Fast out of the blocs
How to acquire an art collection quickly
This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Time was, to be a proper art collector, one had to make a major en bloc purchase of another collection. This time-honoured and rather brisk approach to art collecting was often laden with political significance. The buyer is triumphant over the seller: Look! See! We have bought not just one great work of art, but a shipload.
Arguably the best known of these en bloc purchases was Charles I’s purchase in 1628 of about 400 pictures from the collection of the Gonzaga dukes of Mantua. Others did the same: the Duke of Hamilton purchased 240 pictures from the Venetian Bartolomeo della Nave in 1636 — many of which are now in Vienna. In 1660, Charles II bought 72 pictures from the dealer William Frizell.
A century later in 1762, a young George III with a new German wife in tow and the prospect of a nice suburban house — Buckingham House — to furnish, was advised by Lord Bute to acquire a collection of art.
James Adam (fellow architect brother of Robert) was in Rome and managed to spirit away the famous collection of drawings from Cardinal Alessandro Albani, for the price of 14,000 scudi, having enlisted the assistance of the Cardinal’s willing mistress, Contessa Cherofini, who was paid 500 scudi for the pleasure.
Pictures were still needed, so Bute’s younger brother James Stuart Mackenzie bought on behalf of the king for £20,000 from Consul Joseph Smith, the British representative in Venice, his superb library, engraved gems, coins and medals, and some 500 paintings, including 50 canvases by Canaletto and a painting later identified as Vermeer’s A Lady at the Virginal.
If George III’s acquisition was motivated in part by furnishing, the Russian empress Catherine the Great’s purchase of the cream of the Walpole collection — 204 pictures were bought from Houghton Hall, Norfolk in 1779 for £40,000 — demonstrated the growing global cultural power and status of Russia. Alexey Musin-Pushkin, the Russian ambassador, wrote to the Empress “[The Collection] is worthy, in the opinion of all connoisseurs, of belonging to one of the greatest sovereigns.”
Horace Walpole was not impressed and wrote “I should wish [the paintings] were rather sold to the Crown of England than to that of Russia where they will all be burnt in a wooden palace on the first insurrection.”
A century ago, the new Soviet government in Russia was desperately in need of funds and turned to the possessions of the former Imperial family, selling off crate-loads of Fabergé works of art, paintings, drawings and ceramics to Marjorie Merriweather Post of Hillwood and Mar-a-Lago, Andrew Mellon (who later donated his collection to form the nucleus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC) and Calouste Gulbenkian whose eponymous museum is in Lisbon.
In recent memory, perhaps the most significant sale of a collection en bloc was that of the Swiss collector Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza: 775 pictures were sold to the Spanish state in 1993 for a very reasonable $350m.
Today, most major collections head to auction for dispersal or are broken up by agents and dealers via private sale. Auction sales can sometimes be a fair way to achieve a price and are usually the quickest. Many collectors, touchingly, like to suggest that by conducting a dispersal sale (by auction or private sale), their treasured possessions will be sent out “to find new homes” and to be loved by a “new generation”.
Since about 1900 it has become fashionable to set up a foundation or build a museum to house one’s collection (e.g. The Wallace Collection; Getty Museum). If a collection of art defines a collector, their worldview, or how they wish to be remembered, then buying another collector’s art en bloc may appear to undermine the buying collector’s so-called “eye”.
Maybe the collector’s ego was less prevalent in previous centuries, or, perhaps, it was even the quality of the art which drew buyers or the prestige of acquiring a known collection. Yet, when collectors are genuinely interested in the integrity of their collection — rather than seeking a financially or temporally expedient solution — we may see more collections sold en bloc.
