Public commissioning of works of art (1800-1969): ARCADE Base

The National Archives maintains a large set of **files produced by the Bureau des Travaux d’Art, Musées et Expositions** (available mainly in the **sub-series F/21, on the Pierrefitte-sur-Seine site**). These documents correspond to the **files for ordering or purchasing works of art** (paintings, sculptures, works of art, … prints) by the State, their distribution in museums and in public buildings (town halls, churches, etc.), the photo albums of the works purchased, mainly at salons from 1864 to 1901, and the **books for recording** of the State's deposits in museums. The dataset made available here comes from the **base Arcade**, initiated in 1973 and more widely developed in the 1990s. This database has undergone many changes, both in terms of document amplitude and in terms of fields of analysis. The database now has **nearly 125,000 records**, which will be found here in full, and which cover the files mentioned above for the period 1800-1969**. The dataset is **searchable** according to a large number of fields: name of person (author, copied artist, performer, beneficiary, genre); title of the work; place of employment or depositary of the work (with geolocation); material and technique; procedure (date, nature, stage); file archive listing; etc. The link to the images referred to the Archim database of the National Archives. Data can be queried dynamically, via the resources of the site data.gouv.fr, **by clicking on "Explore data**". It is also possible to download the raw data file.