Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves

by Jacqueline Yallop

  Franks became a mainstay of Victorian collecting, the epitome of the scholar-collector. And the work he undertook to move the British Museum towards a more scholarly, collections-based approach was not unlike Robinson’s crusade at South Kensington. For Robinson, however, it was the nature of the collections at South Kensington – as well as his clash with Henry Cole – that meant progress was particularly tortuous. South Kensington embodied a new and largely untried idea of a museum that might collect neither antiquities nor paintings, but something from the vast number of objects that fell somewhere beyond and between such categories. It is little surprise that the politics were complicated and fiery, nor that the identity of the collection was sometimes vague and confusing. The work both Robinson and Franks were doing, however, showed the increasing importance and influence of professional collectors. Working with large sums of public money, among a community that stretched across Europe, these new collector-curators were very much at the heart of things, forging a new vision for collecting that would last for generations.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Tricks of the Trade

  Despite Robinson’s spirited defence, and the board’s retraction, the notion that he had, for some while, been combining his work for the South Kensington Museum with work for private collectors proved hard to shake. There were plenty of people who marvelled at his ability to run his smart household on a curator’s salary alone, and the conspicuous blanks in his museum diaries, especially when travelling abroad, were commonly held to conceal all kinds of private transactions. The belief that he had been using his knowledge and contacts as a collector to make money from dealing was widespread – and the idea stuck because there was truth in it. Travelling for the museum across Europe, Robinson was ideally placed to know where and when pieces were coming on to the market. From his discussions at the Fine Arts Club, he also knew exactly what people were collecting, and which works they were eager to acquire. It was not difficult to put the two together for profit. Robinson was a collector who revelled in the thrill of collecting, the sport of it, the hunting out and tracking down, the negotiations, intrigues and manoeuvrings; he also had a voracious appetite for acquisition. Funding this was desperately expensive. Adding to his museum salary seemed to make sense, either by buying directly for friends or by speculating on pieces that he knew he could sell on himself for a reasonable profit at auction.

  Robinson bought and sold furiously. It was not necessarily unusual at this time for the distinction between collector and dealer to appear hazy. Dealers could end up amassing far more stock than they could sell, and so metamorphosed into collectors; the lively and extensive interaction between collectors meant that it was common for prized objects to change hands between them. But Robinson’s official status at the South Kensington Museum made his situation sensitive; his foray into dealing, especially while on official trips abroad, was a disquieting complication of his role as a public servant with responsibility for public money. On top of this, there was also a lingering sense among some collectors that collecting and dealing should remain separate.

  When Augustus Franks applied to join the British Museum in 1851, there was much discussion among his family as to whether a gentleman of his standing should be considering paid work. He had a ready entrée into high society and the reputation of being a keen member of his prestigious gentleman’s club, the Athenaeum. He was certainly wealthy enough to be dismissive of the salary on offer, regarding it as pocket money. In these circumstances, the idea of a ‘job’ was distinctly uncomfortable. In the end, however, Franks managed to construct a philosophical basis for his work that satisfied his family’s sensitivities, while allowing him to continue professional collecting: he positioned himself very clearly as a public servant, in the same way as other gentlemen of means in the Foreign Office, Parliament or the Church. He accepted a paid role at the museum, but also managed to keep himself apart from the usual administrators and workers. He made frequent purchases from his own money that he then donated to the museum, amounting to a value of around £50,000 (which would correspond to as much as £2 million today). This alone set him apart, reinforcing the impression that he was a gentleman of rank.

