Documentary holdings
The archive
What the house kept: images, papers, canvases. Each piece is given with its date, its provenance and its credit — and the inventory is still under way.
Primary sources
The hotel’s archives held elsewhere
Part of the Hôtel Baudy’s historical holdings left Giverny and is today kept in public institutions. These documents are the reference source for establishing who stayed here, and when.
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Hôtel Baudy guest register, 1887–1899
One volume, some seven hundred entries: name, occupation, age, residence, passport origin, previous address, destination and each lodger’s arrival and departure dates. The original is held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; it can be consulted only as a microfilm made in 1989 by the Archives of American Art (reel 4236). The guest book was given to the museum by Alice Osborn, who had bought a Cézanne painting from Madame Baudy and received the register as proof of the painter’s stay. Any publication or reproduction requires written permission from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
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Hotel Baudy Collection, 1887–1922
Half a linear foot of documents relating to Cézanne’s stay at the hotel and to the provenance of the Cézanne paintings acquired by Frank Osborn in 1920. Mostly in French, open to research, catalogued in 2019. Held in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s library and archives.
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Departmental Archives of the Eure
Two avenues not yet explored: the Giverny land registers, which would date the hotel’s building works; and the commercial register of the Les Andelys court, where the number 1318 B on the advertising leaflet should correspond to a file in the name of W. Evans.
Do you hold a piece?
A letter on the hotel’s headed paper, a photograph of the house or the garden, an invoice, a postcard written from here, a canvas that passed through the hotel: the collection was built that way, one piece at a time. If you hold one, or if you are descended from someone who lodged here, write to us. A photograph is enough to begin with, and nothing leaves your hands.