Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (10 page)

Entangled with Robinson's discontent about the new museum
was a lingering feeling that at the same time his own role was being overlooked and undervalued. He was travelling extensively to seek out objects: in 1854 alone, he had acquired over 1,400 new pieces. He was writing and lecturing vigorously on the collections; he was making contacts. Delighted by the growing number of visitors, he was constantly refining the rapidly expanding displays, and he was bombarding the board with requests for money to make acquisitions. He had taken responsibility for most of the collections, added a couple of titles to his role and had brought some of Europe's finest objects to the rooms in Marlborough House. His work with the Fine Arts Club and networks of private collectors also allowed him to see the wider influence of his activity. His buying on behalf of the museum was changing the market, pushing up prices rapidly. During the museum's five years at Marlborough House, the value of its collections rose so much that Robinson was able to report happily that he had ‘speedily doubled or trebled' the original investments. There was also, however, a downside to this, as the competitive Robinson was quick to recognize. As the market boomed, the museum needed to keep pace, he said, with ‘a host of wealthy amateurs, who, unfettered by the delays and difficulties impeding all governmental action. . . step in, and, by the power of ready money, triumphantly beat out of the field the unlucky curators of our public collections'.
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It was clear that the mutual, and complex, relationship between the museum and the private collector, and the markets they shared, was developing quickly. And in this cut-and-thrust environment Robinson felt that his collecting skills were needed more than ever.

Since he was of such benefit to the museum, Robinson could see no reason why his salary, at least, should not be raised in recognition of his contribution. At the beginning of March 1855, he wrote to Henry Cole to ask for more money. Acknowledging his young curator's energy and enthusiasm, Cole agreed promptly
to the pay rise. But he just as promptly regretted it because, less than six months later, Robinson was writing again to demand another raise.
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The collections were continuing to thrive under his hand and his devotion to them was evident. His every thought was about the objects he might bring to Marlborough House and improvements he might make to the displays. He had completed two scholarly catalogues, ‘with critical or theoretic illustrations for the information of the student' and more and more visitors were coming to see what was being achieved.
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He believed he had a convincing case for promotion and, with a successful precedent behind him, Robinson was confident. He could not see how Cole could fail to reward him again.

But weeks passed, the builders moved on to the site in South Kensington and still there was no official answer to Robinson's request. Slowly the iron frame of the new museum grew into the London landscape, the grass around became muddy with the tramp of workers' boots, and still Robinson waited. He was angry and puzzled. He wondered if Cole and the museum board had somehow overlooked his request in the flurry of activity caused by the building project. But when he tried to raise the matter again, he received only awkward and evasive answers. He was convinced that Cole could do more and he grew increasingly frustrated and cross. Worse still, he could not bring himself to admit the heart of the matter. It was true that he was indispensable to the growing museum. It was clear that it needed his scholarship. He may well have deserved better remuneration for the work he was doing. But more immediately apparent than any of these arguments – to Robinson and to his disapproving bank manager – was that he was in desperate need of the extra money for which he was asking.

Robinson had never lived cheaply. He aspired to keep a household that suited his sense of refinement and announced his success. On
accepting the job in London, he had taken on both a substantial and elegant townhouse in York Place, Portman Square, along with the requisite number of servants, and a wife. Marian Elizabeth Newton, the daughter of a successful Norwich tradesman, was quiet and undemanding. As far as we know, she did not share Robinson's taste for stalking antiques shops and dealers in search of costly pieces of bric-a-brac, nor his habit of spending money on European travel. But nevertheless, with a household to support, Robinson's costs escalated and, within a few years of marriage, the first of seven children arrived. Robinson's expenses were rising along with his sense of frustration. It was not just that he felt he deserved more money; he
needed
more money.

