Center for the History of Collecting in America 2007 Symposium

Turning Points in Old Master Collecting, 1830-1940
Saturday, May 19, 2007

The cause for a shift in artistic taste or a realignment of collecting patterns at times may seem untraceable. As one generation of collectors placed a premium on Italian primitives of the Quattrocento, another favored British portraiture, while yet a third focused on the work of contemporary artists. This symposium identified turning points in Old Master collecting during the so-called long nineteenth century and explored the socioeconomic circumstances that made these shifts all but inevitable.

The Center for the History of Collecting in America was established to stimulate awareness and study of the formation of fine- and decorative-arts collections, from Colonial times to the present, while asserting the relevance of this subject to art and cultural history. The Center's public programs provide a forum for thoughtful exchange that may expand and further stimulate scholarship in this discipline.

Program

	Welcome and Opening Remarks Anne L. Poulet, Director, The Frick Collection Inge Reist, Director, Center for the History of Collecting in America
	Keynote Address — Beyond Biography: Art Collecting as Social Experience Neil Harris, Preston and Sterling Morton Professor of History and of Art History, University of Chicago
	False Dawn: Pioneering American Collectors of Old Master Art Christine I. Oaklander, Art Coordinator, Lehigh Valley Hospital and Health Corporation, and Independent Scholar
	The "Sphinx of Delft" in New York: The Vermeer Purchases of Henry Marquand, Henry Clay Frick, and Their Contemporaries Esmée Quodbach, Research Assistant in the Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
	"I was to have all of the finest." Henry Clay Frick, Jack Morgan, Joseph Duveen, and the Dispersal of the Morgan Collection Flaminia Gennari Santori, Sylvan C. Coleman and Pamela Coleman Memorial Fund Fellow, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
	Seen from afar. Collecting, Displaying, and Writing about British Art in America Malcolm Baker, Professor of Art History, University of Southern California, and Director of the USC-Getty Program in the History of Collecting and Display
	Panel Discussion followed by questions from the audience Neil Harris, Moderator

The symposium was made possible through the generosity of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

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