During the antebellum period, art collecting centered on buying and selling American art. Auction catalogues featuring American art typically listed only the artist’s name, artwork title, and city of residence. But by the 1870s and 1880s, the market shifted towards European, particularly French art. Art dealers and collectors traveled abroad, particularly to Paris and London, to acquire artworks and see art in private and public venues, such as dealers’ shops, the Paris Salon, international exhibitions, and artists’ studios. Their collections rapidly became internationalized, with works representing French, German, Austrian, Dutch, Belgian, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, and Scandinavian schools. New York, the center of the art market, was the locus of this internationalizing trend. Art catalogue entries reflected this development. They created both cultural and commercial value through additional information, including awards and provenance. Scholarship on the art market in the United States has explored class identity, the effect of business practices on collecting, and art consumption. The numerous catalogues produced during these decades have been overlooked. This paper examines the seemingly negligible catalogues’ as key indicators of internationalization and important educational as well as commercial tools. What information did catalogues communicate about artists, schools, nationality, and value?
About the presenterLeanne Zalewski
Dr. Zalewski, Assistant Professor of Art History at Central Connecticut State University, earned her B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University, and her Ph.D. from The Graduate Center, CUNY. She recently published articles on the art collections of Thomas Jefferson and William Henry Vanderbilt and is writing a book about early Gilded Age art collecting. She received grants from the Getty Research Institute, Huntington Library, and Center for the History of Collecting in America.