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In this essay we discuss two examples of the influence exerted by the advice of scholars from the United Kingdom on the shaping and management of Spanish collections – those at the Museo de Reproducciones Artísticas de Madrid and the Real Academia de la Historia. We take as the starting point for our study two letters sent by Juan Facundo Riaño to scholars from the UK, both of which provide valuable information on the international networks in operation at a time when some collections – including those dealt with here – were being created or expanded. The first of the letters was sent by Riaño to Austen Henry Layard in 1881; the second was addressed in 1895 to Archibald Henry Sayce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When private collectors amass collections of significant size, there often comes a point where disposition must be addressed. This article will explore the complex process of finding new homes for dress collections, using the case study of the Suddon-Cleaver collection and linking it to Walter Benjamin’s reflections on book collecting in the essay “Unpacking my Library.” Although the process of breaking up a collection is associated with negative connotations, this Canadian case study will show how the process can serve to optimize access and value, especially at a time when museum resources are limited and overstretched. Other examples of redistributed dress collections will be reviewed including the dispersal of the wardrobe of Georgian banker Thomas Coutts and the Brooklyn Museum dress collection transfer to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We argue that the process of finding multiple new homes should be viewed as a way of liberating the best pieces in the collection from the burden of items that are of low value or in poor condition. In carefully articulating the process of distributing the Suddon-Cleaver collection, this article outlines a process that may be adapted for similar dispersals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores fashion collecting and dress exhibitions in nineteenth-century France. The first three exhibitions of historic dress in France, which occurred in 1874, 1892, and 1900, raised a host of questions for French dress historians, collectors, and curators: they debated how historical dress should be displayed, what kind of garments should be collected, and what role fashion had in the narrative of French history. This article explores the “historical turn” in dress history, which formalized the practice of using historical garments and accessories as sources for the writing and display of history. It also examines how the shift from industrial to decorative arts spurred an interest in fashion collecting. Finally, it argues that the spectacularization of fashion display between 1874 and 1900 had an impact on the garments themselves, as collectors and curators began to alter garments in order to display them within imaginative settings. Rather than condemning these restorations, this article proposes that we view them as forms of historical imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the anthropological collecting habits and practices of the U.S. Exploring Expedition from 1838 to 1842, led by naval officer Charles Wilkes. Topics discussed include the mission of the expedition to map unchartered territories worldwide and collect cultural and natural specimens, officers and seamen's collection of cultural objects three times more than the scientific corps, and the anomaly of the collections from Niue or the Savage Islands.

This article examines the ways in which the processes of collecting, ordering and governing were imbricated both in the metropole and in the colony. Focused on the ethnographic missions carried out by the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (MET) and by the École Française d'Extrême Orient from 1900 to the 1930s, the paper explores the network of local collectors, the methodological protocols and standards, the collecting practices, and how objects were gathered in the field for displays at the MET in Paris and at the forthcoming ethnological museum at Dalat in French Indochina (what is now Vietnam). The article argues that the circulation of objects, and the information related to those objects, conceives both the metropole and the colony as sites for the production of ethnological knowledge. It also seeks to demonstrate that collecting practices entailed distinct government effects both in metropolitan France and in colonial Indochina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the fictional representations of objects in Richard Marsh's Curios: The Strange Adventures of Two Bachelors (1898), a collection of tales in which things come alive in many ways, calling for a more nuanced approach than that allowed by commodity criticism. Marsh's objects are in fact sites of intersection between issues of identity, professional expertise, and relations between individuals. In my essay, I focus on three main aspects, all deeply informed by the author's exploration of the importance of sensorial perception in human-thing relations: the issue of evidence, the assessment of value, and the concepts of ownership and circulation. My point is to demonstrate that Marsh's stories foreground a mixed attitude towards collectors, and deploy a way of representing objects that emphasises the uncanny power they can exert on humans, but also the wealth of imaginative and sensorial possibilities they offer. Although much stress is given to the elusiveness of specific objects, these tales also show an amused awareness that material things will always escape us, but this very quality is what makes them interesting and worth