Introducing Ancient Andean Art in the United States: The Guillermo Schmidt Pizarro Collection from the Brummer Gallery Records

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the transactions of the Peruvian antiquarian and collector Guillermo Schmidt Pizarro (Tacna, 1880 – Lima, 1964) with the Brummer brothers, through the analysis of the Brummer archives recently made available online by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We were able to identify some of his clients and study his sales and pricing strategies. We could also identify the actual location of some purchases and, in some cases, virtually reconstruct several scattered artefacts from the same archaeological context. This work demonstrates the effectiveness of analysing the archives of private merchants in provenance research.