Regency Collectors: Buying and Displaying Old Masters in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain

The Regency was a period of crucial importance in the history of collecting Old Master paintings in England.

As the owners of aristocratic collections in France and Italy were forced by the political upheavals following the French Revolution to part with their inherited possessions, Old Masters arrived on the London art market in unprecedented quantity and quality. This book presents seven case studies of English collectors of the period, tracing how their collections were formed, and analysing the taste that guided them. Also discussed here are how these new owners displayed their acquisitions and how they sought to organise them into a new unity.

Peter Humfrey examines in detail seven notable Regency collectors - the 4th Earl Darnley, the 2nd Earl Grosvenor, Amabel de Grey, Sir Richard Colt Hoare, Philip John Miles, Samuel Rogers, and the 5th Earl Cowper. All were of course from the upper ranks of society. They nevertheless show, as well as many other similarities, several telling differences. They were from both the higher and lesser nobility, and the gentry; they acquired their fortunes (and collections) through inheritance, but also made them anew; predictably, most of the collectors were men, but one to be discussed here was a woman; some chose to house their collections in central London, but others at their seats in the country; and within the parameters of fashionable taste, the seven show rather different priorities in their choices of schools, scale, and subject matter. No doubt, too, the collectors selected here were motivated by different considerations, and fashion, financial investment, and political and social self-promotion - in addition, presumably, to aesthetic pleasure - must all have played a part.

For each case study an Appendix lists the paintings they acquired. Together the appendices may serve to give a general idea of the prevailing taste among collectors during the Regency period. Among the Italian paintings, the Carracci and their Bolognese followers (Domenichino, Albani, Guido Reni, Guercino) feature prominently. Other highly sought-after Old Masters included Poussin, Claude and Dughet, and no less attractive to the Romantic generation were the contrastingly wild landscapes of Salvator Rosa.

Published by Paul Holberton Publishing

Peter Humfrey is Emeritus Professor of Art History, University of St Andrews, where he taught from 1977 to 2012. His many books and articles on Venetian Renaissance art include The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice (Yale UP, 1993) and the exhibition catalogue, Vittore Carpaccio (2002). More relevantly to the present book, he edited the volume The Reception of Titian in Britain from Reynolds to Ruskin (Brepols, 2013), and he is the author of The Stafford Gallery: The Greatest Art Collection of Regency London (Unicorn, 2019).