Accession Books of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: Gemäldegalerie and Kaiser Friedrich Museumsverein Berlin
Reporting period 1833 – 2019
Although the Gemäldegalerie (Picture Gallery) opened in 1830 and its director at the time, Gustav F. Waagen, presented a comprehensive catalogue of the works on display, the legally relevant inventory of the collection did not begin until three years later, in 1833. Waagen arranged his 1830 catalogue according to art-historical schools (I-III). The numbering system for the paintings followed this order, so that the works were assigned a Roman numeral and a consecutive Arabic numeral (I.134). This numbering system introduced by Waagen in 1830 was adopted for the first inventory in 1833. With the publication of the eighth edition of Waagen's collection catalogue in 1845, the collection was reorganised into a school-independent, continuous numbering system (Arabic numbering). Around 1884, a new, second inventory was created, based on Waagen's ‘Kat.Nrn.’ (catalogue numbers), but also incorporating later acquisitions into the sequence. These numbers were called ‘neue Inv.Nrn.’ (new inventory numbers), which were designated as ‘alte Inv.Nr.’ (old inventory numbers) from 1833 onwards. The data on the objects was recorded on individual inventory cards. Despite the inventories, the ‘cat. nos.’ became established in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie as the authoritative identification numbers for the paintings. To this day, the term ‘cat. no.’ is used throughout the research literature, never the inventory number.
The consecutive inventories I–V of the Gemäldegalerie cover the period from 1833 to 1944 (1833–1886, 1886–1890, 1872–1895, 1896–1924, 1924–1944). Additional inventories were carried out. In addition, between 1936 and 1943, the so-called ‘secondary inventory’ (B-Inv.) was created, in which old items that had not been inventoried for various reasons, transfers from the Prussian state, former possessions of lodges, etc. were recorded and inventoried.
In 1894, the main collection of miniatures was transferred from the Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings). In the same year, a separate accession book for miniatures was created. After part of this collection had been sorted out and auctioned off in 1907, the remaining items were transferred to a newly created inventory book for miniatures.
In 1938, the old handwritten inventory, the supplementary inventory and the miniature inventory were transcribed and recorded in typescript. This transfer proved to be extremely fortunate for the Gemäldegalerie, as almost all of the original inventories of the collection were destroyed during the Second World War.
After the Second World War and with the division of the collection into the East (Bode Museum, Museum Island) and West (Gemäldegalerie Dahlem), new acquisition books were created and continuously maintained, in the Bode Museum from 1952 to 1997 and in Dahlem from 1950 onwards. Only the Dahlem inventory book was continued as a joint accession book after the reunification of the two collections in 1998. It was continued in an accession register created in 2009, which is still valid today.
In addition to the paintings, the Gemäldegalerie also has a large collection of frames, which were initially recorded systematically in inventory books in Dahlem from 1950 onwards, but were then continued after reunification and expanded to include older holdings, so that today there are a total of three accession books for the frames (1950-58, 1959-90, 1991-93).