For a young man establishing a family and a professional career, it was not unusual to find daily expenses running over budget. But Robinson's collecting could be seen as something of an extravagance and, in the mid-century, this kind of excess was subject to a raft of moral judgements that, if turned in Robinson's direction, could have threatened his future. Profligacy, bankruptcy, financial disaster and the lack of good moral character they suggested fascinated Victorian writers such as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, who kept the spectre of ‘living beyond one's means' firmly in the public eye. The plot of Dickens's
Little Dorrit
, published between 1855 and 1857, at the same time as Robinson was making his overtures to the museum authorities, highlights the shame, personal decline and poverty that accompany bankruptcy, while almost a decade later, in
Our Mutual Friend
(1864–5), the contrast between the simple living of the impoverished Mortimer Lightwood and the glittering, unpaid-for interiors of the Lammle household has a clear moral message: ‘how often have I pointed out to you that it's the moral influence is the important thing?' asks Lightwood's friend Eugene Wrayburn.
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Too overt a display of possessions was not only an
indication of suspect taste, but also of dubious character. The glut of objects on show in the Lammle household acts to conceal both their lamentable financial situation and their sinister intentions:

The handsome fittings and furnishings of the house in Sackville Street were piled thick and high over the skeleton up-stairs, and if it ever whispered from under its upholstery ‘Here I am in the closet!' it was to very few ears. . .
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Robinson needed to take care that his collecting did not come to be seen as simply an expression of wanton spending and lack of moral fibre. Nor would he have wanted to get caught up in the Lammle fashion for objects merely as display. To maintain his course towards serious, meaningful collecting, it was imperative that he steady his financial situation.

Disappointed with Cole and obstructed by the board, Robinson continued to wait. If he could not succeed in increasing his regular salary, then the obvious next step was to sell some of his collection to supplement what he earned. But such a move was not to be taken lightly. Souvenirs of his youth in Paris; bargains from French and Italian junkshops; finely framed paintings and mirrors; jewel-coloured tapestries – they all meant something special to him. In the spring of 1855, Robinson was still, at thirty-one, a young collector. In time, he would become accustomed to the idea of changing his collection, of selling on some pieces to buy others, of investing for profit. His own preferences would evolve as his knowledge increased. At this stage, he found such a prospect difficult to contemplate. It seemed like a betrayal of the idea of the collection that he was still building. Daunted by such a step, nothing much happened.

The weeks and months passed, and no letter came to signal an upturn in Robinson's fortunes. The final touches were put
to the building at South Kensington, and articles quickly appeared in the press to mock it. Reporters marvelled at its ugliness and its spirit of utilitarianism. Prince Albert's giant structure, clad in iron and looking like a cross between a beached ship and an oversized oil drum, was ridiculed as ‘a threefold monster boiler'.
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And the name stuck. Robinson shuttled backwards and forwards between Marlborough House and the new South Kensington site, ‘The Brompton Boilers'. He moved objects and arranged displays. With the criticism of the Prince's design ringing in his ears, he battled with the weaknesses of the clumsy architecture: leaking roofs and poor drainage; galleries that baked in summer and were brittle with winter cold. Hastily, he had to move the plaster casts from their planned home upstairs as the floors groaned and buckled under the weight. But in June 1857, despite all the doubts and disturbances, he stood proudly at the opening of the new museum, holding himself tall and straight for the curious eyes of the press and public, stupefied for a moment by the enormity of what had been achieved and feeling his future unfolding before him.

The opening of the new buildings at last prompted the chequewriting hands of the board into action, and Robinson settled into his new professional home with a slightly improved salary of £450 a year, the dual responsibility of Librarian-Curator and an assistant. This was a comfortable living: probationary police officers were paid only £10 a year, a chaplain could expect a salary of around £30 and a letter sorter at the General Post Office earned £90 a year, about the same as a senior teacher, although solicitors and barristers could expect to earn as much as £1,800 a year by this time. But in the context of Robinson's professional colleagues, the pay rise was minimal, far from the £600 a year, plus accommodation, enjoyed by the curators at the British Museum or the £750 salary granted to the Keeper of the National Gallery.
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Moreover, it still
did not pay the bills. There was no choice: some of Robinson's collection would have to be sold.

