MAGPIES, SQUIRRELS & THIEVES
MAGPIES, SQUIRRELS & THIEVES
HOW THE VICTORIANS COLLECTED THE WORLD
JACQUELINE YALLOP
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © 2011 by Jacqueline Yallop
The moral right of Jacqueline Yallop to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 84354 750 1
eBook ISBN: 978 0 85789 561 5
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‘Things’ were, of course, the sum of the world.
Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton, 1897
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Catching the Collecting Bug
1 Exhibition Road, London, 1862
2 The Useful and the Beautiful
3 A Public Duty and a Private Preoccupation
Making Museums: Collecting as a Career
JOHN CHARLES ROBINSON
4 On the Banks of the Seine
5 The Battle of South Kensington
6 The Tricks of the Trade
7 Changing Times
Ransacking and Revolution: The European Crusade
CHARLOTTE SCHREIBER
8 Mrs Schreiber’s Big Red Bag
9 Pushing and Panting and Pinching their Way
10 The Gourd-shaped Bottle Gourd-shaped
Pride, Passion and Loss: Collecting for Love
JOSEPH MAYER
11 Waiting for the Rain to Stop
12 Mummies, Crocodiles and Shoes for a Queen
13 The Treasures of the North
14 A Larger World
Fashion, Fine Dining and Forgeries: Dealing in Society
MURRAY MARKS
15 Rossetti’s Peacock
16 A Notorious Squabble
17 The Fake Flora
Collecting the Empire: In Pursuit of the Exotic
STEPHEN WOOTTON BUSHELL
18 The Route to Peking
19 The Promise of the East
20 Collecting Without Boundaries
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
1. The South Court at the South Kensington Museum. Illustrated London News (6 December 1862). © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans.
2. Portrait of John Charles Robinson by J. J. Napier. © National Portrait Gallery, London.
3. Robinson’s collection at Newton Manor. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
4. Portrait of Charlotte Schreiber by George Frederic Watts. From Charlotte Schreiber’s Journals: confidences of a collector of ceramics and antiques throughout Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Austria and Germany from the year 1869–1885 (1911).
5. Portrait of Charles Schreiber by George Frederic Watts. From Charlotte Schreiber’s Journals: confidences of a collector of ceramics and antiques throughout Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Austria and Germany from the year 1869–1885 (1911).
6. Gourd-shaped bottle. Courtesy of Sotheby’s Picture Library.
7. Portrait of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Theodore Watts-Dunton by Henry Treffry Dunn. © National Portrait Gallery, London.
8. The Peacock Room. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1904.61.
9. Murray Marks. From George Charles Williamson’s Murray Marks and his Friends: A Tribute of Regard (1919).
10. Murray Marks’ trade card. From George Charles Williamson’s Murray Marks and his Friends: A Tribute of Regard (1919).
11. Portrait of Joseph Mayer by William Daniels. Courtesy National Museum Liverpool.
12. The ‘Mummy Room’ in Mayer’s Egyptian Museum. Courtesy of Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool Libraries.
13. Stephen Wootton Bushell. Courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum, PH118-80.
14. The Bronze Pavilion at the Imperial Summer Palace. Reproduced by permission of Durham University Museums.
15. Satirical engravings by George du Maurier. Punch Almanack (December 1875). Courtesy of the author.
16. Aston Webb’s South Kensington complex. Getty Images.
17. The glass palace of the Art Treasures Exhibition, Manchester. Art-Treasures Examiner: A Pictorial, Critical and Historical Record of the Art-Treasures Exhibition (1857). Reproduced by courtesy of the University Librarian and Director, The John Rylands University Library, The University of Manchester.
MAGPIES, SQUIRRELS & THIEVES
Preface
Today we are accustomed to the mechanisms that allow collectors to build a collection: auctions and antique dealers, car-boot sales and internet trading sites. We expect to have public collections in town and city museums, even if we rarely visit them. The motivations that drive collectors have frequently been examined by psychologists and psychoanalysts, and this has given us some understanding of why collecting is such a popular activity and how it can become so obsessive. What I want to do with this book is to take a step back, to a period during the nineteenth century when many of the aspects of collecting which we now take for granted were being newly explored, when collectors were emerging into the public eye and when the hunt for objects was at its most inventive and eccentric. The thrills and perils of Victorian collecting will, in some respects, appear very familiar; it was the collectors of the nineteenth century who laid the foundations for later collectors and many of their networks remain. In other ways, however, we will discover outlooks and experiences very different from those which collectors might expect today. Victorian collecting had a character of its own, and it is this robust and intrepid spirit of adventure that I hope to convey.
