One catalogue, searched at once
Museum open-access programmes, national libraries and auction records in a single index. Search by title, artist, accession number or institution from one box.
Provenance · Cataloguing · Market evidence
Every object
has a history.
Art Trace brings the world’s open museum collections, library archives and auction records into one research desk — so you can identify an artwork or a luxury object, follow its ownership through the centuries, and see plainly where the record runs out.
11.2M records from 1,781 contributing institutions
Illustration
Still life with pewter jug
- by 1789Private collection, Paris
- 1789 – 1811By descent
- 1811 – 1928No record locatedGap
- ca. 1928Sold through a dealer, Amsterdam
- 1952 – presentMuseum collection, by gift
The undocumented years are shown as a gap, not bridged.
- Catalogued records
- 11.2M
- Works with an image you can view
- 5.2M
- Auction and market price observations
- 880K
- Contributing institutions
- 1,781
Counted from the catalogue itself and refreshed hourly. Most institutions reach us through open-access aggregators such as Europeana.
What we provide
The reading room, the archive and the saleroom in one place
Identify from a photograph
Photograph an object and Art Trace reads it — maker, period, material, type — then finds the catalogued records it most resembles, with its confidence stated.
Provenance as a timeline
Each owner, each transfer and the source that records it, laid out in order. Where the record is silent, the timeline shows a gap rather than bridging it.
Risk signals, kept apart
Documented owners during 1933–45, loss-database checks, and trade-restricted materials such as ivory and tortoiseshell — each flagged on its own terms, never folded into one score.
Market evidence
Auction and marketplace price observations, Market Movers, and a valuation cross-reference for watches, jewellery and clocks. When the data cannot support a figure, none is shown.
A dossier you can file
Print any record to PDF for a client or for counsel, or download museum-standard LIDO XML carrying the full ownership chain.
How it works
From a photograph to a filed dossier
Search or photograph
Start from a name, a reference number or a picture taken on your phone.
Match
Comparable records from collections worldwide, our own catalogue first.
Trace and file
Read the ownership chain, check the risk signals, export the dossier.
How we handle evidence
Absence of evidence is never evidence of innocence
A provenance tool is only as useful as it is honest about what it does not know. These rules are built into how every record is displayed.
A gap is a gap
Missing evidence is never drawn as a clean history. An undocumented period is shown as undocumented, so a reader can see exactly where the research stops.
Hedged dates stay hedged
“ca. 1928” and “1911 (?)” are kept as the source wrote them, not rounded into a precision the record does not have.
Images on open terms
Images come from museum open-access programmes and openly licensed collections. Where an image is not available on those terms, you get the catalogue entry and a link to the source.
Counted, not claimed
Every figure on this page is queried from the catalogue itself and refreshed hourly — not typed in once and left to drift.
Who it is for
Built for the people who have to be sure
- Provenance researchers
- Auction houses and dealers
- Collectors and advisers
- Insurers and lenders
- Museums and registrars
- Legal and restitution counsel
Begin with one object.
Access is by invitation during the evaluation period. To request an account, write to binericai@gmail.com.
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