I have not found a record of exactly what Robinson chose to part with at this time. Certainly, the core of his collection remained intact, but even so the process was a wrench. Characteristically, he took refuge from the distress of the sale, and the frustrations of life at the museum, in the showrooms of Europe's antique dealers. The museum may have been unwilling to raise his salary substantially, but it was prepared to fund continuing research trips abroad. Robinson undertook a series of yearly expeditions, each lasting several months, and each yielding ‘an infinity of treasures. . . at fractional prices'. In the summer of 1857, just after the museum opening, Robinson took off to Dresden and Vienna. By the summer of 1859, he was back in Italy on the trail of ‘cartloads of majolica ware, innumerable cassoni, terra-cottas, and bronzes'. He was in the mood for aggressive collecting. The spoils of Italian cultural life ‘must be diligently fought for', he asserted, throwing himself wholeheartedly into the crusade to find new objects and writing home enthusiastically that ‘Florence has not had such a raking out as this within the memory of man'.
¹³

Robinson relished the independence of collecting on the move. His days took on the rhythms common to collectors across the Continent: bursts of enthusiastic buying, long hours of frustrated travelling and the enduring desire to discover more and better things. If there were gaps in his knowledge, he plugged them with scholarly reading and conversation, so that he could hunt out and identify the best objects. Alongside his study of sculpture, he launched into the appreciation of bookbinding and manuscripts, textiles, metalwork, furniture and jewellery. He travelled quickly and bought extensively. He felt liberated again. He could ignore the irritations of the museum, and what he viewed as Henry Cole's attempts to limit him.

But such freedom was not to last. Robinson, with his nose on the trail of prestigious collections, perhaps misread the mood back at South Kensington. The museum, installed in its new site, was becoming more professional, and Henry Cole, free of the burden of the building project, was turning his attention to improving administration; there was a growing realisation that the museum should provide a model of what could be done, a blueprint for budding municipal projects up and down the country, and, indeed, across the world. In the years after the opening of the South Kensington Museum, a number of institutions were established along similar lines, with an emphasis on educating and developing public taste, raising the quality of manufactures and providing a showcase for craftsmanship. In Vienna, the Museum of Applied Arts opened in 1864, and in Berlin and Hamburg, two large and ambitious museums began assertively collecting the decorative arts during the 1860s with such success that by 1878
The Athenaeum
was proud to announce that ‘Art and Industrial Museums, humble copies of our own parent establishment in South Kensington, continue to spring up all over Germany.'
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And it was perhaps in the USA that the specific example provided by South Kensington was most admired and emulated.
Harper's New Monthly Magazine
claimed that the founding of museums in Cincinnati, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston was in direct and admiring imitation of the London model and hoped that this new generation of public institutions would be as successful as South Kensington in ‘widening waves of taste and love of beauty through the country'.
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Meanwhile, the
New York Herald
looked forward to the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in early 1872 by explaining that it would be modelled on ‘the splendid South Kensington Gardens London [sic], which is probably the most perfect thing of the kind in the world. . . a great work in behalf of civilization and education'.
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In the light of such praise, Cole was no doubt aware that others
were scrutinizing his models of curating and display. With the management of the British Museum and the National Gallery drawing such frequent criticism, he may well have seen a further chance to impress. Public discussion of the National Gallery had singled out the museum at South Kensington – as well as his leadership – for commendation: ‘We cannot refrain from bearing testimony to the ability, knowledge, and devotion displayed by Mr Cole in the management of the Kensington Museum,' suggested an article in
Quarterly Review
. ‘The varied and admirably arranged collections exhibited there now form one of the most useful and interesting exhibitions of the metropolis, and are a convincing proof of what may be accomplished in a short space of time by well-directed and unfettered energy.'
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With such approval from the critics, and as the museum matured, Cole turned his attention more and more to securing its administration. Creative collecting and active educating needed reinforcing with clear and accountable day-to-day systems. This meant the careful management of staff and finances – and it meant keeping a close rein on Robinson.