Secret Code Found in the Archives
You may have heard about messy metadata…but did you know we have some that’s written in a secret French code?
The Getty Research Institute’s database of the stock books for the prominent New York art dealer M. Knoedler & Co. lists row after row of purchase prices and sale prices. Most of these are numbers representing dollars, francs, or pounds, but some are written as scrambled characters, like “IRXXX” used here for Mary Cassatt’s pastel Fillette (“Little Girl”).
It turns out that Knoedler used a secret code for writing down certain amounts, lest a nosy competitor get wind of the prices they were willing to offer to some sellers. So rather than writing out numbers, Knoedler often used the cipher AMONSIEURX (“To Mr. X…”), where A = 1, M = 2… X = 0. That pastel by Cassatt: actually 23,000 francs!
For more metadata nerddom, see #MetadataMonday on the Getty Iris.