  Robinson, it was clear, was treading a tricky path. Dealers were men of trade, while collectors were gentlemen. It would not do for the two to be confused. Austen Henry Layard, a diplomat, MP and archaeological pioneer, as well as a trustee of the National Gallery, voiced the concerns of the establishment. Robinson, he snorted, was ‘bumptious and odious. . . the more I hear of Mr Robinson the less I like him. He is nothing but a dealer – up to every trick of the trade.’1 Layard was, like Robinson, a collector. He was an excellent draughtsman and a scholarly historian and writer, specializing in European art. The two men’s interests intersected particularly in their enthusiasm for Italy – where Layard was born and where he was to retire in the 1880s to write on Italian art and to develop his collection. They should, perhaps, have been friends. But Layard’s assessment of Robinson, and his easy dismissal of dealers in general, was a clear indication that in many minds there remained a gulf between collecting and dealing. To be ‘nothing but a dealer’, Layard implied, was to be nothing much at all.

  Robinson may well have harboured similar reservations himself. He was now a man with excellent social connections, a reputation for scholarship and a first-rate collection, and he was surely loath to sully any of these with the suggestion of commercial coarseness. But in 1868, with his tenure at the museum now at an end, he needed funds more than ever. He put fifty-six paintings and seventy-one Old Master drawings into a sale in Paris in May, but still money was tight. He could not afford to ignore the potential for using his knowledge to make a living. Moreover, he was distinguished, energetic and, at forty-three, still young. He was well equipped to deal with the demands of a new challenge, and well placed for forging a new career. If he was obliged to reinvent himself, what could be better than becoming a helping hand for other collectors, an expert friend, a seeker out of bargains and a stalwart at the sales? He would, at least, be free from the restrictions of public administration and accountability.

  In 1871, Robinson was put forward for the directorship of the National Gallery, but when this fell through it seemed certain that his formal connection with British museums was over. His new life trading objects had begun in earnest. Nevertheless, it was likely that Robinson regarded himself as a successful collector, rather than as an outright dealer. He never owned a shop and he only worked with a range of refined, high-quality objects. But in practice the outcome was the same: collecting was making a profit, and Robinson’s new career flourished rapidly. In 1873, just five years after leaving the South Kensington Museum, he had made enough money to begin looking around at suitable properties to supplement his London townhouse at York Place in Portman Square. He chose Newton Manor, near Swanage in Dorset, a secluded seventeenth-century house with walls of local Purbeck limestone, nestling among tall elms that creaked in summer winds.

  When Robinson first discovered the old manor house, it had been used for years as a farm store and was putrid, neglected and shabby. Nonetheless, he was immediately taken with it and quickly set to work clearing the mess of low agricultural buildings and lean-tos from the back, and emptying the rooms of their animal inhabitants. ‘Bats, rats and mice occupied the bedrooms, a colony of owls was established in one of the stone chimneys, and a swarm of bees was installed. . . at the other end of the roof,’ he noted delightedly in a pamphlet of his reminiscences. Even better, ‘we possess a private breed of spiders, fine, big, long-legged creatures, as active as race horses. One of their amiable customs is to drop down on the shoulders of our lady guests at dinner time.’2 Robinson improved land on the estate, building new roads and planting trees, and discovered an interest in horticulture. He took to spending time outdoors and became fond of the many fine views stretching away across England’s south coast.

  There was just one disappointment – the house lacked a ghost. It
certainly looked as though it should be haunted but, no matter how hard Robinson listened out for tell-tale bumps and moans, the ghosts failed to appear. To make matters worse, the little cottage at the edge of the estate, which had traditionally been used as the dower house, was notoriously haunted. Robinson could not suppress his envy: ‘my house has not got a ghost whilst the cottage rejoices in the possession of a first-rate one,’ he complained.3 Despite this cause for regret, however, Robinson was in his element at Newton. He would be intense and emotional to the end of his days – without his ‘extreme enthusiasm’, noted his wife patiently, he would be a lesser man, a ‘Samson with shorn locks’ – but Newton Manor provided a sanctuary from the worst of life’s irritations.4 The angry days at South Kensington seemed to have passed.

