How to read a museum label: dates, credit lines and accession numbers
What the small print under each artwork tells you, using examples from this site.
The small print beside an artwork looks like a list of dry facts, but each line answers a question. Here is how to read it, using the records behind the pages on this site.
Title and artist
The title is the name the museum uses today, which is not always the one the artist used. Many older works were named by dealers or later scholars. The artist's name is often followed by nationality and dates. Where the work is not by one artist, you may see a phrase like workshop of, attributed to, or after. For example, the museum credits one Rubens painting on this site to Rubens and workshop, which means other hands helped make it.
Date
A date like c. 1590 to 95 means circa, or about, and a range of years. When no one knows the exact year, museums give a range. A date such as 1305 to 1296 BCE is counted backwards, so the earlier number is larger. Ancient Egyptian works are often dated by the reign of a pharaoh, as in reign of Amenhotep III.
Medium and size
The medium says what the work is made of, such as oil on canvas, bronze or woodblock print. Size is usually given in centimetres and inches, with height first, then width, then depth. A museum may give both framed and unframed sizes, and the unframed size is the size of the artwork itself.
Credit line
The credit line says how the museum got the work. Gift of means a donor gave it. Bequest means it was left in a will. Purchase from a named fund means the museum bought it with money set aside for that purpose, and the fund is often named after a past donor. The year in the credit line, such as Purchase, 1993, is normally the year the museum acquired the work.
Accession number
The accession number is the museum's own identifier. In the examples on this site it usually starts with the year of acquisition, followed by a number for the order in which items were recorded that year. It is the most reliable way to find a specific work in a museum catalogue, since titles are often shared by many works.
Why we show this
Each page on this site includes the museum's own record details for these reasons. They let you check what we say, they give credit to the museums that share their collections, and they help you find the work again in the museum's online catalogue.
More guides
- How to look at a painting: a slow-looking guide
- Oil painting basics: what the paint is and why it lasts
- A short guide to Impressionism
- Public domain and CC0: why these images are free to show
- How artists paint light: from candle to sunrise
- Ancient Egyptian art: what to notice
- Greek vases: a beginner's guide
- Chinese bronzes and porcelain: a short tour
- American landscape painting of the 1800s
Written with AI assistance and checked against museum records and standard references. Spotted a mistake? Tell us.