Sherlock and Watson? No—a curator and a writer at the Yale Center for British Art.
Edward Town stares quizzically at his laptop. Ancestrylibrary.com. Search bar: John B. Gibbons. The first result is a man born in Staffordshire in the 1770s. Ed turns to me and cracks a grin. “That’s our guy,” he says.
We are sitting in a bright seminar room on the fourth floor of the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA). Ed has dark brown hair and wears a pair of thick tortoiseshell glasses. He’s what a strict, bonnet-wearing mother might call “good-mannered.” Ed’s eye contact is direct, his handshake gentle. And his accent. Oh, his accent! It’s of the soft, mellifluous kind that never fails to delight American ears. In other words, he’s British.
“Look at the ceiling,” he says, and I notice that the roof is translucent. During the museum’s recent two-year renovation period, a new film was installed in the roof, subtly reducing the amount of natural light that enters the space. “For the sake of the preservation of the collection,” Ed announces with a stately air.
Since 2014, Ed has served as the YCBA’s assistant curator of paintings and sculpture. To be a curator is to wear many hats at once. When he’s not choosing which paintings go on display, Ed researches provenance.
“Provenance,” a lovely word made lovelier if pronounced in a French accent, refers to an artwork’s history of ownership. Paintings have parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, so-great-and-grand-that-no-prefix-does-them-justice parents. When Ed wants to display an archived painting, he must first trace its genealogy. He follows his nose, sniffs about. He pores over ancestry data, combs through online databases like The Getty and the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, scans old auction catalogs, and rifles through letters. In short: he’s an art sleuth.
Currently, Ed is trying to track down the provenance for a painting in the collection called “Lock Gate.” A description of the painting in the YCBA’s online catalog reads: Attributed to William Mulready, 1786–1863. Ed shakes his head. “Attributed implies uncertainty,” he says.
Ed always begins his sleuthing the same way: he examines the back of the canvas, usually plastered with signs that contain the names of art dealers, their addresses, and notes by previous owners. This is where the fun begins.
And yet—sometimes the clues are insufficient. The back of “Lock Gate” reveals only one sticker: a hardly legible cursive note that looks like it was written with a quill and ink. This charming bit of Painting by W. Mulready was bought by Mr. Wyatt of Oxford at Mulready’s Sale, exchanged by him with W. Delamotte, artist. From his son Philip Delamotte it passed to me Geo. Gaskoin. Ed reads it and sighs. That’s all we know. Our luck stops with Gaskoin.
Ed is not demoralized. “Art is in many respects a secret history, and I enjoy the discoveries that reveal those secrets,” he explains with wide-eyed zeal.
His first order of business is to examine the back of another painting by Mulready. “An Old Gable,” in the YCBA’s collection. The two paintings might have been bought by the same person, Ed tells me. On the back of “An Old Gable” are several yellowed labels bearing the names of previous owners. “Painted in late 1809 for Thomas Welsh,” one reads. And then, on the next line: “The property of John Gibbons.” Aha! Hallelujah! Holy mackerel! If John Gibbons was an art dealer, Ed deduces, he might also have collected “Lock Gate.” Therefore: ancestrylibrary. com. Therefore: “John B. Gibbons” in the search bar.
Curators strive to map out complete provenance histories of every artwork in their collections. They don’t like gaps in the narrative, which point to doubts, uncertainties, suspicions. Sometimes, people who bought paintings at auctions or inherited them as family heirlooms incorrectly identified the sitter or artist. “Knowing who owned it subsequently can also account for why a spurious identity may have been grafted onto the portrait at a later date,” Ed explains.
The history of a painting’s ownership also involves questions of restitution. In the last fifty years, museums have been reckoning with their responsibility to find out if artworks have been looted, stolen, or sold on unfair terms. Paintings that were acquired illegitimately might then be returned to their rightful owner or country of origin. Provenance is not just a history of ancient bloodlines and family heritage. It’s also a legal history.
