Journal of the History of Collections - recent issues

The Spanish acquisition of King Charles I's art collection: The letters of Alonso de Cardenas, 1649-51

Brotton, J., McGrath, D. — 2008-04-30

The letters of Alonso de Cárdenas, the Spanish diplomatic representative in London from the 1630s to the 1650s, offer an unrivalled account of the everyday activities involved in the Commonwealth sale of King Charles I's art collection from 1649 to Cárdenas's diplomatic expulsion from England in 1655. Previously published in the original Spanish, this article provides the first complete English translation of Cárdenas's letters during this period. It also offers an account of Cárdenas's dealings with the republican authorities and private dealers and situates the Spanish diplomat as central to the development of an English art market under the Commonwealth.

William Bullock: Collections and exhibitions at the Egyptian Hall, London, 1816-25

Pearce, S. — 2008-04-30

The influence of William Bullock and the exhibitions at his Egyptian Hall, London, upon the trajectory taken by visual imagery and the interpretation of objects has been underrated. Between 1816, when his natural history exhibitions began to lose importance, and 1825, when he left the Hall, he mounted two major exhibitions, of Lapp and Mexican artefacts, which he had collected himself. Both featured important material culture, shown within ‘realistic’ settings, and both included talks and demonstrations by local people, whom Bullock had brought to London. In these exhibitions, Bullock used innovative ideas to transform material culture from the outlandish to a field for sympathetic understanding.

The papers of Joseph Gillott (1799-1872)

Chapel, J. — 2008-04-30

A Victorian entrepreneur, Joseph Gillott, is a key figure in the history of collecting and patronage from the mid-1840s. He assembled one of the largest and most important painting collections of the day and also collected musical instruments and precious stones. His huge fortune derived from the development of machinery to enable the mass production of steel pens with ‘elongated points’ (nibs). The traffic of works of art was constant and large numbers of paintings were traded mostly through a network of dealers. To accommodate his vast collection, Gillott built three picture galleries at his house in Edgbaston, Birmingham, and another at his London house in Stanmore, Middlesex. His collection was dispersed after his death at a much publicized six-day sale at Christie's in 1872.

Anthropological landscaping: General Pitt Rivers, the Ashmolean, the University Museum and the shaping of an Oxford discipline

Larson, F. — 2008-04-30

This paper explores disciplinary formation as both a physical and an intellectual process. That is, how decisions regarding tangible entities – in this case, the Pitt Rivers collection and the building designed to house it in Oxford – have shaped the intellectual landscape of a university discipline. The negotiations surrounding General Pitt Rivers's donation to Oxford in the 1880s were driven forward by a group of Oxford scientists based in the University Museum who were intent on establishing a dedicated space for anthropology at the University. The collection might have been amalgamated with that of the Ashmolean, since its future was also the subject of active debate at the time, but Pitt Rivers and his scientific peers at Oxford succeeded in establishing the collection as a new ethnographic department within the University Museum. Their achievement had long-lasting implications for the University's collections, and for the future shape of Oxford anthropology as an academic discipline.

The rites of man: The British Museum and the sexual imagination in Victorian Britain

Janes, D. — 2008-04-30

In the nineteenth century, the British Museum possessed a locked store of erotic objects. However, this did not serve to sanitize the rest of the collection. I use the evidence of an anonymous tract, Idolomania, set in the context of other literary productions of the time, to show how a wave of anti-Catholic agitation led to claims that the public displays of the British Museum were saturated with morally dangerous material. A wide range of objects, images and motifs were interpreted as evidence of pagan fertility cults, thus throwing into question the seemliness of the Museum's public displays.

Aspirations to life: Pleas for new forms of display in Belgian museums around 1900

Nys, L. — 2008-04-30

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the volume of criticism of public museums in Belgium increased. As a result of their uninspiring design, museums were repeatedly described as graveyards that held little attraction for the public. According to reformers, new forms of presentation, with the objects arranged in context, would transform museums into living institutions, with much more appeal. In this article, the debate concerning the novel arrangements proposed for Belgian museums is examined, using five case-studies relating to various types of collection. This discourse, which is strikingly uniform in its treatment of the different kinds of museums, reveals not only the changing expectations of public museums around the turn of the century but also the resistance evoked by attempts to reform the museum system in Belgium.

