The Collection of Edmond Foulc
1930; Volume: 2; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/15436314.1930.11466835
ISSN2325-5420
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Art and Culture Studies
ResumoTRANSFERRED from its original setting in the rue de Magdebourg in Paris to a gallery in the Pennsylvania Museum of Art, the collection of the late Edmond Foule presents a rare and stimulating experience in America. For, quite aside from the intrinsic beauty of the pieces—a high standard of beauty well nigh constant despite the wide diversity of the objects—the collection has an intellectual entity and comprehensiveness peculiar to a culture which died with the war. It reflects the personality of the educated patron, a man of encylopaedic tastes and accomplishments. Today collecting has ceased to be an art practiced by the gentle few and has become a great competitive business. The best things that money can buy are offered by skillful dealers to the best people and the possession of works of art has become a criterion for social success. It is only among the few collectors brought up in an older and more thoughtful taste, such as Mrs. Havemeyer, Joseph Widener, and George Blumenthal, that the tradition of the Cabinet des Amateurs, that amazing group of connoisseurs of the Second Empire, is carried on. The men to whom the Louvre and the Musée des Arts Decoratifs owe so much, the Due d'Aumale, the Marquis Arconati-Visconti, Chabrière-Arles, Georges Hoentschel, Mme. Audré and her brother, M. Jacquemart, and M. Martin Le Roy, studied not only the objects of art with which they enriched their collections but applied themselves wholeheartedly to the understanding of the great periods of the past in which those works were created.
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