Provenance is the discipline that the auction houses, in their public conduct, claim to honour and that, in their commercial conduct, they are permitted to honour only within the limits the calendar imposes. The calendar imposes a great deal. The catalogue must close by a particular date. The lot must be photographed. The condition report must be drafted, the cataloguer's note approved, the consignor's expectations managed. The provenance, by the time these other things have been done, has been afforded such time as remains. It is not always sufficient.
I make this observation without complaint and with some sympathy for the colleagues among whom I spent the larger part of my working life. The auction system, of which I remain an admirer, does what it does very well, and the rules within which it operates are mostly the rules its principals would themselves prefer if the question were posed to them in private. The system, however, was not designed for the kind of provenance work I now undertake on behalf of the Maison's members, and it was perhaps unreasonable to expect that it ever would have been.
What that work consists of, when described plainly, is the patient assembly of a complete history of an object, from its making to the present day, in such detail that no reasonable person, on examining the file the Maison prepares, would harbour doubts about any chapter of it. The work proceeds at the pace the documents are willing to be found. It frequently takes months. It occasionally takes years. The Maison's members are, by now, accustomed to this and would, in many cases, regard a swifter answer with suspicion.
The pieces about which I write, by way of example, are watches. The provenance of a watch — by which I mean a serious watch, of a maker whose archives extend deep into the last century — begins with the maker itself. The maker's archives, where those archives are intact and the maker continues to maintain the department that holds them, can confirm the date of manufacture, the original specification, the original retailer, and, in many cases, the first owner. This is a great deal more than most owners realise the maker can tell them, and it is the proper starting point for any serious provenance file.
From the maker's archives the work then moves to the retailer. The retailer's records, where they survive, can confirm the date of sale and, with great fortune, the identity of the customer. From the customer the work moves, by such means as are available, through the chain of subsequent owners. Each step is a separate piece of work, conducted in a different language and against a different archive, and the success of each step depends on relationships that have, in many cases, been maintained over decades by colleagues whose names will not appear in any catalogue.
It will be evident, from this brief account, that the work is unsuited to the deadlines of the auction season. It is also, importantly, unsuited to the temperament of the buyer who has become accustomed to acting at speed. The Maison's members, in this regard, are an unusual category of buyer. They are willing to wait. The waiting is itself part of what they regard themselves as paying for.
There is a further dimension of the work that is rarely discussed in print and that I will discuss only briefly here. Provenance, fully assembled, occasionally reveals chapters of an object's history that the buyer would, on reflection, prefer not to be associated with. The Maison's view on these matters is that the chapters must be revealed in any case, and that the buyer must then make an informed decision. We do not soften the file. We have, more than once, advised against the acquisition of an object on grounds that the auction catalogue did not raise, and on which the auction system would not have been positioned to raise. The members concerned have, in each case, accepted the advice. I take some quiet satisfaction in this.
The opposite circumstance also arises. An object whose provenance, on an initial examination, seems incomplete may, after the patient work I have described, prove to have a history that is, in fact, exemplary. The catalogue, on which the prior estimate was based, was simply unable to gather the relevant material in time. The Maison, having gathered it, is then in a position to advise that the object be acquired and to suggest a price that reflects the more complete picture. The members concerned have, on a number of occasions, done very well by this kind of advice.
What I would press most firmly on the reader who has followed me to this point is the simple observation that provenance is not a service. It is a discipline. The discipline is unfashionable, in the present commercial climate, because it is incompatible with the speed at which most modern commerce prefers to operate. The discipline is, however, the only sound basis on which serious objects may responsibly enter into serious collections, and the Maison is unwilling to relax it for the convenience of any party.
I will close with the observation, perhaps too obvious to require statement, that the patience required of the provenance professional is also asked of the member on whose behalf the work is undertaken. The Maison's members, in the long experience I have now had of them, are willing to extend this patience. The objects that have entered their possession during my tenure have done so under the discipline I have described. I am, in private, rather proud of this, and I have permitted myself this once to say so in print.
— Tomás Reinhardt, March 2026