Duveen papers housed at Getty

For the last decade, the Getty Research Institute has maintained a huge portion of the archive of art dealer Joseph Duveen, who built an empire from the 1880s to the 1930s by buying Old Master works from impoverished Europeans and selling them to rich Americans such as Henry E. Huntington and Henry Clay Frick. Now -- thanks to a long-term loan from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. -- the Getty is the one-stop research center for Duveen scholars.

Duveen bequeathed a major part of his papers to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, but his library and many of his business records remained with his fine art dealership, Duveen Brothers, until 1965, when Los Angeles-based collector Norton Simon bought the firm’s inventory. Simon kept some of the artworks, put others up for auction and sold the library -- including the business records -- to the Clark.

The Met gave its Duveen archive to the Getty in 1998. In a recent transaction, the Clark transferred its holdings to the Los Angeles institution. The loan includes personal correspondence, client lists and records of authentication procedures. Microfilmed copies of the entire archive eventually will be available at the Met, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and the Institut national de l’histoire de l’art in Paris.