What to say when trying to sell paintings: Text models and rhetoric strategies in British and French auction sales catalogues (1750-1820)

While most research has focused on how the specialized art auction emancipated itself from the more general estate sale during the 18th century, and on the increasingly social and cultural dimension of the auction, the actual language and rhetoric strategies used in auction sales catalogues underlying those developments have received less attention. For the most part, analyses have focused on the title pages and prefaces of these catalogues, and on selected examples of words and phrases used to exalt works, their creators and collectors. By contrast, we apply textual analysis methods to the extensive lot descriptions in British and French auction sales catalogues in the Getty Provenance Index® for the period 1750-1820, totaling 453,540 descriptions, in order to identify information about paintings that point to new categories, and to assess their signaling value and changes over time in both locations – for instance, categories such as old masters and stylistic attributes that do not necessarily coincide with traditional conceptions of national schools, genres and artists’ nationalities. By creating a machine classification framework based on attributes of the lot descriptions (by length, presence of key words, etc.), we identify descriptive strategies that were commonly combined, and evaluate how persistent and effective these strategies were over time.