Collectors and Collections

In 1798 three British aristocrats, the Duke of Bridgewater, his nephew Lord Gower and the Earl of Carlisle, bought the French and Italian pictures from the celebrated collection of the Duke of Orléans. They kept many for themselves, Titian’s Diana and Actaeon among them, but they also put Old Masters from the Orléans collection on public display. The National Gallery in London credits those shows with changing how Britain collected and exhibited art, and with helping lead to its first public galleries.

That pattern, private wealth turning slowly into public property, runs through this section. It covers the people who gathered art, the paths objects took between owners, and the market that set their prices and kept the paperwork.

From townhouse to nation

The National Gallery itself began in a private house. When it was founded in 1824, its first 38 paintings came from the collection of the banker John Julius Angerstein and hung in his townhouse at 100 Pall Mall. The Trafalgar Square building by William Wilkins opened in 1838. Today the collection numbers more than 2,300 works, shaped throughout by gifts, bequests and donations.

A century later in New York, a collector’s frustration produced a museum. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney had been buying and showing work by American artists who struggled to find a public, and by 1929 she had more than five hundred pieces. She offered them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which declined. She founded the Whitney Museum of American Art instead in 1930, and it opened the next year with her holdings, about six hundred works by then, as its founding collection.

Following a painting

Provenance is the record of who owned a work, and when. Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait of 1434 shows how much it can hold. Its first recorded owner, the Spanish nobleman Don Diego de Guevara, gave it to Margaret of Austria, who listed it in her palace at Mechlin on 17 July 1516 and ordered a lock fitted to its shutters. It passed to her niece Mary of Hungary, then to Philip II of Spain, and remained in the Spanish royal collection into the nineteenth century. Then it surfaced with James Hay, a Scottish soldier who may have taken it from the baggage of Joseph Bonaparte after the Battle of Vitoria in 1813. Hay offered it to the Prince Regent, who returned it in 1818. The National Gallery bought it in 1842.

Each step in that chain is documented by an inventory, a letter or a receipt. Where the documents run out, so does the certainty.

The market as archive

Auction houses and dealers created much of that documentation, and their records are now research tools in their own right. The Getty Provenance Index, founded in 1974 by Burton Fredericksen, holds more than twelve million digitised records. They include sale catalogues for works offered in Europe from 1650 to 1945, the stock books of the dealers Goupil in Paris from 1846 to 1919 and Knoedler in New York from 1872 to 1970, legal inventories of European private collections from 1520 to 1880, and records of payments to artists in Rome between 1576 and 1711. The Getty points to restitution efforts as well as scholarly books among the projects its data has informed.

Reading a collection

A collection tells you about its owner as much as its objects: what they could afford, what their advisers recommended, what their era admired. The articles below look at individual collectors, at the institutions their gifts built, and at the records that let us reconstruct where a work has been.