Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (4 page)

As the museum's leading curator, Robinson worked closely with Cole in acquiring objects and arranging them for display. He supported the general principles of education at the museum but he did not fully share Cole's views about the importance of manufacture and the best ways to instruct and influence the public. His real interest was in beautiful and historical things, and he was convinced that he knew better than Henry Cole how to find, treasure and display them. His relationship with his employer was edgy and barbed, liable to erupt in furious explosions. Both men were obstinate, confident and opinionated, and their ambitions collided too frequently for comfortable coexistence. Robinson was not above claiming, in public, that Cole did not know very much about art; Cole struggled to assert his authority over his excitable curator. Inevitably, in time, the friction between them would rub bare uncontainable feelings of anger, disappointment and betrayal. Within a few years, working relations would sour beyond the point of no return. But for now Robinson bided his time. It was with the two contrasting displays either side of Exhibition Road that he made his case.

In many ways, the two men and their exhibitions represented opposing sides in the debate about the value of art that had been raging for over a century, but into which the Victorians had entered with particular gusto. Did art need to have a function or purpose, or could it exist for its own sake? How did one attach value to an object – because it was useful or because it was
beautiful? Did art have to be linked to social and moral responsibility, or was it autonomous, following its own rules? Such questions had been exercising educated minds since Edmund Burke's influential
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
, published in 1757, and the emergence of the Romantic movement's preoccupation with personal creativity and emotional and artistic truth at the end of the eighteenth century. Proposals to create a national gallery of art at the beginning of the nineteenth century had reinvigorated the debate, in and out of Parliament, setting the case for historic art against modern examples, and looking at ways of organizing displays to best make them meaningful. An exhibition of ‘Ancient and Medieval Art' held by the Society of Arts in London in 1850 and the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester seven years later both linked the viewing of works of art to a useful purpose: ‘To the Artist and Manufacturer, an opportunity is afforded of comparing the handiwork of ancient times with the productions of our own skill and ingenuity,' explained the 1850 catalogue, ‘to the Amateur, means are supplied of correcting the taste and refining the judgement'.
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By the middle of the nineteenth century, the discussion was by no means confined to the intellectual elite. Most of those in the public eye, as well as those writing in the popular press, had an opinion. Nor was this a distinctly British trend: across Europe, museums, galleries and governments were discussing what kind of art to collect, and how to show it. Many successful mid-century Victorians considered the fine arts to be some kind of adjunct to the real business of mechanical invention and production, where value was attached to accuracy and originality. Others maintained that art could not be conflated with commerce and that its value was as much emotional as practical. Writers like Tennyson, the poet laureate, and painters like William Holman Hunt preferred their art with a moral message; advocates of the Arts and Crafts
movement emphasized the utility and social community of craftsmanship; on the other side, critics like Walter Pater argued vehemently that formal, aesthetic qualities should take precedence over moral or narrative content. In 1857, the critic and writer John Ruskin launched a scathing attack on the South Kensington Museum because, in his opinion, ‘fragments of really true and precious art are buried and polluted amidst a mass of loathsome modern mechanisms, fineries and fatuity'; ten years later, Matthew Arnold's influential series of articles, ‘Culture and Anarchy', appeared in the
Cornhill Magazine
, exploring ‘what culture really is, what good it can do, what is our own special need of it' and discussing the role of art in a rapidly changing world.
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It was not a debate that was going to be resolved in the galleries of the South Kensington Museum: at the end of the nineteenth century, it was still a matter of intense argument as the Aesthetic movement and Oscar Wilde made an ostentatious case for ‘Art for Art's Sake'. But many of the museum visitors would have been well versed in the discussion, and would have recognized in Robinson's loan exhibition an unexpected contrast to Henry Cole's usual principles of display. Robinson's emphasis on beauty and on collecting for pleasure set the display well apart from the paean to commercial progress that was Henry Cole's International Exhibition.

Robinson was clear on the point: for all Cole's hectoring, what visitors really wanted to see – what a museum was about – was the exhibition of the most exquisite and refined objects. ‘What', he asked an audience at one of his lectures, ‘is there to trust to but the silent refining influence of the monuments of Art themselves?'
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Not lectures and labels, not modern mass-produced pieces straight from the production line, but the ‘monuments' most able to assert their ‘silent refining influence' – the medieval silverware, the exotic oriental screens, the jewelled Renaissance chalices. Robinson was a connoisseur: his enthusiasm for collecting went hand-in-hand with an appreciation of the beautiful. And, as the
Victorians continued to debate the ways in which art might influence their lives, more and more people were making their allegiances evident by also choosing to collect, making space for objects in their homes because they liked them there and because the desire for lovely things seemed irrepressible.

T
he mid-Victorian period saw a boom in collecting. Explorers and adventurers to new and distant lands brought back plants, seeds and shells, pinned butterflies, bright beetles and stuffed animals to fill the gardens and display cases of the natural history collector. Enthusiasts dug for fossils, dinosaur bones and geological specimens, while archaeologists unearthed beads, weapons and brooches to fill shelves and cabinets. Art collecting moved away from the country homes of the rich into the fashionable townhouses of the increasingly confident and wealthy middle classes, and in turn attention moved from Old Master paintings and sculptures to more domestic works in materials such as ceramic or glass. A trend for highly decorated parlours, stuffed with all kinds of pictures, statues and objects, became endemic: showing off a collection of curios sent out messages about social status, and helped the owner appear educated and cultured.

