Art Markets, Agents and Collectors: Collecting strategies in Europe and the United States, 1550–1950

Abstract

In the early modern and modern period, agents provided a bespoke service to Europeans forming their collections, as well as discreetly advising those who wished quietly to dispose of their works of art. For diplomats and artists, scouting for art was a way of supplementing income. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries such activity provided a means for many connoisseurs to earn a crust until such time as they could get a secure post in a museum or university. And yet there were clearly those for whom being an agent was a vocation rather than a side-hustle. As the great Italian connoisseur Giovanni Morelli acknowledged in a letter to his friend Otto Mündler in 1859, Mündler had more than enough ‘knowledge and talents’ to walk into any opening for a ‘gallery director, art historian or academy secretary’, but ‘knowing you as I do, you prefer an independent life as a painting speculator [Bilderspekulant]’.1 Like other intelligence agents, art agents have always had a free-wheeling glamour, right down to today’s art consultant jetting between Miami Beach and some Swiss freeport.