Edwardian scholars may be interested in the following announcement:
The Monument Trust has just granted The Burlington Magazine their generous financial support to catalogue digitally all past and present advertisements 1903-2013, which will be freely available through the Burlington Index Website.
As you probably know, the advertisements placed by art dealers in The Burlington Magazine since 1903 (a data bank of circa 90,000 images) are an unexplored source for the study of the art market and its contribution to art history. Thet supplement directories to reveal the locations of galleries and are an essential tool for mapping the expansion of the commercial art world during the twentieth century. They also include photographs, providing visual evidence of stock held by dealers. Finally, and most importantly, these images provide important evidence of untraced works of art and their whereabouts at a given moment: the digitisation of these resources will greatly aid provenance research.
The cataloguing of the dealers’ advertisements and their images is a significant scholarly project that will contribute much to our knowledge of the twentieth-century art market and will make accessible much information which currently is unavailable.
If you are working on, or simply curious regarding, any of the aspects of this project (history of the art market, provenance research etc.) do get in touch, as I am more than happy to provide further information and/or images. I would look forward to hear from you and perhaps organise collaborations through exchanges of digital files, swap notes on attributions, on the history of individual dealers and galleries, etc.
Barbara Pezzini
Project Editor, The Burlington Index
