"A passion for pictures": the art collection of Austin and Susan Dickinson assembled between 1856 and 1913
Date
2000
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Knowledge about the function of private nineteenth-century American art collections is based on records of collections assembled by wealthy collectors. It is more difficult to track what middle-class collectors were buying. Austin and Susan Dickinson of Amherst, Massachusetts collected art during the nineteenth century. Their house and its contents have been left relatively intact providing an opportunity to study an art collection within a specific middle-class Victorian home. ☐ In 1913 Susan willed the house to her daughter who, in 1943, left the house to a friend, Alfred Hampson. His wife, Mary, established a trust to turn the house into a museum in 1988. This thesis provides an interpretive plan for the artwork inside the house and explores the Dickinsons, their personalities, the events that shaped their lives, and their efforts to present an identity of culture and refinement in part through their choices of artwork.