German Sales – Source Material for Art Market and Provenance Research

As part of its collection focus on ‘European Art History’, Heidelberg University Library holds over 20,000 auction and sales catalogues from various German and international auction houses and other art dealers. Since 2010, we have been building the portal ‘German Sales – Source Material for Art Market and Provenance Research’ in the context of various third-party funded projects and in collaboration with numerous cooperation partners, with the aim of identifying the catalogues published in Germany, Austria and Switzerland up to 1950 as completely as possible, recording them bibliographically, digitising them and making them freely accessible in open access and searchable in full text. In addition to other gallery publications and historical journals on the art trade, the offer is supplemented by the German Sales Institutions database with comprehensive information on art dealers as well as the results of the research focus ‘Hand copies and protocol catalogues’.