'rapacious greed'

"The British as Art Collectors, liberally and beautifully illustrated, sets out the history of the art-collecting impulse in Britain from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the present. Shaping it into four densely packed, chronological sections, James Stourton and Charles Sebag-Montefiore deal, first, with “Royalty” (in other words, collecting at Court, above all the assembly and dispersal of the superb collection of King Charles I at Whitehall); “Aristocracy” (the principally eighteenth-century Whig Grand Tour and country-house phenomena which Quatremère de Quincy had in mind); “Plutocracy” (the transitional period brought about by the displacement effects of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars); and, finally, “Democracy” (which concerns the arrival of the public art museum in the early nineteenth century, its proliferation, and the gradual institutionalization, professionalization and broadening of the collecting impulse into our time).

But this is an over-simplification, for the history of collecting is really the history of individual shoppers, and, occasionally, partnerships or syndicates such as that of the coal and canal magnate the third Duke of Bridgewater, with budgets ranging from the merely large to the positively obscene, and not necessarily husbanded with corresponding degrees of wisdom. It is also the history of sweaty-palmed acquisitiveness, of rapacious greed, and also of processes of dissolution and loss – an invariably human story in which mostly anonymous crate-makers, removalists and shipping agents must figure prominently, while debt, disease, dispossession and death often interrupted grand schemes. Thus certain of Queen Christina of Sweden’s belongings, “The Death of Actaeon” by Titian (National Gallery), for example, which originated as one of the poesie commissioned by Philip II of Spain, turned by stages into a portion of Philippe-Egalité’s inheritance, and afterwards, at the Orléans sale which took place in London in 1798–9, became a golden opportunity for Sir Abraham Hume MP. The paradox of a study which seeks to isolate or make sense of a national collecting impulse is that the very objects that generations of collectors have pursued with vigour pass so easily back and forth across international boundaries, such that, especially in the seventeenth-century context, the collections of the Earl and Countess of Arundel and that of Cardinal Jules Mazarin begin to look rather similar in character, content, style of accumulation, and dispersal – indeed Mazarin competed aggressively with the Spanish ambassador to secure for himself sixteenth-century Italian paintings lately owned by Lord Arundel, with mixed success. Nevertheless, the Stuart Court, adorned not only by Charles’s ill-fated royal collection but also by those of the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke of Hamilton, the Earl of Pembroke and Lord Arundel, forms perhaps the most spectacular but short-lived episode in British connoisseurship."

parte deste artigo sobre o livro The British as Art Collectors.
do we owe them, do they owe us: a never ending issue.

(no meu tema continuado sobre a natureza dos museus e o estado do mundo)