Art, Commerce and Connoisseurship in the Bourgeois Era: The Painting Collection of Franz Salzmann, Edler von Bienenfeld
Franz Salzmann (Prague 1788–1865 Vienna) pursued a distinguished career as a senior official in the newly founded Privilegierte Österreichische Nationalbank, where he introduced the banknote printing machinery designed by John Oldham. His collection of paintings, assembled between 1823 and 1828 and comprising 245 pictures, was previously entirely unknown. The inventory of Salzmann’s collection not only describes the individual pictures in detail, but also documents meticulously from where and for what price he purchased them, and to whom and for what price he then resold the majority of them. On his business trips chiefly to England, Germany and the Netherlands, the passionate collector systematically visited private and public art collections and at the same time conducted a brisk trade in paintings. The contextualized analysis of the inventory provides important insights into the workings of the Vienna art trade in the early 19th century and into the motivations, practices and networks of art dealers, connoisseurs and collectors.
