A Museum of One’s Own: Private Collecting, Public Gift by Anne Higonnet
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The hardcover version of A Museum of One’s Own, published in 2009, is beautifully designed and illustrated with many photographs of the collections Ms. Higonnet covers, as well as the buildings in which they are housed. The book is well researched and written. It is insightful and addresses with objective sensitivity the range of motives, circumstances and conditions that led American and European founders to acquire great works of art, and make their private collections public. I was particularly interested in the later chapters of the book that cover female collectors, and how their motives and methods of collecting were vastly different from their male counterparts. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about collection museums of the late 19th and early twentieth centuries, but I am disappointed to say it is very difficult to find a copy of this book. Ultimately, my local library was able to locate it through an interlibrary exchange between college libraries. There are some copies available through third-party sellers on Amazon and eBay, but they are absurdly expensive. It would be great if the author or publisher considered reprinting this worthy book so more readers could enjoy it.
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