The Purchase of the Past
The Purchase of the Past

Author: Tom Stammers

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-06-25

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 1108807224

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Offering a broad and vivid survey of the culture of collecting from the French Revolution to the Belle Époque, The Purchase of the Past explores how material things became a central means of accessing and imagining the past in nineteenth-century France. By subverting the monarchical establishment, the French Revolution not only heralded the dawn of the museum age, it also threw an unprecedented quantity of artworks into commercial circulation, allowing private individuals to pose as custodians and saviours of the endangered cultural inheritance. Through their common itineraries, erudition and sociability, an early generation of scavengers established their own form of 'private patrimony', independent from state control. Over a century of Parisian history, Tom Stammers explores collectors' investments – not just financial but also emotional and imaginative – in historical artefacts, as well as their uncomfortable relationship with public institutions. In so doing, he argues that private collections were a critical site for salvaging and interpreting the past in a post-revolutionary society, accelerating but also complicating the development of a shared national heritage.

Revolutionary Paris and the Market for Netherlandish Art
Revolutionary Paris and the Market for Netherlandish Art

Author: Darius A. Spieth

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-11-06

Total Pages: 535

ISBN-13: 9004276750

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings were aesthetic, intellectual, and economic touchstones in the Parisian art world of the Revolutionary era, but their importance within this framework, while frequently acknowledged, never attracted much subsequent attention. Darius A. Spieth’s inquiry into Revolutionary Paris and the Market for Netherlandish Art reveals the dominance of “Golden Age” pictures in the artistic discourse and sales transactions before, during, and after the French Revolution. A broadly based statistical investigation, undertaken as part of this study, shows that the upheaval reduced prices for Netherlandish paintings by about 55% compared to the Old Regime, and that it took until after the July Revolution of 1830 for art prices to return where they stood before 1789.

Rubens and His Age
Rubens and His Age

Author: Art Gallery of Ontario

Publisher: London [England] : Merrell Publishers ; Toronto : Art Gallery of Ontario

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Rubens was the most important and creative Flemish artist of the seventeenth century, an era noted for the internationalism of its art. As political and cultural barriers fell, Rubens and his contemporaries, including Van Dyck and Brueghel, travelled throughout Europe, working for a wide variety of patrons that included the different European courts, the Church and the most prominent private collectors of the age. Catherine the Great of Russia sent advisers throughout Europe in search of the most prestigious art collections, with the result that the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg is filled with examples of paintings, drawings and the decorative arts from Antwerp, where Rubens and his circle formed a close-knit artistic community, the hub of a network of influence that spanned the Continent. Rubens and his Age presents the jewels of the Hermitage's collection, many of them never before published, including Rubens's monumental allegory The Union of Earth and Water, as well as a remarkable selection of objets d'art, some of which were either owned, designed or commissioned by Rubens himself. This book represents an unprecedented opportunity to explore one of the world's finest collections of European art.