Abstract
AbstractThis article explores the role of the auction in the formation and dispersal of collections of ancient art in late‐eighteenth‐ and early‐nineteenth‐century Britain. I demonstrate that competitive collecting, as well as the culture of acquiring and fragmenting collections at auction, had a profound effect on the way in which British buyers collected and displayed antiquities within their private collections. I argue that through an exploration of two textual sites, the auction and collection catalogue, we can observe that collectors carefully curated their collections, visually as well as textually, in order to craft specific narratives centred on the act of collecting at auctions, shaping and shifting the ways in which collectors understood and curated the art of antiquity.
Highlights
In Frances Burney’s 1782 novel Cecelia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, the eponymous heroine attends an auction for the liquidation of the estate of Lord and Lady Belgrade
In focusing on the sales of ancient art at auction in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, this article illuminates this underexplored trade in classical art through the auction saleroom.[4]
I assert that, through the auction, antiquities were intimately connected with the identities and biases of their former and new owners, changing the ways in which ancient art was viewed and interpreted in Britain, offering new perspectives on antiquities trade, collection formation and identity construction
Summary
In Frances Burney’s 1782 novel Cecelia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, the eponymous heroine attends an auction for the liquidation of the estate of Lord and Lady Belgrade. Applying a lens of competitive collecting and social interaction, this article makes a significant and original contribution to knowledge and understanding around the auction’s crucial role in the formation of art markets and value It draws from, but more importantly builds upon, the few studies devoted to the broader history of auctions.[5]. This became an even more crucial collecting space when, in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, travel to continental Europe was restricted and export more difficult Drawing on this scholarship, but using the auction as a lens, this article offers new interpretations of the role of competitive buying and social interactions between buyers and its effect on the acquisition and display of classical sculpture in this period. Soane’s home at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London preserves Soane’s vast collection of sculpture, casts, paintings, drawings, books and more as they were displayed upon his death in 1837
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