“himself is as great a curiosity as any in his collection”: Gender, Curiosity, and the Collector as a Character

This chapter will explore the relationship between gender, curiosity, and collecting through eighteenth-century examinations of the collector as a character. Through using personal papers and contemporary publications and prints addressing collecting and curiosity, it argues that by focusing on and objectifying the collector as a character type, elite female collectors were compiling sources of reference that enabled them to cultivate agency over their own role as a collector of things and of knowledge. Analysing collectors, and describing them in such ways that ‘the collector’ was embedded within any museal encounter, became an important part of developing an understanding of the perceptions of collectors and collections: a key part of the processes of both self-fashioning and the pursuit of knowledge. Not only this, but it inverted a gendered framework of curiosity that had persistently painted women curious for knowledge as transgressive, objectified as muses, or sexualised for their investigative behaviour. In examining the ‘collector’, women were able to turn this dynamic on its head and understand and legitimise their own activities.