# The Loan Register as Provenance Evidence > A loan places an object in a named city on a dated day, and British law makes museums publish that record in advance. Exhibition history is the cheapest provenance evidence there is. > The Study - 2026-08-02 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/study/the-loan-register-as-provenance-evidence/ ## Key points - UK regulations of 2008 require a borrowing museum to publish the lender's name and address, a description, a photograph for pre-1946 objects acquired after 1932, and a statement on 1933 to 1945 ownership, four weeks before the object enters the country. - Immunity from seizure under the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007 lasts twelve months and can be refused or withdrawn where a museum's provenance procedures are inadequate. - Egon Schiele's Portrait of Wally was seized in New York in 1998 because a loan brought it into a jurisdiction where a claim could be filed; the case settled on 19 July 2010 for 19 million dollars. - The Getty Provenance Index covers over 1,600 German sales catalogues of 1930 to 1945 in about 236,000 records, while exhibition catalogues remain largely unindexed. ## A loan is a dated, witnessed statement of possession ## British law turned the loan register into a published provenance document ## Portrait of Wally: the exhibition that produced the evidence ## The market has been indexed; the exhibitions have not ## How to work an exhibition history properly The loan is the most honest document a work of art generates, because it is created for an operational purpose by people who have no stake in the later argument. A registrar recording a lender's address in 1937 was solving an insurance problem, and in doing so left a dated fix on an object's position that no subsequent narrative can dissolve. British law has now made that fix public by statute, four weeks before the crate arrives. The researcher who reads loan registers and exhibition checklists before reaching for the auction databases will keep finding what the auction databases cannot show. ## Questions **Does immunity from seizure prevent a restitution claim?** No. It prevents a court from ordering the object seized while it is on loan, for twelve months from entry. The claim itself survives, and the immunity is conditional: the museum must be approved, must have adequate provenance procedures, and must have published the required information about the object four weeks before it arrives. **Why is a loan record stronger evidence than a family recollection?** Because it is contemporaneous, dated, institutional and financially consequential. A museum that borrows must identify the lender to insure the object and to print the catalogue, and both the insurance schedule and the catalogue are created before any dispute exists. That makes the loan record a statement against interest in a way that a later recollection is not. **Where do I find whether a work was in a given exhibition?** In the printed catalogue's checklist, held in national art libraries, and in the exhibition list of the catalogue raisonne, which should be treated as a starting point rather than a source. Unlike auction records, exhibition catalogues have not been comprehensively digitised or indexed, so this remains manual work. ## Sources - [1] Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007, Part 6, Explanatory Notes (sections 134 to 138, protection of cultural objects on loan). - [2] The Protection of Cultural Objects on Loan (Publication and Provision of Information) Regulations 2008, SI 2008/1159. - [3] Museums Galleries Scotland, 'Immunity from Seizure' (application timetable and DCMS 2005 due diligence guidance). - [4] ArThemis, Art-Law Centre, University of Geneva, case note 'Portrait of Wally, United States and Estate of Lea Bondi and Leopold Museum'. - [5] Getty Research Institute, 'Publishing German Sales: A Look under the Hood of the Getty Provenance Index' (reprinted by the Commission for Looted Art in Europe). - [6] Forschungsstelle 'Entartete Kunst', Kunsthistorisches Institut, Freie Universitat Berlin, Beschlagnahmeinventar database.