Dr. Tom Stammers is Reader in Art and Cultural History at the Courtauld Institute, University of London. He is a cultural historian of modern France and modern Europe, having taught previously in Cambridge, Paris and Durham. His first book, the Purchase of the Past: The Culture of Collecting in Post-Revolutionary Paris (c.1790-1890), won the 2021 Gladstone Prize from The Royal Historical Society. He was co-investigator on the major AHRC-funded project ‘Jewish Country Houses: Objects, Networks, People’ (2019-2024), the outputs from which include two forthcoming volumes on Jewish dealers and Jewish collectors in modern Europe (both co-edited with Silvia Davoli). He has published widely on the history of collecting, the art market, museums, connoisseurship, the historiography of art and the material legacies of the French Revolution; he is also a regular contributor to arts magazines such as Apollo and the London Review of Books. Through research, public events and exhibitions he has frequently collaborated with a heritage institutions in Britain and Europe.
Tom is currently completing two book projects. The first is a study of the Jewish cultural revival in Edwardian London, exploring the intersections between historical writing, archaeology, art and literature in constructing new forms of Jewish heritage in Britain. The second provides a global history of the Orleans dynasty in exile, c.1848-94. It explores how the family reinvented its politics in the wake of revolution, and articulated its enduring values, and ambitions, through architecture, collecting and patronage.
Tom is thrilled to be teaching the history of the art market within the new MA in Art & Business.
Research Interests
*Museums and Collecting (17th-20th Centuries)
*Histories of the Art Market (17th-20th Centuries)
*The Enlightenment and European Romanticism
*The French Revolution and its Afterlives
*Counter-Revolutionary Thought and Culture, c.1789-1940
*French Society and Culture, c.1750-1950
*Cultural History and the History of Ideas in Britain and Europe, c.1750-1950
*Historiographies of Art, c.1750-1950
*Heritage Politics and Historical Consciousness
*The Country House in Historical Perspective
*Anglo-Jewish Social and Cultural History
*Jewish Art and Culture in Europe (18th-20th Centuries)
Past and Current Doctoral Students
•Claudia Tavernse (Picasso’s Red period: politics, peace and public perception)
•Tom Cubillas (Parenting the Self: Welfare, Family, and Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century France)
•Antonia Perna (Children and childhood in French Revolutionary Politics)
•Lindsay Macnaughton (Collecting and staging French history in the homes of John and Josephine Bowes- CDA with the Bowes Museum)
•Seren Nolan (Rome’s immortal fair: the Roman matrona in long eighteenth-century imagination)
•Mathew Norman (Portrait drawing in three generations of the John Bacon family)
•Elisabetta Maistri (La común patria de los artistas’: the Spanish colony of artists in Rome (1830-1873)
•Isobel Muir (Jewish collectors, donors and fundraisers at the National Gallery, 1824-1945- CDA with the National Gallery)
•Sahava Baranow (exhibiting Japan in Paris, London and Vienna)
•Natasha Shoory (female collectors in eighteenth-century Paris)
•James Godwin (Johann Zoffany and the Georgian art market)
•Friederike Schwelle (Jewish histories of Egyptology- CDA project with the EES)
•Constance Booker (plutocratic taste in France and Britain c.1900)
•Emma Richmond (Collecting the Counter-Revolution: Refugees, Religion and Anglo-French Politics in the library of Richard Viscount Fitzwilliam (1745-1816)- CDA with the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)
Select Publications
Authored book
•The Purchase of the Past: Collecting Cultures in Post-Revolutionary Paris c.1790–1890 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020 [Winner of the RHS Gladstone Prize]
Edited books
•Jewish Dealers and the European Art Market, 1860-1940: Negotiating Cultural Modernity (co-edited with Silvia Davoli, forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic 2024)
•The Contours of Jewish Collecting: Art and Identity in Europe, 1860-1940 (co-edited with Silvia Davoli, forthcoming with Harvey Miller/ Brepols, 2025)
•The Allure of Napoleon: Essays Inspired by the Collections of the Bowes Museum (Barnard Castle, The Bowes Museum, 2017).
Special issues
•(with J. Hilary), ‘German-Jewish Collectors Beyond Germany c.1870-1940’, Journal of the History of Collections (2022).
•’Women Collectors: Taste, Legacy and Cultural Philanthropy, 1850-1920,’19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 31 (2021).
•(with S. Davoli), ‘Jewish Collectors and Collecting’, Journal of the History of Collections, (Virtual Special Issue) (2019).
Chapters in edited volumes
• ‘Othering the Ex-Libris: Israel Solomons (1860-1923) and the Invention of the Jewish Bookplate,’ in Where Words & Images Meet (eds.) L. Jordanova, F. Grant (London: Bloomsbury, 2024), 37-50.
• ‘Before the Visual Turn: Twentieth-Century Historians and the Uses of Art’ in Art & Knowledge after 1900: Interactions between Modern Art and Thought (ed.) J. Fox (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 86-110.
• ‘The Rise and Fall of the Psychology of Collecting: Historiographical Reflections,’ in Mapping Art Collecting in Europe, 1860-1940: Eastern and Western Sociocultural Perspectives, edited by Milena Wozniak-Koch (Leiden: Brill, 2023), 1-26.