pursuing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hughenden Collection of Disraeli Papers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford comprises over 50,000 items relating to the life and work of Benjamin Disraeli and his family. This article tracks hair through the Hughenden Collection in order to explore the collecting habits of Mary Anne Disraeli. It argues that reading Mary Anne Disraeli's story through hair – both hair as object, held in an archive and hair as represented in archival text – reveals aspects of that story occluded by reading only those archival texts with self-evident documentary value. It thus makes the case for a holistic reading of the Disraeli archive, and Victorian collections of personal papers more generally, by taking Mary Anne Disraeli as its central case study. In so doing it also illuminates her story, and points to the necessity of reading the stories of forgotten women through archival silences and absences. Section I reviews recent scholarship on hair in nineteenth-century Britain in order to contextualize Mary Anne Disraeli's case. Section II anatomizes the Hughenden hair collection in order to illuminate Mary Anne's history, her impulses as a collector, and the extent to which her activities complicate scholarly narratives about the sentimental commodification of Victorian hair. Section III gestures towards recent work on the archive and material culture to tease out the consequences of her example for our reading of the archive and our understanding of the texture of Victorian ‘thing culture’ more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Together with the Revd Daniel Tyerman, George Bennet formed part of a deputation sent out in 1821 by the London Missionary Society with the aim of undertaking a global inspection of the state of the mission. This paper aims to map the collection that Bennet assembled in Central Polynesia during that journey and to ask what the parties involved in the collecting encounters understood to be embodied in the material forms that were collected. By paying attention to how the various agents involved in the collecting process played a role, the Bennet collection offers an appropriate case-study to query the view of missionary collecting as merely trophy collecting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The influence of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill is traced in the little-known collections created in the 1830s and early 1840s at Rosamond’s Bower by the writer and antiquary Thomas Crofton Croker (joint author of the Gooseberry Hall satire of the Strawberry Hill sale of 1842) and by Thomas Baylis and Lechmere Whitmore at The Pryor’s Bank, both at Fulham. They were active purchasers at the sale (particularly Baylis), and Walpole’s Description of Strawberry Hill is a continuing presence behind Croker’s accounts of both collections. Both houses were social spaces, presented for antiquarian display, and in the case of The Pryor’s Bank in particular that display was played out in entertainments and Dickensian amateur theatricals. An under-explored element in this combination of collecting, antiquarianism, and jocularity is the Noviomagian Society, an antiquarian dining club of which Croker was a founder and which has connections to both houses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The glass marine invertebrate models produced by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka represent the most accurate museum artefacts ever made to represent cnidarians, nudibranchs and radiolarians. University College Dublin, originally the Royal College of Science for Ireland, holds a collection of these models, acquired in 1885, some of which continue to be used as teaching aids to the present day, but many with the passing of time have been damaged. A project has been initiated to recover and restore the collection as it was initially constituted. The first stage of this project, presented here, has involved compiling an account of the history of this collection, the recovery of most of the specimens in varying states of disrepair from different repositories, and their registration. Several lists have been retrieved, spanning nearly 150 years, as well as the original invoice indicating that the original purchase, by Professor A. C. Haddon, comprised 139 models, of which 114 have been retrieved in the course of this study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The violence and vandalism of 1870-71 had a profound effect on stirring the conscience of private collectors in Paris. Taking their cue from the 1790s, they scrambled to safeguard the city's treasures, form new antiquarian associations, and indulge in forms of patriotic philanthropy. The 1870s and 1880s represent a crucial moment in the visibility of the rich collector, offering a new legitimating rhetoric for luxury consumption and marking a growing rapprochement between public service and private possessions. But under commercial pressures, these decades also witnessed a more chauvinist reaction, with fresh attempts to imagine social and ethnic restrictions on who was entitled to be a custodian of the French past. Focusing on the correspondence of bibliophile Baron Jérôme Pichon and on the memory palace of Léopold Double, this article seeks to retrieve an understanding of heritage and conservation radically distinct from the scientific and secular definitions elaborated by government agencies arising out of the French Revolution and the July Monarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Interest in the history of colonized areas has always been existent. For utilitarian purposes colonizers wanted to know more about the past of the areas they started to trade with and where they