Anthropology, fine art and missionaries: The Berndt Kalighat album rediscovered

Brittlebank, K. — 2008-04-30

In the early 1960s, the Australian anthropologist, Ronald M. Berndt, purchased a Victorian album containing forty-four Kalighat paintings from Bengal. The attraction of the album for Ronald and his wife Catherine, also an anthropologist, is examined here in the context of their work on Aboriginal Australia, revealing links between their public life and their personal collecting activities. The second part of the paper reconstructs the album's life history, prior to its acquisition by the Berndts. Owned previously by the artist Sir Hans Heysen, the album is shown to have been collected by the Australian Baptist Church's earliest missionaries to India. At the centre of the ownership of the paintings, from the time of their collection, lies their iconographic imagery: idolatrous to the eyes of the Christian missionaries, visually appealing to the artist and embodying rich religious and mythological meaning for the anthropologists.

Wondrous Curiosities. Ancient Egypt at the British Museum

Whitehouse, H. — 2008-04-30

Carolus Clusius. Towards a Cultural History of a Renaissance Naturalist

MacGregor, A. — 2008-04-30

Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century

Smiles, S. — 2008-04-30

From Wunderkammer to Museum

Harrison, C. — 2008-04-30

De Kunstkamera van Peter de Grote. De Hollandse inbreng, gereconstrueerd uit brieven van Albert Seba en Johann Daniel Schumacher uit de jaren 1711-1752

Toorians, L. — 2008-04-30

Portrait of a Patron. The Patronage and Collecting of James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos (1674-1744)

Watkin, D. — 2008-04-30

De idealen van Pieter Teyler. Een erfenis uit de Verlichting

Toorians, L. — 2008-04-30

Joseph Banks and the British Museum. The World of Collecting, 1770-1830

Anderson, R. G. W. — 2008-04-30

La circulation des oeuvres d'art. The Circulation of Works of Art in the Revolutionary Era, 1789-1848

Murgia, C. — 2008-04-30

Exhibiting Maori. A History of Colonial Cultures of Display

Atkinson, J. — 2008-04-30

William Hunter and the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, 1807-2007

Pearce, S. — 2008-04-30

Museums, Nations, Identities: Wales and its National Museums

Watson, S. — 2008-04-30

Books Received

2008-04-30

Introduction: Neapolitan effervescence

Schnapp, A. — 2007-10-26

Antiquaries and politicians in eighteenth-century Naples

Rao, A. M. — 2007-10-26

In eighteenth-century Naples, as elsewhere in Italy and in France, enlightened reformers criticized antiquarian culture and claimed that new scientific and economic thought was of greater importance for the development of the state. Some modern historiography has taken at face value this confrontation between erudition and politics. This essay, on the contrary, shows that many exchanges and borrowings occurred between ‘antiquaries’ and ‘politicians’. Far from being eruditely but backwardly self indulgent and hostile to enlightened reform movements, antiquarianism embodied a whole set of cultural practices that were well articulated both within the realm of knowledge and that of politics. The ‘taste’ for the antique fuelled legal and economic reforms, contributed to the renewal of historical knowledge and natural sciences and favoured intellectual sociability; it also led to a full awareness of the importance of cultural and natural patrimony, and to the birth of new professions.

Academicians and academies in eighteenth-century Naples

Chiosi, E. — 2007-10-26

The academies make it possible to trace the transformations that took place in eighteenth-century Neapolitan society, and their history illuminates the role played by Freemasonry throughout the Enlightenment. They promoted dialogue between professional corporations and the establishment, as the former experimented with new training and production methods. Natural history played a crucial role, investigating the territory in terms of both space and time and accumulating knowledge and resources which could benefit the nation. The area around Vesuvius became a laboratory where scientists, enquirers into natural phenomena and antiquaries worked side by side, while Naples established itself as the capital of research into archaeology and natural history.

Museums, safeguarding and artistic heritage in Naples in the eighteenth century: some reflections

Fittipaldi, A. — 2007-10-26

This overview of Bourbon cultural policy in the eighteenth century, from the creation of the Kingdom of Naples to the end of the century, highlights the most significant episodes in the safeguarding of the artistic heritage, some undoubtedly innovative and others less so. Museums, excavations, academies and legislation: these all form parts of a single mosaic, seen in the context of contemporary culture. Despite its numerous contradictions, this period emerges as one of the most pioneering in the history of museology and of attitudes to the ancient world.

