Against All Risks: Insuring Art in the Nineteenth Century

This paper addresses speculative financial services in the nineteenth-century British and European art worlds and looks at the development of art insurance in the 1880s and 1890s. Art institutions, collectors, and artists deployed these new technologies, offsetting risks to traveling artworks and exhibitions. These actors dispensed with the faith in Providence that so marked early modern approaches to risk. But in what ways did artworks and artifacts test underwriters’ capacities in the nineteenth century? How did unique artworks challenge laws of averages? How did insurance industries create and mobilize interpretive methods for enumeration and valuation?

To answer these questions, my paper traces the advent and activities of The Fine Art & General Insurance Company, Ltd., the earliest self-styled art insurer. Established in London in 1890 by art dealer, William Agnew, The Fine Art underwrote major collections like the Chantrey Bequest, art museums like the South Kensington Museum, and international exhibitions like the World’s Columbian Exposition. It established branches in Alexandria, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris, and cultivated ties with Jardine Matheson & Co., the China trading company infamous for its earlier role in the Opium Wars. In this regard, I investigate the art insurance world’s ties to semi-colonialism, and explore how British cultural risk analysis impacted art’s circulation and exhibition. As I will show, this company’s early efforts helped inaugurate a robust cultural risk-management sector arguably even more active today, as evinced by international companies like AXA Art Insurance, and indemnity schemes run by the UK Arts Council.