A historic house museum is a house of historic significance that is preserved as a museum . Historic furnishings may be displayed in a way that reflects their original placement and usage in a home. Historic house museums are held to a variety of standards, including those of the International Council of Museums . Houses are transformed into museums for a number of different reasons. For example, the homes of famous writers are frequently turned into writer's home museums to support literary tourism .
79-559: The Nickels-Sortwell House is a historic house museum at 121 Main Street in Wiscasset , Maine , United States. Built in 1807 by a wealthy ship's captain, the house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1970 as an exceptionally high-quality example of the Federal style of architecture. After serving as a hotel for much of the 19th century, the house returned to private hands in 1900. It
158-541: A common source, or fonds , should be kept together – where practicable, physically, but in all cases intellectually, in the way in which they are catalogued and arranged in finding aids . Conversely, records of different provenance should be preserved and documented separately. In archival practice, proof of provenance is provided by the operation of control systems that document the history of records kept in archives, including details of amendments made to them. The authority of an archival document or set of documents of which
237-408: A considerable difference to its selling price in the market. This is affected by the degree of certainty of the provenance, the status of past owners as collectors, and in many cases by the strength of evidence that an object has not been illegally excavated or exported from another country. The provenance of a work of art may vary greatly in length, depending on context or the amount that is known, from
316-403: A half-round window at the third level, exhibiting tracery similar to that found in the entry windows. The interior of the house has a modified central-hall plan, with the central hall divided by a partition into a front public hall and a rear service hall, which is continued to the service rooms in the rear ell. The front hall is semi-oval in shape, and is divided crosswise by an arch. Doorways in
395-534: A historic house museum derives from a branch of history called social history that is solely based on people and their way of living. It became very popular in the mid-twentieth century among scholars who were interested in the history of people, as opposed to political and economical issues. Social history remains an influential branch of history. Philip J. Ethington, a professor of history and political science, further adds to social history and its relationship to locations by saying – Following this historical movement,
474-549: A lavish house, was financially ruined by the Embargo of 1807 and the War of 1812 , and died in 1815. From 1820 to 1900 the house was operated as a hotel. During this time a number of alterations were made to the interior, including subdividing some of its bedrooms. The house was purchased in 1899 by Alvin F. Sortwell of Cambridge, Massachusetts , and redecorated by his family in the then-fashionable Colonial Revival style. The solarium in
553-440: A look at the importance of collective memory and how it is embedded in culture and place. Thus, collective memory does not only reside in a house or building, but it also resonates in outdoor space – particularly when a monumental event has occurred, such as war. Problematic creation of collective memory occurs within historic house museums when the narrative of non-family members is dismissed, ignored, or completely rejected. Within
632-472: A more general work on the artist, period or genre. Similarly, a photograph of a painting may show inscriptions (or a signature) that subsequently became lost as a result of overzealous restoration. Conversely, a photograph may show that an inscription was not visible at an earlier date. One of the disputed aspects of the "Rice" portrait of Jane Austen concerns apparent inscriptions identifying artist and sitter. Provenance – also known as custodial history –
711-588: A painting whose current ownership and location are known, it is important to record the physical details of the painting – style, subject, signature, materials, dimensions, frame, etc. The titles of paintings and the attribution to a particular artist may change over time. The size of the work and its description can be used to identify earlier references to the painting. The back of a painting can contain significant provenance information. There may be exhibition marks, dealer stamps, gallery labels and other indications of previous ownership. There may be shipping labels. In
790-417: A photograph of the item with its original owner. Simple yet definitive documentation such as that can increase its value by an order of magnitude, but only if the owner was of high renown. Many items that were sold at auction have gone far past their estimates because of a photograph showing that item with a famous person. Some examples include antiques owned by politicians, musicians, artists, actors, etc. In
869-409: A piano's provenance. Pianos can sell for millions of dollars, when the provenance is significant enough to increase its value well beyond what it would be worth as a musical instrument alone. When decisions need to be made in a court of law for a bankruptcy, or before a piano goes up for auction, or when an educational institution needs to establish a value for a deed of trust being established with
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#1733086253395948-494: A private transaction, there may be a bill of sale or sales receipt that provides evidence of provenance. Where the artist is known, there may be a catalogue raisonné listing all the artist's known works and their location at the time of writing. A database of catalogues raisonné is available at the International Foundation for Art Research . Historic photos of the painting may be discussed and illustrated in
