Tastemakers, Collectors and Patrons: Collecting American Art in the Long Nineteenth Century is an ambitious undertaking: a collection of a dozen contributions, including the introduction. Best described as a collection of case studies with each essay dedicated to a single collector or coherent group of collectors, this volume stands out for the ways in which it does not engage in much conjecture about why a person made a particular artistic decision. Often books dedicated to the history of collecting art in the United States—whether early contributions like Aline Saarien’s The Proud Possessors (1958) and Lilian B. Miller’s Patrons and Patriotism (1966) or the more recent A Museum of One’s Own (2009) by Anne Higonnet and Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California (2014) by John Ott—there is an attempt to tie art collecting to psychological motivations, political engagement, or a framework of accruing social capital to mirror growing financial resources. In contrast, these essays are mostly of the “just the facts ma’am” nature. They do not seek to present theories or cohere into an overarching narrative about collecting American art from the late 1700s to early 1900s—unsurprising for an edited volume. Nonetheless, some of the facts presented can be interesting, and the book is a useful resource in presenting a centralized and somewhat expanded roster of American collectors and boosters of American art.

Written mostly by veteran scholars—and based on a symposium held at the Frick Collection in 2017—some of the featured collectors will be familiar to students of the history of collecting in nineteenth-century America. There is Luman Reed, William Corcoran, and the meteorically successful, then outlawed American Art-Union. Nonetheless, there are surprises presented about some of them. These include the involvement of Reed’s widow in the handling of his exceptional collection of canvases by Thomas Cole, and the fact that Cincinnati’s Nicholas Longworth—known as a patron of the Black painter Robert Duncanson—was, in fact, anti-abolitionist and was largely tolerant of Southern slavery. This volume allows its contributors to go into these kinds of details that complicate known narratives and assumptions about their subjects.

While there are the usual suspects, there are also some new and compelling protagonists that the book introduces. For those unfamiliar with her 2022 book, Sophie Lynford’s essay provides insight into the oft-overlooked American Pre-Raphaelite movement and its patrons within elite US universities. Julia Flanagan’s contribution about the Grand Central Art Galleries illuminates the cultural life of less-studied cities like Aurora, Illinois, even if it is through the lens of a New York-based gallery program. Stories about uncrated art works shipped from Grand Central station all over the country will make registrars cringe but provide fascinating insight—and a map—about historic demand for fine arts exhibitions outside of larger, more established urban centers. One of the most interesting contributions is not about an accomplished collector, but about the devious behaviors of dealers and curators. Richard Saunders exposes the fraud that accompanied the growth in demand for colonial era paintings in the early twentieth century—and a web of experts and dealers who knowingly sold fakes or wrongly attributed paintings.

Overall, this book is a valuable resource for students and scholars interested in the history of collecting in the United States and will offer exceptionally useful information if those students and scholars are working on an artist who interacted with one of the featured collectors. This is the type of scholarly legwork that helps build strong, shared foundations in an historical sub-discipline. It is, however, interesting to see an edited volume published in 2024 that was conceived in 2017. Editor Linda Ferber herself points out that the anthology does not address collectors of Native American art. One wonders what else this collection of essays may have included if it had been based on a symposium held after 2020. In the last five years, the field of American art has expanded and routinely grappled with its boundaries—rather than assuming that “American” refers to work in the Euro-American tradition and produced within the United States. In a way, this volume—unintentionally and instructively—represents a moment before that broader questioning.