The amateur and the public sphere

Abstract

In nineteenth-century Belgium, private collections were visited by an interested local and international public; they formed popular topics in travel literature. Travellers such as Johanna Schopenhauer even characterized Belgium as the ‘country of private collectors’, suggesting that collectors were important actors in the public sphere. How precisely was their position perceived in the Belgian cities, and how was it communicated beyond the country’s borders? Based on the analysis of contemporary travel literature, this article aims to explore the public life of private collectors in the artistic centres of Brussels, Antwerp and Ghent over the course of the nineteenth century. It argues that collectors played a prominent role in urban cultural life especially between 1780 and 1860, while major societal and cultural-political changes – mainly related to the growing importance and shifting function of public museums – resulted in the gradual withdrawal of private collectors from the public sphere later in the century.