Victorian Artists' Autograph Replicas

Book excerpt: This book is a wide-ranging exploration of the production of Victorian art autograph replicas, a painting’s subsequent versions created by the same artist who painted the first version. Autograph replicas were considered originals, not copies, and were highly valued by collectors in Britain, America, Japan, Australia, and South Africa. Motivated by complex combinations of aesthetic and commercial interests, replicas generated a global, and especially transatlantic, market between the 1870s and the 1940s, and almost all collected replicas were eventually donated to US public museums, giving replicas authority in matters of public taste and museums’ modern cultural roles. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, museum studies, and economic history.