Naples and the birth of a tradition of conservation: The restoration of wall paintings from the Vesuvian sites in the eighteenth century

D'Alconzo, P. — 2007-10-26

The exciting discovery of ancient Herculaneum and Pompeii brought to light problems of conservation that had never before been faced on such a large scale, and, in the case of paintings, the need to invent methods of intervention in an area of restoration that was almost without precedent. The decision to detach the wall paintings from their original contexts, thus transforming them into suitable pictures for the royal collections; the search for a form of protection that would preserve the original colours; the unprecedented choice of not integrating the lacunae; the attention to faithfulness of graphic reproduction: these elements characterized the birth and the strengthening of a tradition of conservation that was marked by unexpected intuitions, ingenuities and some manifest contradictions.

The birth of ancient vase collecting in Naples in the early eighteenth century: Antiquarian studies, excavations and collections

Masci, M. E. — 2007-10-26

In Naples by 1764, the year in which Sir William Hamilton arrived in the city and in which Winckelmann asserted that the so-called ‘Etruscan’ vases should be attributed to the ancient Greeks, the collecting of figured vases was already a well-established practice. This paper examines the process that led to the codification of this new typology of antiquarian collecting during the first half of the eighteenth century. The analysis of this phenomenon takes into account three key components and their mutual interaction: the tradition of antiquarian studies, the antiquarian market and original eighteenth-century Neapolitan vase collections that are here reconstructed on the basis of archival documents.

The figure of the naturalist antiquary in the Kingdom of Naples: Giuseppe Giovene (1753 1837) and his contemporaries

Toscano, M. — 2007-10-26

Genuine products of Enlightenment encyclopaedic culture, the naturalist–antiquaries followed Bacon and Buffon in applying the scientific inductive method with its reliance on material evidence to the study of history. This gave rise both to original research and to the formation of collections combining naturalist and antiquarian studies. This approach was particularly prevalent in Britain and in Italy in the Veneto and the Kingdom of Naples, thanks to exchanges between scholars. Giuseppe Giovene's collection and library are highly representative of this intellectual activity in southern Italy, with its vital local roots and awareness of contemporary developments abroad.

Nola and the historiography of Greek vases

Lyons, C. L. — 2007-10-26

Cemeteries that encircled the Campanian town of Nola furnished many of the ancient vases most highly sought after by eighteenth-century collectors. Attracted by the exceptional quality of the glazes on what was later recognized as Attic pottery, antiquaries looked to the figured scenes for reflections of lost masterpieces of ancient Greek painting. Enmeshed practices of connoisseurship, scholarship and commerce were already firmly in place by the 1740s. Comparing vases to Old Master drawings and adopting modes of display popular for Continental porzellan-kabinetten, collectors relocated Greek vase painting from the realm of curiosity to that of fine art.

The antiquary Alessio Simmaco Mazzocchi: Oriental origins and the rediscovery of Magna Graecia in eighteenth-century Naples

Ceserani, G. — 2007-10-26

A. S. Mazzocchi was the most renowned antiquary in eighteenth-century Naples – immersed in many of the prestigious cultural initiatives of the newly installed Bourbon court and celebrated by fellow Neapolitans for his European-wide fame. This paper focuses on an aspect of his work generally overlooked, namely his search for a biblical origin for early South Italian society, a quest that led to his claim that the Greek temples of Paestum were oriental monuments. The present investigation demonstrates that Neapolitan eighteenth-century scholarship was engaged in a lively dialogue with the wider European world, but also that it was caught between local and foreign approaches to the past, suspended between the traditions of Neapolitan heritage and the appeal of emerging Hellenism promoted by the rediscovery of the ancient Greek colonies of southern Italy – Magna Graecia.

