Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (48 page)

After his retirement, Bushell spent his remaining years quietly, surrounded by the pieces that evoked for him the spirit of the China he had left. He continued to study and worked hard on
Chinese Art
, which was published in two volumes by the South Kensington Museum in 1904 and 1906. Although it professed to be simply a guide to the Chinese collection, it was of course much
more. It was a unique and lasting achievement, a fine piece of scholarship in praise of the exquisite objects and fascinating traditions that had enthralled Bushell for so long. It is still valued today. Although Bushell remained characteristically modest about his achievements, he knew that the publication would identify him forever as a collector and connoisseur, and he was proud of this. There was also something reassuring and satisfying about seeing his contribution made tangible in museum displays, and when he died, two years after the second volume of
Chinese Art
appeared, Florence agreed to a series of loans and sales which further consolidated his presence at South Kensington. With prices for Chinese objects already rising sharply, the museum took advantage of a number of bargains. Thanks to Bushell's canny dealing in the ceramics markets, Florence was, staff noted, ‘not by any means in straitened circumstances' and she seemed willing to preserve her husband's memory at the museum at the most reasonable of costs, agreeing to accept £700 in payment for vases valued at £1,054 and selling a number of small items for as little as £5 each.
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When Bushell sailed from Shanghai for the last time, just before the dawn of the twentieth century, China was changing fast. It was already more familiar to Europeans than it had been when he arrived during the 1860s, and was now a target for international territorial ambitions as well as an important trading partner. Peking, too, was becoming increasingly accessible and within a few years was linked by rail to strategic centres across China and so to the rest of the Continent. But it was also becoming a more turbulent and dangerous place for foreigners as locals rejected what they saw as the corruption of the West. Just a year after Bushell's departure, this spilled over into overt violence: during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, the foreign legations in Peking were put under siege for several months, businesses that dealt with Western clients were attacked and there was fierce fighting between European and Chinese troops. The opportunities for
collecting as Bushell had done – thoughtfully, sensitively and over long decades – were disappearing, and the contribution he had made to scholarship was increasingly recognized as bold and unique. Few collectors in the future would have such an opportunity to unravel the mysteries of an unknown nation through its objects, or would make so much of the chance when it came.

‘To stay what is fleeting. . . to immortalize things that have no duration.'

John Ruskin

W
riting in
The Stones of Venice
, in the middle of the nineteenth century (1851–3), John Ruskin urged his fellow Victorians to look for something enduring and meaningful in art, a special quality that would arrest the destructive forces of time and ‘stay what is fleeting'. It could have been the motto of the Victorian collector. In an age of bewildering technological, scientific and social change, the collection often appeared as a still point, a place outside of time where all that mattered was the objects and where the desire of the collector removed them from the chaos of the world beyond. Then, as now, some collectors embraced the idea of buying and selling, bartering and exchanging; they viewed their custodianship as a temporary hiatus in the dynamic life of the objects they collected. But many more had at least a core to their collection that they wished to protect. Where they could,
they put in place mechanisms for ensuring that the collection would survive without them, defending it from the threat of an uncertain fate.

The collectors in this book were typical of many in imagining a durable future for their collections. They believed that they had created something lasting and self-contained, buffered from forces over which they had no control. Murray Marks and J. C. Robinson both celebrated a lifetime spent acquiring beautiful objects by donating to a range of public museums, making permanent in the galleries their expertise and achievements. Stephen Wootton Bushell arranged for his objects to become part of the collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum after his death, visibly marking decades of scholarly collecting. With her gift of English ceramics, enamels and glass to the same museum, Charlotte Schreiber hoped to preserve a memorial to her beloved husband, a sense of what they had enjoyed and achieved together. Joseph Mayer left both the collection at the Liverpool Museum and the thriving village of Bebington as a monument to his work, convinced he had secured their future by his lifetime's efforts.

All of these collectors tried to preserve the objects they thought best captured their dedication and expertise. They attempted to immortalize themselves in the continuing life of the collection. But they had all seen other collections come and go. Inevitably, if regretfully, they must have had a sense of collecting as an intrinsically ephemeral occupation. They had seen numerous collections sold and dismantled; they had indeed profited themselves from the ebb and flow of objects coming on to the market. What made them think, then, that this time it would be different?

The emergence of a network of public museums appears to have convinced many Victorian collectors that their collections would survive their deaths. Private collections, they had witnessed, were subject to death and war, bankruptcy and changes in taste and
fashion. Public galleries, it seemed safe to assume, were immune from such vacillations. Once given over to the protection of the British Museum or the Victoria and Albert, it seemed, the fate of the individual was irrelevant to the survival of the collection. Original intentions – and the personality of the collector – would be preserved forever. By the end of the nineteenth century, almost every town in the country had a public museum asserting order and permanence, and many boasted impressive examples of philanthropy – parks and schools and libraries – that added to the impression that individual names could be saved from obscurity by being associated with lasting municipal projects. Collecting was perhaps not as fragile an occupation as it once had been. Instead, it seemed to be part of a wider public movement.

Of course, it was not always to turn out that way. It is true that public collections would have languished and faded without donations from private collectors. At the end of the nineteenth century, particularly in the uncertain economic climate of the 1880s and 1890s, the sums available for public purchases dwindled, and became increasingly difficult to tease out of government. By 1887, it was estimated that the value of gifts and bequests from individuals to the Victoria and Albert Museum, for example, had exceeded £1 million, at original prices – over three times as much as had been spent on acquisitions by the museum itself.
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Nothing displayed the breadth of Victorian collecting so well as the range of objects bequeathed to the South Kensington galleries: books, Old Master drawings and prints in 1876 on the death of John Forster, the historian and critic who became famous for writing the biography of his friend Charles Dickens; six years later, a superb collection of French eighteenth-century furniture donated by John Jones, who had made his fortune in tailoring uniforms for the military; in 1888, hundreds of sketches from the studio of John Constable, given by Isabel, his last surviving daughter; and, at the turn of the century, the
library of Emilia Strong, Lady Dilke, author and art historian. Victorian collections like these form the basis of most British museum displays today.

