Abstract
Critic F. G. Stephens’s 100+ Athenaeum series, “The Private Collections of England” (1873-1887), propelled collectors into national culture heroes. Stephens detailed these collections’ expanded geography in England’s industrial north, turning local art collecting into a national, unifying force, a transformation through his series. These collectors ranged from aristocrats to middle-class industrialists, merchants and bankers, socially networked with artists and with each other, often in complementary industries. Stephens, a former co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, wrote for forty years at the Athenaeum from 1860 as art critic and later art editor, writing about 475 reviews. Covering two generations of collectors, especially from England’s industrial North, Stephens’ essays benefitted from new forces in Victorian visual culture: the press, art critics, philanthropic collectors, museums and their emerging public role, celebrity culture, and the growing status of visual cultural capital. Stephens expanded the public image of collectors into a cultural role as sustainers of British culture by their collecting and canonizing contemporary British artists. Stephens’ series on collectors appeared at a time when collectors were being seen as cultural heroes throughout Europe and the US, praised for sustaining living artists whose works they collected and building a national visual culture, since most of them gave their collections to public museums, thus shaping public taste. Complementing collectors’ rising profile were a slew of new British art histories emphasizing nationalism in books and the press, as London was becoming a center of an international art market.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2024 Special Focus—-Art for Sustenance
KEYWORDS
Collectors, Nationalism, Serialization, Networks, Sustenance, Art Market
