While many study art history, less attention has been focused on the history of art collecting. The Frick Collection established the Center for the History of Collecting in America to stimulate awareness of this growing scholarly field. At its first public symposium on Sunday, scholars engaged in a wide-ranging discussion of changes in collecting Old Masters between 1830 and 1940.

A professor at the University of Chicago, Neil Harris, opened by arguing that biography — especially those of East Coast figures — had dominated the history of art collecting. He said the very mention of names of prominent collectors from Cincinnati, Cleveland, or St. Louis in the late 19th and early 20th century could cause “blank stares or even raise eyebrows.”

Mr. Harris urged that collecting be studied as a social activity that “incorporates biography but is not dominated by its details.” To try to uncover why, for example, Boston had more Old Master collecting than Chicago, one would need to examine local cultures and patterns of taste, he said. This could help explain why curiosity in certain objects is stimulated in some locales and what social networks were in place to sustain it.

Speaking of social networks, a fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Flaminia Gennari Santori, said that unlike Pierpont Morgan, Henry Clay Frick was never part of a tight-knit group of connoisseurs. Frick remained “an outsider to the very last.”

Mr. Harris praised the history of book collecting as a model that the study of art collecting might emulate. As a result of well-documented hubs such as the Grolier Club and other bibliophilic organizations, where collectors took pleasure in fellow members’ acquisitions in a collegial setting, “we know a lot more about the social history of book collecting than art collecting,” he said.

To better understand art collecting as a social activity, Mr. Harris said, more study was needed of the links among dealers, museums, and collectors. He said dealers’ memoirs and collectors’ notebooks are useful sources.

Mr. Harris also suggested looking at various events such as world’s fairs and expositions. He said there has been no systematized attempt yet to show how expositions and collectors help to shape each other. Mr. Harris gave the example of the Columbian Exposition in 1893, which so impressed Frank Lloyd Wright that he fell under the sway of the power of wood block prints, and the exposition in St. Louis in 1904, where many dealers encountered Jugendstil for the first time.

When an audience member asked about the psychology of collectors, Mr. Harris said a good example is the current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Impressionist and early Modern paintings owned by Robert and Stephen Clark. Each brother, he said, had a different approach to immortality.

An independent scholar, Christine Oaklander, examined collectors between 1820 and 1860, a period in which the growing country still felt insecure about its cultural achievements. She cited Frances Trollope, mother of Anthony Trollope, who upon visiting exhibitions in New York, wrote, “The Medici of the Republic must exert themselves a little more before these can become even respectable.”

Ms. Oaklander displayed a magazine illustration from 1840 showing a fox as a dealer showing a small Old Master painting to a donkey collector, symbolizing an American dupe. She said that in those early years of American collecting, an auctioneer would rent a storefront for a day, since commercial galleries did not take hold until midcentury.

Picking up on the theme of being duped, a research assistant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Esmée Quodbach, showed images of a few fake paintings that Americans have acquired over the years that were been purported to be by the Dutch master Johannes Vermeer.

But this was after she discussed at length the authentic Vermeers that Henry Marquand, Henry Clay Frick, and others purchased during the economic boom of the Gilded Age. Ms. Quodbach said Americans have more than a third of all works by Vermeer, who did not paint much and whose work commanded ever larger sums. New York alone has eight (five at the Metropolitan Museum and three at the Frick) that is more than the entirety of the artist’s work owned in the Netherlands: seven.

After Ms. Quodbach discussed collecting Vermeers, Ms. Santori discussed the opposite; dispersal — more specifically, the breakup of J.P. Morgan’s huge art collection, with which dealer Joseph Duveen assisted.

The audience broke into laughter when the president of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Marilyn Perry, concluded the program by telling an anecdote about another kind of dispersal. It seems that an English professor came to Texas to present a lecture. Before a large crowd in front of him, he leaned on the podium and hit some switches, whereupon the audience chairs began to vanish and the auditorium was transformed into a basketball court.

gshapiro@nysun.com