Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (37 page)

Working for Pierpont Morgan was high-profile and prestigious. It could do no harm to Marks' business to be seen dealing for the world's richest and most influential men. Better still, this kind of prominent collecting was often attended by lectures, articles, catalogues and books that acted as further promotional tools. When Marks helped construct Morgan's collection of Renaissance bronze sculptures and figurines, the result was immortalized in a three-volume publication by the German art historian Wilhelm von Bode, who could not help but mention Marks' contribution: ‘I am especially indebted to Mr Murray Marks. . .', he wrote, ‘through whose hands so many beautiful specimens have passed.'
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When Marks undertook the research and investigation that enabled Pierpont Morgan to acquire a famous twelfth-century triptych from the Abbey of Stavelot in Belgium, he was rewarded with an evening at the Society of Antiquaries where the display of the spectacular gold and enamel medieval treasure caused a sensation. His shrewd scholarship and timely involvement were again applauded: ‘We have here before us this evening a monument of medieval art workmanship of a
kind and importance that is seldom found on the open market. . .' enthused the fellows, before noting that it was dealers like Marks who ‘help to make London a market or exchange for works of art and the wealthy buyer is forced to come here to increase his collections'.
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Marks clearly had a taste for the sensational and the extravagant. Nowhere was this more evident than in his work to decorate one of Victorian London's most celebrated and controversial interiors, a statement of avant-garde Aesthetic taste which became known as the Peacock Room. Once the prosaic dining room of a house at 49 Princes Gate in Kensington, the Peacock Room belonged to Frederick Richards Leyland, a Liverpool shipping magnate and art collector. In 1867, Leyland took on the tenancy of the gracious timber-framed Speke Hall, on the north bank of the Mersey, but there was little that could be tastefully done to improve an Elizabethan mansion, and so he also bought less distinctive modern London townhouses, first at Queen Anne's Gate and then at Princes Gate – just a stone's throw from the South Kensington Museum – with the intention of creating a visually impressive status symbol at the heart of the capital. Leyland was a naturally conservative man and, when he first began collecting art for his homes, he bought traditional landscapes and watercolours. But then he commissioned pieces from the young Rossetti and began to appreciate the work of new, emerging, more innovative artists. He found that he liked being regarded as a trendsetter and, when it came to creating a new interior in the mid-1870s, he turned to two other members of London's thriving modern artistic scene – James McNeill Whistler and Murray Marks.

Whistler's contribution to the Peacock Room became famous, in no small part because a bitter row broke out between the artist and Leyland before it was even completed. The dining room had been designed by Thomas Jeckyll to showcase Leyland's collection of blue-and-white, and Whistler's initial commission was for a
simple decorative piece. Leyland had recently acquired Whistler's painting
La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine
, but when Jeckyll hung it over the mantelpiece in the new dining room he found that some of the red tones in the antique Spanish leather wall hangings on either side clashed with the colours in the painting. So he asked Whistler to add a few decorative touches to the room to create a more balanced effect, to retouch the leather with traces of yellow and decorate the wainscoting and cornice with a simple wave pattern. And that is how Whistler started out. But he soon began to turn the dining room into a personal evocation of his aesthetic principles, a ‘Harmony in Blue and Gold'.

While Leyland was in Liverpool, launching a shipping line, Whistler moved in, living on site for months so that he could commit himself entirely to the project. He undertook increasingly ambitious alterations, covering the ceiling with Dutch metal, an imitation gold leaf, over which he painted a vibrant series of lush peacock feathers. He gilded every inch of Jeckyll's walnut shelving and decorated the shutters with four magnificent golden peacocks. He wrote confidently to Leyland, delighted with the changes, explaining that the room was now ‘really alive with beauty – brilliant and gorgeous while at the same time delicate and refined to the last degree. . . there is no room in London like it'.
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He showed off his work to visitors and called in the press to admire what he had done. But when Leyland returned he was horrified, appalled by the liberties the artist was taking with his home and money. He refused to pay the 2,000 guineas which Whistler was demanding and, on Rossetti's advice, offered half the amount in settlement. But Whistler was a notoriously difficult and passionate man. He took the reduced payment as a personal slight, exacerbated when Leyland wrote out a cheque in pounds instead of guineas. A pound was worth twenty shillings, while a guinea was worth twenty-one, but worse still, while the pound was the currency of trade, the guinea was the currency of gentlemen and
artists. Whistler was furious. In revenge, he painted over Leyland's antique leather with blue paint, creating a mural of two enormous gold peacocks, dominating the dining room, strutting and brash. The telling details were highlighted in silver: scattered at the feet of the squabbling birds were the silver coins Leyland refused to pay; the silver feathers on one of the peacock's throats recalled Leyland's taste for ruffled shirts while the silver crest feather on the other resembled Whistler's distinctive lock of white hair. He called the mural
Art and Money; or, The Story of the Room
and when it was finished, in March 1877, Whistler quit and never set foot in the dining room again.
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Behind the bluster and ranting and preening, Marks' contribution to Leyland's distinctive interiors has often been overlooked, but he was an integral part of the process of transforming the Peacock Room, and the rest of the house. He worked closely with Leyland's architect Thomas Jeckyll long before Whistler became involved, putting together the core of Leyland's distinctive collection and integrating it into a decorative scheme on his client's behalf. Marks provided a range of quality blue-and-white pieces that was displayed on the dining room's narrow carved shelves, rising in thin columns up the walls of the room. He was aiming to capture the spirit of the Renaissance, of the
Porzellankammer
or porcelain rooms which were statements of wealth at the heart of many seventeenth-century collections. But his contribution did not end with the fine china. As well as the blue-and-white, Marks supplied rugs, carvings and tapestries. He provided Botticelli drawings, paintings by his Pre-Raphaelite friends and heavily carved Italian chests. He found the highly coloured stamped leather wall-hangings that Whistler was to paint over in fury, and he set a striking female figure at the foot of Leyland's stairs, taken from the prow of a Renaissance galley.

