Provenance is an art history guessing game for people who like their culture slightly competitive and a bit cheeky.
You're shown an artwork and its title. That's it. From there, you've got to work out the Artist, Movement, Year, and Country of Origin — or at least make a convincing argument to yourself in the moment.
Inspired by games like Interior Motives, Wordle, and talking shit in the gallery. The game is approachable, fun, and quietly humbling.
Is this a Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece, or a chiaroscuro? Pop-Art or Neo-Expressionism? Test yourself to find out! The works stretch from ancient images carved 32,000 years ago right through to contemporary pieces still warm from the studio.
There are hints if you get stuck, but learning is part of the fun. Play in rounds of five, ten, or fifteen works, and try to beat your own best score — or just enjoy the slow realisation that you've been lying to yourself about knowing art history this whole time.
Either way, I hope you have fun!
Provenance was made by me with the assistance of Anthropic's AI agent Claude. I'd never written code before (still can't), so Claude wrote the code, working from my decisions about how the game should look, feel, and play.
The human part: I chose, researched, and tagged every artwork in the game. The visual design, the rating ladder, the tone of the writing, the scoring rules, the difficult calls, the comedy at the bottom of the rankings was all moi. So is the editorial responsibility for what's in the game and how it plays.
The AI part: Claude wrote and debugged the underlying code, suggested technical tradeoffs, and helped shape the structure of the page. When something didn't work or didn't feel right, I asked for changes; Claude made them.
I think of the relationship as closer to "I directed, Claude implemented" than "I used a tool." It's a collaboration that wouldn't have produced this game without both halves, and I'd rather be honest about that than pretend otherwise.