Experts around the world use our services to check the provenance of items before they buy or handle them. Police, insurers, the trade and the public may record items that have been stolen to maximise their chances of recovery, and to record disputes or items within collections.

The Art Loss Register (ALR) holds the world’s largest private database of lost, stolen and looted art, antiques and collectibles, currently listing more than 700,000 items. Items are added to this database on behalf of the victims of looting or theft, insurers, police forces and others.

Our database is then utilised to offer a due diligence service to clients in the art market who wish to ensure that they are working with items to which no claim will arise. This provides an invaluable risk management tool to our searching clients. Through searching it is also possible to identify stolen items and other claimed works as they move through the art market and to secure their recovery for the claimant.

All of our services are offered free of charge to law enforcement agencies and nation states.

Our history

The Art Loss Register (ALR) was established in London in 1990. Our founding shareholders included major businesses from the insurance industry and art market. Satellite offices were subsequently opened in New York, Cologne, Amsterdam and Paris to cater to growing client bases in these countries. In January 2010, we  consolidated the regional offices in to one central, international office, run from London.

The ALR’s origin was The International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), a not-for-profit organisation based in New York. In an attempt to deter international art theft, IFAR established an art theft archive in 1976 and began publishing the “Stolen Art Alert”.

What we do

We offer three main areas of services:

• Search – Check objects with the ALR database to demonstrate due diligence, to prevent the handling of stolen art and to find out more about an object’s history through our in-house Provenance Research team.
• Register – Report the theft or loss of an artwork or valuable item to the ALR database for registration on the database.
• Recover – We help lost items of art to be reunited with their owners through the ALR database and our specialist Recoveries team.