In last week's post, I looked at a Roman lamp in M. Knoedler's stock book that was sold to Alphonse Kann. I have a few more pieces to add to this puzzle. First, the sale of the lamp is recorded in a second Knoedler source, his sales book. I found this because the stock book provided the page number of the sales book. Here's a screen cap of Knoedler Sales Book 10, page 164 (I was able to infer the sales book number because of the year [1913]):

Hurrah for more pertinent information - the "9" at the top of the page indicates the day of June that the lamp was sold. In the stock book, only the month of June had been recorded. 

Even better, this record gives more information about the material of the lamp - it was bronze, not the more common and expected terracotta. A bronze Roman lamp - great.

What are the next steps? For one, I requested a copy of the original purchase of the lamp made by Knoedler: that from Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge, earlier in 1913. Lo and behold, a couple of bronze lamps are listed for sale from the Egyptian collection of Robert de Rustafjaell, Esq., British collector and fellow of the Royal Geological Society:

(above) Pages from the 1913 sale of Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge

(right) Bronze lamps, including one from the Hilton-Price collection

​Is it possible that no. 533 is the bronze lamp that Knoedler bought and then sold to Alphonse Kann?

I also thought I'd check out one of the sales catalogues of Kann's collection from 1927. Alas, despite being a very attractive catalogue, I couldn't find any Roman lamps, neither listed nor photographed. Had Kann sold or given this lamp away before or after he left France for England in 1938, escaping WWII?

(left) 1927 catalogue of the auction of Alphonse Kann's antiquities

The final step - for now - in this little journey was to search the ERR Jeu de Paume database. This website documents the Cultural Plunder of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), a "Special Task Force" of Hitler that looted art objects from French and Belgian collections during WWII. Had Kann left the lamp in France when he fled his home, it may be listed in here. Indeed, there are over 1600 objects associated with Kann in the database, and well over 200 with the tag of "Antiquities." 

But no Roman lamp. Yet.

I did, however, find an incredibly cute lamp in the shape of a mouse (?? I'm not sold on that description) from the Near East, dated to the 9th-11th cent. AD that was once part of Kann's collection [Ka 131], and with that I'll end this story - for now. The database entry includes a note that it was to be auctioned in Paris in February 2017, and one can only imaging the new travels it will have embarked on since then.

​The mystery of the Roman lamp bought by Knoedler and sold to Kann remains unsolved, but the journey and the pieces I've stitched together have, I hope, been at least somewhat enlightening for seeing the challenges (and rewards!) of tracing antiquities provenance. In the meantime, I'd love to hear any thoughts and comments you might have. There are so many avenues to travel in provenance research, and so much more to explore.

One of my major projects as a Research Assistant at the Getty Research Institute is compiling a concordance of stock numbers that the art dealer M. Knoedler used for works of art that he bought and sold. Since Knoedler would often use multiple numbers for the same object as it came into and went out of his stock (sometimes purchasing and selling it multiple times), I am building a concordance of associated numbers that will aid in the transformation of this material into Linked Open Data. 

Most of Knoedler’s transactions were in paintings and sculpture, and rarely do we see antiquities. But as a Classicist, my ears perk up every time I come across a Greek or Roman artifact. I’ve only seen a handful of them in the six out of eleven books I’ve worked on so far, perhaps fewer than a dozen in total. But I found one the other day: a Roman lamp that was sold to a well-known WWII-era art collector of Jewish descent by the name of Alphonse Kann, whose collection was looted by the Nazis after he fled from France to England in 1938. Here's the record from the Getty's Dealer Stock Books:

This example illustrates well the problem with tracking antiquities provenance in terms of incomplete information.

The data above comes from a transcription from the stock books, and I include two screen caps below from the two sides of the page: the first shows us that Knoedler purchased a Roman lamp from Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodges (the name under which Sotheby's was known between 1864 and 1924) on January 22, 1913, for 1.8 pounds. Below that, the right side of the ledger records his sale of it to A[lphonse] Kann in June of 1913.

This was clearly a good sale for Knodler. The lamp was in his stock for only six months, and he sold it for 10 times the price for which he purchased it. But beyond this, the context is lost. "Roman lamp" tells us little more than what the object is. Typical of antiquities, there's no artist's name to attach to this object. Its archaeological context is not given. Its provenance prior to Sotheby's is unknown. Its decoration, shape, and style are all missing.
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Where did the object go once Kann acquired it? Part of my interest in tracking antiquities provenance is building complete histories for an object from the time of their excavation to their current location. Seemingly, this can't be done in this case. Kann's name also stood out to me because the Getty owns a Roman sculpture object associated with his name: A portrait head of a Roman woman from the 2nd century AD.

The Getty's collections pages (a rich source of provenance information, which I've screencapped above) provide us with the information, via a Christie's sale catalogue, that this portrait passed from Kann to a private collection, whereby it was bought and donated to the Getty museum in 1978 by Milton and Pat Gottlieb. 

There's no reason to link these two objects together, of course. But by showing you the Knoedler stock book of his sale to Kann of a Roman lamp, and diving into the provenance data of the Getty's collections pages, we can see two ways of tracing the histories of ancient objects. Neither is as complete as I would like. The Roman lamp is missing so much pertinent information - an archaeological context, previous ownership history before Sotheby's, its whereabouts after it entered Kann's collection (including to whom he may have sold it), and even its dimensions, material, and decoration, that it might be virtually impossible to trace. The next steps for me would be to delve into the auction catalogues associated with Kann's name: the one above for the Roman portrait from 1978 might be of some use, as well as later sales of works of art associated with his collection. I may not get very far with this, given the incomplete nature of the lamp's description, but we'll see. So, stay tuned!

​ETA: See here for a second post on this topic!