Private collection

Art collecting was common among the wealthy in the Ancient World in both Europe and East Asia, and in the Middle Ages, but developed in its modern form during the Renaissance and continues to the present day.

The tastes and habits of collectors have played a very important part in determining what art was produced, providing the demand that artists supply.

Increasingly collectors tended to specialize in one or two types of work, although some, like George Salting (1835–1909), still had a very wide scope for their collections.

The extension of serious collecting to art from all periods and places was an essentially 19th-century development, or at least dating to the Age of Enlightenment.

[3] The important collection of the Thyssen family, mostly kept in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, which settled in Madrid in 1992, was bought by the Spanish state.