Men’s reliance on the self-portrait print to cement their legacies and secure undying fame is well established. While a few outstanding women experimented with the genre, the medium’s peripatetic, sociable life – works that were gifted, liberally shared, and even transported on the body – was at odds with traditional ideas about women’s place within the private realm. Studying the handful of examples created by women across Europe from c. 1700 onwards – including etchings by Anna Maria van Schurman, Maria de Wilde, Angelika Kauffmann, and others – this chapter examines the strategies they developed to present themselves in print, ever mindful that by showing themselves off they risked opening themselves up to a range of personal and often harsh judgements.

This chapter is centred on what was widely seen as the sale of the nineteenth century- the 1893 dispersal of the Spitzer collections. Austrian-born Frédéric Spitzer in many ways was the inheritor of the salvage crusade begun in earlier generations, building up a brilliant array of medieval and Renaissance artefacts (including some faked and composite pieces created on his commission). This chapter explores the visibility of Spitzer in French print culture in order to interrogate the claims for private collectors as patriots, and the attempt by the Third Republic to make collectors into auxiliaries of national policy. The scandal surrounding his sale exposes the anxieties about the interplay of private interest and public institutions, the sensitivity about curators like Émile Molinier when they operated in the market, as well as the virulence of anti-Semitic hostility to Jewish dealers. Most pervasive was the wider fear that French heritage was increasingly snapped up and repatriated by foreign buyers, so that the 1893 sale could be alternately depicted as a triumph, a swindle or a defeat for French culture.

This chapter examines the career of Alexandre-Charles Sauvageot, the violinist-turned-collector of French medieval and Renaissance art, who became one of the prime donors to the Louvre in the nineteenth century. It reconstructs his social networks of collectors in the immediate post-revolutionary period and examines how their purchases were identified as a salvage crusade. It points out the ambivalence of Sauvageot’s cabinet as both a domestic space and a semi-public urban attraction and explores the mixed motives that prompted his unprecedented decision to donate his artworks to the Louvre in 1856. To that extent, it explores not only why the Second Empire witnessed a growing convergence between private collectors and state cultural institutions, but also the ongoing tensions created by this new partnership. It traces the fate of Sauvageot’s bequest after his death and suggests why the reputation of his collection was soon overtaken by other developments in the 1860s in the taste for the fine and decorative arts.