From Portugal to England

Abstract

In 1865 John Charles Robinson travelled to Portugal in the service of the South Kensington Museum and plunged into the art market with the intention of acquiring works for that institution’s collections that were representative of Portuguese artistic production. This article provides a broad and contextualized approach to this connoisseur’s experience on the Portuguese market, framing it within a hitherto undervalued phenomenon: the persistent presence of English agents in this system. An original identification of all the works acquired in Portugal by Robinson and of all those so-far neglected dealers involved in such transactions allows us to assess the real extent and impact of such mission. We shall also show that the acquisitions made were decisive not only for diversifying the museum’s collections but also for art historiography, both being inseparable from the invention of the term Indo-Portuguese.

ORION—Art Collections and Collectors in Portugal

“…However, after that natural catastrophe, two key political moments caused much more damage to the national historic and artistic heritage, and ultimately shaped the history of collecting: the extinction of religious regular orders in 1834 as well as the suppression of their assets; and the implantation of the republic in 1910 that led to the subsequent nationalization of the royal heritage and the publication of a law by which the state was separated from the churches (1911), thus affecting secular clergy. These troubled periods originated the dispersal of cultural heritage through auctions or simply by loot, as well as the acquisition of works of art by foreign collectors [13][14][15]. Consequently, the identification of the origins of works of art in museums and private collections became an area of study that has been explored by few art historians.…”