1027-416: A provenience and a provenance. The provenance of works of fine art , antiques and antiquities is of great importance, especially to their owner. There are a number of reasons why painting provenance is important, which mostly also apply to other types of fine art. A good provenance increases the value of a painting, and establishing provenance may help confirm the date, artist and, especially for portraits,
1106-401: A semi-elliptical fanlight with similar tracery. The entry is sheltered by a portico supported by four Corinthian columns, with a latticework balustrade on top. Above the central projecting arches, four fluted Corinthian pilasters rise to the roof level. The fenestration of the bays other than the central one is uniform; there is a Palladian window at the second level in the center, and
1185-429: A single name to an entry in a scholarly catalogue some thousands of words long. An expert certification can mean the difference between an object having no value and being worth a fortune. Certifications themselves may be open to question. Jacques van Meegeren forged the work of his father Han van Meegeren , who had forged the work of Vermeer . Jacques sometimes produced a certificate with his forgeries, stating that
1264-460: A site. Artifacts can be moved through looting as well as trade, far from their place of origin and long before modern rediscovery. Many source nations have passed legislation forbidding the domestic trade in cultural heritage. Further research is often required to establish the true provenance and legal status of a find, and what the relationship is between the exact provenience and the overall provenance. In paleontology and paleoanthropology , it
1343-494: A work was created by his father. John Drewe was able to pass off as genuine paintings, a large number of forgeries that would have easily been recognised as such by scientific examination. He established an impressive, but false provenance. Because of this, galleries and dealers accepted the paintings as genuine. He created this false provenance by forging letters and other documents, including false entries in earlier exhibition catalogues. Sometimes provenance can be as simple as
1422-449: Is a core concept within archival science and archival processing . The term refers to the individuals, groups, or organizations that originally created or received the items in an accumulation of records, and to the items' subsequent chain of custody . The principle of provenance, also termed the principle of "archival integrity", and a major strand in the broader principle of respect des fonds , stipulates that records originating from
1501-417: Is an inscription on the object, or an account of it in written materials from the same era, an object of study in archaeology or cultural anthropology may have an early provenance – a known history that predates modern research – then a provenience from its modern finding, and finally a continued provenance relating to its handling and storage or display after the modern acquisition. Evidence of provenance in
1580-548: Is authenticated before a piano is inducted into a museum, sold at an auction, or appraised for an estate or legal action, when it has extraordinary value in connection to a composer, performer, event or location that has become famous. For example, the piano that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart used during the final 10 years of his life, is on display in the Mozarteum Museum in Salzberg, one of many historical pianos in museums around
1659-436: Is charged, except for members of Historic New England. Part of the house is now also available as a short-term vacation rental. Historic house museum Historic house museums are sometimes known as a "memory museum", which is a term used to suggest that the museum contains a collection of the traces of memory of the people who once lived there. It is often made up of the inhabitants' belongings and objects – this approach
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#17330862533951738-438: Is completed. Another alternative approach, deployed by nonprofit organization House Museum , includes contemporary art integration, where artists are invited to respond to the physical and conceptual history of a site, thus injecting contemporary perspectives and value into historic places. In each kind of museum, visitors learn about the previous inhabitants through an explanation and exploration of social history . The idea of
1817-449: Is essentially a matter of documentation . The term dates to the 1780s in English. Provenance is conceptually comparable to the legal term chain of custody . For museums and the art trade , in addition to helping establish the authorship and authenticity of an object, provenance has become increasingly important in helping establish the moral and legal validity of a chain of custody, given
1896-399: Is mostly concerned with authenticity . Some museums are organised around the person who lived there or the social role the house had. Other historic house museums may be partially or completely reconstructed in order to tell the story of a particular area, social-class or historical period. The " narrative " of the people who lived there guides this approach, and dictates the manner in which it
1975-518: Is no firm provenance during that period. Documented evidence of provenance for an object can help to establish that it has not been altered and is not a forgery, a reproduction, stolen or looted art . Provenance helps assign the work to a known artist, and a documented history can be of use in helping to prove ownership. An example of a detailed provenance is given in the Arnolfini portrait . The quality of provenance of an important work of art can make
2054-450: Is normally to provide contextual and circumstantial evidence for its original production or discovery, by establishing, as far as practicable, its later history, especially the sequences of its formal ownership, custody and places of storage. The practice has a particular value in helping authenticate objects. Comparative techniques, expert opinions and the results of scientific tests may also be used to these ends, but establishing provenance
