Provenance covers an object's complete documented history. An artifact may thus have both a provenience and a provenance. The provenance of works of fine art, antiques and antiquities is of great importance, especially to their owner. There are a number of reasons why painting provenance is important, which mostly also apply to other types of fine art. A good provenance increases the value of a painting, and establishing provenance may help confirm the date, artist and, especially for portraits, the subject of a painting. It may confirm whether a painting is genuinely of the period it seems to date from. The
Provenance archivists Samuel Muller, J. A. Feith, and R. Fruin, published in the Netherlands in 1898 (often referred to as the "Dutch Manual"). Seamus Ross has argued a case for adapting established principles and theories of archival provenance to the field of modern digital preservation and curation. "Provenance" is also the title of the journal published by the Society of Georgia Archivists. In the case of books, the study of provenance refers to the study of the ownership of individual copies of books. It is usually extended to include study of the circumstances in which individual copies of books have changed