The abundance of literature dealing with the Parthenon Marbles, the Benin Bronzes, and NAGPRA has made it seem that conflict over the fate of patrimonial property is always a story about contemporary society's encounter with its colonial past. Professor Bailkin's recent book reveals a considerably more varied, complex, and multi-layered history of cultural property controversies.

Her book takes the form of a series of case-studies from early twentieth-century Britain: a battle for the return of Celtic gold ornaments to Dublin from the British Museum; the National Galleries of Scotland Bill; the Duke of Norfolk's proposed sale in 1909 of Holbein's 1508 portrait of Christina of Denmark; and the establishment of the London Museum, Britain's first folk museum.

Perhaps because Bailkin seems most comfortable writing as a scholar of feminist history, I found her chapter on the Holbein controversy the most interesting and incisive part of the book. On the surface, the story was simply one of a campaign to keep a national art treasure from going abroad, probably to America, and exemplifying the financial and political decline of the English aristocracy. But Bailkin elicits a much richer story out of the Holbein affair. Important art has always been in the hands of the men who ran the nation, both as collectors and as administrators of national institutions. But because women took a leading role in the campaign to save the portrait of Christina for the nation, and because that portrait was not a female image that accorded with conventional male taste, Bailkin says, “the Holbein controversy was as much about the National Gallery's memorialization of feminism as it was about its effort to contain radical feminist discourse (p. 123).” The role of women as conventionally conceived in Victorian England was deeply at odds with women taking a leading role in defining and shaping Britain's artistic patrimony.

Moreover, as Professor Bailkin emphasizes throughout the book, these controversies inevitably brought into question the established (and long unquestioned) link between ownership and control, not only in the marketplace and government, but in artistic and cultural realms as well. Previously, England's patrimony was defined by what peers like the Duke of Norfolk owned and exhibited, with the acquiescence and support of the men who ran institutions like the National Gallery. Now, however, though the Duke was willing to dispense with Holbein's Christina as a constituent of the nation's patrimony, it turned out to be not enough that he was its owner. Women who campaigned (and paid) to save it from the auction block thereby became a force in deciding what would be defined as patrimonial.

One nice aspect of the book is the author's ability to see the significance of the cases she details from various perspectives. While the Holbein affair is treated primarily as a study in the evolution of the role of women in cultural politics, Bailkin takes care to note other crucial facts. For example, “[t]he duke's withdrawal of his Dutchess from the sphere of public art and education … represented his effort to punish the Radicals for their assault on aristocratic privilege (p. 143)” and “[t]he duke's proposal confirmed the curatorial fear that paintings in British galleries were always private property, to be reclaimed at any moment. The case thus seemed to underscore the failings of national art institutions (p. 143).”

A central theme of the book is the disjunction between ownership and cultural significance, illustrated not only by the Holbein matter, but also, and even more neatly, by the chapter on the Celtic gold. I have to confess that some of the discussion of Celtic-ness and Irish cultural nationalism passed over my head, but I think I got the general point: that the repatriation effort was a playing out of one of the complex historic tensions between the Irish and England, and whether the Dublin museum was to function simply as an outpost of the South Kensington Museum in London (now the V&A), or would be a distinctive center for Irish national culture. In this respect, the very idea of repatriation (bringing home) of the Celtic artifacts took on a distinctly cloudy aspect, not least because they had been discovered in Ulster, underlining the degree to which Ireland embodies “heritage dissonance (p. 35).”

In any event, the gold ornaments case had the most extraordinary denouement, providing a wonderful example of the tension between claims based on ownership and those based on asserted cultural entitlement. A laborer named Nicholl had plowed up the ornaments on a farm in Derry in 1896. The owner of the farm bought them from him, and in turn sold them to a dealer or collector, who then sold them to the British Museum. Subsequently, the Attorney General of Ireland sued on behalf of the Dublin Museum to get them back, essentially claiming they belonged to their place of origin, and had been illegally exported.

The trial must have been fascinating. The British Museum denied that Celtic art was a uniquely Irish product, its expert witness testifying that late Celtic objects were pre-eminently English. Irish advocates, conversely, asserted that the Roman conquest of England had obliterated any trace of Celtic culture from England, which had been totally “Romanized.” Patrimonial squabbles can't get much closer to low comedy than this. But it got even better. Ignoring all such testimony, the Court held that the ornaments were Treasure Trove and therefore belonged to Edward, the King of England. Edward then made a gift of them to the Royal Irish Academy, which deposited them in the Dublin Museum. If there is a better cautionary tale about repatriation litigation, I haven't seen it.