Henry Willett (1823–1905) was a wealthy Brighton brewer who, funded by a large inheritance, became a nationally renowned collector and one of the founders of Brighton Museum. This article focuses on Willett as a ‘collector of collections’ and investigates the eclecticism of the artefacts that he accumulated in a wide range of areas: archaeology, books, curiosities, ethnography, fine art, fossils, furniture, minerals, natural history, ‘objects of vertue’ and pottery. It argues that collecting (and exhibiting) objects, for Willett, was partly a strategy for collecting people, a means of elevating himself into cultural and intellectual circles in both Brighton and London. It also speculates on the idea that Willett’s serial collecting reflected a desire to create his own private museum referencing the totality of human knowledge – an ‘imaginary museum’ whose specimens remained hidden away in premises in Brighton and Hove, only occasionally seeing the light of day.

This article discusses several rare Egyptian scarabs and Near Eastern cylinder seals, together with their visual documentation in the form of drawings made for Philipp von Stosch (1691–1757) in the 1720s and 1730s. These records have proved important in research on the provenance of the original objects, which entered the British Museum in 1772 from the cabinet of incised gems belonging to Sir William Hamilton (1730–1803). They also demonstrate that, in his collecting and studies of glyptic art, Stosch not only focused on Graeco-Roman gems but tried to cover all aspects of glyptics, despite the limited availability of some varieties. The drawings deliver proof of the claim that he regarded Egyptian scarabs and Near Eastern cylinder seals as the most ancient glyptic products and began work on the chronological systematization of engraved gems well before Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) presented his vision of the development of ancient art.

Before the seminal exhibition of 2020 to which this volume relates, the Torlonia collection was a renowned but hidden treasure. It was the Roman banker Giovanni Torlonia (1754–1829) who started collecting ancient statues, and his son Alessandro who turned the collection into a museum around 1876. Located in Rome’s Via della Lungara, where 620 sculptures of exceptional quality were displayed, the museum was catalogued not long afterwards in Carlo Lodovico Visconti’s handsomely illustrated two-volume publication of 1884–5, the first catalogue of an ancient art collection with phototype illustrations. This remained the only source of information about the collection for several decades. A private collection open only to select visitors, the Torlonia museum became almost inaccessible after the Second World War. When the palazzo in which it was housed was converted into apartments in the 1970s, the statues were moved to storage, where they remained for the next fifty years. Scholars who studied the Torlonia sculptures never got to see the pieces themselves; on the positive side, hidden from sight and safeguarded by Italian legislation from the early twentieth century, the collection has come down to us almost unaltered.

This volume of Irish inventories is a welcome successor to Tessa Murdoch’s 2009 publication Noble Households: Eighteenth-century inventories of great English houses. In his Foreword, Toby Barnard (whose book Making the Grand Figure: Lives and possessions in Ireland, 1640–1770, published in 2004, did much to promote this topic in Ireland) acknowledges how this Irish project has been built on the pioneering studies of Peter Thornton and of John Cornforth (to whom Murdoch’s earlier volume was dedicated). He rightly observes that the archival record in Ireland is more patchy than in England, not least owing to the disastrous fire in the Four Courts building in Dublin in 1922. But house inventories do survive in various locations, and this is a very welcome harvest. Inventories from eighteen Irish houses are transcribed (the earlier English volume had nineteen). They include three Ormonde inventories, in Kilkenny Castle, Dublin, and in their London house; there are inventories from Lismore Castle, Killadoon, Carton House, Newbridge House and Borris House, and in the north Mount Stewart, Hillsborough Castle and Baronscourt – all residences of important families. These lists are supplemented with fifty-eight illustrations of houses, portraits and individual works of art that feature in the inventories. Like its predecessor, this collection is a cornucopia of information, and while its primary audience will be scholars and curators, there is plenty to be gleaned from the listings for anyone interested in historic interiors.