2133-430: Is recognized that fossils can also move from their primary context and are sometimes found, apparently in-situ , in deposits to which they do not belong because they have been moved, for example, by the erosion of nearby but different outcrops . It is unclear how strictly paleontology maintains the provenience and provenance distinction. For example, a short glossary at a website, primarily aimed at young students, of
2212-401: Is set on a granite foundation. The front facade is finished in flushboard, while the remainder of the house is clapboarded . On the first floor, the middle three bays are outlined by slightly projecting arches, the central bay (where the entrance is) being slightly wider. The entry consists of a single door, flanked by pilasters and sidelight windows embellished with oval tracery, and topped by
2291-406: Is that provenience is an artifact's "birthplace", while provenance is its " résumé ". This can be imprecise. Many artifacts originated as trade goods created in one region, but were used and finally deposited in another. Aside from scientific precision, a need for the distinction in these fields has been described thus: Archaeologists ... don't care who owned an object—they are more interested in
2370-402: Is the chronology of the ownership, custody or location of a historical object. The term was originally mostly used in relation to works of art , but is now used in similar senses in a wide range of fields, including archaeology , paleontology , archival science , economy , computing , and scientific inquiry in general. The primary purpose of tracing the provenance of an object or entity
2449-456: The American Museum of Natural History treats the terms as synonymous, while scholarly paleontology works make frequent use of provenience in the same precise sense as used in archaeology and paleoanthropology. While exacting details of a find's provenience are primarily of use to scientific researchers, most natural history and archaeology museums also make strenuous efforts to record how
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2528-553: The U.S. Global Change Research Program . Some international academic consortia, such as the Research Data Alliance , have specific groups to tackle issues of provenance. In that case it is the Research Data Provenance Interest Group. Within computer science , informatics uses the term "provenance" to mean the lineage of data , as per data provenance, with research in the last decade extending
2607-553: The 1880s, about a century after provenance . Outside of academic contexts, it has been used as a synonymous variant spelling of provenance , especially in American English . Any given antiquity may have both a provenience, where it was found, and a provenance, where it has been since it was found. A summary of the distinction is that "provenience is a fixed point, while provenance can be considered an itinerary that an object follows as it moves from hand to hand." Another metaphor
2686-517: The BBC TV programme Fake or Fortune? the provenance of the painting Bords de la Seine à Argenteuil was investigated using a gallery sticker and shipping label on the back. Early provenance can sometimes be indicated by a cartellino , a trompe-l'œil representation of an inscribed label, added to the front of a painting. However, these can be forged, or can fade or be painted over. Auction records are an important resource to assist in researching
2765-500: The Mediterranean region during late Roman times" says an archaeologist. ... [P]rovenance for an art historian is important to establish ownership, but provenience is interesting to an archaeologist to establish meaning. In this context, the provenance can occasionally be the detailed history of where an object has been since its creation, as in art history contexts – not just since its modern finding. In some cases, such as where there
2844-503: The Netherlands in 1898, often referred to as the " Dutch Manual ". Seamus Ross has argued a case for adapting established principles and theories of archival provenance to the field of modern digital preservation and curation. Provenance is also the title of the journal published by the Society of Georgia Archivists. In the case of books, the study of provenance refers to the study of
2923-797: The OPM Vocabulary and the PROV Ontology make extensive use of metadata models such as Dublin Core and Semantic Web technologies such as the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Current practice is to rely on the W3C PROV data model, OPM's successor. There are several maintained and open-source provenance capture implementation at the operating system level such as CamFlow, Progger for Linux and MS Windows, and SPADE for Linux, MS Windows , and MacOS . Operating system level provenance have gained interest in
3002-621: The Preservations Artisans Guild, were chosen by Mercersburg Academy to research and authenticate the provenance of the Lennon - Ono - Green - Warhol piano before it was put up for sale to fund a Deed of Trust by the Shaool Family to Mercersburg Academy for future student scholarships. Because this piano was part of a famous lawsuit in 2000 and had extensive coverage as the "Lost Lennon Piano", when provenance research done by Lile
3081-583: The Southern United States, plantation museums (the former homes of enslavers) constitute a significant portion of the museum community and contribute to the racialized collective memory of the United States. Because museums are responsible for "the building of identity, cultural memory and community", neglecting to include the narrative of all people who lived there is dangerous. While some plantation museum narratives have changed following an outcry from
