Supplementary Material - From Objects to the Art Market. A data model for provenance research at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, 1933–1960

This directory provides the dataset implementing the data model and case study from the publication "From Objects to the Art Market. A data model for provenance research at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, 1933–1960". The aim of that publication is to presents the workflow and data model developed within the ProvEnhance project to transform provenance information into structured, reusable data. The project investigates the provenance of artworks that entered the collections of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (RMFAB) and circulated on the Belgian art market between 1933 and 1960. Combining archival, sales, and periodical sources with digital methods, it reconstructs ownership histories and contextualises the art market under occupation. Within this context, we document the process through which unstructured research notes are progressively formalised into database records. We detail the methodological choices underlying this transformation and introduce a data model derived from the Linked Art framework, adapted to the specific needs of the project. The implementation of this model is illustrated through a case study from the RMFAB collections, accompanied by example spreadsheets.