Private collection

A private collection is a privately owned collection of works (usually artworks) or valuable items. In a museum or art gallery context, the term signifies that a certain work is not owned by that institution, but is on loan from an individual or organization, either for temporary exhibition or for the long term. This source is usually an art collector, although it could also be a school, church, bank, or some other company or organization. By contrast, collectors of books, even if they collect for aesthetic reasons (fine bookbindings or illuminated manuscripts for example), are called bibliophiles, and their collections are typically referred to as libraries.

For other uses, see Private Collection (disambiguation).

The of Renaissance objects was bequeathed to the British Museum, where it is displayed in its own room (a condition of the bequest), as is the Percival David Collection of Chinese porcelain. Many other bequests or purchased collections are split up within the museum's collection.

Waddesdon Bequest

was an important Russian art collector, mainly of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. His collection is now divided between the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

Sergei Shchukin

The collection became an important part of the Smithsonian—the Freer Gallery of Art.

Charles Lang Freer

Count bequeathed the bulk of his art collection to the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1978 where it is known as the Princes Gate Collection, which was also the title of the catalogue of the collection.

Antoine Seilern

When the banker died in 1969, his foundation donated 2,600 works of art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.^[4] Housed in the "Robert Lehman Wing", the museum refers to the collection as "one of the most extraordinary private art collections ever assembled in the United States".^[5] To emphasize the personal nature of the Robert Lehman collection, the Met housed the collection in a special set of galleries which evoked the interior of Lehman's richly decorated townhouse; this intentional separation of the collection as a "museum within the museum" met with mixed criticism and approval at the time, though the acquisition of the collection was seen as a coup for the Met.^[6] Unlike other departments at the Met, the Robert Lehman collection does not concentrate on a specific style or period of art; rather, it reflects Lehman's personal interests.

Robert Lehman

Very famous collections that are now dispersed include the Borghese Collection and Farnese collection in Rome, and the Orleans Collection in Paris, mostly sold in London. When this happens, it can be a large loss to those interested in art as the initial vision of the collector is lost.

The Princely Family of Liechtenstein have works by such artists as Hals, Raphael, Rembrandt and Van Dyck, a collection containing some 1,600 works of art, but were unable to show them since 1945 when they were smuggled out of Nazi Germany. The works were finally displayed in the Liechtenstein Museum after nearly 60 years with most in storage.^[3] The important collection of the Thyssen family, mostly kept in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, which settled in Madrid in 1992, was bought by the Spanish state. Only an exhibited part, the collection of Carmen Cervera, widow of the late Baron Thyssen, remains private but exhibited separately in the museum.

Many collections were left to the public in some form, and are now museums, or the nucleus of a museum's collection. Most museums are formed around one or more formerly private collection acquired as a whole. Major examples where few or no additions have been made include the Wallace Collection and Sir John Soane's Museum in London, the Frick Collection and Morgan Library in New York, The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon.

Other collections remain complete but are merged into larger collections in museums. Some important 19th/20th examples are: