Provenance is the record of who has owned a thing. In some departments it is a pleasant footnote. In mine it is the difference between a lot we can sell and a lot we must decline.
Three things provenance does
It authenticates. A picture that can be traced to the artist's studio through four owners is a picture whose attribution has survived four separate acts of scrutiny. That is worth more than any technical analysis, because it is the accumulated judgement of people who had money at stake.
It legitimises. In antiquities and in certain areas of Asian and tribal art, provenance is not about connoisseurship at all; it is about lawful export. We do not offer antiquities without a documented history predating 1970, the year of the UNESCO convention. That single rule causes us to decline far more than we accept, and it is not negotiable.
It flatters. A famous previous owner raises a price, sometimes considerably, and this is the part of provenance that is closest to pure romance. It is also the part most vulnerable to invention.
Why continuity beats celebrity
A chain reading "Private collection, Europe" and then "Sold, New York, 1998" tells a buyer almost nothing. A chain reading "Acquired from the artist by X, 1911; by descent to his daughter, 1948; sold Sotheby's London, 1974, lot 43; acquired by the present owner from the above" tells them everything, and each link can be checked.
The gap is the problem. A twenty-year hole in a chain is where a buyer's lawyer will look, and it is where a restitution claim will begin. A chain with no gaps and no famous names is worth more than a chain with a famous name and a hole in 1938.
What a house should say
When we do not know, we should say we do not know. "Private collection, Turin, by 1911" means we have a document placing it there by that date and nothing before. "By repute" means somebody told us and we could not verify it. Both are honest; a house that upgrades the second into the first is not.
And when a chain is being withheld at a consignor's request — as it sometimes legitimately is — the catalogue should say that too, rather than printing a shortened version that looks like the whole.