# Bought En Bloc, and What the Record Loses > The Metropolitan bought nearly 500 pieces of arms and armour sight unseen in April 1904 for just over $250,000. No dealers' invoices came with them, and fewer than half the catalogue entries cite a provenance. > The Study - 2026-08-27 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/study/bought-en-bloc/ ## Key points - In April 1904 the Metropolitan Museum bought the Duc de Dino collection en bloc: almost five hundred pieces, for just over $250,000, the largest sum the Museum had then paid for a single acquisition. - The Museum bought it sight unseen. Its curator of arms and armour records that the purchase rested solely on the enthusiastic recommendation of one trustee, and was made without reference to Dino's own privately printed catalogue. - The paperwork did not come with the objects. Dino left no written account of his collecting, no dealers' invoices or receipts were preserved with the collection, and of the three hundred entries in the printed catalogue fewer than half cite any provenance. - An en bloc purchase buys the attributions along with the objects. Modern scholarship has since found that some of the best-known and most-published Dino pieces are composites or outright fakes. - The armourer who completed and mounted armours for the nineteenth-century trade, Daniel Tachaux, was hired by the Metropolitan itself in 1909 and stayed until 1919. The hand that made some of the composites later worked on the collection that contained them. - A bequest can be worse than a purchase for this. The Waddesdon Bequest arrived at the British Museum in 1898 as nearly 300 objects including a number of nineteenth-century fakes, and the museum took the collection as it stood. ## Buying a collection whole buys the objects and leaves their histories behind ## In April 1904 the Metropolitan bought a collection it had not seen ## The accession numbers are the surviving trace of the transaction ## Fewer than half the catalogue entries carried a provenance ## The restorer who built the composites later joined the museum ## A bequest can force a museum to take the fakes with the masterpieces ## When the lot is the collection, the object has no price ## How to read a collection name in a provenance The Metropolitan's 1904 purchase was a good decision made on bad information, and the Museum has published the evidence of both. That is the right model for handling an en bloc acquisition in a record: state the transaction, state its date and its single price, and then stop, rather than letting the collector's name stand in for four centuries nobody documented. A collection name in a provenance is one link with a date on it. Where the invoices survive, cite them and say where they are held. Where they were never kept, write that down too, because a reader who knows the receipts are gone will go looking in other collectors' letters, and a reader who assumes the chain is complete will not. ## Questions **What does buying a collection en bloc mean?** It means purchasing the whole collection in one transaction at one price, rather than selecting objects individually. The Metropolitan Museum bought the Duc de Dino collection of almost five hundred pieces of arms and armour that way in April 1904 for just over $250,000. **Did the Metropolitan Museum really buy the Dino collection without seeing it?** Yes. Stuart W. Pyhrr, the Museum's curator in charge of arms and armour, wrote in the Metropolitan Museum Journal in 2012 that the Museum purchased the collection sight unseen, on the recommendation of a single trustee, and without reference to the privately printed catalogue Baron de Cosson had written about it in 1901. **Why does an en bloc purchase damage provenance research?** Because the documentation belongs to the collector rather than to the objects. In the Dino case no dealers' invoices or receipts were preserved with the collection, Dino left no account of his collecting, and fewer than half of the three hundred catalogue entries cite a provenance, so each object's chain stops at the collector. **Who was Daniel Tachaux?** A Paris armourer who completed and mounted antique armours for the nineteenth-century trade, including work within the Dino collection, and who was then hired as the Metropolitan Museum's own armourer by Bashford Dean in 1909. He left the Museum in 1919 to work for the collector Clarence Mackay. **Does a bequest let a museum refuse the weaker objects?** Generally not, when the collection is left as a whole. The Waddesdon Bequest came to the British Museum in 1898 as nearly 300 objects that include both exceptionally important medieval and Renaissance work and a number of nineteenth-century fakes, and the museum holds and displays them together. **Can you work out what one object cost in a collection purchase?** No. A single price for hundreds of objects supports an average and nothing more. The same problem attaches to the Hope Diamond, bought by Harry Winston in 1949 as part of the McLean jewels, where the reported figures cover the whole collection rather than the stone. ## Sources - [1] Stuart W. Pyhrr, 'Armor for America: The Duc de Dino Collection', Metropolitan Museum Journal 47 (2012), pp. 183 onward. The April 1904 en bloc purchase of almost five hundred pieces for just over $250,000; the purchase made sight unseen on one trustee's recommendation and without reference to de Cosson's 1901 catalogue; the absence of invoices and receipts; fewer than half of three hundred catalogue entries citing provenance; composites and outright fakes among the best-known objects; Daniel Tachaux's work for Ressman and his employment by the Museum from 1909 to 1919; the Fountaine armour and the Real Armeria thefts sold at Christie's in 1839 and 1840. - [2] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record for the Helmet all'antica, accession 04.3.202, attributed to Filippo Negroli, about 1532 to 1535, credit line Rogers Fund, 1904. Accession numbers, credit lines and dating for the Dino objects cited in the table were read from the Museum's own collection data. - [3] The British Museum, 'The Waddesdon Bequest', Room 2a gallery page. Describes the bequest as a collection of nearly 300 objects left to the Museum in 1898 by Baron Ferdinand Rothschild, consisting of exceptionally important medieval and Renaissance pieces as well as a number of nineteenth-century fakes. - [4] The Walters Art Museum, 'About the Walters Art Museum'. Records that Henry Walters (1848-1931) bequeathed to the City of Baltimore an extensive art collection begun by his father William T. Walters, two buildings and an endowment, and that the museum was established in 1934; the campus holds 36,000 art objects.