Network Analysis and the Nineteenth-Century Art Market

What scholars have referred to as the second industrial revolution was a particularly fertile moment for the art market as the increasingly robust networks of trade, communication, and finance helped to fuel the mobility of art objects across national borders. This paper explores the nature of this international network, focusing on the corporate network established by the Goupil firm over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century. Goupil was originally founded in France in 1829 as a print publishing firm and in the late 1840s added original works of art to its repertoire of reproductive prints. Shortly thereafter it began an explicit program of international growth by establishing branches in other major urban centers, including New York, the Hague, and London. Much of the firm’s business (although not all) was tracked via stockbooks (c. 1860s-c. 1900), which have been preserved and now digitized by the Getty Research Institute. This unique set of data provides an opportunity to develop a model project for the study of the flow of art objects across time and space. Network analysis and visualization of the historic art market not only offers the opportunity to develop new research methodologies based on emergent technologies but also contributes to the ongoing study of cultures of consumption and globalization, recently explored by the research team headed by Frank Trentmann. Thus, within the scope of this project, the digital turn is revealed to be in a dialectical relationship with the material turn.