History of Art & Architecture

Art Sales Catalogues Online from Brill offers access to page images of complete historical art sales catalogues for the period 1600 to 1900. It is based Lugt's Répertoire des catalogues de ventes and can be searched by Lugt number, date, place, provenance, collector name, content, auction house and existing catalog copies.

A current auction results index covering more than 700,000 artists from the 4th c. to present in the following fine art categories: drawing-watercolour, painting, tapestry, prints, posters, sculpture-installation, photography and Audiovisual & Multimedia." data is collected from thousands of auction houses internationally and in the United States. Includes price calculations for works by individual artists over time, a monogram index, and notices of works in upcoming sales.

The Getty Provenance Index, a project of the Getty Research Library, accumulates and disseminates information related to the history of collecting and the provenance of individual works of art. Its content includes: the Inventories Project, a database of archival documents and inventory contents, which are gathered from unpublished seventeenth- and eighteenth-century inventories of collections in France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain; the Sales Index Project, compiled from nineteenth-century Belgian, British, French and Netherlandish sale catalogs, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German and Scandinavian catalogs; the Public Collections and Provenance of Paintings database which contains cataloging information on individual paintings, executed by artists born before 1900, from a selection of American and British public collections.

Invaluable is one of the largest and most comprehensive fine auction database service including unabridged upcoming and past auction catalogs and price results for over 2,000 international art, antiques, and collectible including Artcurial, Christie's, Doyle's, Eldred's, Gallerie Koller, Hindman, Ritchie's, Sotheby's, Swann, Tajan, and Weschler's. This database requires password access; please contact the library.

SCIPIO offers access to art and rare book sales catalogs for sales held from the late sixteenth century to the present. Searchable indexes include auction house name, and places, seller name, date of sale, and title of sale. This database provides access to the Fine Arts Library's extensive collection of printed and microform auction sale catalogs.

The WPI presents a selection of 11,000+ sales catalogues dating pre-1945, many of which are annotated. Search for sales catalogues by entering a keyword or by city, country, and/or date.

The Archives Directory for the History of Collecting is a pioneering resource from the Frick created to help researchers locate primary source material about American art collectors, dealers, agents and advisors, and the repositories that hold these records.

The Frick Photoarchive is a study collection of more than 1 million photographic reproductions of works of art by fourth to mid-twentieth century artists trained in the Western tradition. Each photograph is accompanied by historical documentation that traces the essential elements of the biography of a work of art — changes of attribution, ownership, and condition.

Catalogues raisonnés – scholarly compilations of an artist's body of work – are critical tools for researching the provenance, attribution, and authenticity of a work of art. This section of IFAR's Website is devoted to the Catalogues Raisonnés Database, which is composed of separate databases of published and in-preparation catalogues raisonnés. Note that this resource is an index only. To find the book, copy the publication information into a HOLLIS search.

IFAR, a longtime leader in the field of provenance research, has developed this Provenance Guide as a primer on conducting such research. It includes links to important archives, image databases, dealer and sales records, and other references.

The International Research Portal is a collaboration of national and other archival institutions with records that pertain to Nazi-Era cultural property. The Portal links researchers to archival materials consisting of descriptions of records and, in many cases, digital images of the records that relate to cultural property that was stolen, looted, seized, forcibly sold, or otherwise lost during the Nazi era.

The Wildenstein Institute partnered with international presses such as La Bibliothèque des Arts, Taschen, and Skira to produce more than 50 titles on a wide range of French artists, with a strong focus on 18th and 19th-century art. To encourage the study and appreciation of these artists and their works, the WPI has digitized these publications, which are now freely accessible below.

This guide from GRI is a helpful starting place for appraisal research for works of art, books, maps, and more.