About Provenance

Provenance is a free daily game about museum objects. You see a photograph and the museum's label, then pin where the object was made and pick the year. Five objects a day, plus journeys: short trails of eight objects that tell one story, from Benin brass to Japanese kilns.

Where the objects come from

Photographs: open-access collections, mainly The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Washington and the Art Institute of Chicago, plus public-domain images on Wikimedia Commons. Every object is credited on its reveal and on the credits page.
Places and dates: the museum's own record. Where a museum gives a range, any year inside it scores full marks.
Prices (What was it worth? and What the tycoons paid): real sales recorded in the stock books of the dealer M. Knoedler & Co., from the Getty Provenance Index (CC0). Old dollars are converted to today's with the US Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index.

How it's checked

Every lesson is written ahead of time and checked fact by fact against the museum's record and the sources listed under it.
The writing is drafted with the help of AI (Claude, by Anthropic) and then checked against those sources; nothing is published from memory.
Before a journey is released, a separate AI player plays it blind, and any clue that gives the answer away is rewritten.
If you spot a mistake, use the feedback button in the game. Every note is read.

The small print

Provenance is independent. It is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, any museum, archive or the Getty.
The code is open source under the MIT licence: github.com/xvarc/provenance. Images keep their own licences (see credits).
Inspired by Anthropeum by Matthew Chu.
No ads, and no tracking cookies. Your progress is kept in your own browser.
We count plays, not people: a visit, a finished game or a shared journey adds one to an anonymous total (GoatCounter). No cookies, no ids, nothing that follows you.