Ed’s interest in provenance stems from his work on portraiture under the Tudor and Stuart reigns, where the names of many artists and sitters have been lost. Before coming to the YCBA, Ed worked as a curator at the National Portrait Gallery in London. There, he saw firsthand that discovering the history of a painting’s ownership can lead to clues about who’s depicted in it. The titles of artworks are often changed when they’re passed on from owner to owner. Tracking down a painting’s owners helps curators figure out why the sitter or artist was misidentified.
Like all detective work, provenance research leads to many red herrings. Curators sometimes spend hours—days! weeks!—going down a rabbit hole, Ed tells me, only to discover many wasted hours later… Deary me, there’s nothing there. “It sounds like it’s something that would be occasionally rewarding and often frustrating,” I venture. Ed’s eyes grow wide. “Oh yes,” he says with a vigorous nod. “That’s very right.”
After scouring ancestrylibrary.com, I stroll with Ed through the YCBA’s Long Gallery, a corridor lined floor to ceiling with paintings. With no labels and no blank space, it mimics the portrait gallery of an English country house. Back then, you were just expected to know who painted which painting. No explanations needed.
Ed was in charge of curating the Long Gallery. This came with a lot of difficult choices. One of the idiosyncrasies of the building itself is that the partition walls are flexible; you can arrange them as you please. This means that there’s an inconceivable number of ways to configure the gallery rooms. Fewer walls means less hanging space. But it also means opening up large passages—vistas, as they’re known in the art world—that spark visual dialogues between the paintings.
We weave through the Long Gallery and stop at a portrait of a man dressed in Armenian garb, painted in 1771. The man flaunts a stylish red turban and rests one hand on his hip. He has an air of quiet complacence. A smile flickers at the corners of his mouth. A gold medal adorns his neck. For several centuries, art historians referred to this portrait simply as “The Armenian.” No one knew who he was. The YCBA curators’ best guess was the famous Armenian horse dealer, John Phillippo Nighorus, but they had no way to be sure.
Last year, a scholar pointed out to Ed that Nighorus had been awarded a gold medal by the Royal Society of Arts not long before the painting was made. Upon receiving the scholar’s email, Ed inspected the painting, and he noticed that—lo and behold!—the gold medal around the man’s neck has the exact insignia of the Royal Society of Arts. In 2024, more than two centuries after the portrait was completed, Ed and the scholar discovered the identity of the mysterious Armenian. The painting’s name was changed accordingly from “The Portrait of an Armenian” to “John Phillippo Nighorus.”
“This new information swiftly recontextualized many of the artworks in our collection that depict horses, hunting or racing subjects that could be thought of as being simply British and insular, but in fact belong to a global story,” Ed explains. “The best horses in the world”—he leans in close and his voice grows softer and more urgent—“came from West Asia.”
Context has the power to draw our attention to a global story. Nighorus was the main actor in bringing horses from Armenia to Georgian England, Ed tells me, “travelling to and from West Asia with steeds that would be bred to produce thoroughbred racehorses.” Horse racing was enormously popular in the eighteenth century, and horse wagering was often a source of local economic growth. Ed wanted to honor Nighorus’s importance in this network of trade between Britain and West Asia. So he did what only a curator can do: he surrounded the portrait with depictions of horses in the English countryside. He placed Nighorus in the center of the wall.
Ed and I return to the seminar room. He leafs through his file on “The Old Gable” and pulls out a copy of an annotated auction catalog. Two hundred years ago, a top-hatted, fitted-trousered bidder had the good sense to note down who purchased which artwork. Next to each artwork, names are scrawled in a loose hand. “Gooden, I recognize,” Ed mutters. “Agnew, I know.”
He stops when he gets to the painting he’s interested in. Col, it reads in that same barely legible scribble. “Col?” Ed wonders. “Who’s Col?” In an instant, Ed’s detective hat is back on. He opens his laptop and reloads ancestrylibrary.com. I look away and smile. Here we go again.∎
Allie Gruber is a senior in Pierson College.
Illustration by Jane Callanan
