Since the announcement of the Rose Museum’s closure, I’ve been thinking a lot about art collections, and how they are all really a story of the collector – whether it’s an institution or a person. When collections are disbanded, that story is lost, even if the works survive.

Jennifer Teets pointed me towards Gustave Moreau:

When the artist Gustave Moreau died in 1898, he bequeathed his three-story house, containing more than 1,200 paintings and 12,800 drawings, to the French state. His only wish was that the collection be kept together forever. “Taken as a whole,” he stated, “they give an idea of what kind of an artist I was, and in what kind of surroundings I chose to live my dreams.”

[Link]

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