Famous collectors and their collections
Everyone is more or less a collector. You start small by picking up an inexpensive souvenir on a family vacation to remember the event. Then you seek out similar items on your travels and, before you know it, you have a collection of postcards, magnets, figurines, coins, stamps, dolls, etc. Having a collection in the antique genre is no different. What could have started out as an inheritance that belonged to your grandmother can turn into an obsession of finding other vintage items like it.
Famous people were also collectors. Just for fun, we are going to tell you about a few of them.
Sigmund Freud
The psychologist was an art collector obsessed with antiquity, beauty, myth, and archaeology. His private museum contains two thousand statues, vases, reliefs, busts, fragments of papyrus, rings, precious stones, and prints.
Captain Cook
This British explorer collected tribal artifacts during his Pacific voyages while he looked for the Northwest Passage. The pieces he collected are now owned by many museums around the world.
Thomas Jefferson
Our third president turned his entrance hall at Monticello into an eclectic museum for his collections of maps of the world, European paintings and sculptures, and Native American objects from the Lewis and Clark expedition. He displayed his model of an Egyptian pyramid along with mastodon bones from Kentucky.
Sir Thomas Phillips
The first Baronet, who lived from 1792 to 1872, spent his life collecting books. He believed that he was meant to own one copy of every book in the world, to preserve them for posterity.
Alex Shear
This Emmy Award-winning producer and director has amassed more than a hundred thousand pieces of pop culture artifacts. His collection ranges from transistor radios, which look like Velveeta packages to baseball cards to Pez dispensers to Cabbage Patch dolls to various 7Up bottle designs. It now has its own museum in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
James Smithson
The Smithsonian Institute, founded by this English scientist, has so many collections of memorabilia that it is called our national attic.
William Randolph Hearst
American billionaires like Hearst and JP Morgan bought European heritage for their collections. Hearst Castle is one of the famous tourist stops in California.
Andy Warhol
Famous painter Warhol was an avid collector and patron of flea markets. Warhol’s collections included airplane menus, unpaid invoices, pizza dough, newspapers, stamps, wigs, supermarket flyers, cookie jars, and a mummified foot, among other eccentricities.
The next time you are thinking you may have gone overboard with your collection or that something you are collecting is a bit odd, look back at this list. You can collect anything. In the end, collecting is what is important to the person doing the collecting whether the items are of monetary value or not. If they are important and meaningful to you, then they are important and meaningful.