There was no single archetypal Victorian collector: individual tastes meant that one collection was very different from another. Some collections were ordered, scholarly or scientific; others were quirky, highly personal narratives. Changes in fashions, attitudes and economic climate also influenced the objects people chose to collect. This book presents the stories of five collectors to give some sense of this diversity and of the ways in which collecting evolved through the nineteenth century. It also uses these individual stories to explore more general issues about collecting. What is a ‘collection’? What kind of cultural, social and political factors influence the life of a collection? What drives the collector? What is the relationship between the private collector and the public museum?
Each of my five collectors left lively archives, letters or journals which document their collecting and each has a fascinating story to tell. Between them, they turned their attention to all kinds of art and historical objects. John Charles Robinson was an influential
curator at the South Kensington Museum, which would be renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899, becoming one of the most famous public collections in the world. He collected both for the museum and for himself, indulging a taste for significant, and often expensive, pieces of art and becoming a specialist in the Italian Renaissance. Lady Charlotte Schreiber, the widow of a steel magnate and an intrepid traveller, sought out china and playing cards, fans and glass in showrooms and junkshops across Europe. Murray Marks, a dealer as well as a collector, used his connections in Holland to exploit the fashion for blue-and-white ceramics and his friendship with the Pre-Raphaelites to create elaborate domestic interiors. Liverpool jeweller Joseph Mayer had a taste for Roman remains, Egyptian antiquities, coins, Anglo-Saxon archaeology and quirky objects from history. Stephen Wootton Bushell was sent to China as doctor to the British delegation and ended up becoming a pioneering expert on Chinese art.
The five individual stories offer a portrait of the collector, from the eccentric and obsessive to the scholarly and the professional. Together, they also show us how art-collecting changed during the Victorian period, moving away from the great pictures and sculpture that had fascinated the wealthy in the eighteenth century towards smaller, more varied decorative objects. Science and natural history collections, which were equally popular and active at this time, could not be covered within the scope of the book, but it is worth bearing in mind that this created yet another growing community of collectors, working alongside – and occasionally overlapping – with art collectors. For those whose tastes lay towards stuffed animals, geological specimens or mechanical instruments, there was a correspondingly influential and flourishing network of organizations, museums and collectors to feed their enthusiasm.
None of my five collectors is well known. Even John Charles Robinson has been little studied; in comparison to his colleague at the South Kensington Museum, Henry Cole, his work has been overlooked. Only some of the objects from their collections were important and valuable; some were just as much a demonstration of individual taste or little more than a frivolous purchase. None of the collections survives intact to be seen now. But each one was significant in its own time; some were even famed. And, taken together, these five histories give an insight into a Victorian phenomenon that went much further than just a handful of extraordinary lives, revealing a passion for collecting that helped shape how we see the nineteenth century and the legacy it has bequeathed to us today.
Catching the Collecting Bug
CHAPTER ONE
Exhibition Road, London, 1862
It was a hot June day in 1862. South Kensington was bustle and dust and noise, as it had been for months. Horses, carriages and omnibuses moved slowly in the packed streets. On Exhibition Road, on a site that would, in twenty years’ time, become home to the terracotta columns of the Natural History Museum, two great glass domes shone in the sun. They formed the extravagant centrepiece of the London International Exhibition of Industry and Art, an enormous fair of artworks and manufactures from across the world in the tradition of the 1851 Great Exhibition. Visitors queued at the entrances, eager to see what was on show, crowds inside pushed their way through the glittering displays and Victorian London was, once again, in thrall to the excitement of spectacle
Sponsored by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, the new exhibition boasted 28,000 exhibitors from thirty-six countries. The specially erected building, designed by government engineer and architect Captain Francis Fowke, covered 23 acres of land, with two huge wings set aside for large-scale agricultural equipment and machinery, including a cotton mill and maritime engines, and a façade almost 1,200 feet long, of high arched windows, corner pavilions, columns and flags. At a cost of almost half a million pounds, the exhibition was intended to dazzle and impress even those who had visited the Crystal Palace extravaganza a decade earlier, and the two crystal domes of Fowke’s design, each 260 feet high and 160 feet in diameter, were then the largest domes in the world, wider than (although not quite as high as) both St Paul’s in London and St Peter’s in Rome.
Not everyone liked the building. The popular press seemed to think the vast domes resembled nothing so much as colossal overturned soup bowls; Building News joined other national papers in describing it as ‘one of the ugliest public buildings that was ever raised’.1 But the exhibition inside was very much an attraction. In the six months of its life, between 1 May and 1 November 1862, over 6 million visitors paid between a shilling and a pound, depending on the day, to see new inventions, industrial machinery, home wares, works of art and the occasional splendid folly, such as the huge pillar of gold sent from the Australian gold rush. Not to be put off by a touch of architectural vulgarity, the London crowds flocked to the display galleries where bootmakers rubbed shoulders with baronets; young designers sketched ideas; whiskered manufacturers confided trade secrets; pickpockets, no doubt, flourished, and everyone had a good time.
