There have been collectors since the beginning of civilized society. Ancient kingdoms amassed precious objects and buried them with their masters to bring comfort to the royals in their journey to the other world. For centuries, wars brought the riches of the vanquished to new cities. The rich have always collected; most have seen it as proof of their own importance and insurance for immortality.
In this country, 19th-century “robber barons” spent fortunes scouring the world for works of “old masters” to add to their collections in drawing rooms on Fifth Avenue and homes around the world. Such rooms were gathering places for their equally fortunate friends. The wealthy always had access to the world’s great art. And in the age before mechanical reproduction, ownership of something that existed only in one form, and only in one place, was particularly attractive to the wealthy. It was great art, true — but it was also a trophy, a prize that belonged only to them.
Collecting in early modern times has its roots in Europe, in the courts of Renaissance princes and churchmen. Americans come relatively late to the table; the 18th-century European tradition of public museums was not a given in the New World.
How did the notion of the public museum come to America? To understand this story, we first have to understand that the idea of the museum, supervised by a “keeper” (later to be called a curator) did not just involve collections of art — paintings and sculpture. Even during the colonial period, there were collections of scientific and historic objects. Much of this kind of collecting was associated with small groups of white men who would gather on a regular basis to read papers to each other or to talk about various small “curiosities,” a practice predating the collecting of art, another matter altogether.
Objects collected by the wealthy were of interest not just because they furthered knowledge or scientific advancement. In addition to their aesthetic importance, these objects held the additional cachet of being valuable; marking the owner of such an object as a person of note and importance, a significant member of society.
The founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is a case in point. Its creation story says a good deal about the culture and times of the city and the nation. In 1869, a group of wealthy American business tycoons gathered in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris for a Fourth of July celebration and picnic. The group decided it was time for New York City to take its place alongside other world capitals, join the ranks of the civilized, and establish an art museum — London, Paris, and Vienna all had them. Included in this group was John Taylor Johnson, a railroad magnate, who offered his personal art collection to seed the new museum’s holdings.
The next year, the Met opened, just ahead of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Thereafter, the collection moved twice until it settled into its present location, where it became known as the “castle in the park.”
In Europe, more than a hundred years earlier, battles had raged over whether people who could not read or write should be permitted to view works of art in a museum. For a long time, places such as the British Museum (founded in 1753) required that visitors write to the Keeper for a ticket, which handled the problem neatly: if you could not write, you were not welcome.
In New York, by contrast, the founding of the Met was part of a larger political reform movement: members of the fashionable families who signed the petition proposing the new museum were also interested in making changes to the corrupt Tammany Hall politics of Boss Tweed. Tweed thought he could hold off his inevitable comeuppance by placating do-gooders who wanted a museum, and so gave in to an amazing plan: the board of trustees of the MET would own the objects, but the city would pay for the museum that was to be eventually built in Central Park. It may have bought Tammany Hall some time, but it was part of a cultural sea change about to hit Gilded Age New York.
Founders of the new technologies of the 19th century were also drivers behind the first wave of museums in America. Railroads, mines, chemicals, presses, elevators, reapers were all new technologies that transformed the industrial landscape, and in a more nuanced way, also transformed the cultural landscape.
Museums were also examples of early philanthropy in the United States.
Other events also helped create an audience. The need to raise money for the Civil War led to “sanitary fairs” that often included art exhibitions. The New York Fair, in 1864, attracted over 100,000 visitors from all classes. People began to realize that there was interest and a market for viewing art. The earliest World’s Fairs (London in 1851, Philadelphia in 1876) also included early photography and painting. These were enormously popular.
The earliest museums in America reflected this interest even more than they created it. It is a complex story; and embedded in it is the reflection of the history, tradition, and material culture of the society that invented them.
