AI Chat Agent for a Historic Art Archive

• A decade-old website held the archive but could not answer a visitor's questions about the works, the artist, or the history
• Many works are lost, known only from archival photographs, and every visitor is a potential lead in recovering one
• Scans of original artwork are irreplaceable; nothing automated could be allowed to alter them unsupervised

A rebuilt archive site with an AI chat agent grounded strictly in the archive itself: the biography, the catalogue of all 238 works, the diary, and the photographs.

• Answers only from the archive and cites the specific work it references; when the archive does not record something, it says so instead of inventing
• Never offers valuations or authentication opinions, and asks anyone with knowledge of a lost painting to contact the family
• An image pipeline proposes crops of baked-in frames on scanned artwork, but every crop requires a recorded human decision, and archival photographs of lost works are never cropped at all

A structured content system holding the full catalogue, and a chat service with a two-layer prompt: persona and guardrails above a knowledge base assembled from the archive, with prompt-injection defenses that treat site content as data, never as instructions. Structured metadata on every work makes the archive legible to search and answer engines.

• 238 works, 217 dated diary entries, and twenty years of legacy URLs preserved through the rebuild
• Conversations cost about four cents each, putting a public-facing agent at roughly $10 to $25 a month
• Every answer is traceable to the archive, so the family's scholarship stays the single source of truth