The Rape of Europa

by Charles FitzRoy

  It was leading Victorian industrialists from the Midlands and Northern England who broke new ground. Their wealth encouraged them to purchase works by contemporary British artists. Figures such as the textile manufacturer Thomas Coglan Horsfall from Manchester, Andrew Kurtz, a Liverpool industrialist, James Gillot, a manufacturer of steel pens in Birmingham, and James Leathart, a lead manufacturer from Newcastle, were all very active collectors. The politician Sir Thomas Fairbairn, had played a key role in fixing the exhibition. He had commissioned Holman Hunt’s Awakening Conscience, a moral fable where a fallen woman suddenly sees the light, which was prominently displayed in Manchester. Owing to their support, there was a growing movement to create a national collection of British art, and wealthy collectors such as Robert Vernon, a former horse dealer, the sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey and the clothing manufacturer John Sheepshanks left their collections to the South Kensington Museum with this intention (they were to join the sugar magnate Sir Henry Tate’s legacy when the Tate Gallery was opened in 1897).

  The most persuasive advocate of contemporary British art was the art critic, social thinker and philanthropist John Ruskin, whose Modern Painters, published in five volumes between 1843 and 1860, argued that contemporary British artists were superior to the Old Masters, particularly in their accurate documentation of nature. Ruskin was a great champion of Turner, but also of the Pre-Raphaelites, despite the fact that John Everett Millais, one of the founders of the Brotherhood, eloped with his wife Effie.

  Ruskin’s other great passion was Venice, and he published his magisterial three-volume Stones of Venice in 1851–3. Although he professed to prefer Tintoretto to Titian, like so many others Ruskin found the beauty of Titian’s paintings irresistible, and his memorable evocation of the Serenissima attracted thousands of his fellow countrymen to go to see the Titians in the painter’s native city (few travellers went to see the much superior collection of works by the artist in Madrid and the Escorial).

  In the introduction to his work, Ruskin drew his readers’ attention to the parallel between Venice and Britain, two of the greatest maritime empires in history: ‘Since the first dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice and England.’

  After describing Tyre, Ruskin launched into one of his most famous passages, a magical description of the fragile, evanescent beauty of Venice:

  Her [Tyre’s] successor, like her in perfection of beauty, though less in endurance of dominion, is still left for our beholding in the final period of her decline: a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak – so quiet, – so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and which the Shadow.

  I would endeavour to trace the lines of this image before it be for ever lost, and to record, as far as I may, the warning which seems to me to be uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves, that beat, like passing bells against the STONES OF VENICE.

  Many British tourists were inspired by Ruskin’s words to visit Venice, and returned home determined to build houses for themselves in the Venetian style. Although not all the buildings they erected were always successful, and these pastiches of Venetian Gothic were dubbed by critics as ‘streaky bacon’, there was a growing interest in Venetian art. People wanted to learn more about the major artists. At Manchester, Waagen had provided a description of the Rape of Europa in his A Walk through the Art-Treasures Exhibition: ‘The action of Europa is very animated, the landscape very poetical, the colouring very warm and clear; the treatment, equally broad and spirited, indicates the later period of the master.’

  But this was not enough for the reviewer of the exhibition in the Athenaeum magazine, looking for something more perceptive, who objected to Waagen’s verbiage, as he put it, ‘his use of phrases such as “graceful motives”, “juicy colour”, “silvery tone”, “warm and clear in the chiaroscuro”, “full body”, “juicy in golden tones” abound. This is the true dead language of the old time of the Georges, and which still abounds in Germany. These phrases save all thinking and apply to anything.’ George Scharf, the Art Secretary to the exhibition, in contrast, provided a more detailed technical analysis of Titian’s use of glazes in his Handbook, comparing his coat of transparent colour to the opaque paint used by an artist such as Frans Hals.

  Scharf’s analysis was indicative of a growing interest in art history. There was widespread dismay among collectors at the large numbers of school pictures (paintings by artists working within the circle of a major master) masquerading as works by important artists, and this led to much confusion (not least over the price for these works). This was soon to change with the publication of a number of scholarly works by art historians, carefully discriminating between works by major masters and the far greater output of their followers.

  In the case of Titian, James Northcote, a pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds, produced a Life of Titian in 1828, which recorded a series of anecdotes of the painter’s life. A much more interesting monograph appeared a year later, written by the MP Sir Abraham Hume. Hume’s family had made a fortune in the East India Company, and the baronet had purchased Titian’s Death of Actaeon at the Orléans Sale, a painting he described as ‘unfinished but very beautiful’. He therefore had an intimate knowledge of the artist’s work. In his monograph he provided a topographical catalogue of Titian’s major works, some of which he had seen (the works in British collections and those he saw in the Musée Napoleon in Paris in 1802), an essay on Titian’s use of colour, a list of his pupils and a catalogue of engravings after the master.