Yet these donations and bequests have largely become dissociated from the collectors who made them. Names have been lost; the objects have been re-presented and re-interpreted, often distancing them from their original contexts to emphasize their apparent relevance to modern visitors. In particular, the preoccupations and intentions of the original collectors have frequently been obscured, and very often collections that were meant to remain intact have become scattered. The objects themselves are no less important, rare or beautiful than they were a hundred and fifty years ago, but they have been pared of their personal associations. The ingenuity and pride of the people who acquired them has been dimmed, and the durability they envisaged has often proved fleeting. The safe haven that was imagined to exist in the galleries of public museums has proved precarious after all. As we have seen, even the most self-contained collection is subject to all kinds of social, economic and political forces. For a collection in a public gallery – rather than tucked away in a private study – these forces are, if anything, magnified; they are certainly inescapable. No matter how serene and timeless a public museum might at first seem, nothing about it is permanent.

While the publication of Charlotte Schreiber's journals gave readers a taste of her collecting adventures, it was not long before the redesign of the Victoria and Albert galleries broke up the collection itself. The pieces were exhibited alongside other similar objects, arranged by type, design or decoration, rather than as a discrete set, and the Schreiber name became a method of curatorial identification, printed in small type at the bottom of display labels, rather than the public celebration of an energetic collecting crusade.
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The jewellery, plate, needlework and other items that Charlotte had been unable to resist on her travels were inevitably
dispersed on her death. So, too, was the not inconsiderable collection of European ceramics and enamels. When Charlotte left Langham House to move in with her youngest daughter, Blanche, Countess of Bessborough in 1890, a sale at Christie's began the process of dispersal, and 217 lots found their way to new homes. The pieces that remained passed to Charlotte's family on her death, were divided among her children and divided again during later generations, until the original shape of the collection was distorted beyond easy recognition.

When Joseph Mayer died in 1886, at the age of eighty-three, his instructions to finance the Bebington projects by selling off the complete Pennant House collection – all the papers, documents and letters as well as the objects – were carried out promptly. Within weeks, his old home was cleared, the whole collection was put under the hammer, and the resulting funds went to the Mayer Trust to finance the village library, gardens and lecture hall. But Mayer's belief that he had created something permanent through his collecting was quickly shown to be misplaced. A growing village is not cheap to run, and the money raised by the sale was only sufficient to finance the Mayer facilities until 1894. After that, a crisis of funds forced the district council to step in, principally to maintain an efficient library service, and for a while things were run jointly between the council and the Mayer Trust. By 1930, however, the Mayer legacy had been exhausted, and the local authorities took over full responsibility: Mayer's involvement, already largely forgotten, officially came to an end. In 1971, traces of his name were further erased when a new civic complex replaced the original Mayer Library; during the subsequent decades Mayer Hall became neglected and shabby, its walls greying and its roof leaking. It can still be seen, at the heart of Bebington, offering a venue for local meetings and events, but rather unhappily awaiting repair.

Meanwhile, Mayer's injunction to the Liverpool Museum that ‘the Collection shall be kept together' was, in time, ignored, or simply forgotten. Visitors lost any clear sense of what it was Mayer had collected, of the range and personality represented by his pieces – of who he was. The eccentricities disappeared; order was imposed. The Egyptian material was carefully displayed with other Egyptian pieces; the ceramics shown with decorative arts; many of the casts, cameos, prints and medals were lost or completely disassociated from the Mayer name. In May 1941, German bombing further added to the confusion: the Egyptian gallery was completely burnt out, the entire building was ravaged by fire, and it was not until fifteen years later that the museum could reopen. Although some of Mayer's objects had been moved out of the city for safety, many were destroyed. The Egyptian sarcophagus of Bakenkhonsu, for example, was smashed to pieces (although it has recently been restored in a major conservation project), and particularly hard hit was his collection of European pottery, which was almost completely wiped out.
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The collection that Mayer believed would long outlive him had turned out to be fragile too; collecting proved a precarious way to arrest the uncertainties of time.

Murray Marks' conscientious support of the Pre-Raphaelite painters has largely been obscured by their subsequent popularity and success; the letters, notes and sketches which he kept as proof of his judgement and foresight have not been enough to prevent him from falling into the shadows. His friends found lasting fame; by contrast, Marks and his influential role in constructing Victorian aesthetics and taste have been more or less forgotten. He was not a diligent letter writer, and was apparently unwilling to enshrine his knowledge and experience in print: ‘he does know a great deal but seems not to have the slightest faculty for writing it down,' remarked Rossetti.
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The objects from his London house were dispersed after his death in several summer sales at Christie's in
1918, and have long since passed into the hands of other collectors. Very few of the pieces he bequeathed to the Victoria and Albert Museum are easy to locate today. A handful of blue-and-white vases displayed together in the British Galleries include two pieces which belonged to Rossetti and one which was part of Whistler's collection. They were quite likely to have passed through Marks' hands, and provide enduring evidence of the popular fashion he helped create. It is also possible to see Rossetti's pastel portrait of Marks' wife in the museum's Print Room. But, on the whole, Marks has simply disappeared. His collecting has been forgotten.