Commentaries: I: Some afterthoughts on Naples and antiquarian culture in the eighteenth century

Gallo, D. — 2007-10-26

Commentaries: II: The Italian and European context of Neapolitan eighteenth-century antiquarianism

Salmeri, G. — 2007-10-26

Ambassadorial plate of the later Stuart period and the collection of the Earl of Strafford

Jacobsen, H. — 2007-04-23

Ambassadorial plate was a perquisite received from the royal Jewel House to enhance the standing of a diplomat abroad. While it had obvious connotations of magnificence, there were also practical consequences relating to its value as specie. Although the plate was specifically lent only for the period of the embassy, attitudes towards the perquisite changed after the Restoration and, increasingly, diplomats viewed it as their own property. This is evidenced by their involvement in commissioning and designing the silver, and the increased number of ambassadors retaining it for their private use. In the light of detailed records relating to the Earl of Strafford's collection, commissioned between 1711 and 1713 while he was ambassador at The Hague, and using other diplomatic sources from the period, this article demonstrates the changing attitudes to diplomatic plate and sheds light on the importance of silver in the increasingly cosmopolitan worlds of fashion and sociability.

The cabinet of Francois-Emmanuel Bonne de Crequy, Duc de Lesdiguieres: A taste most refined

Weil-Curiel, M. — 2007-04-23

Presented here is one of the most interesting collections of paintings gathered in late-seventeenth-century Paris: the thirty-eight pictures of François-Emmanuel Bonne de Créquy (1645–81). Until the present, this cabinet de peintures has been known only through the seven paintings mentioned in 1681–2, by Michel Passart, when, following the death of the Duc de Lesdiguières in July 1681, his whole cabinet was purchased by the art dealer Antoine Hérault. The fact that the Lesdiguières family was related to the more famous Créquys, already known as great art collectors, gives us an insight into the variety of responses to matters of art among the aristocracy in seventeenth-century France. Extracts from Passart's letters referring to paintings from the Lesdiguières collection are also included, since they shed light on sharp practices within the burgeoning trade in works of art during the late-seventeenth century.

A friendly gathering: The social politics of presentation books and their extra-illustration in Horace Walpole's circle

Peltz, L. — 2007-04-23

All authors are at the mercy of their readers. In the eighteenth century, this realization created a tension that was keenly felt, and articulated, by genteel authors whose response to the unchartable nature of reading was inextricably linked to the material qualities of their books as commodities. These anxieties can be traced in the social politics of presentation books within Horace Walpole's circle of friends and readers. This essay examines the production and reception of such genteel books, particularly those collected, inscribed and extra-illustrated by Richard Bull. Bull's deferential annotations and innovative practice of extra-illustration turned his books into personalized artefacts, rich in emotional investment and individualized experience. His books, thus rendered a spectacle for an audience to enjoy, serve as an instructive diagnostic of the socio-economic culture of gift exchange and ritual response that underpinned the rhetoric of eighteenth-century amateurism and thus helped to assert both the author's gentility and that of his extra-illustrator.

A pinacotheque prehistorique for the Musee des Antiquites Nationales in Saint-Germain-en-Laye

Gindhart, M. P. — 2007-04-23

In 1884, the Beaux-Arts inspector and art critic Armand Dayot indicated that the Musée des Antiquités Nationales in Saint-Germain-en-Laye was becoming ‘a sort of prehistoric art gallery where we will be able to gaze with contemplation at the venerable figures of our antediluvian ancestors’. This pinacothèque préhistorique never fully materialized, but a few paintings representing the Stone Age were exhibited at this French institution. These representations established a context for the prehistoric fossils and artefacts housed at the museum, while, symbiotically, the Palaeolithic and Neolithic objects on display helped to validate the images that made reference to them. Similar works of art proposed for the museum were not acquired, however, and two of the paintings were subsequently given away. Only Fernand Cormon's Return from a Bear Hunt (1884) remains on view today, serving as a reminder of an era when artistic depictions of the past both excited and educated the public about prehistory.

Desiring Holbein: Presence and absence in the National Gallery

Rees Leahy, H. — 2007-04-23

The central question of this paper is why are there only three works by Hans Holbein in the National Gallery, London? Through an account of the slow and difficult process of acquiring Holbeins for the national collection, the histories of these three paintings are linked in an exploration of the dialectics of presence and absence in the National Gallery. Each work bought for the Gallery was purchased from the seat of an English land-owning dynasty, and scrutiny of the processes of their acquisition illuminates the cultural politics of transfer from aristocratic to public ownership. Overall, this study of the Gallery's desire for Holbein reveals the invisible threads that bind the paintings on the gallery wall to each other's histories, as well as to the extrinsic fields of finance, the law and politics.

