Provenance Record

What’s in the document

• The works identified with image, title, artist, year, medium and dimensions
• Ownership table: period, owner or custodian, location, acquired from, notes
• Current custodian entered from your gallery profile and badged as current
• A closing line stating that additional entries are to be completed by the registrar
• Compiled-by signature line with a gallery seal
• Document number and date of compilation in the header; number again in the footer

What provenance is, and what it is worth

Provenance is the documented history of who has owned a work, from the artist’s studio to the present holder. Auction houses, insurers and serious private buyers examine it because it addresses three separate questions at once: whether the work is what it is said to be, whether the seller can actually pass good title, and whether the work has a history that would make owning it a problem.

That third question is why provenance research became a professional discipline rather than a courtesy. Works displaced during the Second World War, works removed from archaeological sites, works that left a country in breach of its export law — all of them surface as gaps in an ownership chain, and a gap covering the wrong decades will stop a consignment or a sale outright. The trade’s working assumption is that an unexplained gap is a question, not an oversight.

What this document actually contains

Be clear about what you are getting, because provenance is the area where documentation software most often oversells. This is a register, not a research service.

The works

Each work you include prints with its image, title, artist, year, medium and dimensions, so the record is attached to identifiable objects rather than to titles alone.

The ownership table

Five columns — Period, Owner / Custodian, Location, Acquired From, Notes. One row is written for you: the current year to present, your gallery, your address, badged Current. Beneath it runs a single full-width line reading that additional provenance entries are to be completed by the registrar. That line is a statement, not a set of ruled cells — earlier links go on by hand, in a PDF editor, or by recording them in your own file and regenerating.

The compiled-by block

A signature line naming your gallery as compiler, with the gallery seal. The document says who assembled the record and on what date — which is the honest framing, because a provenance record is a compilation, and the compiler’s identity is part of the evidence.

Number and date

The document number and the compilation date print in the header; the number repeats in the footer alongside your gallery name and contact address. The footer carries no date, so a page separated from its header is identified by number rather than by version — a provenance record is superseded as often as it is amended, and the number is what tells two copies apart.

How to fill a chain in without damaging it

Work backwards from the present, and record each link with the evidence that supports it — an invoice, a bill of sale, a shipping record, a catalogue entry, a letter, a photograph of the work hanging in a named room. Where you have no evidence for a link, write the gap down as a gap. "Private collection, Paris" is an acceptable entry when it is what a vendor stated and you say so; it becomes a problem when it is written as if the gallery established it.

The single most damaging habit in provenance work is smoothing. A chain that reads continuously because plausible entries were inserted to close a gap is worth less than a chain with an honest hole in it, because the first one collapses entirely the moment any single invented link is tested. This document prints only the link it can stand behind, says on its face that the rest is outstanding, and names who compiled it — precisely so that the distinction between what you know and what you were told stays visible on the page.

What it does not do

It does not research provenance, verify any entry, or check a work against a stolen-art register — searches of the Art Loss Register, national databases and the relevant restitution records are separate work, usually paid, and nothing here substitutes for them. It does not extend itself automatically as you record sales; each regeneration prints the current custodian and the same standing line about outstanding entries, and it prints no ruled cells for you to write earlier links into. It does not carry exhibition history or literature references — the exhibition history document is the register for those. And it does not cross-link to the certificate or bill of sale; keeping those together under one file is a discipline you maintain, not a feature.

Questions, answered

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