Provenance Stories trace the movement of artworks through hands, places, and power structures. These stories reveal the colonial entanglements that shaped the creation and circulation of European paintings now displayed in some of the world’s most celebrated museums.
During the eighteenth century, many of Paris’s leading art collectors, artists, and art dealers were also planters, enslavers, or participants in colonial commerce. This website uncovers the deep, yet often-overlooked, connections between the Paris art world and the French colony of Saint-Domingue – now the Republic of Haiti.
Discover these colonial networks through the paintings in the gallery below. Each artwork’s provenance can be explored through an interactive dashboard that combines stories, timelines, maps, and social network diagrams to track the painting’s life. Together, these tools show how colonial connections shaped the meanings of artworks in their own time and continue to influence how we understand them today.
Provenance Stories is part of the Colonial Networks digital art history project, directed by Meredith Martin (New York University) and Hannah Williams (Queen Mary University of London). Developed with support from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, it brings together provenance research and interactive visualisations to illuminate the colonial networks that underpinned the eighteenth-century Paris art world.
Select a painting below to explore its provenance story.
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