MacGregor 1997

Arthur MacGregor. "Collectors, Connoisseurs and Curators in the Victorian Age." A.W. Franks: Nineteenth-Century Collecting and the British Museum. Ed. Marjorie Caygill and John Cherry. London: British Museum Press, 1997. Print.

• more straightforwardly historical than Black 2000
• per intro, AW Franks can be regarded as the "second founder" of the BM— when he started in 1851 the museum was overshadowed by the Library (especially Panizzi) and dominated by C18 Mediterranean-centered classicism, but by the end of the century he’d built on those strengths and expanded non-Western holdings (1)

Intro

• August 1848 Stowe auction of the Duke of Buckingham’s art collection marks a sea change in the private/public shift in c19 collecting: "...the remainder of the C19 was indeed to be marked by a gravitational shift in the collecting scene, with both public institutions and private collectors of middling rank making significant inroads into territory formerly dominated by the aristocracy."
  • think of the art collection of the Dedlocks in Bleak House (1853)— this related to the economic shift represented by Sir Leicester and the Ironmaster (9)

Continental Background

• 7 instability of the European art market starting after the Revolution, through Napoleonic, and in to the Franco-Prussian War in 1870: "material changed hands" more readily than in Britain (though by the 60s and 70s the British were leading collectors)

England’s Old Order

• 8 at the turn of the c19 there was no "centralized, dominant collection...these riches are scattered through every country house" (Quatremère de Quincy writing in 1796)
• 9 cultural "material remained locked out of public circulation"
• The Stowe sale represented an early symptom of a deep-seated malaise that was to bring on to the market art-treasures from hitherto stable country houses, a situation exacerbated by changing economic circumstances that favored industry rather than land as the principal generator of wealth. The trickle of material released in this way turned into a flood with the passing in 1882 of the Settled Lands Act, by means of which the system of entailment that had held in thrall such estates and their respective collections was decisively broken[.]

New collectors and new enthusiasms

• l/u Gerald Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste
• 10 decorative and applied arts a new main area of interest
• Scott as a collector: his "importance in the development of contemporary taste unhesitatingly accords him the highest importance: in this world, ‘by virtue of his international reputation as a poet, novelist, historian, as the chronicle of the whole antiquarian movement in the Antiquary and as the creator of Abbotsford, [Scott][11] occupies a crucial and central position.’ ...Particularly in its enthusiasm for hitherto little-regarded medieval material, the collector’s response has to be seen as merely one product of the Romantic movement.”
  • quoting Clive Wainwright, The Romantic Interior
  • see Underwood 2013, Griffiths 2016 for Scott
• 11 Sir John Soane’s evocative arrangements— see Black 2000
• 13-4 connection of antiquarianism newly interested in the local and medieval to development of c19 British archaeology
  • also connected in textual terms to Lynch 2015, The Mayor of Casterbridge (Hardy, 1886)
  • John Mortimer - Yorkshire antiquarian inspired by the Great Exhibition to dig at barrows
• 16 Pitt-Rivers: "In an early attempt at serial classification he had successfully elucidated the technological development of firearms and was struck by the possibility that the evolutionary processes which he was able to perceive could be reduced to general principles for material culture as a whole, in much the same way that biological theory was being fundamentally re-thought in the 1860s."
  • l/u MW Thompson, General Pitt-Rivers: Evolution and Archaeology in the C19

Temporary exhibitions and displays

• 17 Great Exhibition: "Although its impact on the museum-building and museum-visiting sectors was to be enormous, the primary purpose of the exhibition was purely commercial"

Public Museums

• 20 in universities: first oriented mainly toward the public was Dulwich College picture gallery in 1817
• 21 purpose of municipal museum legislation in 30s-40s in part biopolitical: controlling the laboring classes along with reading rooms and libraries (though Black 2000 is good on their resonance beyond the biopolitical)
• 1845 Act for Encouraging the Establishment of Museumd in Large Towns
• 22 divestment of natural history collections from BM to Kensington after 1851 under Franks’ direction
• National Gallery 1824
• 24 Henry Cole a primary architect of the Great Exhibition and then of South Kensington Museum
• 26 Given the nature of the genesis of the collections at South Kensington, it was inevitable that the character of the Museum should represent an epitome and a summation of the development of taste among english collectors of the c19.

Conclusion

• The spheres of private and public collecting were intimately interrelated in the c19 in a way that they certainly were not before and probably have not been since.
• A further instance of direct practical utility derived from museum collections is provided by certain of William Morris’s designs. Some of his [27] influential textile patterns, for example, were developed from study of material in the South Kensington Museum, while his ‘Daisy’ pattern was derived from manuscript [printed? The 1597 Herbal?] sources in the BM.
  • see Cowan 2015 and Miller 2013 also for the continuum with his literary and political endeavors