  Since Hume’s monograph, little had appeared in print on Titian in English, but this was to change with the advent of two leading art historians: the English consular official Sir Joseph Archer Crowe and the Italian writer and art critic Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle. The two men became lifelong friends on a visit to Italy in 1846–7. They collaborated on two major works: Early Flemish Painters and the History of Painting in Italy before publishing Titian: His Life and Times in 1877. Crowe and Cavalcaselle were strongly influenced by Cavalcaselle’s fellow Italian Giovanni Morelli, who had created a new form of connoisseurship by making a careful comparison between individual paintings of a particular Old Master in order to ascertain their authenticity. This approach was to be of major importance in transforming the study of Old Master painting, and in the prices that discriminating collectors were willing to pay for paintings which had been authenticated by this process. Both Morelli and Cavalcaselle advised Eastlake on the purchase of Italian paintings for the National Gallery, with outstanding success.

  Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s entry on the Rape of Europa shows their scholarship and sensitivity to the painting. The two art historians began with a very full description of Europa, comparing ‘the silvery light and deep brown shadows of the Europa’ with Veronese:

  but the scene is depicted with much more elevation than Paolo [Veronese] was capable of feeling, and composed with much more thought than he usually bestowed on pictorial labours. Nothing betrays the aged character of Titian more than the inevitable looseness of drawing and the coarse delineation of realistic extremities, to which we must fain plead guilty in his name. But these defects are compensated by startling force of modelling and impaste, by lively effect of movement apparent in every part, by magic play of light and shade and colour, and a genial depth of atmosphere.

  There follows a description of the ‘imposing and triumphant’ bull, with Europa ‘on the back of the beast whose seat she dare not leave, holding on with her left to one of his horns, parted from his white side by an orange cloth, of which a fold is waved by her outstretched right arm. As her face is thrown back it catches a shadow from her arm, and her glance may reach to the shores far away where her companions have been left … Eros clinging with expanded wings to a dolphin, and sporting along in the course of the bull, is a lovely fragment of Titia
nesque painting, representing, as finely as the two Cupids with their bows and arrows in the air, the idea of rapid going, already suggested by the swimming fishes and the surge of the bull’s breast.’

  For Crowe and Cavalcaselle, ‘nothing can be more vigorous or brilliant than the touch which has all the breadth of that in the “Jupiter and Antiope” or the “Calisto,” without the abruptness of Paolo Veronese, the broader expanses of tinting being broken effectually with sparkling red or grey or black, toned off at last by glazing and calculated smirch to a splendid harmony.’

  Almost as important as this detailed and poetic description of the Titian is the authors’ dismissal of various versions of Europa. In a footnote the authors make detailed reference to the painting owned by Sir Richard Wallace, which the owner regarded as a genuine sketch by Titian: ‘This copy is no doubt that which belonged to Dawson Turner, Esq, of Yarmouth (Waagen, Treasures, iii, 18), and has been characterised by some critics as a genuine sketch by Titian. It is, however, but a copy, and probably by Del Mazo [a follower of Velázquez]. A poor copy of the Cobham Hall Europa is in the Dulwich Gallery.’

  Crowe and Cavalcaselle may have been united in their praise for the Rape of Europa but its owner, Lord Darnley, was not to enjoy his painting for much longer. Darnley, like so many English aristocrats, had suffered acutely from the effects of the agricultural depression of the 1870s, and was considering selling the painting. Badly in need of funds, the earl’s holdings in Ireland had been affected by successive Land Acts which enabled tenants to buy their land from the owner. Darnley had also spotted the opportunities offered by the Settled Land Act of 1882, which permitted the break-up of entailed estates, allowing art and land to be turned into cash provided that the proceeds were held on trust for the heirs of the estates. The Act led to a series of major sales in the 1880s, beginning with the extensive 17-day Hamilton Palace Sale in 1882, and continuing with the great Old Master sale at Blenheim Palace in 1884–5. The pressure on owners to sell was increased by the introduction of death duties in 1894.

  The trustees of the National Gallery were determined to try to buy the best paintings appearing on the art market. In 1884 they scored a major coup in raising £70,000 to purchase Raphael’s Ansidei Madonna, showing that, in monetary terms, he continued to be the artist against whom all others were measured. Six years later they bought a number of Venetian paintings belonging to Lord Darnley: the Origin of the Milky Way by Tintoretto for £1,310.10s, and the four Allegories of Love by Veronese for £5,000. All of these paintings had been exhibited in Manchester in 1857. In 1904 the National Gallery was once again successful in acquiring Titian’s superb Portrait of a Man with a Quilted Sleeve, thought to be a portrait of Ariosto, for the much greater sum of £30,000.

  But, between those two dates, the trustees turned down the chance to buy the most important painting in Darnley’s collection: the Rape of Europa. In 1894 the owner’s uncle, the eminent art historian Lionel Cust, wrote to Lord Carlisle (whose ancestor had turned down the chance to buy the painting some 90 years earlier), a trustee of the National Gallery, informing him in confidence that Lord Darnley was prepared to offer the Gallery the painting for £15,000 to be paid in three instalments of £5,000 each. Carlisle passed on this information to the other trustees but, at a meeting held on 1 May, they decided that they were unable to pursue this offer, presumably judging the price to be too high.

