The Stafford Gallery: The Greatest Art Collection of Regency London

(Hardback)

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Description

The book will provides the first detailed history of the Bridgewater collection. The story extends from the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater's purchases in Rome in the 1750s, then on to the major acquisitions of the 1790s (especially from the Orleans collection), then through the incorporation of the collection into the Stafford Gallery by the 2nd Marquess of Stafford (1st Duke of Sutherland), and finally to its reinstallation by Lord Francis Egerton in the new Bridgewater House in 1851. As well as providing a detailed account of the personalities and differing motives of three generations of collectors and owners, the book examines the ways in which the collection was arranged and displayed. It also discusses reactions to it by contemporaries, from sophisticated critics such as William Hazlitt, to the general public, and analyses major publications on it such as the four-volume illustrated catalogue by William Young Ottley of 1818. The illustrations will include many works sold from the collection aft er 1946 and now widely dispersed.

Reviews

"So significant (and unusually well documented) is the collection described in this book that in recent years a number of scholars--the writer of this review included--have elaborated various aspects of the collection's formation and the history of its display in a series of different spaces, galleries and public museums from its formation in the 1790s to the present. Humfrey's book is a welcome addition to this body of research. Over the course of four long chapters, generously illustrated with colour reproductions, he chronicles the development of the Bridgewater / Stafford / Sutherland collection during a period of more than a century. . . . At its heart Humfrey's book is about the formation of the collection. Indeed, to understand what was at stake in the cultures of display that gave rise to the great private galleries built by this family at Cleveland House and subsequently at Bridgewater House and Stafford House, it is essential to make sense of the collection's particularly complicated history. This history was bound up with family history and inheritance, but also with socio-political developments, such as the development of British collecting generally and increasing sympathy among the upper classes towards the notion that the public would benefit from access to art collections. As a result, Humfrey's book forms an essential contribution for scholars working on London's art networks and spaces for display, and on the evolution of collecting practice and what aristocratic collections signified to the general public during the nineteenth century."-- "Journal of the History of Collections"
"The story of the formation of the collection and its display and dispersal is complex, but it is navigated here with great skill, insight and engagement by Peter Humfrey, in what is somewhat surprisingly the first full-length survey of this crucial episode in the history of British taste. . . . Humfrey provides an important survey of the Duke of Bridgewater's family background, his Grand Tour and accumulation of wealth, as well as the formulation of his interests as a collector, including the Orlans purchase in 1799, in the wake of the French Revolution, and his subsequent enthusiasm for Dutch art."-- "Apollo"

Author Bio

Emeritus Professor Peter Humfrey, a leading authority on Venetian Renaissance painting, who also has a strong interest in the history of collecting in Britain. His articles on the Duke of Bridgewater as a collector, and on the Sutherland Gallery at Stafford House, have been published in journals