settled themselves. This article is confined to the use of the sources for the writing of history in the Dutch East Indies in the 19th century. On a limited scale and for diverse purposes, colonial civil servants, scholars and amateur historians started to investigate the history of the colony. This article scrutinizes whether in the 19th-century Dutch East Indies the European tendency to base history writing on a systematic use of archival sources became in vogue. This question, however, raises immediately some epistemological and practical problems that will be discussed in this article. Was there a similar European concept of archives in the Dutch East Indies? How were indigenous archival sources valued and used? What infrastructure was available to study historical archives? This explorative case study shows how historical interest within a 19th-century colony got stuck into an almost obsessive collecting of historical archives and other source material as a prerequisite for historical research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The nineteenth-century Swiss entomologist Henri de Saussure is probably better known today as the father of linguist Férdinand de Saussure than as a scientist in his own right. In this context, it is his personality rather than his work that has attracted attention, encouraged by the availability of letters and diaries in which he expresses himself openly on personal matters. This paper presents an overview of his life that includes analysis of his scientific contribution in order to give a more balanced assessment. Examination of his publications confirms his importance as a taxonomist, and shows interesting trends in his approach. He was also notable for his cultivation of a wide network of collaborators and for the way he used his status to enhance the collections of the Muséum d'histoire naturelle de Genève. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carl Gottfried Semper (1832-1893), German naturalist, produced one of the most influential monographs in the history of sea-cucumber systematics (Echinodermata: Holothuroidea). This work, based on one of the most extensive collections of his time, introduced nearly a hundred taxa new to science. Unfortunately, Semper's collection subsequently became increasingly fragmented, and many of his types soon became considered as lost. We trace the history of Semper's holothuroid collection and report the location of many of the purported missing types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the collection and circulation of scientific instruments in England during the 19th century. The author discusses the public display of instruments in 19th century England, scientific instruments as commodities and gifts, and private collections as a status symbol among English gentlemen. The article discusses the cultural significance of the organization known as the Royal Astronomical Society of London (RAS)

This article examines the purchase of skulls, bones and a few archaeological objects by George Rolleston (1829–81), Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Oxford, from Athanasios Rhousopoulos (1823–98), major collector, art dealer and Professor in the University of Athens. Numerous letters, hitherto unpublished, in the Rolleston archive in Oxford dated to 1871–4 give insights into the network, organization and operation of dealers in Greece at the time. The correspondence reveals the prices attracted by various objects, including antiquities and skeletal remains, providing also a means of assessing attitudes to the study and collection of ancient human remains around 1870. With this material it is possible to reconstruct the original assemblage of bones, skulls and antiquities sold by Rhousopoulos to Rolleston, now distributed among several museums in England. Online appendices provide respectively a catalogue of skulls and other material bought by Rolleston from Rhousopoulos and transcriptions and translations of their correspondence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article calls for a re-definition of eclectic décor as applied to the private interiors of nineteenth-century France. Previously, scholars of the nineteenth century have separated two forms of advice literature, one dedicated to women as house decorators and the other dedicated to men as collectors. By bringing them together, this essay argues that these private interiors, rather than being eclectic, as they might appear to an untrained eye, were, in fact, carefully orchestrated decorative ensembles guided by the rules of historic revivalism and themed décor, which attempted to create a collection of different times and places through interior decoration. The first part of this essay outlines the changes in the art market and the perception of the past in France in the first half of the nineteenth century, while the second part introduces collecting and interior decorating manuals from the second half of the century, written by both men and women alike. The essay concludes with an examination of the work of the furniture designer (architecte d’ameublement) Édouard Bajot (1853–1900s), in order to understand how the theoretical tenets put forth in writing by collecting and decorating advisors were given visual form. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the life of Scottish nobleman William Drummond Stewart, with a particular focus on his travels in the American West and on the western memorabilia which he collected at Murthly Castle, his ancestral home in Scotland. According to the author, Stewart saw parallels between Native American and ancient Scottish cultures and viewed his collection as reflective of his Scottish identity. Details on the history of Murthly Castle are also presented.

