ABSTRACT
This chapter tracks the movement away from a binary debate between artists and aristocrats for authority, toward a Romantic preoccupation with cultural connoisseurship. Throughout the later eighteenth century, the effort made by professional institutions to raise the artist's status from mechanical craftsman to inspired creator threatened the aristocratic claim that only educated; philosophically literate gentlemen were capable of appreciating art and cultivating taste. In the decades following Waterloo, travel to Europe likewise becomes more available to larger numbers of people. As James Buzard has demonstrated, the years following Waterloo mark the beginning of tourism as we know it today. Her language and the incident that she describes mimic Byron's passage on the Uffizi and the Venus de' Medici in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The nineteenth century, often called the age of the museum, witnessed a fierce competition between individuals and groups who demanded to be recognized as the authoritative guides to this new museum culture.