After Whistler's extravagant intervention, much of Marks' work still remained. Despite the controversy, Leyland kept the
Peacock Room as Whistler had left it, and it still displayed the blue-and-white, even if the impact was muted in the new design scheme. As the room became famous, the subject of gossip and scandal, so visitors came to see what Whistler had done, and in turn were able to admire the beautiful pieces that Marks had assembled. In the other rooms of the house, Marks' original contribution remained untouched and the rest of the collection he had supplied to Leyland continued to provide a model for a fashionable townhouse. But Leyland's collecting was a fashion statement: he was interested in making a splash, not in making any kind of scholarly, long-term commitment. Twelve years after Whistler completed the Peacock Room, it was removed from Leyland's house in its entirety and exhibited in a London art gallery; the collection of blue-and-white was dispersed.
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Marks was accustomed to such dispersal. As he had suspected, Sir Henry Thompson's enthusiasm for china also proved shortlived, and in 1880, just two years after the exhibition opening, his pieces of blue-and-white were put into auction at Christie's (where Marks was well placed to buy back some of the most important lots) and he turned his attention to other fashionable pastimes. Marks was more aware than most that there was no single type of collector. Alongside those who entered into an intense, often obsessive, lifelong relationship with their collections, or collectors who combined fashion with scholarship, were men like Leyland and Thompson whose interest was fleeting and who wanted to buy fine things as status symbols rather than for intellectual pleasure.

Marks was unusual among the crowds of London dealers in advising on how to use collections to make a show, to define and create ‘lifestyles' in the way we now expect from interior designers. His willingness to embrace this most ephemeral of collecting habits again set him apart. It was a shrewd way of doing business. Joseph Joel Duveen followed Marks' example and persuaded
Arthur Wilson, a Hull shipowner, to let him redesign his house in the early 1880s, noting that ‘the decoration and furnishing of Mr Wilson's house was the finest advertisement I could have had, and his rich friends almost fell over each other to get beautiful objects, too'.
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In the early years of the next century, Duveen's son Joseph went a step further, immersing his collectors in Old World luxury and frequently advising his wealthiest clients, especially Americans, on ways to make their homes impressive: ‘This decoration always included enormous sales of precious things,' noted Duveen's nephew James.
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In the late 1890s, in an echo of the Peacock Room, Joseph Duveen oversaw the decoration of the London house of J. P. Morgan, son of Pierpont Morgan, a few doors down from Leyland at 14 Princes Gate, creating a special room for a series of eighteenth-century painted panels by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. In 1915, after Morgan's death, he arranged for the sale of the ‘Fragonard Room' to the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, reinstalling it at Frick's mansion in New York. At Whitemarsh Hall in Pennsylvania, he helped the banker Edward Stotesbury decorate his huge mansion with oriental rugs and French sculpture, while the American socialite Eleanor Elkins Widener Rice commissioned Duveen to decorate four houses, paying $2 million for her New York dining room in 1925.

For many years to come, the public face of such ostentatious international collecting owed much to the quiet industry of Marks' research and his early experiments with fashionable collaborations. In an age of conspicuous wealth, when the richest people in the world wanted to create glittering, gilded mansions to flaunt their success, collections were no longer confined to studies and parlour cabinets. They became an essential element of display; rooms, galleries and even entire houses were built to show them off. The luxurious interiors of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century European royalty and nobility were reinvented for a new generation of high-society aristocrats. And
as Marks demonstrated, these new collecting showcases owed as much to the dealers who made them possible as to the owners who financed them.

T
he wax bust of Flora, Roman goddess of flowers and of Spring, was delicate and elegant. The close-coiled tresses of Flora's hair were intertwined with roses, her smiling face was smooth and noble, the slip of material draped over her shoulders and breasts hardly imagined by the sculptor. It was a classic piece, a masterpiece, and it seemed to bear all the hallmarks of Leonardo da Vinci's distinctive style: the same alluring half-smile as the famous Mona Lisa, the expressive sculptural lines, the modest female form. Given that only a handful of Leonardo's works survived his experimentation with different materials and techniques, and the procrastination of a perfectionist, Flora was not just beautiful – she was also both important and rare.
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As a new century dawned, Murray Marks was seduced by Flora. It was 1909, and he was sixty-nine years old. In many ways, he had become a figure of the art establishment. He had worked closely with the giants of late-Victorian collecting from Pierpont Morgan to Wilhelm von Bode. Since the late 1870s, he had been in partnership with Durlacher Brothers, an old and established London dealer's, and in 1885 the new business moved into Bond Street, at the heart of the antique trade. His townhouse was
replete with his collections: the dining room alone featured a helmeted head and a fine display of blue-and-white, glass showcases exhibiting jewellery, enamels and ceramics, and a French Renaissance cabinet and table. Another house, a seaside retreat at 75 Marine Parade, Brighton, was furnished with a Regency collection. He worked closely with several museums, especially South Kensington, attending auctions on the museum's behalf, and supplying eye-catching objects such as a marble and alabaster rood screen from the Cathedral of St John at Bois-le-Duc (or 's-Hertogenbosch), south of Amsterdam. This seventeenth-century masterpiece with statues of the saints, pillars and angels, delicate carvings, arches, balustrades and massive ornamental candlesticks, was a huge architectural gem 36 feet high and 32 feet long, and became a mainstay of the new Cast Courts (or Architectural Courts) when they were built at the museum in the early 1870s. To acquire
Flora
would be a crowning glory, an impressive finale to a great career.