Volume 39, Number 3 · January 30, 1992
Only Collect
By Francis Haskell
Le Géant, La Licorne et La Tulipe: Collections françaises au XVII siècle
by Antoine Schnapper
Flammarion, 415 pp., fr255
Les Frères Goncourt: collectionneurs de dessins
by Elizabeth Launay
Arthena, 552 pp., fr680
J.P. Morgan: The Financier as Collector
by Louis Auchincloss
Abrams, 144 pp., $37.50
Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800
by Krzysztof Pomian
Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers, 348 pp., $44.95
Pricing the Priceless: Art, Artists, and Collectors
by William D. Grampp
Basic, 290 pp., $19.95
The Return of Cultural Treasures
by Jeanette Greenfield
Cambridge University Press, 361 pp., $44.50
The Ethics of Collecting Cultural Property: Whose Culture? Whose Property?
edited by Phyllis Mauch Messenger
University of New Mexico Press, 266 pp., $15.95 (paper)
Books and articles about collectors and collecting have now been popular for nearly a century and a half—the vogue seems to have started during the second Empire and to have gathered pace over the next few decades—but, with only a few exceptions, their contribution to history, and even to art history, has been negligible. This seems an ungrateful response to a literary genre that has provided generations of readers with unrivaled offerings of nostalgia, sycophancy, and amateur psychology—not to mention some very enjoyable anecdotes, and the often great importance of art collections themselves: but it would surely be hard to contest.
Review, 2684 words
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