In 1865 John Charles Robinson travelled to Portugal in the service of the South Kensington Museum and plunged into the art market with the intention of acquiring works for that institution’s collections that were representative of Portuguese artistic production. This article provides a broad and contextualized approach to this connoisseur’s experience on the Portuguese market, framing it within a hitherto undervalued phenomenon: the persistent presence of English agents in this system. An original identification of all the works acquired in Portugal by Robinson and of all those so-far neglected dealers involved in such transactions allows us to assess the real extent and impact of such mission. We shall also show that the acquisitions made were decisive not only for diversifying the museum’s collections but also for art historiography, both being inseparable from the invention of the term Indo-Portuguese.

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