This article considers Goethe as both practitioner and theorist of the art of collecting. Drawing on biographical, historical, critical, and fictional sources, it explores how acquiring objects establishes a nexus of telling relationships among the object, the collector, the collection, other observers (real or fictitious), and between all of these and the external world. Producing at once a body of knowledge and a source of aesthetic contemplation, collecting figures prominently in Goethe's epistolary novella, Der Sammler und die Seinigen (1799), a rich exposition of collecting practices and their multiple meanings, and a text which can be seen obliquely to illuminate many of its author's later writings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines souvenirs collected by George M. Turner, a soldier who served in the Third Rhode Island Regiment of Heavy Artillery (Third RIHA) during the U.S. Civil War, and held in the collections of the Rhode Island Historical Society. According to the author, the collection reflects Turner's attempt to curate and memorialize his experience of the war. Details on several items in the collection, including a baby sock acquired by Turner during a raid on a Confederate camp, a fragment of a palmetto tree, and several fragments from cotton plants, are presented. The emotional significance of souvenir objects is also discussed.

El artículo discurre sobre Édouard Pingret, pintor que emigró de Francia a México a mediados del siglo 19. Los autores describen la vida de Pingret en México, incluyendo su colección de antigüedades de la cultura azteca. Describen el contenido de su colección, la cual incluye artefactos del periodo prehispánica y del periodo colonial. Se reproducen extractos de la correspondencia personal y documentos escritos por Pingret sobre su colección.

This essay examines the contributions of Mme Hortense Lacroix Cornu to national archaeological projects in France during the reign of Napoleon III (Emperor 1852-1870). Cornu, whose mother had been a lady-in-waiting to Queen Hortense, knew Louis-Napoleon from early childhood. During his reign, Napoleon III respected Cornu for her loyalty and scholarship, and they shared mutual interests in history and archaeology. He followed many of her recommendations at court: at her prodding, he appointed Alfred Maury, Léon Renier, Victor Duruy, and Ernest Renan to his administration. Although her support for archaeological undertakings has largely been overlooked due to the unofficial capacity in which she operated, Cornu played a central role in the purchase of the Campana Collection (1861), the foundation of the shortlived Musée Napoléon III (1862), and the creation of the Musée de Saint-Germain (1862). While Napoleon III had long supported Gallo-Roman archaeology, Cornu's timely interventions ensured the allocation of sufficient resources to these institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents a group of photographs and other images, most of them little known, which together provide an idea of the appearance of the museum of ancient sculpture that belonged to the Marchese Giovanni Pietro Campana (1808-80), who formed one of the most important private collections of the nineteenth century in Rome. Some of the sculptures were displayed in a gallery in the Campana villa in San Giovanni in Laterano, while others were in the Campana palazzo in Via del Babuino. The new photographs allow us to reconstruct another building devoted to the ancient marbles, in which the Marchese made the sculpture accessible to the public. Moreover, it appears that Campana was in the forefront of the use of photography to reproduce works of art. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This short article explores the history of the first-millennium AD textiles from Egypt housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It introduces four of the major donors with the aid of acquisition records held in the V&A's archives. These contributors laid the foundation for the Museum's rich collection of ‘Coptic’ textiles. The acquisition files are also essential to our understanding of the dealings in and distributions of archaeological material, and to some extent they provide of a context for material which otherwise is generally of unrecorded provenance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1883, the great showman P. T. Barnum agreed to build an eponymous museum of natural history on the campus of Tufts University, which he had served as a founding trustee. After a long career managing dime museums and a travelling circus, Barnum hoped to secure a positive legacy through the creation of an unambiguously serious institution. In addition to building and collections funds, Barnum supplied the Tufts museum – as well as the Smithsonian and American Museum of Natural History in New York – with exotic and valuable dead animals from his circus. Barnum brought his influence to bear on the latter two in order to develop his museum at Tufts. His greatest prize was Jumbo the Elephant, whose skin and bones were involved in a contentious tug-of-war among the three museums following his death in a train accident in 1885. