Before the tragedy of the Holocaust, many of the leading art and antiques dealers across Europe were Jewish, establishing dynamic cross-Channel, international and transatlantic networks. Aside from a few famous examples, however, we are only at the beginning of exploring the diversity of Jewish dealers’ commercial and cultural worlds, and reflecting on the particular conditions that made possible their dramatic expansion within the art and antiques business.
A new book from Bloomsbury brings together a team of distinguished international contributors to consider Jewish art dealers as an interconnected cohort, tied together by common strategies and a shared vulnerability. Spanning the decades 1860-1940 the essays consider Jewish family businesses in Western Europe; the role of Jews as mediators of art from East Asia; the antisemitism and suspicion faced by Jewish dealers; Jews as theorists, exhibition makers and promoters of modern art ; and the geographical mobility and professional reinvention of Jewish dealers in times of economic and political crisis.
The volume’s editors- Tom Stammers and Silvia Davoli- will lead a panel discussion with some of the contributors including Diana Davis, Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz and Sir Nicholas Penny on some Jewish art dealers in late nineteenth-century Britain and Europe and their impact on the international art market.
Organised by Dr Tom Stammers, Reader in Art and Cultural History, The Courtauld, in collaboration with the Society of the History of Collecting.
Speakers:
Dr Tom Stammers is Reader in Art and Cultural History at the Courtauld Institute, and co-leader of the new MA in Art and Business. His first book, The Purchase of the Past: Cultures of Collecting in Post-Revolutionary Paris, c.1790-1890 (Cambridge, 2020) won the RHS Gladstone Prize. He was co-investigator on the major AHRC project ‘Jewish Country Houses: Objects, Networks, People’ (2019-2024). Tom has published widely on French art, the history of collecting, the art market, museums and heritage politics, and contributes regularly to publications including Apollo and the London Review of Books.
Dr Silvia Davoli is Head of Collections and Research at Strawberry Hill House, an associate researcher at the University of Oxford, and a core member of the JCH team, with particular expertise in the Collecting/Material Culture research strand. This work has resulted in two volumes of which she is co-editor: Jewish Dealers and the European Art Market, c. 1860–1940: Negotiating Cultural Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2025) and The Contours and Contexts of “Jewish Collecting” (Brepols, 2025, title TBC). Silvia also curated the online exhibition The Unexpected Jewish Past of Strawberry Hill House (2021) and ‘Discovering Jewish Country Houses: Photographs of Hélène Binet’ (2024). Her expertise in provenance research has informed collaborations with the Wallace Collection, National Gallery, Waddesdon Manor, and the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin. She is the author of Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill: Masterpieces from the Horace Walpole Collection (2018), and a monograph on Henry Cernuschi, forthcoming with Brill.
Dr Diana Davis is an independent researcher on the art market and the role of the dealer. The Tastemakers: British Dealers and the Anglo-Gallic Interior, 1785-1865 was published in 2020. As the Getty Rothschild fellow in 2022, she researched antique dealers from the 1870s until 1930. She has lectured and published for the Jewish Country House project, the National Trust, London Art Week, Christie’s Education, the Furniture History Society, Masterpiece, BIFMO, and the Wallace Collection. A past member of the Council for the French Porcelain Society, she co-edited three volumes of the society’s journal.
Dr Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz is an independent art historian and curator. With a BA in the History of Art and Postgraduate Diploma in Art Gallery and Museum Studies from the University of Manchester, she researched and organised exhibitions for the Barbican Art Gallery, and various venues, most recently for Canterbury Museums and Galleries. She is a leading expert on nineteenth-century artists James Tissot and David Roberts, contributing to publications for major exhibitions of their work in 2019-20, as well as essays concerning their replicas for a 2020 anthology edited by Julie Codell. Krystyna’s research on Victorian art dealers and collectors stems from work with clients of Roberts and Tissot. She has presented conference papers on collector Kaye Knowles and print dealer Roberts Guéraut, and her article ‘Algernon Moses Marsden “the most enterprising of picture dealers”‘, was published in the Burlington Magazine, September 2022.
Sir Nicholas Penny. After teaching art history at the University of Manchester, Nicholas Penny occupied curatorial positions in the Ashmolean Museum, the National Gallery and the National Gallery of Art. From 2008 – 2015 he was Director of the National Gallery. He is now a visiting professor at the National Academy of Fine Art in Hangzhou. His books include Taste and the Antique (together with the late Francis Haskell) (1981) which has recently been republished in a revised and amplified form, also Raphael (together with the late Roger Jones) (1983) and The Materials of Sculpture (1993). His catalogues of the sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum (3 vols., 1992) and of the sixteenth-century Italian paintings in the National Gallery (2004, 2008, 2016) give unusual attention to the history of collecting and the art market, as do those he is writing for the Norton Simon Museum. One of the latter was published in 2021 and the other, written with Imogen Tedbury, is approaching completion.
