Collecting Spanish Art: Spain's Golden Age and America's Gilded Age

Abstract

This is a rich collection of essays on Spanish art in America from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, published by the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Collection, New York (established in 2007) with the assistance of the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica in Madrid. Although comprising a range of contributions, there is a sense of a cohesive whole to this volume, which is conveniently divided into three sections: the formation of the American taste for Spain; great collectors of Spanish art in America (Isabella Stewart Gardner, Henry Clay Frick, Charles Deering, William Randolph Hearst, Archer Milton Huntington and Algur H. Meadows); and the evolution of taste for the great masters (Velázquez, Murillo and Goya). Some themes appear and reappear, for example the question of exporting works of art from Europe to the States, an aspect with which many today might feel uncomfortable. Richard Kagan quotes the dealer Arthur Byrne, writing in 1934 to Julia Morgan, ‘My only role in life is taking down old works of art, conserving them to the best of my ability and shipping them to America.’ Another (more positive) thread which we perceive again and again is the awakening of a taste for Spanish art, a renaissance of sensibilities, partly inspired by some of the collectors discussed here, and partly by nineteenth-century American writers such as Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and artists such as John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt.