# The Woman in the Provenance Line Is Usually Recorded as Her Husband > Across 1,322 provenance events in this archive nineteen name a woman, and four of those give her no personal name at all. The twentieth-century entries are worse than the seventeenth. > The Study - 2026-08-25 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/study/the-woman-in-the-provenance-line/ ## Key points - Of 1,322 provenance events in the 184 published records of this archive, nineteen carry an explicit marker that the owner was a woman. In four of the nineteen she has no personal name of her own anywhere in the entry. - The Cleveland Museum of Art publishes a Lamerie tea caddy under the credit line The Thomas S. Grasselli Memorial Collection and records its previous owner as Mrs. Thomas S. [Emilie Schmidt] Grasselli. Her own name survives only inside the museum's square brackets, and the date she acquired the object is recorded as a question mark. - The seventeenth century records these women better than the twentieth. On one Caravaggio the Metropolitan names the duchesse d'Aiguillon in full for a 1650 purchase and a 1675 inventory, and names the woman who sold the same picture in 1947 only as Mrs. David Burns. - The honorific carries a woman's marital status and nothing equivalent is recorded for the men beside her. In the Cozio Archive a twenty-seven-year ownership of an Andrea Amati violin is entered as Miss Hilda Barry, between W. E. Hill & Sons and Rudolph Wurlitzer Co. - Where a woman does get her own name in these records she is usually titled, rich or professionally qualified: Bess of Hardwick, the Dowager Duchess of Portland, Dr Marie Lea-Wilson. ## Nineteen events out of 1,322 name a woman ## The credit line names her husband and so does the provenance ## A woman sold this Caravaggio and the record of her is her husband's name ## The seventeenth century names her better than the twentieth ## The honorific records the marriage, and only for the women ## Rank and money buy a woman her own name ## Sometimes the wife turns out to have been the buyer ## How to search for a woman recorded as her husband A provenance line exists to record who owned the object, and where it records a marriage instead it has recorded the wrong fact and kept it for a century. The correction is not a note of regret in the catalogue. It is a search, and the search has a shape: take the date the husband died, go to the inventory taken at that death, and read it for the name of the woman who then owned the thing. Cleveland has already done this once, and the result is sitting in square brackets in its own published data, where anybody can read it. ## Questions **Why do museum provenance records name women as Mrs plus their husband's name?** Because that is usually the only form in which the name reached the file. Twentieth-century provenance is compiled from invoices, dealer correspondence, insurance schedules and gift paperwork, and in all of those a married woman was routinely addressed and recorded as Mrs plus her husband's forename and surname. The museum is reproducing its source rather than making an editorial choice. **How many women appear in the provenance records of this archive?** Nineteen provenance events across eighteen objects, out of 1,322 events in 184 published records, carry an explicit marker that the owner was a woman. That is a floor rather than a measurement, because the test only catches titles such as Mrs, Madame, Miss, Lady or Countess and the word widow, and misses any woman recorded plainly by forename and surname or inside a family group. **Was Vermeer's patron Pieter van Ruijven or Maria de Knuijt?** The couple's holding was credited to Pieter van Ruijven for decades. In the catalogue of the Rijksmuseum's 2023 Vermeer exhibition, co-curator Pieter Roelofs argued that his wife Maria de Knuijt was the collector, citing her will, which left Vermeer 500 guilders and made him the only beneficiary outside her family, and put her purchases at around twenty paintings, about half the surviving oeuvre. **How do I find a woman in a provenance index when she is recorded under her husband's name?** Search his name and read the entries dated after his death, since those are the years the object was hers. Then find the probate inventory taken at his death, because an inventory records a widow as a legal party and is the document most likely to carry her own forename and surname. Dealer correspondence is also better than the printed catalogue, because dealers wrote to whoever was actually selling. **Does an accession credit line tell you who owned an object?** No. A credit line records whom the museum chose to honour, which is often not the person who owned or gave the object. The Cleveland Museum of Art publishes a Lamerie tea caddy under the credit line The Thomas S. Grasselli Memorial Collection, and its own provenance field shows that the donor was his widow, Emilie Schmidt Grasselli, who gave it in 1943, the year after his death. ## Sources - [1] Cleveland Museum of Art, Open Access API, artwork records for accession numbers 1943.179, 1943.179.a and 1943.179.b, Tea Caddy, Paul Jacques de Lamerie, 1741-42. Fetched directly; the credit line and the full provenance string, including the bracketed name Emilie Schmidt and the date range beginning with a question mark, are quoted verbatim from the museum's own data. - [2] Cleveland Museum of Art, Open Access API, artwork record for accession number 1941.601, Tray, Paul Jacques de Lamerie, 1745-46. Fetched directly. The credit line reads Gift of Mrs. Otto Miller and the provenance array is empty. - [3] Metropolitan Museum of Art, object record and published provenance for Caravaggio, The Musicians, accession 52.81. Read in full for the Richelieu estate sale of 1650, the duchesse d'Aiguillon's 1675 inventory, the entries for David Burns and Mrs. David Burns, and the 1947 sale to Cookson and Thwaytes. - [4] Metropolitan Museum of Art, object record and published provenance for Georges de La Tour, The Fortune-Teller, accession 60.30. Read in full for the 1650 Bretagne inventory valuation, the 1879 Lemonnier de Loriere inventory, the entry for Mme de Gastines to 1921 and the 1949 sale to Wildenstein. - [5] Tarisio, Cozio Archive, property record for Andrea Amati, Violin, Cremona, the Kurtz, Metropolitan, property ID 40073. The provenance table listing Miss Irene Pellew and Miss Hilda Barry, 1896-1923, alongside Sir Louis Mallet, Edward Heron-Allen, W. E. Hill & Sons and Dr. Arved Kurtz. - [6] Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection API, object record 503517, ex Kurtz Violin, accession 1999.26, for the credit line Purchase, Robert Alonzo Lehman Bequest, 1999. - [7] National Gallery of Ireland, online collection, The Taking of Christ, loan number L.14702. Read for the credit line naming Dr Marie Lea-Wilson and for the provenance entry naming Mrs Mary Georgiana Constance Nisbet Hamilton Ogilvy, died 1920. - [8] Milo Keynes, The Portland Vase: Sir William Hamilton, Josiah Wedgwood and the Darwins, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London. Read for the Duchess Dowager of Portland's purchase of the vase with three other antiquities for 1,800 guineas in 1784, her death in July 1785, and the sale of her collection in thirty-eight sessions between 24 April and 7 June 1786. - [9] The Art Newspaper, Revealed: Vermeer's patron was, in fact, a woman and she bought half the artist's entire oeuvre, 7 February 2023. Reporting Pieter Roelofs's argument in the catalogue of the Rijksmuseum's 2023 Vermeer exhibition, including the 500-guilder bequest in Maria de Knuijt's will and the estimate of at least twenty paintings. - [10] Iconotheca, records for lamerie-tea-caddy-cleveland, lamerie-tray-cleveland, caravaggio-the-musicians, georges-de-la-tour-the-fortune-teller, amati-ex-kurtz-violin-met, devonshire-hunting-tapestries-va, girl-with-a-pearl-earring and the-portland-vase. The 1,322-event count and the nineteen-event figure were computed across the 184 published records of this archive.