•’Inverting the Louvre: Connoisseurship in the French Second Empire’ in Connoisseurship: New Studies in Taste and Collecting (eds.), C. Anderson, P. Garrett (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2023), 95-129.
• ‘Délécluze’s Augustus and Cinna: Painting and Performing Rome at the End of the Napoleonic Empire’ in Representing the Past in the Art of the Long Nineteenth Century Historicism, Postmodernism, and Internationalism (ed.) M. Potter (New York and London: Routledge, 2021), 48-69.
•’Collecting and the Contemporary Antiquarian: Documenting the Present in Fin-de-Siècle Paris,’ in Time on a Human Scale: Experiencing the Present in Europe, c.1860-1930 (eds.) J. Wright, A. Fryxell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 121-155.
•’Salvage and Speculation: The London Art Market After the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71),’ in Museums, Modernity and Conflict. Museums and Collections in and of War since the Nineteenth Century (ed.) K. Hill (London: Routledge, 2021), 15-38.
•’L’exception anglaise ? Constance Battersea et la philanthropie artistique des Rothschild d’outre-manche,’ (eds.) P. Prevost-Marcilhacy, L.de Fuccia, De la sphere privée à la sphere publique(Paris: Publications de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, 2019) [online].
•’Graphiksammler,’ in Lexikon der Revolutions-Ikonographie in der europäischen Druckgraphik (1789-1889) (ed.) R. Reichardt, R. Münster (Rhema, 2017), 1: 149-166.
•’Jean-Louis Soulavie: une collection de l’histoire immédiate,’ in Collectionner la Révolution française (eds.) G. Bertrand, M. Biard & A. Chevalier (Paris: Société des Études Robespierristes, 2016), 81-93.
•’The Myth of the Belle Madeleine: Street Culture and Celebrity in Nineteenth-Century Paris,’ in Food Hawkers: Selling the Street from Antiquity to the Present (eds.) M. Calaresu & D. van Heuvel (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016), 136-164.
•’Enlightenment Intersections in the work of Jeffrey Rubinoff,’ in The Art of Jeffrey Rubinoff (ed.) J. Fox (Madeira Park, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 2016), 153-168.
•’Scavenging rococo: Trouvailles, Bibelots and Counter-Revolutionary Politics,’ in Rococo Echo: Art, History and Historiography from Cochin to Coppola (eds.) M. Hyde, K. Scott (Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, 2014). 71-86.
•’Rendering the Rag-Picker in Nineteenth-Century Paris,’ in Generals and Beggars, Actors and Sovereigns: Portraits in Widely Circulating Prints from the XVII to XX Century (ed.) A. Milano (Tassotti, 2013), 393-99.
•’The Faubourg Saint-Antoine: Epicentre of Revolution?’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Paris (ed.) A.-L. Milne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 52-70.
•’The Refuse of the Revolution: Autograph Collecting in France 1789-1860,’ in Historicising the French Revolution (eds.) C. Armenteros, T. Blanning, I. DiVanna & D. Dodds (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 39-63.
Journal articles
•(with Amy Freund), ‘Harping on Patriotism: Female Education Meets Orléanist Ambition in Jean-Antoine-Théodore Giroust’s The Harp Lesson (1791),’ French History, (2024)
•‘Materializing France in Exile: Henri, duc d’Aumale, the Orléans Family and the Transnational Politics of Collecting,’ French History, 37.4 (2023), 442-67.
• ‘Jewishness, Antiquity and Civilisation: Alfred Mond, Lord Melchett (1868-1930), and the Renewal of a Collecting Legacy,’ Journal of the History of Collections, 34.3 (2022), 427-40.
•(with J. Hilary), ‘Introduction: Bildung beyond Borders: German–Jewish Collectors outside Germany, c.1870–1940,’ Journal of the History of Collections, 34.3 (2022), 375-86.
•’Women Collectors and Cultural Philanthropy, 1850-1920,’ 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 31 (2021) [online]
•’Old French and New Money: Jews and the Aesthetics of the Old Regime in Transnational Perspective, c.1860–1910’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 18(4) (2019): 489-512.
•’Transmitting the French Revolution: A Compulsive History,’ H-France Salon, 11(18) (2019): 1-16.
•’The Homeless Heritage of the French Revolution, c.1789-1889,’ International Journal of Heritage Studies, 25(5) (2019): 478-490.
•’Historian, Patriot and Paragon of Taste: Baron Jean-Charles Davillier (1823–83) and the Study of Ceramics in Nineteenth-Century France,’French Porcelain, VII (2018): 1-27.
•’From the Tuileries to Twickenham: The Orléans, Exile and Anglo-French Liberalism, c.1848–1880,’ English Historical Review,133(564) (2018): 1120-1154.
•’Facets of French Heritage: Selling the Crown Jewels in the Early Third Republic,’ The Journal of Modern History, 90(1) (2018): 76-115.
•’Collectors, Catholics, and the Commune: Heritage and Counterrevolution, 1860-1890,’French Historical Studies 37(1) (2014): 53-87.
•’The Bric-à-Brac of the Old Regime: Collecting and Cultural History in post-revolutionary France,’ French History, 22(3) (2008): 295-315. [winner best article prize]