Linked Art Provenance

In the past year, together with Ingrid Vermeulen (VU Amsterdam) and Chris Dijkshoorn (Rijksmuseum Amsterdam), I had the pleasure to supervise two students from VU, Babette Claassen and Jeroen Borst, who participated in a Network Institute Academy Assistant project around art provenance and digital methods. The growing number of datasets and digital services around art-historical information presents new opportunities for conducting provenance research at scale. The Linked Art Provenance project investigated to what extent it is possible to trace provenance of art works using online data sources.

Caspar Netscher, the Lacemaker, 1662, oil on canvas. London: the Wallace Collection, P237

In the interdisciplinary project, Babette (Art Market Studies) and Jeroen (Artificial Intelligence) collaborated to create a workflow model, shown below, to integrate provenance information from various online sources such as the Getty provenance index. This included an investigation of potential usage of automatic information extraction of structured data of these online sources.

This model was validated through a case study, where we investigate whether we can capture information from selected sources about an auction (1804), during which the paintings from the former collection of Pieter Cornelis van Leyden (1732-1788) were dispersed. An example work , the Lacemaker, is shown above. Interviews with various art historian validated the produced workflow model.

The workflow model also provides a basic guideline for provenance research and together with the Linked Open Data process can possibly answer relevant research questions for studies in the history of collecting and the art market.

More information can be found in the Final report

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