Copies and imitations of ancient and medieval artifacts hold a curious place in the history of collecting. Disdained by the arbiters of élite taste, ignored by the general public, gleefully exposed by scholarly experts, replicas, casts, and imitations have always attracted a certain type of collector undeterred by popular indifference and deaf to the Siren song of authenticity. What motivates institutions and individuals to acquire, knowingly or unknowingly, copies or imitations of ancient or medieval artifacts, often beside or in addition to ‘genuine’ materials? Although the phenomenon is by no means limited to the USA, the focus of this workshop will be on American collectors and collecting practices from the late nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century, with a concentration on the Golden Age of the American acquisition of antiquities and replicas, ca. 1870-1940.
During this period, even as international banking fueled a mania for acquiring cultural property as an expression of power, a variety of different motives inspired the collectors of replicas and imitations that “aimed above all at recreating a past even more to the taste of modern readers [or viewers] and scholars than was the real antiquity uncovered by technical scholarship.”[1] Historical veracity and authenticity in these contexts were less important than evocative recreation of an imaginary ethos of a period and place. For these purposes ‘genuine’ artifacts, copies, and creative reconstructions all held equal, if different, value. Ready to supply all three were the dealers who stood between the crafters and the buyers of antiquities and antique reproductions, middlemen able to service the needs or to take advantage of the vanities of collectors of all sorts, as the opportunity offered.
“The Gilded Collector” is planned to complement a related event, “Fabricating Material Histories: From Artifact to Asset (c. 1870-1940)”, organized by Brown colleagues Margaret Graves (History of Art) and Felipe Rojas (Archaeology), on March 7-8, 2025. Both workshops are concerned with the production and dissemination of copies and imitations of archaeological artifacts during an expansive period of international collecting. “Fabricating Material Histories” will focus on the craft laborers who produced ‘fakes’ ranging from Aztec skulls to Māori sculpture for a voracious art market in global antiquities. “The Gilded Collector” will bring together a group of historians, art historians, archaeologists, and curators to investigate the diverse motives and practices of the buyers of reproductions of primarily European artifacts in the American milieu between the end of the American Civil War and the outbreak of World War II.
[1] A. Grafton, Forgers and Critics. Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (new ed., Princeton 2019) 26