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The History of Collecting Old Masters
By Constantine Lindsay
To write a true history of the collecting of old masters would mean examining the history of every surviving painting and ordering it into a colossal story. It has been possible to do this for a restricted number of well-known old masters whose surviving works are limited in number. From these individual studies certain trends emerge but these are misleading in a general sense as the chosen artists tend to be the exceptional ones.
Today's collections
The present day distribution of Old Masters world-wide is inevitably the product of history, and by looking at the existing collections and the way they were formed we get a broad but accurate indication of the general sweep of collecting since the Renaissance. Most people take for granted that the great collections of Old Masters, as we now know them, are, by their very essence static. Nothing could be further from the truth as there is a constant state of flux in many collections. The cause of this in recent times is most often administrative rather than dynastic or political as was more common in the past.
The collection of Old Masters (and now by extension nineteenth-century paintings) fall into a series of definable categories, each with their own specific characteristics and histories. Analysis of these categories, and how such collections were brought together, summarises the history of collecting far more succinctly than the alternative approach by strict chronology
National collections
The very words National Gallery, National Museum, Rijksmuseum, Galleria Nazionale, Staatliche Gemäldegalerie, etc. conjure up ideas of a cultural monolith which enshrines the cultural values of the nation it represents. Thus the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is the Valhalla of Dutch art even though the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam is the richer in non-Dutch painting.
The concept of the nation state is nineteenth-century and almost all national galleries today date from this period (with obvious exemptions such as the USA and Australia, whose national galleries were founded in the twentieth century). Even though nationalism was the inspiration for all these foundations, the premise on which they were created was different in almost every instance.
The most obvious form was the confiscation of an existing and usually royal collection. The two largest collections of Old Master paintings in existence - the Louvre in Paris and the Hermitage in St Petersburg - owe their existence to this process. The Louvre became public property as a result of the French Revolution, while at the same time the collection at the Royal Palace at Versailles was dispersed. The Hermitage, too, was a result of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and its aftermath. So the two most significant revolutions of modern times resulted in these two arguably, greatest royal collections of all time becoming available to the public, and at the same time becoming national collections symbolic of the nation state.
Both these collections owed their pre-eminence to a remarkably small number of individuals. For the Louvre two kings stand out, François I and Louis XIV, and for the cedilla Hermitage, Catherine the Great. These three figures, always seen for their role in history rather than as collectors, live on in their collections - the Mona Lisa, the Virgin of the Rocks and the Madonna Litta , to name three of Leonard da Vinci's most celebrated pictures.
Unlike the Hermitage, the Louvre has continued to grow as a national institution and the number of acquisitions in the twentieth century, although numerically small in relation to the existing collections, has allowed the Louvre to consolidate its pre-eminence as, arguably, the greatest gallery of them all.
Other marginally lesser examples of royal or imperial collections to become national are the Imperial Hapsburgs in Vienna (the Kunsthistorishes Museum), the Spanish Royal Collections (the Prado, in Madrid), the Medici (the Uffizi and Pitti Galleries, in Florence), and less well known the Princely, Ducal and Electoral Galleries of the former German states (Hesse-Kassel, Baden-Würtenburg, etc.).
A further category of the national collection is those countries who set out to buy or acquire a national collection where none could be confiscated. The newly united German states after 1870 were particularly successful at this, as was the United Kingdom in the 1850s and 1860s, followed by Ireland. The United States did not begin until 1936 but Washington remains one of the most truly delightful of all national collections, chiefly because it was the product of a small group of individual collectors rather than being acquired ad hoc over a long period. The National Gallery in London, now considered to be the best-balanced of all the national galleries has been built up slowly over a period of 174 years. Yet a surprising number of the masterpieces were acquired through the efforts of individual directors such as Sir Charles Eastlake in the nineteenth century and Neil McGregor in the twentieth century.
National collections often have a specific flavour quite unlike other collections in the same country. This is usually caused by the idea of the nation state, a nineteenth-century notion which was cultural as well as political. Thus in the nineteenth century the Louvre acquired large numbers of, then contemporary, French pictures in order to demonstrate the progress of French painters, even though Impressionism was excluded. In the early twentieth century, the French founded the Museé National d'Art Moderne but it never occurred to them to buy anything which was not French. Thus Whistler's Mother had alone to represent non-French art as French nationalism could not cope with the importation of 'foreign' art. Almost all other European countries suffered from this but usually to a lesser extent. Sometimes national neglect led to other institutions in the same country compensating for the glaring gaps in the national collection.
A good country in which to observe this is the Netherlands. The premier national museum for paintings is the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which has a comprehensive collection of Dutch art until the end of the nineteenth century with the exception of Van Gogh, whose paintings are housed separately in a nearby museum. The core of this collection, including masterpieces by Rembrandt and Vermeer still belong to the city of Amsterdam and are only placed in the Rijksmuseum (albeit since the founding in the 1880s).
It is hardly surprising therefore that the Rijksmuseum has paid scant attention to the other European schools although there are a few outstanding examples by artists as wide-ranging as Lorenzo Monaco and Goya. Yet taken as a whole, and considering its small size, the Netherlands is astonishingly rich in Italian, French and, to a lesser extent, Flemish painting. The glaring gaps in the Rijksmuseum are filled in the other Dutch Collections, and, owing to the small size of the country are easily accessible. Most of these collections of non-Dutch works have come from individual collectors, mostly in the twentieth century. Taken as a whole therefore Dutch collections are surprisingly well balanced for the main European schools, even though it appears to be the result of collectors building up in areas known to be weak in the national collection itself.
The United Kingdom, always the exception in the history of collecting, worked in reverse of the other countries. At the end of the nineteenth century it was decided that the National Trust was not happy in the National Gallery and a new gallery was created - the Tate. This meant that the National Gallery was happy to lose all its British art, including the Turner Bequest, and only retained a token representation of artists, such as Gainsborough, Reynolds, Constable and Turner (3 works).
The immediate effect of this was to distort the national collection to a gross degree, especially as in its early years the Tate did not have the funds or the status to compete. This unfortunate state of affairs was concurrently being partly compensated by the fact that the rich cities of the Industrial Revolution in the Midlands, the north and Glasgow in Scotland were consolidating their collections of nineteenth-century British art (see below). The United Kingdom was also unusual in preserving its Royal Collection. Apart from the Louvre already mentioned, the Prado in Madrid, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Kunsthistorishes in Vienna all fall into this category. The exception is Italy which did not become a nation state until 1860 and thus kept all its original individual ducal and royal collections in situ, hence the staggering richness of many now relatively small Italian towns, once capital cities in their own right. Florence and Venice stand out but former capitals such as Mantua, Modena and Parma owe their artistic richness to their former status as capitals.
Historic collections
These collections, briefly referred to above, form the core of the European artistic heritage and they exist in a surprising number of places all over Europe with the exception of France, whose revolution of 1789 resulted in complete dispersal (see below under Municipal Collections for the special position of France).
The best country in which to study historic collections is present-day Germany, as until 1789 it was split into more than three hundred individual states, many of whom had elaborate courts and palaces. A surprising number of these rulers collected art and an equally surprising number of them survived the vicissitudes of eighteenth-and twentieth-century wars (in the nineteenth century Germany was more usually the occupying power).
If the Electoral Gallery at Dresden is well enough known the rest are not. Few people have heard of the Dukes of Meckelnburg-Strelitz (although one of the line is better known as Queen Charlotte, consort of George III). The ducal gallery at Schwerin contains outstanding Dutch pictures and a Gainsborough of Queen Charlotte as well. There are many superb picture collections of the type all over Germany and among the best are those of the Dukes of Brunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (Brunswick) the landgraves (later Electors) of Hesse-Kassel (Kassel) and most spectacular of all the Electors (later Kings) of Bavaria at Munich, whose glorious Pinakothek is the finest purely Old Master collection in Germany.
No other country in Europe can begin to match this German heritage but Italy provides a number of these collections such as the Galleria Estense at Modena with its Velazquez and, most extensively, Naples where there was a long tradition of collecting.
What sets these collections apart is that they were de facto state property - some rulers disposed of the treasures (the Duke of Mantua sold to Charles I of England) but in most cases each successive ruler inherited the art collection as one of the appurtenances of power. As a result these collections are especially atmospheric in terms of the history of taste.
Two of these collections have remained private entities, the Papal Collection at the Vatican and British Royal Collection. Both are difficult to take in as a historic entity, although for the intrepid, it is possible to see most of the major pieces in both of them. The Papal Collection in its present form was largely put together during the Renaissance when the art itself was new. Relatively little was added later.
The British Royal Collection is altogether a more complex story. The great collection formed by Charles I was dispersed under the Commonwealth and the restored monarchy remained impecunious compared with its European counterparts. Not until George III was collecting begun in earnest and this was continued by his profligate but discerning son George IV, especially during his time as Prince Regent.
Prince Albert added a small group of Renaissance pictures for his study at Osborne House (Isle of Wight), (these pictures are now mostly at Hampton Court or are on loan to the National Gallery in London), but the collection was virtually doubled in size by Queen Victoria. This activity by the generous-hearted patron (she seems to have enjoyed the company of artists) unbalanced the collection making it top the statistical table for the United Kingdom in various quite unexpected areas. The Queen's abiding interest in India after Disraeli made her Empress (although she never went there) meant that she collected numerous portraits of her Indian subjects. She commissioned likenesses of all her relatives and descendants thus making the Royal Collection the largest collection of portraits of Germans by Germans outside Germany.
Taken as a whole these historic collections form the backbone of Germany's art galleries, play a significant part in the Italian heritage and occur in isolated but significant examples elsewhere, such as Sibia in Romania or Estzergom in Hungary.
The municipal collections
This forms by far the largest group numerically and contains a significant proportion of the surviving Old Masters, and because of the United States of America, Impressionism.
If Impressionism is included then the municipal category has in it two world class collections - the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Art Institute in Chicago. Such great institutions are the apex of a tradition which began in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. Quite often these municipal collections were of modest origins and were more often cabinets of curiosities rather than art galleries in their own right, indeed, it is in the United States that municipal collections have the highest profile although many of them draw on extensive private funds and endowments. Their European counterparts are almost always less fortunate, but this varies from country to country.
The largest assemblage of municipal museums is in France, directly as a result of the Revolution of 1789. Many of the paintings confiscated from aristocrats and removed from churches were collected together and redistributed to a whole group of new institutions founded for the purpose in every major town in France except Paris, which in any event had the Louvre once the monarchy had been expelled. These major collections were created in towns as far apart is Lille, Montpellier, and Rennes and Grenoble - to mention a few but in this context special mention should be made of Tours, Caen, Dijon, Toulouse and Amiens. These collections were further enriched by state deposits from the Napoleonic era of looting from conquered European states. When the French were required to return their booty as a result of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, many of these deposited pictures, then considered to be of lesser merit, were left where they had been sent. Thus the Duke of Brunswick's Cornelis van Haarlem remains at Toulouse and pieces of Perugino's Perugia altarpiece are at Toulouse and Marseilles. This also explains the presence of the Montegnas at Tours.
Many of these French towns were also the recipients of the bulk private collections good and bad, large and small which make the French municipal collections the richest and most varied. By this method Aix en Provence, Montpelier, Lille and Quimper benefited especially, although there were few of the several hundred municipalities in France who received no gift or bequest. From the beginning of the World War I onward these museums settled into a long period of neglect. Some like Lille or Saint-Quentin were bombed or looted and in World War II whole museum collections were lost at Calais and Douai (the latter has since been reconstructed with great success). Only in the last decade have French municipal museums seen a revival, holding pioneering exhibitions and making judicious additions to their collections.
In other countries the position of the municipal museums and their collections is far less consistent than in France and they often reflect the particular history of the town or city. France specialises in collections devoted to one artist, often given on bequeath by the artists themselves. The Musée Bonnat, Bayonne, the Musée Henner in Paris, the Musée Toulouse Lautrec at Albi are perhaps the best known. Other countries have their share of these although they are often little known. Belgium has the Musée Wientz in Brussels, Sweden the Anders Zorn Museum at Mora and the Netherlands the Museum Ary Scheffer at Dordrecht (later incorporated into the Dordrecht Museum).
It is in the low countries and the United Kingdom however, that local art has so often been built and enhanced. The most beautiful of them all is the Museum Groeninge at Bruges but local art is beautifully represented in the Fries Museum, Leeuwaarden, the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, and the Central Museum at Albrecht. The United Kingdom has a few of these collections altogether less well known. The best are Christ Church Mansion at Ipswich for Suffolk artists (Gainsborough and Constable) the Castle Museum at Norwich for the Norwich School and the Joseph Wright Collection at Derby.
Taken as a whole, however, the municipal collections of the United Kingdom present a polyglot mixture. Many of them owe their main strengths in the Old Masters to specific gifts and bequests, especially Liverpool, Manchester and York. Others have been built up by careful purchase from municipal bequest funds. In this way Leicester, Hull and Southampton have acquired modest but stimulating collections. Not one of these institutions, however, can begin to rival what has been achieved in the USA. The municipal museums there (apart from New York and Chicago, already mentioned), are unrivalled. Seen in European terms their collections may not be large but in almost all of them there is an overriding sense of quality. The best of these are Minneapolis, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Kansas City, St Louis, San Francisco, Cleveland, Toledo and Cincinnati. It is astonishing to think that these collections were so often built up as a result of a consistent purchasing policy and only rarely were they dominated by a single gift or bequest. This domination from a limited number of benefactors of a few high quality pictures is more often seen in the smaller municipal institutions, and it often gives them the edge over their British counterparts.
What is, consistent in these collections is that the accumulated masterpieces are almost always (with the exemption of Impressionism in American collections) in single examples. This forms a stark contrast to the vast accumulation of the works of single artists in the national and historic collection. In many of these collections the groups are often of more than twenty or thirty examples, Goya and Velazquez in the Prado, Poussin and Corot in the Louvre, Rembrandt in the Rijksmuseum and the Hermitage, Rubens in the Pinakothek in Munich. These accumulations of large numbers of works by one artist are indeed the norm in these institutions thus making them curiously unbalanced, which, for the dedicated art lover, is never to their detriment as it is always enlightening to see a group of pictures by one artist displayed together.
Taken as a group worldwide almost every great artist is represented by an odd example in one or other municipal institution.
This exercise takes on something of an intellectual game but even artists whose work is rare will be found in these institutions
- Pieter Brueghel (Detroit)
- Vermeer of Delft (Frankfurt)
- Georges de la Tour (Leicester)
- Caravaggio (Hertford, Connecticut and Kansas City)
- Van Eyck (Antwerp)
are good examples of this phenomenon. However, there is also a list of equally rare artists whose work is never found in these institutions. This includes most of the great names of the Early Italian Renaissance: Giotto, Fra Angelico, Masaccio, Paolo Uccello, and Piero della Francesca spring to mind. Yet pictures attributed to these masters, but not quite up to scratch are found in that usual repository - the French provincial museum. A near miss Angelico is at Cherbourg, Van Eyck at Montauban, Correggio at Strasbourg, Masaccio/Ucello at Chambery. This underlines the depth of those French collections round which a very nearly complete history of art could be written. The same could not be said of any other country.
The university collections
Universities collected by the very nature of their function in the middle ages but did not come to collecting pictures until relatively late in their histories. At the present time the university collections of the United Kingdom and the USA form a significant group far more important than is usually realised.
Considering the antiquity of many continental European universities it is surprising that their collections are so meagre. An exception is the Musée Atger at the University of Montpellier, which houses a collection of old master drawings.
The Dutch universities, largely founded in the sixteenth century, collected portraits of both their staff and well known figures of the time. The largest and most interesting of these is that of the University of Leiden even though relatively few of the pictures have artistic merit. The seventeenth century professors did not choose Rembrandt to portray their likenesses although a member of staff of the sadly defunct University of Franeker in Friesland sat to Frans Hals. A number of these university portraits are preserved in the Stedelijkmuseum 't Dr. Coopmanstiûs at Franeker where they act as striking testimony to the fact that the Dutch portrait artists we revere now were exceptional in their own times.
The doyen of university art collections is arguably the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Founded by Elias Ashmole in 1689 it is rightly considered to be the oldest museum in the western world. However, paintings formed a very minor part of the collection until the middle of the nineteenth century. Even today the Ashmolean's paintings cannot rival the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. This institution was founded in 1816 with a major bequest and the collection continued to expand throughout the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, with gifts and bequests of whole collections of paintings. What is often overlooked is that Christ Church in Oxford received the bequest of General Gaise in 1765 to which further pictures were added from other testators and donors in the early nineteenth century. Today, although the collection contains works by Annibale Carracci, Salvator Rosa and an extensive collection of relatively minor (but still beautiful) early Italian panel paintings, the collection appears modest enough. Other United Kingdom universities have art collections, many of them minor or very specialised such as those at Hull and Leeds (both twentieth-century British). The exception is the Hunterian at the University of Glasgow, also founded in the eighteenth century with outstanding works by Chardin and Stubbs. This collection, too, attracted later gifts and bequests including the large collection of works by Whistler.
Although very little is now added, it is the university collections of the USA which act as a model. Only one collection of this type exists in the United Kingdom - the Barber Institute at Birmingham. The collection there is still surprisingly small but is so well chosen that it surveys the whole history of European painting to the end of the nineteenth century.
The list of good American university collections is a long one and they have many characteristics in common. They were most usually built up by purchase with a modest endowment fund. This meant that the curators tended to choose pictures of academic interest or artists less expensive because their work was temporarily out of fashion. Thus the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin, Ohio, could afford its great Ter Brugghen of St. Sebastian or Providence, Rhode Island its Poussin. Some of these university collections are specialised, for example, the Spanish Collection in the Meadows Museum at Dallas, Texas, or are completely wide-ranging as at Rochester, New York, or Princeton, New Jersey.
The two finest of these collections belong respectively to Yale and Harvard. Yale is more heavily weighted towards the early Italians with its celebrated Jarvas Collection. Harvard's collection in the Fogg Art Museum is more wide ranging and has some masterpieces interspersed with much larger groups of pictures of the greatest academic importance and interest. In quality terms the Fogg has a slight bias towards French art (Ingres and Impressionism) and at the same time has a few British Victorians - a rarity in the USA.
Taken as a whole these collections have fewer outright masterpieces than might be expected given their number. At the same time they allow the student of art history continuous access to 'problem' pictures of all schools and periods, and in any event there is no shortage of outstanding works of art in most of the big city collections in the USA.
Private collections
These are by far the best-loved of all collections. The reason for this is that they have usually, but not always, preserved the ambience of the time in which they were collected. Most of them have never been subject to museological ordering, indeed one, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, specifically forbids the curators to move anything from the place where Mrs. Gardner put it.
Almost every European country as well as the USA has one or more of these collections and in many cases they remain as secret places only visited by serious art-lovers. Often their opening hours are quirky or Byzantine in their complexity.
The country with an abundant supply of those 'secret' collections is inevitably France. They are usually quite small and are often in cities where the larger museum takes the limelight. Thus, Marseilles has its Musée Grobet-Labadié, Toulouse its Musée Paul Dupuy, Dijon its Musée Magnin (a very large collection of pictures). Paris is full of such collections, the Musée Cognac-Jay, the Musée Missim de Cummondo, and most beautiful of all, with its Paolo Uccello and its Rembrandts, the Musée Jacquemart-André. The finest of these collections in France is the Musée Condé at Chantilly where the collector, the duc d'Aumale, a younger son of King Louis Philippe, amassed a vast collection of paintings with a higher than usual proportion of outright masterpieces. These range from Piero di Cosimo, through Raphael, Poussin and Watteau to Ingres.
Italy is not quite so lucky in this type of collection, although the Museo Poldi Rezzoli in Milan is high on the list of small institutions for many people. Venice has several such collections including the Museo Correr and the Pinacoteca Querini-Stampaglia. Madrid has its Museo Lazzaro Galdiáno, an eclectic but delightful collection where masterpieces jostle with dubious works. Belgium has the Museum Ridder Smidt van Gelder and the Museum Mayer van den Bergh, both in Antwerp. Nevertheless some of the very best museums of this type are in the English-speaking world. By far the largest and the most distinguished is the Wallace Collection in London, with its incredible holdings of the Dutch seventeenth-and French eighteenth-century, as well as superb representation of many other areas of painting. Like Paris, London has other collections in this category ranging from the small but near perfect collection at Kenwood, to the extensive collection of Old Masters at Dulwich.
The finest of these private collections in the USA is the Frick in New York, but a number of others can often be overlooked such as the Taft Museum in Cincinnati or the Crocker Gallery in Sacramento, California. Not all of these American collections keep to the standards of the Frick or the Huntington at San Marino, California, but they are all interesting in the history of taste. Sometimes they contain a higher proportion than is desirable of dubious works, or contain significant groups of works in one area such as the nineteenth-century European paintings in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore.
The United Kingdom has two exceptional examples of a private collector buying with the intention of creating a personal museum. Both collectors John and Josephine Bowes in the nineteenth century and Sir William Burrell in the twentieth-century, made paintings numerically a small part of their collections. Neither collector had the history of art in mind - they were opportunists spending relatively little on each object so they could acquire more for their money. Burrell had a surer eye than the Bowes and there are fewer 'mistakes' in the pictures he selected. Nevertheless, seen as a group Burrell's pictures do not match the overall quality of the applied arts.
The same is true of the Bowes when seen overall, but John Bowes was the quirky one of the couple acquiring masterpieces by Goya, Sassetta, Tiepolo and El Greco. His wife was more conventional and she acquired several hundred French nineteenth-century paintings which make it one of the largest collections of its type outside France.
Without these special, personal and always fascinating collections, any country would be the poorer. They are the despair of the museum officials who run them as they never fit the idea of modern museological classification. For the art lover, however, it is in these collections that we can be closest to the wonder and the mystery of the past.
Private collections still private
For the Old Masters there are still rather more of these than the casual traveller might imagine. Some, such as that of Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, have been leased into the public sector (in Madrid). Others have been open to the public for so long such as the Galleria Doria-Pamphilj, that it can be forgotten that they are still private. None of these collections remain in the USA and the likely reason for this is that American tax-law has always encouraged donation into the public sector - hence the survival of so many US collections subsumed into the great municipal collections all over the USA. The best example is the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
The Doria-Pamphilj collection is unusual in an Italian context on account of its scale and holdings of high quality such as Raphael, Caravaggio and Velazquez. Most other European countries have an example although the scale varies, from the Six Collection in Amsterdam with its celebrated Rembrandt Portrait of Jan Six to the extensive collection of less well-known old masters in the Rococo Palace at Pommersfelden (Graf von Schönborn). In Germany too there is the extensive but uneven collection of the Princes of Salm Salm at Anholt, which contains fine Rembrandt's.