The taste for this kind of event was by now well established; most visitors already knew how to negotiate the vast spaces and overwhelming displays. They liked the bewildering array of exhibits, the crowded corridors and the chance to see and be seen. Not only the 1851 Great Exhibition, but other international exhibitions such as the 1855 Paris Exhibition and, closer to home, the 1857 Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester, had accustomed the Victorians to the idea of huge and eclectic displays, sparkling showcases for the most beautiful, the most efficient and the most innovative. Even those who had never before visited such an exhibition would have read about them in the newspapers, and seen all kinds of prints and photographs of what they had been missing. This new event filled the front pages of the press: the Illustrated London News was just one of the papers to issue a special event supplement, and to use its editorials to update readers with news of the exhibition’s progress. Visitors came to the International Exhibition at South Kensington expecting to be amazed and entertained by the practical, the pioneering and the extraordinary.
The objects brought together under Fowke’s clumsy crystal domes included everything from a working forge to sewing machines, from slates and rock salt to the Brazilian ‘Star of the South’ diamond. The exhibition was a symbol of mid-Victorian aspiration, manufacturing success and consumer confidence. It was a message to the world about the ambition of Britain and its Empire. But to the millions of visitors that pushed through the crowded galleries, it was also, quite simply, a chance to admire and desire beautiful and unusual things. It evoked, on an enormous scale, the Victorian idea of the collection and what it might mean to bring things together, to compare them, to own and value them, to present them in public with pride.
It was not only the brightly painted and lavishly ornamented arcades of the International Exhibition that hummed with activity. On the other side of Exhibition Road, more objects and more collections were attracting public interest. The new South Kensington Museum, which had been emerging since 1857 in a mish-mash of temporary buildings, was also noisy and crowded. The recently opened permanent galleries of the North and South Courts – also designed by Francis Fowke – more than rivalled the glamour and glitter across the road. Here, too, there was a glass roof to let in light and air. Boldly painted walls in deep blood-red and purple grey prepared the eye for corridors packed with elaborate highly coloured arrays of patterned wallpapers, mosaics, friezes and stained glass. Here, too, visitors clustered close together around cases of fascinating and attractive things, preening, laughing and flirting, enjoying the buzz. Voices, and the chink of fine china, drifted from the mock-Tudor refreshment rooms where colourful flocks of women took afternoon tea; in the new display spaces collectors, connoisseurs and the simply curious marvelled at some of the world’s finest art objects brought together for the delight of the public.
This was the ‘Special Exhibition of Works of Art of the Medieval, Renaissance, and more Recent Periods, on loan at the South Kensington Museum’, a complementary – or perhaps rival – att
raction to the more manufacturing-based displays across the road. The catalogue played down the ambition of the exhibition, describing it simply as ‘fine works of bygone periods’, which had been made possible with ‘the assistance of noblemen and gentlemen, eminent for their knowledge of art’.2 In fact, the displays featured some of the rarest and most beautiful objects ever set before the British general public, over 9,000 works of art from over 500 of the country’s richest and most influential owners, from the Queen, aristocracy and the Church, to London livery companies, municipal corporations and public schools. These were private treasures, not normally on open display, brought together for the first and only time – a triumph of negotiation and diplomacy.
The exhibition covered over 500 years of art production, and included all kinds of media, from painting, ceramic and glass, to metal, ivory and textiles. Objects were organized in the catalogue into forty categories, which more or less corresponded to the layout of the galleries. There was no chronological arrangement to the displays, which were bewildering in their haphazard glamour and sheer abundance. Beginning with sculptures in marble and terracotta, the exhibition moved on to nearly 300 carvings in ivory, bronzes, furniture, Anglo-Saxon metalwork, enamels, jewellery and glass, textiles and illuminated manuscripts. There was a Sèvres porcelain vase in the form of a ship painted with cupids and flowers; a Limoges enamel casket, one of the many enamels on display from the collection of the Duke of Hamilton; a silver-gilt handbell which ‘doubtless’ came from the chamber of Mary Queen of Scots; and a modest pair of Plymouth porcelain salt cellars, in the form of shells, belonging to the Right Honourable William Gladstone MP.
Contributors had loaned not only individual objects but sometimes entire collections, often with ancient family roots. This was particularly true in the case of bookbindings, portrait miniatures, jewellery and cameos, the popular mainstays of country-house collections: ‘The Devonshire Gems’, for example, assembled in the eighteenth century by William Cavendish, 3rd Duke of Devonshire, was displayed in its entirety, apart from eighty-eight of the cameos which had already been committed to the International Exhibition. So extensive and unique was the collection, and so difficult to assess in the short period of time that had been given over to organizing the exhibition, that the catalogue was forced to confine itself to listing just a few ‘of the finest gems’.
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