Author: The Society for the History of Collecting

Florence, Berlin and Beyond: Late Nineteenth-Century Art Markets and their Social Networks (Series: Studies in the History of Collecting & Art Markets, Volume 9) Lynn Catterson, 2020, Brill. Review by Tom Stammers Networks are now a ubiquitous, if rarely theorised, concept in the history of collecting. Networks typically demonstrate how diverse actors, often operating across considerable … Continue reading Review: Florence, Berlin and Beyond: Late Nineteenth-Century Art Markets and their Social Networks

John Wilson in The Billion Dollar Art Hunt. BBC Four Documentary: The Billion Dollar Art Hunt  19 October 2020 and available on BBC iPlayer for 10 months Reviewed by Eleni Vassilika. Presented by the journalist John Wilson, this documentary tells the story of how thirteen works of art stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum … Continue reading Review: The Billion Dollar Art Hunt (BBC Four Documentary)

The Purchase of the Past: Collecting Culture in Post-Revolutionary Paris c. 1790-1890 by Tom Stammers, 2020, Cambridge University Press Review by Simon Spier Tom Stammers’ new volume The Purchase of the Past: Collecting Culture in Post-Revolutionary Paris c.1790-1890 is a significant contribution to the history of collecting in the nineteenth century, opening new vistas on … Continue reading Review: The Purchase of the Past: Collecting Culture in Post-Revolutionary Paris c. 1790-1890

Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France by Robin Mitchell, 2020, University of Georgia Press Review by Natasha Shoory Gustave Courbet’s visual allegory of life as an artist in mid-nineteenth-century France—L’Atelier du peintre (The Artist’s Studio, 1855)—depicts figures in three groups: laypeople on the left, Parisian elites on the right, and the … Continue reading Review: Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France