Creating ‘a palace of art’

Abstract

Abstract Nineteenth-century art collecting in Britain is typically characterized as a rejection of the earlier aristocratic tradition of amassing Old Masters in favour of a bourgeois preference for more relevant contemporary paintings. Inspired by the intellectual ideal of ‘Bildung’, however, German-Jewish collectors settling in fin-de-siècle London brought with them an expectation of high cultural engagement with the most important masterworks of the European tradition. This paper’s reconstruction of the lost collection of Leopold and Mathilde Hirsch reveals a level of sophistication and personal involvement with the art market which dispels any suggestion that these were uncultured parvenus seeking to secure a place in high society by means of conspicuous consumption. It also requires us to distinguish between German-Jewish migrant collectors and their British contemporaries when describing the different models of collecting among those who shared a non-aristocratic family background.