"Art Treasures or Art Market?: The Collaboration of Author, Publisher, and Dealer To Construct the Collector"

Earl Shinn’s Art Treasures of America, published between 1879 and 1883, quickly emerged as a key source of information on Gilded Age collections. As early as 1912, historian of British art, William Roberts, drew on Shinn’s text to argue that there had been a dramatic and wholesale shift among American collectors in the previous decades: from the eager acquisition of contemporary European paintings, to a new found enthusiasm for the “Old Masters.” However, this paper will question whether Shinn can be seen as a reliable documenter of American taste around 1880. Firstly, Shinn was selective. Why did he choose to cover some collections and not others? This question leads me to investigate links between Shinn’s publisher, Gebbie and Company of Philadelphia, and the art dealing and publishing firm of Goupil et cie, who dominated the international art market at the time. Despite Goupil going unnamed in Shinn’s introduction, Art Treasures of America was illustrated by full-page photogravures supplied by the firm, a fact which significantly shaped the volumes’ contents. Gebbie and Company collaborated with the Paris-based publisher, and in the late 1880s they recruited artisans from Goupil’s workshop to start the Gebbie and Husson Photogravure Company. These links suggest that author, publisher, and dealer were working together, on multiple fronts to construct a particular image of the American collector. Finally, I consider the agency of the collector when faced with these market forces.