Many works reach museums with no date, no signature and no records. Art historians date them the way detectives solve a case: by gathering clues and seeing where they agree. In Telling the Styles Apart you used style clues to name a period. Here you will use several kinds of clues together to narrow a date, as in Dating and Attribution.
- Style: brushwork, color, composition and the clues of each period.
- Subject: what people chose to paint, such as railway stations (after the 1830s) or factory chimneys.
- Clothes and hair: fashions changed fast and can date a portrait within a decade or two.
- Materials and technique: the canvas, the support, the pigments, the printing method.
- Things in the picture: a building known to be finished in a certain year, a ship, a kind of carriage.
- Documents, when they exist: letters, inventories, exhibition catalogs.
Key idea
Why it works
Looking closely: dating by clues
Suppose this portrait had no label. Clothes and hair: towering powdered hair with feathers and a silk gown with lace were the court fashion of the late 1770s and early 1780s. Style: soft pastel color, a smooth idealized face and an easy, elegant pose are late Rococo. Sitter: if we recognize the queen of France, she was queen from 1774 until the monarchy fell in 1792. The clues agree on about 1775 to 1790; the catalog date is 1783.
Common mistake
Worked example: Earliest possible date
- The pigment gives an earliest possible date: not before it was available in Japan in quantity.
- Strong Prussian blue in ukiyo-e is typical from about 1830.
- So the print most likely dates from about 1830 or later, and style and subject can narrow it further.
Answer: About 1830 or later.
Worked example: Combining clues
- Photography: after 1839.
- Steel-framed office towers: after the 1880s.
- Long skirts and bowler hats: fashions of roughly the 1880s to the 1910s.
- The window where all clues agree: about 1885 to 1915.
Answer: About 1885 to 1915.