Women Collectors and Cultural Philanthropy, <i>c</i>. 1850–1920

Abstract

This introduction examines the richness within, but also some of the interpretive and evidential challenges intrinsic to, the study of nineteenth-century female collectors. It offers a synthetic overview of some of the central issues within scholarship related to the perceived absence and silence of women collectors within the historical record, as well as illuminating the distorting effects of gendered assumptions about the history of taste and consumption. Mapping the period from roughly 1850 to 1920, the article places developments in Victorian Britain in a wider transnational framework through allusions to parallel developments in France and the United States: many of the women featured within this issue of <i>19</i> were cosmopolitans whose cross-border lives have been neglected within institutional histories. The introduction underlines not simply the growing claims of women as collectors within the home, but also considers the public ramifications of female collecting, through the connections with debates around education, public museums, and the national heritage. The introduction closes by sketching the different contributions to the issue and underlining some recurrent thematic preoccupations.<br>