a work of art to an owner, heir, community or country from whom it was taken, whether by looting, forced sale, colonial appropriation or theft.

It is distinct from repatriation, which describes return to a country of origin rather than to an identified claimant. Most restitution is settled by negotiation rather than litigation, and many settlements are confidential, so published cases understate the volume.

Attribution and cataloguing

Attribution

An attribution is the assignment of a work to a particular artist, workshop or period, and it is an argument from evidence rather than a fact about the object.

Attributions change, in both directions, and a change is a scholarly event rather than a scandal. The evidence is usually some mixture of documentary record, provenance, style and technical analysis.

Autograph

A work is described as autograph when it is held to be entirely by the hand of the named artist.

The term matters most where a busy workshop was normal practice: much of what hangs under a great name was executed partly or wholly by assistants under supervision, and the market values the distinction heavily.

Circle of, studio of, after

These are the standard cataloguing qualifiers for degrees of distance from an artist: studio of means produced in the artist's workshop, circle of means by an unidentified contemporary close to them, and after means a later copy of a known composition.

The wording is not decorative. Auction houses use a defined ladder of these terms and the difference between two rungs can be the difference between six figures and seven, which is why a lot description should always be read literally.

Catalogue raisonne

A catalogue raisonne is a scholarly attempt to list and describe every known work by an artist, with the compiler's reasoning for what is included and excluded.

Inclusion functions in practice as an authentication and exclusion can make a work almost unsaleable, so the compiler holds unusual power. Successive editions frequently disagree with each other.

Accession number

An accession number is the unique identifier a museum assigns to an object when it formally enters the collection, and it usually encodes the year of acquisition.

It is the most reliable way to refer to a specific object, because titles vary between languages and catalogues while the accession number does not. A Metropolitan Museum number beginning 1975 records the year that object was accessioned.

Recto and verso

Recto is the front or principal face of a sheet, panel or canvas; verso is the reverse.

The verso is often the more informative side for provenance: collectors' marks, dealer stock numbers, exhibition labels and inventory stamps accumulate there. Many records here cite verso evidence for that reason.

Controlled vocabulary

A fixed list of permitted values for a catalogue field, checked when a record is written rather than when it is read.

Museums apply controlled vocabularies to fields such as object type, medium, role and place, most often against a published authority like the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus or the Union List of Artist Names. The purpose is comparison rather than tidiness: where the list is enforced, a search for one term returns every record that means it, and a total can be trusted. Where it is not, the same fact filed as Inscription and as Inscriptions becomes two fields that no query joins, and the loss is silent because a human reading the page still sees one thing.

Carbon print

A carbon print is a photographic print made in pigment suspended in gelatine rather than in silver, valued in the nineteenth century for its permanence and usually made commercially from a copy transparency rather than from the photographer's original negative.

The process was patented by Joseph Swan in 1864 and worked in Britain chiefly through the Autotype Company, which printed editions for photographers including Julia Margaret Cameron. Because the printing was delegated, a carbon print is often not the work of the photographer's own hands, and the copy transparency stage allowed spots and flaws to be retouched out, so a carbon print can look cleaner than any print the photographer made. Catalogue practice varies on how to date one: some museums give the date of the negative alone, others give the negative and the printing year separately, as in 1867, printed 1875. Where the difference matters to a reader, the fuller form is the honest one.

Blindstamp

A blindstamp is a mark embossed into paper or mount board without ink, used by photographers, printers, dealers and collectors to identify who issued or owned an object.

It is read by raking light rather than by colour, and it survives trimming and fading better than a printed label. On nineteenth-century photographs a dealer's blindstamp records who sold the print rather than who made it: prints of Julia Margaret Cameron's portraits carry an oval stamp naming Colnaghi of Pall Mall East as the seller. Museum records transcribe the wording and note whether the stamp is on the recto or the verso, because both placement and wording distinguish issues of the same image. A blindstamp is evidence about an individual object and never about an edition as a whole.

Pastiche

A pastiche is an object composed from the motifs and techniques of a period it was not made in, presented as a work of that period.

The word describes the object and also implies an intention, which is why it is not a synonym for composite. An object can be composite because its maker built it from many parts in one campaign, or because it acquired parts over centuries of use, without anybody having meant to mislead. A pastiche is assembled recently from a borrowed vocabulary in order to be marketable as something older. The Tiara of Saitaphernes, bought by the Louvre in 1896 as Greek work of the third or second century BCE, was made in Odessa in 1894 or 1895 from published excavation material supplied to its maker by the dealers who commissioned it. Museums use the harder word forgery when they mean to allege that deception was deliberate, and that allegation can be withdrawn: the Metropolitan Museum published The Forgery of Our Greek Bronze Horse about its own statuette in February 1968 and later restored the object to antiquity.

Duty dodger

A piece of English silver into which hallmarks cut from a smaller, already assayed object have been soldered, so that the larger piece appears to have been tested and taxed when it was not.

