OBJECTive

Historical data on auctions in the modern era (1750-1950), ready to explore and reuse

Objets d'art (or decorative arts) are challenging to research as they include a vast array of objects, encompassing ceramics, furniture, glass, metalwork, and textiles, all with distinctive forms, functions and materials, and their creators are often unknown. Under-represented in cultural economics and heritage studies, the absence of a comprehensive dataset is an obstacle to study and track pieces across time.

This project aims to create a database on objets d'art auction sales by working from a consistent source: the auction catalogue.

From September 2023 to 2025 this project benefited from an ANR/Access ERC funding, to explore the corpus, map the project planning and test the methods. This is a first step (proof of concept) to build-up a formal model, in offering access to a dataset (FAIR) from a first selection of 28 auctions, taking place in Paris from 1839 until 1895, referencing their catalogues and total of 12 596 lots (around 23 000 objects), corresponding to more than 456 000 information in the database.

From the mid-18th century auctions have been organised, mainly in Paris and London, to sell and disperse objects, increasing greatly in the first half of the 19th century to reach a rhythm of several thousand sales per decade. Individual auctions have always both combined and dispersed a great diversity of fine objects, from a multitude of origins. The catalogue is a crucial record. In many cases annotated catalogues exist (with hammer prices and buyers) and others can be cross-referenced with auctioneers' archives. The core of the dataset will be built up from the selection of a vast corpus of auction catalogues for the decorative arts. These catalogues will be interrogated through digital methods (extraction, processing and machine learning). The database will offer a new tool for identification and provenance research but will also focus on the individuals and institutions involved (sellers/buyers), allowing for a study of the networks and characteristics of this market over a long period.

The team

Dr. Camille Mestdagh

Project Leader

LARHRA Collaborators

Morgane Pica M.A

Database preparatory work

Institutional Partners

Credits

To refer to this page and database please use:
Mestdagh Camille, "OBJECTive - Tracing Objets d'art in Time through the Art Market", ANR (ACCESS-ERC23) - Université Lumière Lyon 2, LARHRA - 2025.

All Data is published as open data under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license.

OBJECTive Data repository : 10.5281/zenodo.10728078
ORCID : /0000-0001-8135-254X