  This may seem surprising, considering the popularity of Titian in England. However, the gallery already possessed a good collection of works by the artist, including the Tribute Money, Noli me Tangere and Bacchus and Ariadne, the latter belonging to his first poesie series. In addition it appears that by the time the Rape of Europa appeared on the market the director and trustees favoured the artist’s earlier style, and showed little appreciation of what the former director, Dr Nicholas Penny, Director of the National Gallery (2008–15) has described as Titian’s ‘interest in rough and smudgy handling and deliberately blurred form’.

  Darnley therefore determined to offer the painting elsewhere. The most likely candidate was Dr Wilhelm Bode, the extremely knowledgeable and acquisitive Director of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin (a post that had been held by Waagen until 1868). Bode had begun working for the picture department of the museum in 1872 and his abilities were soon spotted by the director, Julius Meyer, who authorized him to search out suitable paintings to add to the museum’s collection. In this he was outstandingly successful. Bode had joined the museum just one year after Berlin had become an imperial capital, following the defeat of France and the creation of the German Empire, dominated by Prussia. This triumph, aided by high indemnities which the French were forced to pay, resulted in an unprecedented economic boom.

  The self-assured Bode was determined to take advantage of this and make the collection of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum the greatest in Europe. Coolly calculating and single-minded in his pursuit of great Old Masters, the doctor soon made a number of major acquisitions, at first concentrating on Italian Renaissance paintings (later on he was to form an extraordinary collection of works by Rembrandt, Durer and the Early Flemish Primitives), including Titian’s Portrait of the Daughter of Roberto Strozzi. Bode’s professional advice was much sought after by collectors throughout Europe, which he was willing to give, providing that these collectors were willing to donate paintings to the museum.

  It was Bode to whom William McKay, senior partner of Colnaghi’s, an old, established firm of art dealers in London, turned when he heard that the Rape of Europa was coming on to the market. He wrote to the director on 1 June 1895: ‘Dear Dr Bode. I think I ought to let you know that Lord Darnley has approached me through a relation with a view to sell the famous picture of Europa by Titian. I understand that you have had the picture under consideration for some time.’ McKay was keen to offer Bode the painting, but was anxious that he should have a cut in any deal Bode was likely to make, adding: ‘I can certainly assist you greatly … I have no doubt I could buy it much cheaper than you’.

  Later that month Dr Bode visited Cobham Hall with McKays’ junior partner Otto Gutekunst who had learned his trade dealing in art in Paris before joining Colnaghi’s in 1894. He was to play a major role in transforming the firm into a leading picture dealer in Old Masters. A restless opportunist and not one to waste any time, Gutekunst wrote the following day to thank the earl and, at the end of the letter, requesting an interview at Darnley’s earliest convenience. His next letter was designed to pave the way for the opening of negotiations but this was unsuccessful, probably because Bode, who was very careful in his use of his museum’s funds, like the National Gallery, baulked at the price.

  Despite the fact that Darnley and other owners felt compelled to sell due to financial constraints, the mood in Britain in the 1890s was generally upbeat. London remained a great imperial capital, and the industrial cities in the Midlands and the north of England continued to benefit from the enormous wealth accrued during the Industrial Revolution. Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 was a chance for the nation to celebrate its success over the 60 years since the queen had ascended the throne, reigning over an empire that extended to every corner of the globe and included Canada, most of the islands in the Caribbean, great swathes of Africa, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand and India, where Victoria had been proclaimed empress in 1877. These far-flung territories were protected by the Royal Navy which had had undisputed control of the seas since Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar in 1805.

  Nevertheless, other nations were catching up. In the late nineteenth century, as economic growth slowed in Britain, with arable farming, textiles, iron and steel, engineering, and consumer goods all facing difficulties, other nations, now enjoying increased economic production, were keen to compete. Germany and the United States enjoyed more abundant and cheaper supplies of energy and raw materials, and had erected tariff barriers to protect their trading interests, unlike Britain, which was still a believer in free trade.

  Germ
any had enjoyed its own Industrial Revolution and had overtaken Britain by the end of the century in economic production. The country had also become the dominant military power in Europe, led by Kaiser Wilhelm II (1888–1918) and his domineering Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the architect of German Unification in 1870 and the driving force in promoting the German economy. Outside Europe, Germany belatedly sought to compete with Britain in acquiring an empire in Africa. More importantly, the Kaiser and Admiral von Tirpitz began to build a navy with the clear intention of challenging the hegemony of the Royal Navy.

  The United States provided a less immediate threat to Britain but the sheer size of the country meant that it possessed far greater potential economic strength. In addition to the development of more competitive and advanced manufacturing processes, the building of railways across the continent meant that America began to take full advantage of her vast natural resources. Millions of the poorer working class throughout Europe emigrated to the New World, hoping to make their fortunes; it has been estimated that during the years 1875–1900 the United States doubled in population and trebled in wealth. Fortunes were made and a number of self-made millionaires sought to invest some of their new-found wealth in art.