Works by American and British artists that were not collected in continental Europe during that time have also been excluded. Prints and decorative arts objects have been excluded owing to the difficulty of accurately describing non-unique objects for provenance research. Works that entered the collections as gifts from artists or their immediate families have also been excluded. The drawing collection comprises some 12,000 sheets, ranging in date from the fourteenth century to the present and encompassing works mainly from North America and Europe. We estimate that approximately 3100 drawings were created before 1946 and acquired by the Fogg after 1932, excluding works from the American, Canadian, British, and Irish schools.
Curatorial files exist for nearly all of the drawings under consideration.
We are in the process of entering full catalogue information from the files into the collection database. Further research into the provenance of each of these drawings will be part of the cataloguing process. The department cares for over 2,100 paintings made in Europe and America before 1901, some 800 of which were acquired after 1932. An initial survey of provenance records for all paintings meeting the target criteria has been completed. After examining the curatorial files for each of these paintings and eliminating those with a provenance clearly locating them in the United States throughout the relevant period, we arrived at a list of more than 500 paintings needing additional research.