From guidebook to guest book

Abstract

Abstract At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Netherlands was rightly considered ‘the land of collections’. By the end of the century, a new museum culture had emerged, altering for ever both the role and the relevance of private art collections. This essay collects data from two sources – contemporary travel guides and the guest books of the Six collection in Amsterdam – to understand how public access to private collections worked; to determine the social composition of the private art collection visiting public; and to illustrate how that public changed over the course of the nineteenth century.