Where It Is Now Is a Dated Observation

A location line is a claim about the present tense

Every other line in an object record is a claim about the past, and a location line is a claim about right now. A date of manufacture, a medium, a dimension, a sale price and an owner in 1893 are all fixed: new evidence can correct them, but the thing they describe has stopped happening. Where an object is has not stopped happening. It is the only field on the page that can be falsified by a van.

That difference should change how the field is written, and almost nowhere does it. Museum collection pages, auction catalogues, reference works and databases all print a location in the same flat present tense they use for the medium, with no indication of when anybody last looked. The reader is given a fact and denied the one thing needed to weigh it, which is its age.

This archive stamps a date on the location of every record it publishes and prints it beside the line. That is not a courtesy. It is the minimum a location claim has to carry to be checkable, and the rest of this piece is about what the stamped dates reveal once you have them.

The Louvre warns you about exactly one field

The Louvre's online collection catalogue carries a standing notice telling readers that some of its information, and rooms in particular, may not be up to date. It appears above the object itself, on every entry, and it names the location as the field affected while the museum rebuilds its collections management tools. On the entry for the Monzon Lion, the bronze aquamanile the museum holds as OA 7883 in the Department of Islamic Art, that notice sits above a record whose other fields, the inventory number, the department, the dating of 975 to 1100, are presented without qualification.

It is worth being fair to the Louvre here, because the notice is the honest act, not the failure. A museum that tells you which of its fields is unreliable has given you more than one that prints all of them in the same confident type. The point is what the disclaimer concedes: that the location of an object inside the institution that owns it, the easiest location claim in the world to verify, is the one the institution will not stand behind between system migrations.

If that is true of a room in a building the museum controls, it is far more true of every location line written by someone who does not own the object.

What 223 researched records actually record

Every published record in this archive carries a location, and the interesting number is how thin the evidence behind it usually is. The table below counts the 223 records published here on the day this piece was written, by what stands behind the location line rather than by what it says.

Ninety-one per cent carrying an inventory number is the healthy figure, because an accession number is a location claim somebody else has to honour. Thirty-eight per cent resting on a transaction is the figure that should give a researcher pause, and it is the subject of the next section.

For 84 objects, the location is inferred from a sale

Eighty-four of the 223 records here locate the object by naming the last transaction rather than the current holder. The chain of reasoning is that somebody bought it, buyers keep what they buy, and so it is presumably where the buyer is. Every step of that is ordinary and reasonable, and none of it is a sighting.

Botticelli's Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel is the clean example. It sold at Sotheby's in New York on 28 January 2021 to an anonymous buyer, and everything published about where the panel is since then descends from that one event. The record says private collection because the sale said private buyer. Nobody has reported seeing it, no institution has accessioned it, and the honest form of the location line is a statement about a sale with a date on it, not a statement about a place.

The Salvator Mundi is the same inference stretched to breaking. It sold on 15 November 2017, and no public record has placed the panel anywhere since. It has been reported aboard a yacht, promised to a museum in Abu Dhabi and withdrawn from a Louvre exhibition, and the archive's own line for it reads unlocated because that is what the evidence supports. An object with the most famous price in the history of the market has no verifiable address.

A tribunal placed the Kandinsky and the museum moved it anyway

On 22 October 2018 the Dutch Restitutions Committee issued binding opinion RC 3.141 and concluded that Amsterdam City Council was not obliged to return Kandinsky's Bild mit Hausern to the applicants. The painting had been bought by the city in 1940 and held by the Stedelijk Museum ever since. The Committee weighed the applicants' interest against the city's, recorded that the work was an essential link in the museum's Kandinsky holdings and was on permanent display, and rejected the application in terms that were about as final as a location claim can get.

The painting left the Stedelijk in February 2022. It was returned to the heirs of its last Jewish owner and sold to a private collector, and in February 2023 it was reported at more than 60 million euros, the most valuable painting the Netherlands has restituted. A second Kandinsky, returned by the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, went to Sotheby's the following month.

The lesson is not that the Committee was wrong. It is that a location which had been litigated, reasoned over by seven named people and published as binding was out of date inside four years. If that line can go stale, an ordinary one written by a cataloguer in passing certainly can, and the only defence a reader ever has is the date beside it.

Three ways a location line can fail, and they fail differently

A location line goes wrong in one of three ways, and telling them apart is most of the skill. The first is decay: the line was right and the object moved, which is the Kandinsky. The second is inference: the line was never a sighting, only a deduction from a sale, which is the Botticelli. The third is dispersal, where the question is malformed because the object is not in one place at all.

The Codex Sinaiticus is the case that breaks the field. Parts of the manuscript are held by the British Library, the University Library in Leipzig, the National Library of Russia and Saint Catherine's Monastery on Sinai, and the four institutions have published a joint statement acknowledging that the events of its history since 1844 are not fully known and are open to widely divergent interpretations. Four holders, one object, and a shared text conceding that the account of how it was divided is contested.

No single location line can carry that. What a record can do is say which institution holds which part, and on what date somebody confirmed it, which is the same discipline applied to a harder case rather than a different one.

How to read a location line

Ask first when the line was last checked, and treat an undated location as an assertion rather than a fact. Most published location lines carry no date at all, which does not make them wrong; it makes them unweighable, and the correct response is to find out when the source was written and treat that as the ceiling.

Ask next what kind of evidence sits behind it. An inventory or accession number is the strong form, because it commits an institution that can be asked. A named institution without a number is weaker. A private collection following a sale is an inference from a transaction, and should be read as a statement about the sale. Unlocated, written plainly, is stronger than any of them, because it is the only one that cannot mislead.

Then ask who would know if it changed. For an accessioned object the answer is a registrar with a legal duty. For an object bought anonymously at auction the answer is nobody with any reason to tell you, and a location line under those conditions has a half-life measured in the years between sales.

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