Book contents
- The Purchase of the Past
- The Purchase of the Past
- Copyright page
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Amateurs and the Art Market in Transition (c.1780–1830)
- 2 Archiving and Envisioning the French Revolution (c.1780–1830)
- 3 Book Hunting, Bibliophilia and a Textual Restoration (c.1790–1840)
- 4 Salvaging the Gothic in Private and Public Spaces (c.1820–1870)
- 5 Royalists versus Vandals, and the Cult of the Old Regime (c.1860–1880)
- 6 Allies of the Republic?
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Allies of the Republic?
Inside the Sale of the Century (c.1870–1895)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2020
- The Purchase of the Past
- The Purchase of the Past
- Copyright page
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Amateurs and the Art Market in Transition (c.1780–1830)
- 2 Archiving and Envisioning the French Revolution (c.1780–1830)
- 3 Book Hunting, Bibliophilia and a Textual Restoration (c.1790–1840)
- 4 Salvaging the Gothic in Private and Public Spaces (c.1820–1870)
- 5 Royalists versus Vandals, and the Cult of the Old Regime (c.1860–1880)
- 6 Allies of the Republic?
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter is centred on what was widely seen as the sale of the nineteenth century- the 1893 dispersal of the Spitzer collections. Austrian-born Frédéric Spitzer in many ways was the inheritor of the salvage crusade begun in earlier generations, building up a brilliant array of medieval and Renaissance artefacts (including some faked and composite pieces created on his commission). This chapter explores the visibility of Spitzer in French print culture in order to interrogate the claims for private collectors as patriots, and the attempt by the Third Republic to make collectors into auxiliaries of national policy. The scandal surrounding his sale exposes the anxieties about the interplay of private interest and public institutions, the sensitivity about curators like Émile Molinier when they operated in the market, as well as the virulence of anti-Semitic hostility to Jewish dealers. Most pervasive was the wider fear that French heritage was increasingly snapped up and repatriated by foreign buyers, so that the 1893 sale could be alternately depicted as a triumph, a swindle or a defeat for French culture.
Keywords
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- The Purchase of the PastCollecting Culture in Post-Revolutionary Paris c.1790–1890, pp. 243 - 285Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020