About the Project

Provenance Stories is a digital art history resource for scholars, museum professionals, students, and anyone interested in histories of European art, slavery, and colonialism. Through the lives of objects and people, the site explores connections between the eighteenth-century Paris art world and the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). It forms part of Colonial Networks, a multimedia, decolonial art history project directed by Meredith Martin and Hannah Williams and based at New York University and Queen Mary University of London.

Provenance Stories began with a central research question. What can the histories of individual artworks and their owners reveal about the colonial entanglements that shaped the eighteenth-century Paris art world? Our research into colonial property maps of Saint-Domingue revealed that the names of many plantation owners corresponded with prominent figures in French artistic and cultural life—including collectors, artists, architects, and dealers. These connections demonstrate how empire and enslavement were deeply entwined with the production and consumption of art in this period of French history.

Provenance Stories tracks these relationships through individual paintings, following their journeys across collections, places, and historical moments. By examining who produced, owned, exchanged, and displayed these artworks, the stories reveals how colonial systems influenced not only the production and circulation of art, but also the histories through which artworks have been preserved and understood.

By following these object histories over time, Provenance Stories invites visitors to look beyond questions of style, authorship, and subject matter—to consider instead paintings as things that moved across time and space and through systems of colonial wealth and power. Rather than treating artworks as individual masterpieces, this project understands them as participants in wider histories of empire, enslavement, commerce, and collecting. Viewed in this way, they become historical evidence for the colonial networks that determined their pasts and inflect their meanings in the present.

How to use this site

Each painting in the Gallery has its own interactive provenance dashboard. Rather than presenting provenance as a simple list of previous owners, each dashboard brings together narratives, timelines, maps, and social network visualizations to reconstruct the wider social, economic, and colonial worlds surrounding each object. These tools make visible connections and relationships that are often difficult to perceive through traditional catalogue entries or collection records.

The nine paintings featured on the site are intended as case studies rather than a comprehensive survey. Together they demonstrate how provenance research can illuminate the colonial networks that connected the eighteenth-century Paris art world with Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and, more broadly, with France’s colonial empire.

The site can be used in different ways. Visitors may follow the creation and ownership history of a single painting; compare the provenance stories of multiple artworks; investigate the biographies of the Key Figures in the stories; or use the accompanying visualizations to trace intersecting connections among people, places, and objects across the network. The site is designed to support teaching, research, curatorial work, and public engagement by offering new ways to explore how artworks participated in histories of colonialism, empire, and enslavement.

If you use this resource in research, teaching, exhibitions, publications, or other contexts, please cite the relevant story or page, together with the url and date accessed. A recommended citation format is:

Meredith Martin and Hannah Williams, Colonial Networks: Provenance Stories, https://provenancestories.colonialnetworks.org (accessed: date).

Research and Methodology

Provenance research is a process of reconstruction. The historical record is uneven: some ownership histories are well documented, whereas others remain uncertain, fragmented, or obscured by the ways in which records were created and preserved. Provenance documentation has traditionally privileged those with the legal and economic power to own property—most often elite white men—which leaves women, free people of colour, enslaved people, and non-elites far less visible in the historical record. This absence is part of the history that the Colonial Networks project seeks to examine and, where possible, challenge.

Provenance Stories brings together evidence from archival sources, museum records, auction catalogues, correspondence, and existing scholarship to reconstruct the histories of selected artworks and the people connected to them. Where evidence remains incomplete or contested, this is acknowledged within the individual stories.

By combining archival research, provenance scholarship, and digital methods, Provenance Stories offers new ways of understanding artworks as objects shaped by networks of exchange, movement, labor, and power.

Project team and acknowledgements

Provenance Stories was created as part of the Colonial Networks project, directed by Meredith Martin (New York University) and Hannah Williams (Queen Mary University of London).

The website was developed by Zhiyang Wang.

The project team would like to thank the following people who provided valuable assistance with and feedback on the site’s development: Lucy Appert, David Pullins, Mark Pyzyk, Mia Ridge, Tim Schaffer, and Nancy Um.

Image credit for website banner: Detail from Louis Roucel and Louis Nicolas van Blarenberghe, Snuffbox (tabatière) of the duc de Choiseul, 1770-71. Gold, with miniatures painted in gouache on vellum under a crystal plate, approx. 4 x 6 x 8 cm. © 2022 GrandPalaisRmn (musée du Louvre) / Hervé Lewandowski.

This project was generously supported by a grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, advancing innovative digital approaches to research, teaching, and scholarship in art history.