  Newton Manor was also the perfect location for an intimate, informal showroom. Robinson was keen to maintain the distinction between what he was doing and the tradition of the shopkeeping dealers pressed into Europe’s major cities. Here he could create an environment that established him as the country gentleman. He could fill the house with his collection in the tradition of the aristocratic elite and create tasteful, elegant displays that had the illusion of being completely divorced from the financial realities of trade. Over the years, Robinson made a small fortune out of his knowledge of the art markets, but he spent much of it making Newton Manor beautiful. The house and its grounds became an extension of his collection. The garden was filled with Venetian sculpture, columns and fountains, including a life-size statue of Sylvanus, a muscular Roman woodland god, which puzzled and apparently alarmed locals passing by on the road. The dining room was hung with sixteenth-century Spanish panelling, Italian fireplaces and heavy carved wooden doors which gave it the sombre magnificence of an ancient ancestral home. Seventeenth-century suits of armour stood guard in the corridors; Roman busts gazed out across the estate and all kinds of fine paintings lined the walls of the old house, including a full-scale portrait of a nameless Dutch Gentleman. At Newton Manor, Robinson displayed his learning and scholarship, his eye for grace and refinement, his collector’s instincts and his exquisite taste – everything his clients wanted in someone buying and selling works on their behalf. But Newton Manor had the added advantage of conveniently obscuring the fact that Robinson was a first-rate dealer and not a very wealthy private collector. In the simple solid walls of an old manor, Robinson set up a complicated illusion, a house of mirrors, the perfect salve for Victorian anxieties about class and the changing world of trade.

  The genteel lifestyle at Newton Manor was as important to the way Robinson saw himself as to how he wanted others to see him. He bemoaned the break-up of the English country-house collections of the past and there is little doubt that he admired the tradition of collecting that had its roots in the aristocracy. As a dealer, he drew on his conservative credentials to emphasize the discretion and sheer class of the service he was offering. He tried to tempt even the most wary of men with his promise of prudent and tactful dealing, and he was able to count society heavy-weights such as William Gladstone, who somehow found time to be a ceramics collector, among his most honoured customers. Gladstone, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, sent Robinson a speculative £2 in 1869 for the purchase of ‘an interesting piece of Italian ware’ and, suitably reassured by the return on his investment, continued to patronize Robinson from time to time.5

  Not all of Robinson’s clients were society figures, but they were all influential or wealthy, or both. Nearly six hundred works, including some by renowned artists such as Michelangelo and Raphael, passed through his hands to John Malcolm, the 14th Laird of Poltalloch, in Argyll, Scotland, who inherited three houses in 1857. He traded energetically for Robert Napier from Dunbartonshire, who had made a fortune patenting a new naval engineering method, and for Sir Francis Cook, a textile trader, who was left more than £2 million by his father. Abroad, he worked for influential collectors such as Wilhelm von Bode, the creator of the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum who shared Robinson’s taste for the Italian Renaissance, and the art historian Stephan Bourgeois. He even managed to establish himself as a royal dealer, cultivating the business of the Kaiserin Victoria, more familiarly known as Princess Vicky, the Empress of Germany, eldest daughter of Queen Victoria and wife of the German Emperor Frederick III. Shrewdly recognizing the value of such exclusive clients, Robinson seemed content to use high-profile royal transactions as a loss leader: he sold the Princess a still life of Dead Game and Fruit by Frans Snyders in 1877 for nothing more than the price he had paid for it, generously adding a complementary new frame, and during their long association as dealer and client he carefully adhered to a non-profit policy. He even presented a number of valuable works as gifts to celebrate the silver wedding anniversary of Vicky’s marriage to the Kaiser in 1883, including a Sketch of Hampstead Heath by Constable and Reynolds’ A Portrait of a Child with Doll.