Collecting had long been part of the upper-class way of British life. Most of the country's leading families boasted a collection
of art and sculpture, jewellery or elite porcelain such as Meissen or Sèvres. The tradition of the Grand Tour had been flourishing since the middle of the seventeenth century, serving not only as a cultural education and a rite of passage but also as an opportunity to add to the family's collection by buying up works of art to ship home. Collecting was considered a fit occupation for a gentleman, drawing on the habits of European royalty and the erudite tradition of the
Wunderkammer
, or cabinet of curiosities, which had emerged among the wealthy during the Renaissance. The custom for collecting was inextricably linked to power, prestige and riches: during the sixteenth century, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, for example, was an obsessive collector of paintings, and the seventeenth-century Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria employed the Flemish painter David Teniers the Younger to care for a hugely expensive collection which boasted everything from works by Italian masters to Cromwellian souvenirs of the English Civil War. The fortunes of the royal and aristocratic houses of Europe were clearly reflected in the ebb and flow of their collections, which were regularly sold, moved or broken up as the result of marriage and war, gambling debts and revolution. The Orléans Collection of over 500 paintings was assembled at the beginning of the eighteenth century by the French prince Philippe II, Duke of Orléans and nephew of Louis XIV. Its core, however, already dated back to the 1600s when Swedish troops sacked Munich and Prague during the Thirty Years War, looting masses of objects including the Habsburg collections of Rudolph II and Emperor Charles V from Prague Castle. These were added to by Queen Christina of Sweden, with a particular focus on Renaissance and Roman art, before being sold off at her death in 1689 to cover her debts. When he bought the collection, Philippe II added to it extensively, investing in a range of prestigious works from all over Europe including many of the key pieces accumulated by Charles I of England, another
avid collector. The collection was celebrated as one of the gems of European culture, housed in the magnificent Palais Royal in Paris, and asserting the power and splendour of the French monarchy.

When Philippe died in 1723, his pious son Louis inherited the collection. But his tastes were not the same as his father's, and he was alarmed by the subject matter of some of the paintings. In a fit of religious zeal, he attacked several of the most famous works with a knife, slashing Correggio's
Leda and the Swan
which depicted an erotic scene from Greek mythology, and ordering three more of Correggio's works to be cut up in the presence of his personal chaplain. The collection survived, but neither Louis nor his son, Louis Philippe, had the will or money to be active in their collecting, and at the end of the eighteenth century the pieces were put up for sale in a desperate attempt to pay off enormous debts. It was the complex political pressures and the financial uncertainty of the French Revolution which finally decided the fate of the collection, however. Extravagant displays of personal wealth and royal power were out of fashion, a liability, and in 1793, just as Louis Philippe was arrested at the height of the Reign of Terror, almost 200 paintings were shipped over to London's salerooms. In the months prior to his execution at the guillotine in November, negotiations were finalized for selling the rest of the collection, mainly Italian and French paintings, to a Brussels banker.

During the mid-seventeenth century and in the period following the French Revolution, political upheaval and changes in European social order saw many collections from the Continent, such as the Orléans collection, dispersed, relocated or re-formed. By contrast, in England the nineteenth century started with considerable security among the landed classes, with the aristocracy generally thriving and their collections benefiting from the distress of their European counterparts. But this
gradually changed. In August 1848,
The Times
reported on the sale of the collection at Stowe, the home of the 2nd Duke of Buckingham and the first of numerous country-house sales that would have been unimaginable a couple of decades earlier. It was, the report explained, ‘a spectacle of painfully interesting and gravely historical import . . . an ancient family ruined, their palace marked for destruction, and its contents scattered to the four winds of heaven'.
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The auction was the first symptom of a lingering malaise among country estates that was to last throughout the century, and to bring more and more art treasures on to the open market. A changing economic climate favoured industry rather than land as a way of making money, and old families feeling the pinch often turned to the sale of at least part of their collections as a way of boosting funds.

In 1882, the Settled Land Act brought things to a head. The old system of entailment had prevented the sale of land and collections, keeping them intact. Property passed from generation to generation through the eldest son (or, in the event of there being no son, via another male relative). Under the rights of primogeniture, he held a lifetime's interest in the land, house and contents: he was not free to sell or divide anything. With the new Act, this age-old arrangement was overturned. Restrictions on the sale of property were lifted and the tenant for life was given much stronger powers for dealing with his inheritance. Suddenly, family collections could be viewed as marketable commodities, and so converted into cash – and treasures from the most venerable and celebrated collections soon came under the hammer. In 1882, immediately after the Act was passed, the Duke of Hamilton sold most of the contents of his South Lanarkshire palace for almost £400,000 (the equivalent today of over £30 million); two years later, at Blenheim Palace, the Duke of Marlborough was given leave to dispose of some of his family's collections in a series of sales. The 18,000 volumes of ‘The Sunderland Library' raised
£60,000, and over the following years a collection of enamels and some of the palace's major works of art, including Raphael's
Madonna degli Ansidei
, were also sold.