Eddie Marsh: a picture collector's 'lust for possession'.

This article considered matters of taste, acquisition and display in relation to the art collection of the civil servant, literary editor and influential patron Sir Edward Marsh. It drew on a range of analyses of the impulse to collect, examining transformations in Marsh’s activities in relation to his social and cultural milieu in the years prior to the First World War. Recent research on the period has centred on themes associated with modernity in contexts of national, racial, gendered and sexual identities. This article extended some of those debates in relation to art collecting and collections. The article was included in the themed issue (edited and Introduction by Holt) of the journal deriving from the conference ‘Visual Culture and Taste in the Late Victorian and Edwardian Period’. This journal issue brought together scholars from Britain, Germany and the US concerned to bring new perspectives to the study of this period. The conference was the culmination of Holt and McConkey’s Leverhulme Trust project ‘Impressionism in Britain’ and received additional funding from the British Academy. Holt has extended her research interests in art collecting and dealerships in new studies to feature in her monograph. She has already explored the relationships between art collecting in England and the US in a conference paper delivered in New York in 2003 on the influential painter John Quinn, again in a New York College Arts Association paper in 2006 on the activities of the Chelsea Chenil Gallery and is currently researching relations between English artists and the New York Knoedler Gallery in the early twentieth century for a paper to be delivered at the 2008 Annual Association of Art Historians conference.. Holt’s Ph.D student Kim Pearson’s thesis ‘Patterns of Collecting in British Art, 1890-1914’ relates to this research.