Provenance research refers to the investigation of an artwork’s ownership history from the date of its creation to the present day. It’s an essential field of research for uncovering evidence of looted or illegally acquired art, and for rectifying historical injustices, particularly concerning contexts of war or other conflict. The aims of provenance research are to verify authenticity, help establish legal title, and ensure ethical standards in compliance with common national and international frameworks.

In the context of WWII-looted and Nazi-looted art, institutions have increasingly invested in analysing artworks’ ownership histories, catalysed by the Washington Principles and public revelations like the Gurlitt trove of confiscated goods. For instance, the case of “Portrait of Wally Neuzil” (1912) by the Expressionist artist Egon Schiele demonstrates how deep provenance research can lead to the restitution of looted art.

Originally stolen from Lea Bondi Jaray during the Nazi annexation of Austria, it was later recovered and returned to her estate after nearly a decade of legal and archival work, leading to a $19 million settlement and a landmark acknowledgement of moral responsibility by institutions like the Leopold Museum and MoMA (Zhou 2025). Similarly, database-driven efforts using records such as the Linz Collection, archives of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce, “ERR”), and K‑List have revealed multiple inconsistencies, including mismatched titles and dimensions that suggest conflation of distinct works. In one case, multiple sources attributed records to the same object, despite up to 50 cm differences in reported dimensions, raising the possibility that recovered works had been misidentified (Leeson et al 2025).

The provenance of a François Boucher painting now held at the Cleveland Museum of Art, accession number 1979.55, raises similar questions. Official records trace the painting’s ownership to Baron Edmond de Rothschild in Paris, passed down to his son Maurice de Rothschild, who was stripped of it in 1940 by the Nazi ERR task force. By 1974, the Rothschild family appears to have recovered the piece, which they then sold through P. & D. Colnaghi gallery in London to the museum, where it was subsequently restored and relined in London before shipping to Cleveland (Open Art Data 2021).

Yet parts of this history are shaky. Colnaghi records reference a Lichtenstein art house called “Galleria Bernini” that was allegedly involved in bringing the painting into Britain, but no other sources corroborate the gallery’s existence. Colnaghi also claimed the painting had passed via Sotheby’s London, which the auction house has categorically denied, leaving that part of the chain of custody undocumented (Cleveland Museum of Art 2025). Further, the Colnaghi gallery was owned by Jacob Rothschild (a relative of the original owner) and later operated a New York branch under a former Met curator with Medici connections, representing a network that appears fraught with potential conflicts of interest.

As a bit of a tangent on the latter point: the so-called “Medici conspiracy” describes a high-profile network that was active from the 1960s to the 1990s and which trafficked primarily in looted Italian artifacts. In the mid-1990s, a major breakthrough came when Italian cultural heritage investigators uncovered an organisational chart linking tomb-robbing gangs, smuggling middlemen, major auction houses, dealers, and museum curators. Central to the ring was Italian dealer Giacomo Medici, whose Geneva warehouse (later raided by Italian and Swiss authorities) contained thousands of antiquities, Polaroid documentation, correspondence, and shipment invoices. These materials confirmed systematic smuggling from illegal excavations in Italy, followed by laundering through auction houses like Sotheby’s via front companies to manufacture a legitimate provenance for elite buyers.

Medici’s network included figures like Robert Hecht and implicated J. Paul Getty Museum staff such as Marion True, who bought looted artifacts despite red flags in their histories. Medici was convicted in 2004 and sentenced to ten years and a €10 million fine, and this case led to the returns of major works like the Euphronios Krater to Italy, forcing museums worldwide to scrutinise provenance more rigorously (Watson and Todeschini 2007). The purpose of this tangent is to problematise the appointment of Carlos Picón as head of the new Colnaghi branch in New York, considering he has been linked directly with Medici and, during his tenure as curator at the San Antonio Museum of Art, acquired several undocumented artifacts which are similarly believed to have been looted (Felch, 2012).

To be fair, I conducted an image-matching analysis which showed that the painting currently displayed on the CMA website is identical to photographs associated with the ERR and Linz Collection records: pixel-for-pixel alignment confirms it is the same object, not one of multiple variants. However, the recorded dimensions diverge considerably. Across the ERR, Linz, and K‑List databases, the height varies from about 214.5 cm to nearly 267 cm, and width from 162.5 cm up to 220 cm. However, despite a discrepancy of over 50 cm and differences in the titles of the seized artwork and that which was restituted, the ERR postwar record states “we will presume it is one and the same painting” (Leeson et al 2025; Open Art Data 2021).

These discrepancies and the uncorroborated details from Colnaghi raise the possibility that multiple paintings have been conflated. This may have resulted from the disorder that followed the postwar restitution process, or that authorities assigned to the ERR record a later photo of the recovered painting in the absence of a picture taken at the time of the Nazi confiscation. There is also evidence of restoration: photographs from the ERR record show that the original painting had an arch-shaped top panel for use as an overdoor, but that the curved section (measuring roughly 18 cm) along with portions at the base edges appear to have been removed during cleaning in London. However, the documentation is incomplete regarding precisely when and under whose authority these alterations to produce a rectangular shape were made (Open Art Data 2021).

Additionally, Rothschild family correspondence and partial archives suggest some ambiguity about the painting’s trajectory post-WWII, for example whether it passed through Maurice’s widow or son, and exactly how it returned to French hands before reaching the art market (Cleveland Museum of Art 2025). The lack of transparent records is particularly disconcerting given the Rothschild family’s historical prominence and the relative success of many other campaigns for the restitution of WWII-looted artworks.

Finally, broader provenance research confirms that databases like ERR, Linz, and K-List often contain conflicting or partial data when cataloguing seized Nazi-era artworks. A recent analysis in Archival Science emphasises that such fragmented records can mislead researchers investigating the postwar trajectories of looted goods (Leeson et al 2025). In this case, I suggest that the CMA painting’s identity may still be in dispute. While it has been visually matched to ERR and Linz imagery, substantial metadata inconsistencies undermine certainty over whether the Cleveland painting truly is the same work originally confiscated from the Rothschild collection.

Beyond legal and moral imperatives, provenance research enriches historical understanding by contextualising objects within their cultural and social history and helps institutions make informed decisions about restitution or retention, aligning with international ethical commitments. Whether identifying illicitly trafficked antiquities (like those seized from Medici’s network and stored in the Geneva freeports) or documenting colonial-era dispossession (e.g., the case of the Benin Bronzes), provenance acts as an investigative tool that can restore value, justice, and recognition to displaced communities, particularly when it leverages open data.

Although I have no satisfactory conclusion to offer for the present case, I hope it has at least shown that provenance research presents an important tool for museums, governments, and researchers. It not only uncovers questionable ownership but also provides the basis for restitution, restoration of dignity, and deeper engagement with cultural justice.

References

Cleveland Museum of Art. 2025. “Fountain of Venus.” The Cleveland Museum of Art.
Felch, Jason. 2012. “Almagia Objects Traced to Boston MFA, San Antonio Museum, Indiana University.” Chasing Aphrodite.
Leeson, Madison, Riccardo Giovanelli, Sara Ferro, Michela De Bernardin, and Arianna Traviglia. 2025. “Overcoming Data Siloes in Cultural Heritage Crime Research: A Consolidated OSINT-Derived Dataset on Art, Antiquities, and the Trade in Cultural Goods.” Archival Science 25 (16). DOI: 10.1007/s10502-025-09485-x.
Open Art Data. 2021. “Valentin or Buchholz in Provenance Texts of American Museums.” Open Art Data.
Watson, Peter and Cecilia Todeschini. 2007. The Medici Conspiracy. New York: PublicAffairs.
Zhou, Diamond. 2025. “The Importance of Provenance.” Paul Kyle Gallery.