Provincial hoplology: Collecting arms and armour in Ontario, 1850-1950

Walton, S. A. — 2007-04-23

Upper Canada (Ontario) never had a medieval past to glorify with the display of arms and armour, but to its populace, conscious of their legacy as heirs to the British Empire, that display seemed sufficiently important to merit encouragement from the earliest days of the Province. In Toronto, although some influential nineteenth-century residents had collections of armour, its collection and display from the earliest days essentially were tied to education. The Toronto Normal School incorporated arms and armour into its history teaching collection, and after the School's failure, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) built arguably the third-best public armour collection in North America. Unique in this collection, however, was the rhetoric of utility and especially of industrial design: Charles Trick Currelly, the ROM's first director, argued that arms and armour should be seen as finely made functional art of the past that would inspire fine functional art for the present. This philosophy, derived and elaborated from the South Kensington model, also saw the role of armour as a cornerstone to the educational mission of the museum. This educational emphasis begun under Currelly remains strong, despite waxing and waning emphasis on arms and armour in the museum as a whole.

The Royal Architectural Museum in the light of new documentary evidence

Bottoms, E. — 2007-04-23

Founded in 1851 by a group of architectural professionals led by George Gilbert Scott, the Royal Architectural Museum's collections were intended to form the nucleus of a ‘National Museum of Architecture’. This article examines the history of the cast museum and its collections in the light of a complete set of minute books and other unpublished material discovered within the Architectural Association (AA) Archives. It draws upon new detail regarding the formative years of the Museum in a London warehouse, through its period at the ‘Brompton Boilers’, South Kensington, to its move to Tufton Street, Westminster, and its subsequent dispersal by the AA in 1916. In addition to identifying and providing new provenance details for many of the surviving casts and original works, fresh information is given regarding the roles of key figures within the museum, including Scott, Alexander Beresford-Hope, John Ruskin, William Burges and J. P. Seddon.

Luxury and Legitimation. Royal Collecting in Ancient Mesopotamia

Bahrani, Z. — 2007-04-23

Lorenzo de' Medici, Collector of Antiquities: Collector and Antiquarian

Leino, M. — 2007-04-23

A Savage Mirror. Power, Identity and Knowledge in Early Modern France

Woodcock, P. — 2007-04-23

Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

Cutler, L. — 2007-04-23

Paper Museums. The Reproductive Print in Europe, 1500-1800

Prange, P. — 2007-04-23

Pietra Dura. Bilder aus Stein

Trusted, M. — 2007-04-23

Ashmolean Museum Oxford: Manuscript Catalogues of the Early Museum Collections (Part II), The Vice-Chancellor's Consolidated Catalogue 1695 (British Archaeological Reports, International Series, No. 1569)

Mason, P. — 2007-04-23

The Nation's Mantelpiece. A History of the National Gallery

Bergvelt, E. — 2007-04-23

Thorvaldsen's Ancient Sculptures. A Catalogue of the Ancient Sculptures in the Collection of Bertel Thorvaldsen

Frederiksen, R., Sullivan, M. — 2007-04-23

Holding Egypt. Tracing the Reception of the Description de l'Egypte in Nineteenth-Century Great Britain

Taylor, J. H. — 2007-04-23

Science & Culture for Members Only: the Amsterdam Zoo Artis in the Nineteenth Century

Clutton-Brock, J. — 2007-04-23

Apres Gassendi. Son inflence et sa reputation, essai. Avec l'histoire des collections scientifiques et un catalogue des instruments et appareils concernant les sciences exactes appartenant au Musee Gassendi a Digne-les-Bains

McConnell, A. — 2007-04-23

Le murier et l'epee. Le cabinet de Charles Daniel de Meuron et l'origine du musee d'ethnographie a Neuchatel

Mason, P. — 2007-04-23

Art under Control in North Korea

Hoare, J. — 2007-04-23

Art and the Power of Placement

Knelman, S. — 2007-04-23

Books received

2007-04-23