The Archive
The works the world cannot afford to lose
A reference archive of landmark artworks — dates, materials, provenance and the handling history that shapes how each one may be moved, stored and displayed.
Timeline
450 — 1950
India.c. 5th century
Bodhisattva Padmapani
Unknown, Ajanta Cave 1
A Vakataka-period wall painting that cannot be moved at all — the case where logistics means environment, not transport.
China.10th century, Song copy
Night Revels of Han Xizai
Gu Hongzhong
A court painter's report delivered as a scroll, and a benchmark for the handling of early Chinese silk.
China.12th century
Along the River During the Qingming Festival
Zhang Zeduan
A five-metre silk handscroll of Song-dynasty Kaifeng, and one of the most tightly controlled loan objects in China.
Flanders / Belgium.1434
The Arnolfini Portrait
Jan van Eyck
An early oil panel of extraordinary optical precision, and a benchmark for the handling of thin, brittle fifteenth-century supports.
Italy.c. 1484–1486
The Birth of Venus
Sandro Botticelli
One of the earliest large-format canvases of the Italian Renaissance, and effectively immovable.
Netherlands.c. 1490–1510
The Garden of Earthly Delights
Hieronymus Bosch
A triptych whose hinged construction makes every movement a structural problem as much as a conservation one.
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Italy.1495–1498
The Last Supper
Leonardo da Vinci
Immovable by definition: painted directly onto a refectory wall, and the clearest case in art of a work that can never travel.
Germany.1500
Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight
Albrecht Dürer
A frontal panel portrait of unprecedented ambition, on a lime support that has never been thinned.
Japan.c. 1501–1506
View of Ama-no-Hashidate
Sesshū Tōyō
A National Treasure of Japan, drawn from life by the country's greatest ink painter in his eighties.
Italy.c. 1503–1519
Mona Lisa
Leonardo da Vinci
The most recognised portrait in the world, and the benchmark against which the handling of irreplaceable panel paintings is measured.
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Italy.1509–1511
The School of Athens
Raphael
The defining fresco of the High Renaissance, and a work whose conservation is entirely a question of building environment.
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Italy.c. 1511
The Creation of Adam
Michelangelo
A ceiling fresco whose only conservation variables are air, light and the number of people beneath it.
Italy.1534
Venus of Urbino
Titian
A Venetian canvas that shaped the reclining nude for four centuries, and rarely leaves Florence.
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Flanders / Belgium.1563
The Tower of Babel
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
A panel of extreme descriptive density, painted on oak boards joined vertically.
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Flanders / Belgium.1565
Hunters in the Snow
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
The winter panel from Bruegel's cycle of the seasons, painted on oak that responds sharply to any change in humidity.
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Italy.1599–1600
The Calling of Saint Matthew
Caravaggio
A church painting of near-square scale that has hung in the same chapel for four centuries.
Netherlands.1642
The Night Watch
Rembrandt van Rijn
A militia group portrait so large it has been cut down, rolled, buried and rebuilt into its own gallery.
Spain.1656
Las Meninas
Diego Velázquez
A monumental court painting that has left the Prado only once since 1819 — and was damaged when it did.
Netherlands.c. 1658–1661
The Milkmaid
Johannes Vermeer
A small domestic scene built from thick, granular paint, and one of the most travel-sensitive canvases in the Rijksmuseum.
Netherlands.c. 1660–1661
View of Delft
Johannes Vermeer
Vermeer's only surviving townscape, and among the most tightly restricted loans in the Netherlands.
Netherlands.c. 1665
Girl with a Pearl Earring
Johannes Vermeer
A tronie rather than a portrait — small, luminous, and among the most closely studied surfaces in European painting.
Netherlands.1669
Self-Portrait at the Age of 63
Rembrandt van Rijn
Painted in the final year of Rembrandt's life, with a heavily worked surface that resists any change in tension.
Korea.1751
Inwangjesaekdo
Jeong Seon
Mount Inwang after rain, painted from observation — National Treasure No. 216 of Korea.
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Japan.c. 1793
Three Beauties of the Present Day
Kitagawa Utamaro
A mica-ground portrait print whose reflective surface cannot tolerate contact of any kind.
France.1793
The Death of Marat
Jacques-Louis David
Painted within months of the assassination it records, and carried into exile with the artist.
Japan.1794
Ōtani Oniji III as Yakko Edobei
Tōshūsai Sharaku
The defining kabuki portrait of the Edo period, produced in a career that lasted ten months.
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Spain.1814
The Third of May 1808
Francisco de Goya
The first modern painting of war, and a canvas damaged during its evacuation in the Spanish Civil War.