The fraud was created by the duty of sixpence per troy ounce charged on new wrought plate from 1 June 1720, which was assessed by weight when a piece was presented for marking, so the saving grew with the size of the object. The marks themselves are genuine, which is why no analysis of the metal detects the fraud: what is false is the relationship between the punches and the object beneath them. Detection is physical, and asks whether the punches sit where that form was normally marked, whether excess solder suggests a let-in patch and whether the impression reads correctly on the reverse. The offence attaches to the marks rather than to a person, so it does not lapse: the Victoria and Albert Museum's Paul de Lamerie ewer of 1736, museum number M.16-1954, had its transposed marks removed and was re-marked by the Goldsmiths' Company in 1944.

Credit line

The fixed line of acknowledgement a museum prints with an object, naming the donor, fund or bequest through which it entered the collection.

It is a permanent acknowledgement rather than a transaction record, and the two can differ sharply. A gift completed by an estate is conventionally credited in the original collector's name, so the Metropolitan Museum of Art credits objects received in 1917 to J. Pierpont Morgan, who died in March 1913 and whose son made those gifts. A credit line can also disagree with the museum's own accession year, as with the armchair credited to 1906 and accessioned in 1907. Read the accession number for the year the museum took the object in.

The market

Hammer price

The hammer price is the amount at which the auctioneer's hammer falls, before any fees are added.

It is not what the buyer pays and it is not what the seller receives. This site states hammer and premium separately on every sale for that reason, and a single conflated figure should always be treated as ambiguous.

Buyer's premium

The buyer's premium is a percentage the auction house charges the winning bidder on top of the hammer price.

It is tiered, typically falling as the hammer price rises, and it has risen substantially over recent decades. A reported total that does not state the rate applied cannot be reconciled back to the hammer.

Estimate

An estimate is the range the auction house publishes before a sale as its expectation of the hammer price.

It is set with the consignor and reflects commercial judgement as well as valuation, so an estimate should not be read as an appraisal. The reserve, the confidential minimum below which the lot will not sell, sits at or under the low estimate.

Bought in

A lot is bought in when it fails to reach its reserve and goes unsold, and it is then returned to the consignor.

A bought-in lot is not a sale and produces no price, although unsold lots are sometimes reported as though a figure had been achieved. Being bought in publicly can depress a work's prospects for years afterwards.

Private treaty sale

A sale negotiated directly between a seller and one named buyer, often brokered by an auction house, with no public bidding and no hammer.

Auction houses run private treaty departments alongside their salerooms, and museums frequently acquire this way. The figure that results is a negotiated price with no underbidder and usually no published buyer's premium, so it is not comparable with an auction result and should never be quoted as one. Prices are commonly undisclosed, and where a number does circulate it often comes from one party rather than from a record of the transaction. In a provenance line a private treaty sale is a documented transfer like any other; in a price series it is a different kind of number and belongs labelled as such.

Bidding on commission

Bidding on commission is bidding at auction as agent for an undisclosed principal, so the name recorded as buyer is the agent's and not the owner's.

An auction house records its counterparty, which is the person who bids, signs and pays. Whoever that person is acting for is a private arrangement and no house is obliged to publish it, so the public sale record routinely stops one step short of the owner. The practice is old and unchanged: the British Museum's catalogue records the 1893 buyer of the Palmer Cup as A.W., probably the dealer Asher Wertheimer, while the Metropolitan Museum's provenance for Velazquez's Juan de Pareja states the fuller form, sold at Christie's on 27 November 1970 to Wildenstein for The Met. A dealer's name in a buyer's column should therefore be read as an open question about ownership rather than as a link in a chain.

Acceptance in lieu

The United Kingdom scheme under which the state accepts an object of national importance in whole or part settlement of an inheritance tax, capital transfer tax or estate duty debt, instead of requiring the tax to be paid in cash.

It runs on sections 230 and 231 of the Inheritance Tax Act 1984, with the heritage qualification set by sections 30 to 35 and 78 to 79, and the accepted object is then allocated to a public institution. The tax satisfied is a special price, found by agreeing a value for the item and then deducting a proportion of the tax given up on it, an arrangement known as the douceur. Because no money changes hands, no market price is created, so an acceptance in lieu credit line is not evidence of value. France reaches the same result through the dation en paiement, by which Vermeer's The Astronomer entered the Louvre in 1982 to 1983. The Devonshire Hunting Tapestries carry the mechanism in their credit line: accepted by HM Government in lieu of tax payable on the estate of the 10th Duke of Devonshire and allocated to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Price realised

The total an auction house publishes for a sold lot, being the hammer price plus the buyer's premium and any applicable taxes.

It is not a bid. Christie's conditions of sale state that sale totals are hammer price plus buyer's premium, and most houses publish only this inclusive figure, so the hammer has to be recovered by applying the published premium schedule in reverse. Because estimates are quoted on a hammer basis and exclude the premium, comparing a price realised directly against an estimate compares two different quantities. A lot that appears to have cleared its top estimate may not have cleared it at all.

Glossary

Provenance

Provenance

Documented, disputed, unknown

Due diligence

Restitution

Attribution and cataloguing

Attribution

Autograph

Circle of, studio of, after

Catalogue raisonne

Accession number

Recto and verso

Controlled vocabulary

Carbon print

Blindstamp

Pastiche

Duty dodger

Credit line

The market

Hammer price

Buyer's premium

Estimate

Bought in

Private treaty sale

Bidding on commission

Acceptance in lieu

Price realised

The Iconotheca Letter