Colonial Networks: Provenance Stories

Provenance stories – tracing the movement of artworks through hands, places, and power structures – vividly reveal the colonial entanglements that shaped their journeys.

This website uncovers the deep yet mostly unknown connections between the Paris art world and the French colony of Saint-Domingue – present-day Haiti. In the eighteenth century, many of Paris’s most prolific art collectors, celebrated artists, and influential art dealers were also planters, enslavers, or beneficiaries of colonial commerce.

You can explore these colonial networks through the objects in this gallery. Each artwork’s journey unfolds through an interactive dashboard – combining storybooks, timelines, maps, and social network diagrams – that brings provenance to life. These tools reveal how colonial ties shaped the meaning of these works in their own time and continue to shape how we understand them today.

Begin by selecting an object from the gallery below.