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United Kingdom.1821
The Hay Wain
John Constable
The best-known English landscape, first celebrated not in London but at the Paris Salon of 1824.
Japan.c. 1830–1833
The Great Wave off Kanagawa
Katsushika Hokusai
The first print in Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, and a masterclass in the light-sensitivity of works on paper.
Japan.c. 1830–1832
Fine Wind, Clear Morning
Katsushika Hokusai
Known as Red Fuji, from Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, and among the most light-sensitive objects any lender will release.
France.1830
Liberty Leading the People
Eugène Delacroix
A political icon of monumental scale, and a canvas the Louvre now moves only for major restoration.
Australia.c. 1835
Patterdale Landscape with Cattle
John Glover
Painted at Glover's Tasmanian property, and among the earliest sustained European records of the Australian landscape.
United Kingdom.1839
The Fighting Temeraire
J. M. W. Turner
Turner's elegy for a Trafalgar warship under tow to the breaker's yard, and a work the artist refused to sell.
United Kingdom.1844
Rain, Steam and Speed
J. M. W. Turner
Turner's Great Western Railway painting, with a thin and unstable paint film typical of his late experiments.
United Kingdom.1851–1852
Ophelia
John Everett Millais
A Pre-Raphaelite landscape of forensic botanical accuracy, painted from life over four months on the Hogsmill River.
Japan.1857
Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake
Utagawa Hiroshige
From One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, and the print Van Gogh copied in oil three years later.
India.1870
Shakuntala
Raja Ravi Varma
The painting that carried European oil technique into Indian narrative, and made its subjects household images.
United States.1871
Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1
James McNeill Whistler
Known universally as Whistler's Mother, and the first American painting bought by the French state.
France.1872
Impression, Sunrise
Claude Monet
The painting that gave Impressionism its name, and the subject of one of the most notorious art thefts of the 1980s.
France.1873–1876
The Ballet Class
Edgar Degas
A rehearsal-room scene reworked over three years, with a fragile, thinly painted surface.
France.1876
Bal du moulin de la Galette
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Renoir's great Montmartre dance scene, painted largely outdoors and carried daily between studio and garden.
France.1884–1886
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte
Georges Seurat
A monumental pointillist canvas that the Art Institute has declared permanently unable to travel.
Netherlands.1888
Sunflowers
Vincent van Gogh
One of the Arles sunflower canvases, and a painting whose chrome yellow is quietly changing colour.
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Netherlands.1888
Café Terrace at Night
Vincent van Gogh
Van Gogh's first night scene with stars, painted outdoors in Arles under gaslight.
Australia.1888
Departure of the Orient — Circular Quay
Charles Conder
A small, atmospheric quayside scene painted when Conder was twenty, and a key work of Australian Impressionism.
Netherlands.June 1889
The Starry Night
Vincent van Gogh
Painted from an asylum window at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, and one of the most heavily impastoed canvases in regular loan circulation.
Australia.1889
Golden Summer, Eaglemont
Arthur Streeton
The first Australian painting to be hung at the Paris Salon, and a record-setting return to Australia a century later.
Australia.1890
Shearing the Rams
Tom Roberts
The defining image of Australian pastoral labour, painted from studies made inside a working woolshed.
Australia.1891
A break away!
Tom Roberts
A drought-country stampede painted at Corowa, and one of the most frequently requested Australian loans.
Australia.1891
Fire's On
Arthur Streeton
Painted at the Lapstone tunnel cutting in the Blue Mountains, on the day a worker was killed by a blast.
Norway.1893
The Scream
Edvard Munch
Four versions exist. The 1893 painting on cardboard is among the most theft-affected works of the modern era.
France.1897–1898
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
Paul Gauguin
Painted in Tahiti on rough sacking, a support that has made this one of the most structurally delicate large canvases in America.
Australia.1904
The Pioneer
Frederick McCubbin
A three-panel narrative of settlement in the Victorian bush, and a case study in multi-panel handling.
Austria.1907–1908
The Kiss
Gustav Klimt
The high point of Klimt's Golden Period, and a metal-leaf surface that cannot be touched, cleaned or flexed.
Austria.1907
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I
Gustav Klimt
A gold-leaf portrait recovered through one of the most consequential restitution cases of the twentieth century.
United States.1930
American Gothic
Grant Wood
Painted on beaver board — a compressed wood-pulp panel whose behaviour under humidity dictates every loan condition.
United States.1942
Nighthawks
Edward Hopper
The defining image of American urban solitude, acquired within months of being painted.