3160-419: The actual structure belongs to the museum collection as a historical object. While some historic home museums are fortunate to possess a collection containing many of the original furnishings once present in the home, many face the challenge of displaying a collection consistent with the historical structure. Some museums choose to collect pieces original to the period, while not original to the house. Others, fill
3239-680: The better-known provenance representation systems that preceded it, such as the Proof Markup Language and the Open Provenance Model. Interoperability is a design goal of most recent computer science provenance theories and models, for example the Open Provenance Model (OPM) 2008 generation workshop aimed at "establishing inter-operability of systems" through information exchange agreements. Data models and serialisation formats for delivering provenance information typically reuse existing metadata models where possible to enable this. Both
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3318-609: The books owned by a writer may help to show which works influenced him or her. Many provenance studies are historically focused, and concentrated on books owned by writers, politicians and public figures. The recent ownership of books is studied, however, as is evidence of how ordinary or anonymous readers have interacted with books. Provenance can be studied both by examining the books themselves, for instance looking at inscriptions, marginalia , bookplates , book rhymes , and bindings, and by reference to external sources of information such as auction catalogues. Provenance for pianos
3397-401: The concept of " open-air museums " became prominent. These particular types of museums had interpreters in costume re-enact the lives of communities in earlier eras, which would then be performed to modern audiences. They often occupied large wooden architecture buildings or outdoor sites and landscapes, that were true to the era, adding to authenticity. Collective memory is sometimes used in
3476-622: The conceptual model of causality and relation to include processes that act on data and agents that are responsible for those processes. See, for example, the proceedings of the International Provenance Annotation Workshop (IPAW) and Theory and Practice of Provenance (TaPP). Semantic web standards bodies, including the World Wide Web Consortium in 2014, have ratified a standard data model for provenance representation known as PROV which draws from many of
3555-418: The context of an object within the community of its (mostly original) users. ... [W]e are interested in why a Roman coin turned up in a shipwreck 400 years after it was made; while art historians don't really care, since they can generally figure out what mint a coin came from by the information stamped on its surface. "It's a Roman coin, what else do we need to know?" says an art historian; "The shipping trade in
3634-511: The context of discussions about the restitution of cultural objects in museum collections of colonial origin , the AfricaMuseum in Belgium started to publicly present information about such objects in its permanent exhibition in 2021. The objective of provenance research is to produce a complete list of owners (together, where possible, with the supporting documentary proof) from when the painting
3713-627: The daughter of Alvin and Gertrude Sortwell, bequeathed the property to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (now Historic New England ) in 1958. The property was designated a National Historic Landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970, and is a contributing property to the Wiscasset Historic District , listed in 1973. It is open seasonally June 1 - October 15 for tours; admission
3792-578: The establishment of the country's first historic site in 1850, Washington's Revolutionary headquarters in New York, Americans have found a penchant for preserving similar historical structures. The establishment of historic house museums increased in popularity through the 1970s and 1980s, as the Revolutionary War's bicentennial set off a wave of patriotism and alerted Americans to the destruction of their physical heritage. The tradition of restoring homes of
3871-608: The front half lead left and right into large parlor spaces, and a free-standing spiral staircase rises in the center. The interior retains much of its original woodwork, including window seats and recessed inside shutters for the windows. The house was built in 1807 by Captain William Nickels, a ship owner and trader. The style and age of the building reflect "a period when shipbuilding and the maritime trade brought prosperity and sophisticated tastes to this riverside community." Nickels, whose earlier success had enabled him to build such
3950-435: The gift of a piano, then experts are usually hired to authenticate the piano's provenance. Piano provenance has emerged as a field of study with experts having college degrees in some specialty connected to the piano or to art combined with professional training and experience in the field. Most experts belong to some form of association. For example, Karen Earle Lile niece of Tony Terran and Kendall Ross Bean , members of
4029-506: The home with replicas of the original pieces, reconstructed with the help of historic records. Still other museums adopt a more aesthetic approach and use the homes to display the architecture and artistic objects. Because historic homes have often existed through different generations and have been passed on from one family to another, volunteers and professionals also must decide which historical narrative to tell their visitors. Some museums grapple with this issue by displaying different eras in
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#17330862533954108-484: The home's history within different rooms or sections of the structure. Others choose one particular narrative, usually the one deemed most historically significant, and restore the home to that particular period. There are a number of organizations around the world that dedicate themselves to the preservation, restoration, or promotion of historic house museums. They include: Provenance Provenance (from French provenir 'to come from/forth')