  Princess Vicky was a collector, from a family of collectors. Her father, Prince Albert, had thrown himself enthusiastically into raising the quality and reputation of the arts; the Royal Collection expanded in all areas under her mother’s rule. Together, Victoria and Albert commissioned artists for all occasions, treated themselves and each other to sculpture for Christmas or birthdays, shopped excitedly for decorative pieces to furnish their houses at Osborne House and Balmoral, and began to encourage scholars to publish about the Royal Collection, which was begun by Charles I. Growing up with this enthusiasm, and with unrivalled access to great works of art, Vicky was knowledgeable, cultured and sophisticated, if rather conventional in her tastes. During years of political machination in Germany, and three bitter wars of German unification during the 1860s and 1870s, the Princess’s love of fine things had been a comfort and an inspiration. And the environment Robinson created at Newton Manor clearly offered her a retreat: The Times noted that she visited there with her four daughters.6

  Such a royal visit was a great achievement for Robinson. It linked him to collecting in the very highest circles and was a clear indication that his activities as a dealer had been accepted. He seemed to be offering a certain type of wealthy Victorian collector just the kind of refined and discreet personal service they demanded. And, in return, they seemed content to reward him with a great deal of money. Details of Robinson’s account books reveal the considerable profit he made on reselling works to his elite network of collectors: he bought a Dutch painting of A Lady at a Harpsichord at a sale in May 1877 for £88, and sold it two months later for £320. Similarly, a Rubens portrait bought for £90 was sold a few weeks later for £300; a painting described simply in his notes as ‘Venus and Cupid’ and acquired for just £5 was marked up to £375; and a Rainbow Landscape, again by an unknown artist, secured Robinson well over £500 profit. As his client list grew, and as he counted more and more obsessive collectors among his customers, Robinson was making transactions with impressive ease. He was working in London, travelling to Europe, entertaining at Newton Manor, networking through his cluster of clubs and societies, and making deals at every turn. He never tired of the adventure of finding the right object for the right client and, during a typical three-month period of the 1870s, he made almost 800 sales of paintings alone, as well as the unrecorded business in his other diverse interests such as Old Master drawings, sculptured bronzes, oriental ceramics and glassware.7

  Robinson’s energy and success as a dealer can be seen as a blueprint for other internationally renowned dealing careers at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Those that followed adopted Robinson’s enthusiasm for mixing in influential circles, and combining erudition with a sharp business sense. Joseph Duveen, for example, one of the most well known and influential of British art dealers, began work in his father’s business in 1886 and made a fortune by selling works to wealthy Americans and trading on the idea that owning pieces of art was a way to acquire social standing. Like Robinson, he had an eye for the art of the Renaissance and he too moved easily in the
company of royalty and millionaires. He was also, like Robinson, confident, ambitious and single-minded. Before the First World War, he established a virtual monopoly on the trade in Old Masters and his talent for salesmanship allowed him to deal on an unprecedented scale. With his success assured, he donated money and paintings to many British galleries and funded the building of the Duveen gallery at the British Museum to house the Elgin Marbles. He was finally knighted for his philanthropy in 1919.

  But Duveen was not alone. The growing number of collectors throughout the Victorian period meant a corresponding growth in the number of dealers who, in turn, created the kind of active, profitable market that later allowed men like Duveen to make a fortune. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the advertising pages of the daily papers teemed with colourful advertisements for dealers and their showrooms. Businesses such as Gladwell Brothers offered everything from ‘new and choice etchings’ to cornices and console tables; the family firm of William Dyer boosted trade as picture restorers by selling a few works on the side, while higher-class dealers such as Agnew’s were responding to the growing market for Old Masters and eighteenth-century portraiture. Others were following more closely in Robinson’s careful footsteps, negotiating the tricky boundaries between trade and social prestige: in the 1880s, for example, Marcus Huish combined his occupation as a barrister and a role as director of the Fine Arts Society with a profitable career in art dealing.8 In the late 1860s and early 1870s, Robinson was at the vanguard of this new profession. He was one of the first to take on the demands of dealing alongside his own collecting. Cloaked in the disguise of the gentlemanly amateur, he was forging new possibilities as a commercially minded professional, and in the process altering perceptions both of collectors and the markets in which they moved.