Provenance in nineteenth-century Europe. Research practice and concept

Abstract

Provenance – an object’s history of ownership – is a historically contingent concept and research practice that emerged in nineteenth-century Europe. In a novel project examining the cases of Beda Dudík (Moravia/Austria), Carl Schirren (Livonia/Russia), and Franz Hipler (Warmia/East Prussia) ca. 1850–1900 I argue that, while the art market and nationalism are important, scholars representing regions with a suppressed past and present are key to understanding the relevance of provenance. Due to seventeenth-century plundering, these scholars were dependent on foreign archives and libraries when researching their regions’ history. Their publications describing provenance research are the project’s main sources. The analysis of these publications targets practices such as classification, a crucial tool as determined provenance equaled historical existence. Merging regional inferiority and transnational dependencies, diverse institutional settings, and political, religious, and scholarly ambitions, scrutinizing these cases reveals the needs and encounters that explain the rise of provenance.