Putting a price on all kinds of collected ‘things’ throughout the ages
WANDERING through the Metropolitan Museum in New York is a wonderful experience, no matter which avenue or wing is explored. But it leaves a reverberating question: how did France, Italy, Egypt, Greece, Spain or a myriad of other countries allow these paintings, these marbles, these icons, to escape? Who let them go, and why? And to whom?
Jacqueline Yallop identifies five collectors in the Victorian era whose wealth, taste and scholarship allowed them to accumulate treasures from all over the world. But marvellous collections had been amassed long before this; in her correspondence with the daughters of Cooper Penrose at Woodhill House in Cork, Sarah Curran asks after the fate of the statues being imported from Italy for display in the sumptuous gardens being created for them at Montenotte.