4187-520: The increasing amount of looted art . These issues first became a major concern regarding works that had changed hands in Nazi-controlled areas in Europe before and during World War II. Many museums began compiling pro-active registers of such works and their history. Recently the same concerns have come to prominence for works of African art , often exported illegally, and antiquities from many parts of
4266-440: The items in their collections were acquired. These records are often of use in helping to establish a chain of provenance. Scientific research is generally held to be of good provenance when it is documented in detail sufficient to allow reproducibility . Scientific workflow systems assist scientists and programmers with tracking their data through all transformations, analyses, and interpretations. Data sets are reliable when
4345-470: The lives of everyday people. Historic house museums usually operate with small staffs and on limited budgets. Many are run entirely by volunteers and often do not meet the professional standards established by the museum industry. An independent survey conducted by Peggy Coats in 1990 revealed that sixty-five percent of historic house museums did not have a full-time staff, and 19 to 27 percent of historic homes employed only one full-time employee. Furthermore,
4424-440: The majority of these museums operated on less than $ 50,000 annually. The survey also revealed a significant disparity in the number of visitors between local house museums and national sites. While museums like Mount Vernon and Colonial Williamsburg were visited by over one million tourists a year, more than fifty percent of historic house museums received fewer than 5,000 visitors per year. These museums are also unique in that
4503-528: The more general sense can be of importance in archaeology. Fakes are not unknown, and finds are sometimes removed from the context in which they were found without documentation, reducing their value to science. Even when apparently discovered in situ , archaeological finds are treated with caution. The provenience of a find may not be properly represented by the context in which it was found, e.g. due to stratigraphic layers being disturbed by erosion, earthquakes, or ancient reconstruction or other disturbance at
4582-579: The northeast corner was added by the Sortwells, as was the present entry portico, which replaced a broader porch added during the hotel period. The Sortwells also repurchased a parcel to the rear of the house that had been subdivided from the Nickels holdings, and built a carriage house on it. The garden in between was designed by Charles Eliot II of the Olmsted Brothers landscape design firm. Frances Sortwell,
4661-513: The ownership of individual copies of books. It is usually extended to include the study of the circumstances in which individual copies of books have changed ownership, and of evidence left in books that shows how readers interacted with them. Provenance studies may shed light on the books themselves, providing evidence of the role particular titles have played in social, intellectual and literary history. Such studies may also add to our knowledge of particular owners of books. For instance, looking at
4740-423: The past and designating them as museums draws on the English custom of preserving ancient buildings and monuments. Initially homes were considered worthy of saving because of their associations with important individuals, usually of the elite classes, like former presidents, authors, or businessmen. Increasingly, Americans have fought to preserve structures characteristic of a more typical American past that represents
4819-429: The piano. For a piano, provenance can be established by starting with the authentication of the brand of manufacture and serial number, which will usually identify age. Then bills of sale, tuning records, bills of lading, concert programs that identify a piano by serial number, letters, famous signatures inside or on the outside of a piano, statements under oath in a court of law and photographs can all help authenticate
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#17330862533954898-435: The potential of improving with age , the issue of provenance has a large bearing on the assessment of the contents of a bottle, both in terms of quality and the risk of wine fraud . A documented history of wine cellar conditions is valuable in estimating the quality of an older vintage due to the fragile nature of wine. Recent technology developments have aided collectors in assessing the temperature and humidity history of
4977-488: The processes used to create them are reproducible and analyzable for defects. Security researchers are interested in data provenance because it can analyze suspicious data and make large opaque systems transparent. Current initiatives to effectively manage, share, and reuse ecological data are indicative of the increasing importance of data provenance. Examples of these initiatives are National Science Foundation Datanet projects, DataONE and Data Conservancy, as well as
5056-554: The provenance is uncertain, because of gaps in the recorded chain of custody, will be considered to be severely compromised. The principles of archival provenance were developed in the 19th century by both French and Prussian archivists, and gained widespread acceptance on the basis of their formulation in the Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives by Dutch state archivists Samuel Muller, J. A. Feith, and R. Fruin, published in
5135-457: The provenance of paintings. If a painting has been in private hands for an extended period and on display in a stately home , it may be recorded in an inventory – for example, the Lumley inventory . The painting may also have been noticed by a visitor who subsequently wrote about it. It may have been mentioned in a will or a diary. Where the painting has been bought from a dealer, or changed hands in
