The Art Market and the Museum: Institutional Collecting, Display and Patronage Since the Mid-Nineteenth Century

This book considers how art market stakeholders, including art dealers, collectors and agents, have shaped museum collections and affected exhibition practices since the mid-nineteenth century. Based on new archival research and data analysis, it explores the role of dealers not only in selling directly to museums, but in influencing museum collecting priorities, as well as potential donors. It also examines the important but hitherto overlooked contribution of the female curator-agent.

The book is divided into three sections, which address the relationship between art dealers and museums, women as art agents and influencers, and the strategies of entrepreneurial collectors. Featuring contributions from a wide range of international specialists in the market for decorative arts and antiquities, as well as European modernism, The Art Market and the Museum explores the origins and development of the modern Western art market and the global art networks that operated not only in Paris, London and New York, but in cities such as Glasgow, Vienna, Melbourne and Kansas City. It is perfect reading for scholars and researchers on the history of the art market, museum studies and art history more broadly.

Frances Fowle is Emeritus Professor of Nineteenth-Century Art, University of Edinburgh, UK. For over twenty years she was Senior Curator of French Art, National Galleries of Scotland, UK. She is a co-founder/ex-board member of TIAMSA.Her previous publications include Van Gogh’s Twin: The Scottish Art Dealer Alexander Reid (2010) and Globalising Impressionism: Reception, Translation and Transnationalism (2020).

MaryKate Cleary is Curator of Provenance at the Princeton University Art Museum, USA. She specialises in provenance research, the history of the art market, and legal and ethical issues of cultural heritage. She was previously Lecturer at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London; Collections Specialist at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Manager of Historic Claims and Provenance Research at the Art Loss Register.