The paintings acquired by the 7th and 8th Barons Kinnaird in the period c.1795–1828 included some of the finest Old Masters on the market, including works by Titian, Rembrandt and Rubens, and works from the Orléans collection. Mounting debts, however, meant that several were soon sold. Those that remained would eventually be displayed (from c.1825) in the newly built family home, Rossie Priory in Perthshire. There they attracted the attention of Gustav Friedrich Waagen, Wilhelm von Bode, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot and Bernard Berenson. The collection, however, was larger than the reports of these scholars suggested and contained important works they failed to mention. Two sources of information presented here provide fuller knowledge of the pictures in the Priory: a group of early photographs made in the 1850s and 1860s (accessible at https://collections.st-andrews.ac.uk/collection/the-rossie-priory-glass-plate-negative-collection/503453) and an inventory of the contents of the house made in 1878 and reproduced in annotated form in an online Appendix to this article. Between them they document the collection before its dispersal, principally at a London sale in 1946.

In this superbly illustrated book, architectural historian Anthony Geraghty visually reconstructs the later years of Empress Eugénie, following the untimely deaths of her husband, Napoleon III, in 1873, and of her son, the Prince Imperial, in 1879. Geraghty deftly weaves together paintings, furniture, porcelain and tapestries with contemporary accounts by Lucien-Alphonse Daudet, Augustin Filon and Agnes Carey, along with an impressive number of little-known photographs now preserved at the Musée du Second Empire at Compiègne, to reassemble the interior displays that Eugénie created at one of her residences. Although titled Empress Eugénie in England, the book focuses solely on the ten-year renovations of the Farnborough Hill estate purchased by Eugénie in 1880. Geraghty positions Farnborough as a tangible manifestation of Eugénie’s grief, where the collections evoked memories of her former life. Here she honoured the legacy of the Napoleonic family while simultaneously embracing ‘le style Louis XVI-Impératrice’, and redefined her new role as a grieving wife and mother.

Darsie Alexander and Sam Sackeroff, Afterlives. Recovering the lost stories of looted art. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2022. isbn 978-0-300-25070-1. 280 pp., 190 col. illus. $50. Alain Brieux, Bruno Halff, Francis Maddison, Youssef Ragheb, Muriel Roiland, Répertoire des facteurs d’astrolabes et de leurs œuvres en terre d’Islam, 2 vols. Turnhout, Brepols Publishers, 2022. isbn 978-2-503-58637-3. 1,190 pp., 969 b. & w. illus. €200. Fiona Candlin, Toby Butler and Jake Watts, Stories from Small Museums. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2022. isbn 978-1-5261-6688-3. 224 pp.,66 b. & w. illus. £16.99. Amanda Claridge and Eloisa Dodero, Sarcophagi and Other Reliefs, 4 vols. Part A.III of The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo: A catalogue raisonné. London, Royal Collection Trust and Turnhout, Harvey Miller Publishers/Brepols, 2022. isbn 978-1-912554-56-0. 1,832 pp., 1,170 col. illus., 190 b. & w. illus. £200. Elizabeth Edwards and Ella Ravilious (eds.), What Photographs Do: The making and remaking of museum cultures. London, UCL Press in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, 2022. isbn 978-1-80008-298-4. 354 pp., 120 col. illus. £30 or open access at https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/192312

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This is a wide-ranging, informative, but ultimately slightly frustrating book. It represents the first book-length account of Martin Folkes, the only man to become president of both the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries, a distinction that, as the author tells us in her acknowledgements, was what drew her to her subject in the first place. Previous authors had been discouraged by the apparent lack of source material, since Folkes directed on his death that his papers should be destroyed. Anna Marie Roos, however, has been able to do much to rectify this state of affairs. Thus she uses materials auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1932, some of which subsequently turned up on book barrows in the Farringdon Road, whence they were retrieved by the late R.E.W. Maddison and subsequently presented to the Royal Society, while others were acquired directly by the Royal Society itself and by the Wellcome Library. She has also been able to trace letters in the collections of such of Folkes’s correspondents as Henry Baker and Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond, and more scattered materials that survive in repositories like the Norfolk Record Office and the Bodleian Library – in the latter case, the travel journal that Folkes kept while he was on a tour on the continent in 1733–5, an episode on which Roos wrote an informative article in the British Journal for the History of Science in 2017 that forms a significant component of the current book.

This is a correction to: Alain Duplouy, Mariana Silva Porto, Lucanian heritage across the world: the Spanish collections, Journal of the History of Collections, 2022; fhac036, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhac036