In the first half of the nineteenth century, Belgium was repeatedly praised as a country of collectors and amateurs, and private art and antique collectors were important and highly visible actors in urban cultural life. At a time when the public museum was still a relatively recent innovation, private collections were quite easily accessible for local and international visitors of the same social rank as the collectors. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the collector's position in the public sphere had changed dramatically. Private collections were less accessible to an ever-expanding and increasingly culture-consuming public, and functioned more strongly in the context of the personal and explicitly private aims and networks of their owners. This book uncovers the premises and reasons for private collectors' shifting public role and relevance in nineteenth-century Brussels, Antwerp and Ghent. It examines the specific social, cultural, political, artistic and material context of private collectors' activity. Its main focus is on three related issues: 1) collectors' social profiles and networks; 2) collectors' tastes; and 3) the function, accessibility, display and reception of the collections. Attention is also paid to the differences between Brussels, Antwerp and Ghent with regard to the urban collecting cultures. The book intends to further our understanding of the diverse ways in which private collectors interacted with the social, cultural and artistic life of their cities and what the collectors' changing relationship to the public sphere can tell us about broader shifts in nineteenth-century culture, art and society.

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