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As proto-ethnologists, missionaries represented an important source of ethnographical material, collecting for many museums and displays. It is contended here that European missions affected the collecting habits of their missionaries through actively encouraging or discouraging collecting on behalf of certain institutions. The motivation behind the endorsement of certain collecting habits and not others was linked to the missionary societies’ perceptions of themselves. This paper examines both religious and secular ethnographical collections, in Herrnhut, Paris, and Berlin, to which missionaries of the Moravian Church were asked to contribute from the mid-nineteenth century; it evinces the tensions between the Church's collecting habits and the religious goals established for missions. Moreover, the examination of this one group leads to broader conclusions about the motivation behind the ethnographical collections of missionaries and of museums in the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article looks at the role of George Rolleston (1829–81), the first Anatomy and Physiology Professor at Oxford, in forming an impressive collection of crania and in bringing closer together archaeology and physical anthropology in a professional, systematic and specialized way. It discusses Rolleston's approach to the study of crania and the ways through which he was able to procure several hundreds of specimens, which after close examination were put on display in the University Museum. From this brief overview it becomes clear that skulls and bones were not neglected in the scramble for ‘objects’ in the nineteenth century but played a significant role not only in the University's natural science education but also in anthropological and archaeological research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Before the arrival of the first missionaries, Niuean warriors fought with stones carefully modified for throwing. This practice, much feared by sailors and missionaries, became a symbol of the primitiveness of the "Savage Island" (Cook 1774). By 1853, following Christian conversion, the practice of throwing stones had come to an end. In so far as it is possible with the limited records available, we reconstruct the original behaviour, as well as the intriguing trajectories the stones took as they left the island and were later collected by and housed in museums. We track this dispersal process, as well as the incorporation of the stones into 19th century anthropological thinking. Today, there is only one stone known on the island, and none are known to have been found in archaeological surveys. This impels us to address the scale of loss represented by these now geographically remote objects of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay uses Anglo-Irish writer Catherine Wilmot's travel journal An Irish Peer on the Continent of 1801–3 to examine the relationship between collecting and empire in the Napoleonic period. Wilmot's journal shows how the Louvre museum, a collection of art objects taken from conquered countries, functions as a large-scale cabinet of curiosities that enabled Napoleon to legitimate his empire. She constructs a literary cabinet in her journal that allows her to take part in the practice of collecting and critique Napoleon's method of imperial acquisition. She further supports British collectors who use their cabinets to compete for control of the Continent and to protect Ireland from French imperialism. Her literary cabinet also critiques England's imperial collecting of her own country and repositions Irish collecting as central to Britain's success against France. Wilmot's account contributes to a wider understanding of curiosity by employing the cabinet for subversive rather than imperial ends. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the Quaker family known as the Barringtons of Fassaroe, County Wicklow, Ireland, focusing particularly on natural history collector Richard Manliffe Barrington (1849-1915), lawyer and gentleman farmer. His father was landowner Edward Barrington (1796-1877) who fathered nineteen children with two wives, Sarah Leadbetter (1798-1843) and Huldah Strangman (1820-1895). The family's bequests to the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin are considered.