Almost every day, young Mary Cassatt could be found in the Louvre in Paris, studying the Old Masters. While looking at an artist’s private collection, the Pittsburgh-born Impressionist discovered “The Toilet of Venus” by 17th-century painter Simon Vouet, and persuaded her family to buy it.

The artwork clearly influenced Cassatt’s realistic portrayals of women and girls, especially her 1891 painting “Young Women Picking Fruit,” which is in the Carnegie Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

“We have a letter from her saying how glad she is that it’s in our collection,” said Louise Lippincott, the museum’s curator of fine arts. “It’s a well-known picture that’s requested for exhibitions all over the world.”

Now the Carnegie has a tool that will tell them all the places the Cassatt painting has been. Elysa, a computer software program named for Andrew Carnegie’s housekeeper, cleans up and standardizes information already known about 30,098 artworks in the museum’s collection. Elysa (pronounced Eliza) breaks apart a paragraph packed with names and dates and organizes it into a format that computers can manipulate or turn into a map. Cassatt’s well-traveled painting is first on the mapping list.

“Once we get our geographical locators, I want to calculate how many miles it’s traveled,” Ms. Lippincott said.

That’s the fun side of Elysa, whose namesake was one of only three of the steel tycoon’s employees who received a pension. The project’s main function is to trace a painting’s chain of ownership, or provenance, and share it with the art world.

Elysa operates at the nexus of provenance, exhibitions and people. Its developers hope it will be to provenance research what the J. Paul Getty Museum is to artist biographies and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is to processing images.

Two years ago, the museum received a $150,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and launched a research project called Art Tracks to better visualize the art museum’s collection. To achieve that goal, a team built Elysa.

Next weekend, to celebrate the 120th anniversary of Carnegie Institute’s founding, the art museum will host a hack-a-thon in which 30 computer programmers will mine new stories from this data and find creative ways to manage and share it.

“We are going to make our collection data as widely available as possible,” Ms. Lippincott said.

The Elysa software is open source and free so it can be improved by other programmers. The project has been a learning experience for David Newbury, lead developer of Art Tracks; Neil Kulas, the museum’s Web and digital media manager; and Tracey Berg-Fulton, a collections database associate.

“We’ve discovered that computers and historical data don’t get along very well. A computer likes precise dates like Aug. 10, 1929. Our dates tend to be 16th century or thereabouts,” Ms. Lippincott said.

“The computer can look at thousands of records at a time. The computer can do stuff that it would take an ordinary person decades.”

Tracing a painting’s provenance is essential to authenticating it and understanding its back story — literally.

“Much of the evidence for our provenance research comes off the back of the painting,” Ms. Lippincott said. “There are old stickers and people scribble stuff on the back of the canvas. There are custom stamps and old accession numbers, all this stuff that becomes incredibly important information for tracking down owners.”

For example, data shows that “The Toilet of Venus” wound up in the hands of Mary Cassatt’s niece, Ellen Mary Cassatt. She became Mrs. Horace Binney Hare and their 1907 mansion in Berwyn, Pa., became part of the Upper Main Line YMCA.

Art Tracks and Elysa have other applications, too.

“What I would love to do is track how all the works of art that went into the Carnegie International got here and what happened to them when the exhibition was over and where they went,” Ms. Lippincott said. “You can see the way the Carnegie shaped the whole national art scene.”

The Carnegie International, the second oldest exhibition of contemporary art, began in 1895 and is held about every three years. The next Carnegie International will open in 2018.

Ms. Lippincott hopes Elysa will be adopted by many museums and that the result will be a wealth of new shared information.

“Everybody in the museum field would love to do this. Because of the Nazi-era provenance research we have had to do, our provenance data is better than ever,” she said.

Marylynne Pitz: 412-263-1648 or mpitz@post-gazette.com.

First Published: November 8, 2015, 5:00 a.m.