The WPI Sales Catalogues Database consists of over 22,000 digitized sales catalogues from Europe and America, dating from the 17th century to 1945. This database reflects the activities and acquisition priorities of the former Wildenstein Institute, as well as art market trends up until the mid-twentieth century. Nearly half of the sales catalogues represented here document sales that took place in London, followed closely by Paris. New York, Amsterdam, and Brussels figure strongly as well.
Sales catalogues are crucial primary sources that document the public sales of works of art. Users of the WPI Sales Catalogues Database can search through the vast holdings by date, place of sale, or by keywords such as auction house, artist, and collector. As these documents have been processed using OCR (Optical Character Recognition), each sales catalogue is entirely searchable.
What Do Sales Catalogues Tell Us?
A sales catalogue, also called an auction catalogue, is published on the occasion of the public sale of a group of artworks or other valuable objects held in private collections. The cover, followed by a title page, includes the full title of the sale, sale name or number, dates of the sale’s preview, date and place of the sale, and the names of the auctioneers and experts. The conditions of sale, bidding procedures, and information about the auction house can often be found at the beginning of the catalogue, as well as an index of the artists represented. Catalogues may also include an introductory text, usually written by a domain expert, that provides an overview of the objects, the collectors, or their collection. The bulk of the catalogue inventories the objects presented at the sale, each with the artist name, title or description of the work, size, media, and provenance when available. Image reproductions of key items and other information such as price estimates and biographical information about the artist may also be included.
A Treasure Trove for Art Market Studies
Sales catalogues serve as an incredible resource for studying art market trends, collections, dealers, and art history, and frequently have served as the primary means of establishing the provenance of a work of art. Many catalogues contain annotations from previous owners with additional insight or information: sales prices, names of buyers, and sometimes sketches. Different institutions have varying copies or editions with unique annotations, providing additional information regarding buyers and participation.
Collectors, dealers, and galleries took great pride in these documents. Auction catalogues were preserved and bound with special bindings, sometimes together as a collection or individually for a private library. These collections have been treated like art collections. Over the years, heirs have divided libraries, sold them at auction, or donated them. Some bound catalogues have bookplates that preserve a part of the book’s provenance and serve as a testament to an individual collector and a unique moment in time. One such collector was the Parisian art dealer Georges Pannier (1853–1944), whose catalogues bear his bookplate.
Another intriguing catalogue features the collection of Henrietta Louisa Koenen (1830 – 1881), who had amassed an astounding number of prints by women printmakers working between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries including pieces by Angelica Kauffmann (1741-1807) and Maria Cosway (1760-1838). In early 1885, the collection appeared at auction, with the stipulation that the potential buyer must purchase the collection “in its entirety” as “a dissemination of this collection would render it impossible to reconstruct.” The collection was not sold, but was later acquired by the collections at the New York Public Library and was the subject of a 2015/2016 exhibition, “Printing Women: Three Centuries of Female Printmakers, 1570–1900.”
An Essential Resource in Restitution Efforts
Sales catalogues are also invaluable as a resource for art restitution research. Ongoing efforts to restore works of art to their rightful owners or heirs in the wake of Nazi-era looting relies on catalogue information from associated auctions. The Vienna-based auction house Dorotheum, for example, regularly sold property seized from Jews by the Gestapo Office for the Disposal of the Property of Jewish Emigrants, and Nazi symbols appeared on hundreds of auction catalogues.
Pictured here is a Dorotheum sales catalogue from March 31st, 1938, shortly after Nazi forces invaded Austria, containing a notice that purchases must be made in Reichsmarks; many subsequent Dorotheum sales catalogues bore the swastika, as seen on this sales catalogue dated July 15 – 21 1938 auctioning “Wohnungseinrichtung” or (likely looted) “Home Furnishings.” As many galleries and their archives were destroyed during the war, preservation of these sales catalogues are essential to this restitution work.
Today, restitution is an international effort between nations and major art institutions, including auction houses such as Dorotheum.
Preserving, Protecting, and Publishing Sales Catalogues for Scholarship
Art researchers, museums, and collectors are greatly indebted to the dedicated people who prepared auction catalogues and recorded the transactions. Their documentation remains as important many decades later. Auction houses, libraries, museums, research institutions, and individuals have held these historical records and invested in their continued preservation. The technology to digitize materials is not only an important step in preserving these materials; it also provides access to a much larger audience and allows for a comparative analysis of sales catalogue databases across research institutions.
We encourage you to explore other repositories at:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Watson Library
INHA (Institut national d’histoire de l’art)
Getty Provenance Index Databases
…and, of course, Wildenstein Plattner Institute’s Sales Catalogues Database here. Researchers can also find many of the catalogues in our collection by searching on SCIPIO, a joint project of 26 different fine arts organizations with catalogues dating from the late 16th century.
