Francis Patrick Garvan papers, 1912-1953

Found here is correspondence, object inquiries, and salse transactions with museums, curators, conservators, and other art dealers. Also included is correspondence with private individuals looking to buy decorative objects or furniture from Francis Garvan. A significant portion of the correspondence in this series regards the 1930 gift made to Yale University which included the majority of his art collection.

Auction records include sales records, lists, and catalogues for auctions in which much of Garvan's collection was sold during the 1930s and 1940s. The auctions were held at the American Art Association, the Parke-Bernet Galleries, and the Plaza Art Galleries.

This series is arranged as 3 subseries.

Loan records consist of detailed lists and letters Garvan used to track all of the objects he lent to various museums, historic homes, or private individuals.

Estate records include legal records, inventories, correspondence, item tags, and other documentation regarding the management of Garvan's estate. The majority of correspondence in this series belongs to George Corbett, Garvan's business partner and manager of his estate. Included are lists and ledgers complied by Corbett regarding various items in Garvan's collection.

Inventories document the thousands of pieces of decorative art and artworks Garvan bought and sold as a collector. The first section of this series is a set of inventory lists organized by Garvan's estate. These lists primarily contain the location information of each item; some lists also include price and brief physical description. The second section of the series consists of inventory files with photographs of the object. The files contain more detailed physical descriptions of the items as well as information regarding the style, source, rarity and present location and condition of the objects. These files were originally contained in leather bound binders. Garvan's collection is also documented in inventory cards. The inventory cards range from one-sentence descriptions to containing almost as much information as that found in the inventory files. At some point Garvan adopted a new numbering system for his inventory cards; this series includes both numbered and unnumbered cards.