Monserrate Revisited. The Cook collection in Portugal

Abstract

While the Frick collection and the Wallace collection rank among the most outstanding of their kind, the nineteenth-century collection of European Old Masters of the English industrialist Francis Cook was considerably larger. If eclipsed today, this is due to the dispersal of the collection at auction in 1946. Fortunately, a project launched by the Portuguese state-owned company Parques de Sintra – Monte da Lua in 2006 to restore the building that housed a part of that vast collection has led to a drive to reacquire pieces that once belonged to Monserrate Palace on the wooded slopes of Sintra, between Lisbon and the sea. A six-month exhibition held there in 2017 to mark the bicentenary of the birth of Cook, accompanied by the publication of the lavishly illustrated work under review, revealed the progress that has been made in a decade as well as encouraging further research on the whereabouts of those pieces and the possibility of restoring them to their former place.