In France the Rothschilds have retained some outstanding pictures dispersed in their various châteaux and town houses but little or nothing is left of the great Belgian collection such as that of the Prince Mérode.
Again it is Britain where the largest number of such collections is to be found. Some remain completely closed even to scholars. This usually affects the private apartments of houses already open to the public.
Most of these private collections are now in the hands of trustees and this is so at Chatsworth and Burghley. Other collections continue to sell on a regular basis (Castle Howard and Althorp are premier examples) with the result that the attractions of the house transfer to other areas as the paintings form less and less significant parts of the whole collection. In spite of these gradual dispersals the contents of the privately owned country houses of the United Kingdom could, if placed under one roof, form a great gallery (the same could be said of the National Trust whose combined holdings are prodigious, but they are scattered over some two hundred houses amongst which only a handful have truly distinguished picture collections. For the record the main ones are Petworth, Sussex, Polesden, Surrey, Waddesden, Buckinghamshire, and Upton, Warwickshire). This also true of the private collections where outstandings ones are Woburn (Bedfordshire), Corsham and Wilton (Wiltshire), Chatsworth (Derbyshire), Elton (Northamptonshire), Harewood (Yorkshire), and in Scotland the various Buccleuch houses. Most of these collections, had assumed their present form by the end of the eighteenth century.
They can sometimes be seen as reminders of far greater glories long since gone. Houghton went to the Hermitage in the eighteenth century and a series of spectacular sales throughout the second half of the nineteenth century disposed far more than is left remaining. The main ones were Stowe (Buckinghamshire), Blenheim Palace (Oxfordshire), Thirlestaine House (Cheltenham) and Hamilton Palace in Scotland. In all these cases the houses remain, their walls bereft of the old masters. But to be non-sentimental, it has to be remembered that these pictures are now incorporated into other collections great and small, worldwide. The pictures are not lost to posterity, merely redistributed. The sentimentalist will be far more disturbed in France where every châteaux is empty and the treasures are, one and all on the walls of the municipal museums where they look fine in their serried ranks but remain devoid of those subtle relationships which define the personal collection of a man or woman of taste.
Conclusion
The present-day collector of the art of the past is part of the continuum of history even though they sometimes imagine themselves as innovative and at the cutting edge of current fashion. The problem for the current collector is the limited availability of most categories of Old Masters and occasionally a collector will be forced to accept a lacklustre example of an artist's work because it is the only picture on the market. The adventurous collector will be more individual and seek out quality, but this will have to be in areas hitherto unexplored or currently completely out of fashion.
It is possible to place the formation of the great collections of the past into various quite distinct categories. The most obvious are those collectors who were patrons going directly to the artists and commissioning specific works. To this category belong some great figures of history - the Medici family in Florence, Philip IV of Spain (Velazquez), the infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, Regentess of The Netherlands (Rubens), the Militia Company in Amsterdam (Rembrandt).
Far more common were those figures in history who collected art when it had already become prestigious and expensive. To this category belong Charles I of England (excepting his patronage to Rubens and Van Dyck), Louis XIV of France, George III of England and Catherine the Great of Russia.
The next category is in some respects the most interesting one. This is the collector who follows his or her own way, sometimes making the reputation of a particular artist more prestigious by the very fact of their collecting. For some bargain hunting led into murky waters as the reserve sections of many a prestigious collection bear witness. Quite often when a writer or critic has revived the reputation of a particular painter it is because they have seen the paintings on the walls of discerning collectors. Thevé-Burger responded in this way to Vermeer of Delft in the 1860s.
As the twenty first century approaches, nineteenth-century paintings will suddenly become old masters and the enthusiastic collector can start the process all over again as there are still large numbers of paintings on the market and a surprising number of painters whose reputations have yet to be revived.