efforts to show works of art beyond the narrow confines of the royal court intensified and in 1796 a
catalogue of national monuments was used as the basis of the newly opened Musée des Monuments
Français, which included works seized during the Revolution including funerary and tomb sculptures.
Before the Revolution the main display area for sculptures in Paris had been the Tuileries Gardens.
During the Revolution these were used as a display area for confiscated sculptures and for festivals; they
were then converted into an openair museum of replicas of GrecoRoman statuary (Berger, 1999, 259–
279).
The Louvre did not become a public museum until 1793, when the Revolution had brought about a
reappraisal of the need to provide fuller public access to works in the royal collection that had previously
remained in storage or accessible mainly to those at court. As a public museum the Louvre was free and
open to the public on three days a week, with artists and foreign tourists able to visit on other days, the
former free (unusually) to choose themselves which works they wished to copy (McClellan, 2008, 18–20,
159, 197–198). The display of paintings, in the splendor of the Grande Galérie, was composed of works
confiscated during the Revolution from the church and royal court, and paintings were arranged in
chronological order, to show how the French school had built on the work of illustrious predecessors.
The gallery drew in members of all social classes and established a template for subsequent “high art”
museums. The Musée Spécial de l’École Française (Specialist Museum of the French School) was
created at Versailles in 1797, an acknowledgment of the growing importance of the French School.
By the end of the century there were approximately 500 amateurs who had significant collections in
France (T.W.Gaehtgens, 2003, 87). Their collections changed with fashion, French genre paintings finally
overtaking the popularity previously enjoyed by Netherlandish works. Oil sketches, cabinet paintings and
copies allowed those with lesser resources to begin collecting (Conisbee, 1981, 27–30). The Académie
royale built up its own collection of works, consisting of reception pieces by its members, submissions
for the Rome prize, gifts and replicas of antique sculptures. In 1712 this collection was given better
display space at the Louvre where the Academy had moved in 1692, and a catalogue to the collection was
written and published in 1715. Guidebooks included plans of the collection, which could be seen
occasionally, by prior arrangement, by amateurs. At the end of the century, Watteau’s Pilgrimage to the
Island of Cythera played a starring role in the collection of the Académie and, subsequently, the Louvre
museum.
Collections of art were an important means of acquiring status. Those who undertook the Grand Tour
brought back works by celebrity artists such as Batoni (whose portraits were much cheaper than those
produced by Reynolds) and Piranesi, as well as watercolors and prints of ancient sites and antiquities.
Some famous collections were established, including Charles Townley’s ancient marbles, subsequently
donated to the British Museum (Coltman, 2006, 165–193) and the Etruscan, Greek and Roman vases of
William Hamilton (1731–1803), sold to the same institution (Coltman, 2006, 16). The burgeoning taste
for antiquarian publications helped to inform and validate such collections. Some patrons even ordered
works from home and waited for them to be shipped back. Shipping could be risky, however. As
mentioned in Chapter 1, much of the foundation collection of the Real Academia in Madrid consisted of
works seized from a ship, The Westmorland, which had been looted while carrying such goods from Italy
to their English owners (Coltman, 2009, 133–140).
Royal households acquired prestigious collections of art in order to impress both their own subjects and
foreign visitors. In Britain, Queen Charlotte (consort to George III) asked Zoffany to carry out some of her
commissions in Italy so that she might acquire by association a reputation for knowledge of Italian art.
Rulers in Hungary, Habsburg and German courts saw art collections as an effective means of self
presentation and of vying with the latest artistic trends (e.g. the rococo, chinoiserie, the gothic and the