5214-407: The provenience is recorded in three dimensions on a site grid with great precision, and may also be recorded on video to provide additional proof and context. In older work, often undertaken by amateurs, only the general site or approximate area may be known, especially when an artifact was found outside a professional excavation and its specific position not recorded. The term provenience appeared in
5293-399: The public and the academy, "plantation museums reflect, create, and contribute to racialized ways of understanding and organizing the world" by limiting or eliminating the narrative of the enslaved inhabitants. A degree of authenticity is also to be considered in the restoration and creation of a historic house museum. The space must be authentic in terms of truly replicating and representing
5372-434: The resurrection of historic house museums; however, not all historic house museums use this approach. The notion of collective memory originated from philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs , in "La Memoire Collective" ("On Collective Memory", 1950). This extended thesis examines the role of people and place, and how collective memory is not only associated with the individual but is a shared experience. It also focused on
5451-419: The security community notably to develop novel intrusion detection techniques. Other implementations exist for specific programming and scripting languages, such as RDataTracker for R , and NoWorkflow for Python . In the geologic use of the term, provenance instead refers to the origin or source area of particles within a rock, most commonly in sedimentary rocks . It does not refer to the circumstances of
5530-437: The smartphone user. This takes the trust issue out of the hands of the owner and gives it to a third party for verification. Archaeology and anthropology researchers use provenience to refer to the exact location or find spot of an artifact , a bone or other remains, a soil sample, or a feature within an ancient site, whereas provenance covers an object's complete documented history. Ideally, in modern excavations,
5609-464: The subject of a painting. It may confirm whether a painting is genuinely of the period it seems to date from. The provenance of paintings can help resolve ownership disputes. For example, provenance between 1933 and 1945 can determine whether a painting was looted by the Nazis . Many galleries are putting a great deal of effort into researching the provenance of paintings in their collections for which there
5688-541: The way individual memory is influenced by social structures, as a way of continuing socialisation by producing memory as collective experience. An example of a site that utilizes collective memory is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Japan. It was restored and is based on the dialectics of memory, however it also has the inclusion of joyous festivals to mask the turmoil. The Hiroshima Traces (1999) text takes
5767-413: The way it once stood in its original form and appear to be untouched and left in time. There are three steps when declaring if a space is authentic: The earliest projects for preserving historic homes began in the 1850s under the direction of individuals concerned with the public good and the preservation of American history, especially centered on the first U.S. president, General George Washington. Since
5846-408: The wine which are two key components in establishing perfect provenance. For example, there are devices available that rest inside the wood case and can be read through the wood by waving a smartphone equipped with a simple app. These devices track the conditions the case has been exposed to for the duration of the battery life, which can be as long as 15 years, and sends a graph and high/low readings to
5925-464: The world, but currently especially in Iraq , and then Syria . In archaeology and paleontology , the derived term provenience is used with a related but very particular meaning, to refer to the location (in modern research, recorded precisely in three dimensions) where an artifact or other ancient item was found. Provenance covers an object's complete documented history. An artifact may thus have both
6004-504: The world. The 300,000th Steinway piano that was presented to President Franklin D. Roosevelt by Theodore Steinway, on behalf of the Steinway family is on display in the White House. It is one of many pianos with a provenance that have extraordinary value because of art, sculpture or design incorporated into the cabinet. It has legs carved into golden eagles and figures painted on the body of
6083-418: Was commissioned or in the artist's studio through to the present time. In practice, there are likely to be gaps in the list and documents that are missing or lost. The documented provenance should also list when the painting has been part of an exhibition and a bibliography of when it has been discussed, or illustrated in print. Where the research is proceeding backwards, to discover the previous provenance of
6162-407: Was given to Historic New England in 1958, which gives tours of the house between May and October. The Nickels-Sortwell House is set facing south on a sideways-sloping lot on the north side of Main Street ( U.S. Route 1 ) in the center of Wiscasset. It is a three-story wood-frame structure, five bays wide and 83 feet (25 m) deep, the length including a rear ell. It has a low-pitch hip roof and
6241-645: Was revealed by the Alex Cooper Auctioneers to the public, the provenance became the subject of dozens of newspapers and magazines that picked up the story. In the case of sculpture or art that are incorporated into the piano's cabinet, experts might be come from the field of art valuation and belong to an appraiser society such as the American Society of Appraisers or the International Society of Appraisers. In transactions of old wine with
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