Reframing Art: Opening Up Art Dealers’ Archives to Multi-disciplinary Research

Abstract

The archival resources digitally available to scholars have been transforming rapidly in the past few years, an evolution in evidence in museums and galleries as well as in the wider field of art history. This change was, at first, operational: as the use of the Internet becamemore widespread from the late 1990s onwards, museums, libraries and archives started to place their catalogues online. Then, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, projects were developed to digitise selected items from library and archive collections. Such projects enabled researchers to gain remote access to flat images of archival material, and the scope of these digitisation projects has only increased in recent years, with more images being added to websites across the world; attention is now turning to the examination and extraction of the data contained in those flat images. In 2014 the National Gallery Research Centre acquired the archive of the art dealers Thomas Agnew & Sons (Agnew’s). This was a significant acquisition: the firm has an illustrious history dating back to 1817, and has dealt in some major works of art, such as Diego Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus (London National Gallery) and Portrait of Philip IV (New York, Frick Collection), John Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral (Tate Britain) and J.M.W Turner’s Helvoetsluys (Tokyo Art Museum). Agnew’s archives, which date from the 1850s, represent one of the most comprehensive collection of an art dealership’s business records, containing stock books, day books, photographic records and correspondence as well as other types of miscellaneous records such as, for instance, comprehensive lists of works shipped to the United States from London. The acquisition of the Agnew’s Archive enhanced the existing rich holdings of the Research Centre in the field of the history of collecting. The Gallery’s library contains over 80,000 printed volumes, including a particularly excellent holding of books relating to private collections. Similarly, the archive not only comprises the Gallery’s institutional records but also numerous private collections, including the papers of Francis Haskell (1928–2000) and Nicholas Penny relating to the history of collecting. The Agnew’s Archive was catalogued between 2014 and 2016 and the resulting finding aid was published online in April 2016. At the same time the Gallery appointed two doctoral students, Alison Clarke and Barbara Pezzini, to undertake research in the archive under the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scheme. Both these initiatives were intended to raise the profile of the archive and once underway, the Research Centre started to consider how it could