Private Collecting, Exhibitions, and the Shaping of Art History in London. The Burlington Fine Arts Club

Abstract

This valuable book deals with a familiar topic, though one little known in detail, the Burlington Fine Arts Club (bfac), a Mayfair club dedicated to sharing and promoting interest in a wide variety of collecting activities, from European prints to Oriental ceramics to indigenous and primitive art. Those interests were demonstrated in numerous loan exhibitions between 1867 and 1938. The primary audience was the membership of the bfac itself, but the public was also admitted. Records show that as many as 12,000 attended the exhibition of portrait miniatures in 1889–90, but that prints by Sebald and Bartel Behan drew only 196 visitors in 1877–8. Pierson adopts the term ‘active connoisseurship’ to describe the Club’s quasi-public role. The exhibitions tended to be thematic – for example ‘Oriental porcelain’ (1869) or ‘Gothic art in Europe c.1200–c.1500’ (1935–6) – rather than monographic. The exhibitions derived from the wealth and variety of privately-held material that was available for loan, primarily from Club members. Pierson discusses the ways in which objects of diverse types were treated as works of art, bolstering the aesthetic treatment of primitive work that was increasingly being taken up by contemporary artists and theorists such as Roger Fry, an important figure in the bfac as member, lender and critic. Exhibitions such as ‘Art of primitive peoples’ (1935), it is now possible to see, were ground-breaking, discipline-shaping events.