Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (9 page)

For the next few years, before starting at the South Kensington Museum in 1853, Robinson travelled as much as his job would allow – for work, for pleasure and to make himself an expert. In 1851, he discovered the pleasures of Italy, and found for the first time a beauty and romance to challenge anything he had seen in France. Apart from the ‘curse' of mosquitoes, which he bemoaned in his letters, there was nothing to upset his enthusiasm. He was overwhelmed by the spectacular sculpture and the magnificent architecture of cities like Verona and Padua; in Florence the glories were so numerous that Robinson was ‘too excited to go to bed'; and then there was Venice. ‘I have just got in from a moonlight sail through Venice,' he wrote to a friend. ‘The moon is at the full – brilliant – pouring down floods of light through a deep blue endless sky, such as
you
have never seen and never will til you come to Italy – Imagine, but you can't imagine! – and I am too stupid to describe and no I can't, I can't begin, what an ass I am.'
⁹

Robinson was inspired by Italian architecture and art, by the landscape, the language and the culture. He felt he had found a spiritual home, one which was to influence his collecting for the rest of his life. For several months during the summer of 1851, he went from city to city, from Milan to Brescia, Verona to Padua, Ferrara to Bologna. Italy was beginning to occupy a particular place in the Victorian imagination, and Robinson was at the heart of this impulse to celebrate, and romanticize, what could be experienced there. Since the eighteenth century, the British elite had shown a fascination with Italy and its art: half of the paintings sold for more than £40 at London auctions between 1711 and 1760 were by Italian masters, and the Italian towns were well-established highlights of the Grand Tour. Canaletto's idealized paintings of Venice, showing aristocratic
palaces alongside pristine canals, were hugely fashionable in eighteenth-century Britain. But travellers like Robinson were beginning to look beyond the well-trodden paths to the Grand Masters. In 1851, the same year as Robinson's journey, John Ruskin published the first volume of
The Stones of Venice
, an influential book-length essay which held up Italian Gothic architecture, and the communities of craftsmanship from which it emerged, as a model for cultural and social reform. Ruskin's campaign to save neglected and shabby Italian buildings, including St Mark's Cathedral in Venice, took on the vehemence of a crusade, and he arranged for paintings, photographs and plaster casts to be taken of what he considered the most threatened architectural features. Works like
The Stones of Venice
, and the earlier
Seven Lamps of Architecture
(1849), inspired the Victorian public to look at Italy in a new light, not just as the fashionable birthplace of Dante or a place of restless politics and retarded modernity, but as a medieval and Renaissance treasure.

This was something Robinson was delighted to discover first-hand. But collecting in Italy during the middle of the century was not easy. Transport was unreliable, treasure-hunting was notoriously hit-and-miss, and armed scuffles were not at all uncommon. Since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the movement towards unification of the Italian states had gathered pace. The years 1848 and 1849, just before Robinson's visit, marked the high point of revolutionary idealism with popular support from all classes: from Sicily in the south to Venice and Lombardy in the north, people took to the streets against both native rulers and the Austrian Habsburgs. Though the insurgency collapsed in the summer of 1849, through a combination of dynastic rivalry, foreign invasion and the withdrawal of key support from papal and Neapolitan forces, the movement rumbled on uncertainly and a series of internecine
conflicts broke out, especially in the central Italian states. For travellers this could be disruptive and even dangerous: ‘We are expecting a battle every hour, and however exciting and romantic it might be, it would not be pleasant to be rolled amongst the debacle of a beaten army and a panic-stricken population,' Robinson wrote during an eventful journey from Florence.
¹⁰

But there were advantages to such upheaval. Collecting in Italy had rarely been so rewarding. As the old structures of power were challenged, objects from both the aristocracy and the Church found their way on to the open market and into the hands of collectors. Charles Eastlake, the first Director of the National Gallery (1855–65), was just one of those who were drawn to the treasures made newly available by the troubled political climate. He made a series of collecting trips to Italy throughout the 1850s and 1860s; his acquisitions included Fra Angelico's
Adoration of the Magi
and thirty other paintings from the Lombardi-Baldi collection in Florence in 1857. Whatever the risks, the allure of Italy, it seems, was too great to resist.

Despite his eventful holidays, and his preoccupation with collecting, Robinson's day job continued to go well. He was, as he had foreseen, creating an immediate impression at the School of Design and, by 1852, after just over five years, he had been promoted to Teachers' Training Master. His timing could not have been better. It was the same year that Henry Cole began to reorganize and reinvigorate the government design programme, and Robinson soon came to Cole's notice, partly for his practical work, and partly because he put himself in Cole's way by sending him, with characteristic confidence, a series of suggestions for improving the Schools. Less than a year later, in September 1853, Robinson was in London, at the heart of things, in a new position at the South Kensington Museum. It seemed like the perfect job. He could bring to bear all the art knowledge he had gleaned, he
would have public money to spend and he could immerse himself in collecting. What began as a temporary post was confirmed as permanent on 8 July 1854, and Robinson took his place in the ranks of professional collectors.

W
ithin two years of starting work in London, John Charles Robinson was sitting at his desk, watching the tree tops scraping a bare spring sky. It was early March 1855 at the end of a particularly cold fortnight. Frosts had set hard in the city parks, making them shine white through the smoke-thick air, and the pavement corners were slippery with ice. From the window of his office in Marlborough House, on London's Pall Mall, Robinson could see uniformed doormen stamping their feet to keep the chill from their bones. A discreet notice at the end of the closely raked gravel path tried to entice the public into the warmth to see the displays of ‘manufactures', all that yet existed of what would eventually become the splendour of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Visitors made their way steadily into the striking redbrick building and up the marble stairs to peer into the heavy glass cases that lined the rooms inside. In the dignified Georgian townhouse which Sir Christopher Wren had designed for the first Duke of Marlborough and his wife Sarah, porcelain, glass and metalwork were displayed on the first floor; plaster casts were
pushed into chimney niches, paintings hung high from the elegant coving and Indian textiles draped over couches. There was plenty to admire.

Robinson watched the visitors arrive. On Mondays, Tuesdays and Saturdays, entrance was free, but the rooms were enormously crowded; on the remaining weekdays, an entrance fee of 6d ensured more space for those who wanted to study quietly. From an average of a thousand visitors a day on free days, attendance on paying days fell to fewer than eighty, but still annual visitor figures for the mid-1850s hovered around the 100,000 mark. During the same period, at the much larger and more established British Museum, figures were sliding rapidly from a peak of over 2 million in the year of the 1851 Great Exhibition to around 300,000. The ideal of public access that had been heralded by the Crystal Palace event seemed to have dissolved and the grand galleries of the British Museum were once again viewed by many as the exclusive haunt of scholars and the wealthy. The six rooms at Marlborough House, in contrast, appealed to the middle classes and the temporary displays were a lively source of entertainment for everyone from serious students to families.

For Robinson, this popularity was a matter of pride. When the Marlborough House rooms were first opened in 1852, Henry Cole had featured an exhibition of ‘False Principles in Design', popularly nicknamed the Chamber of Horrors, a practical demonstration of how not to do things that was supposed to stand as a warning to British buyers and manufacturers: ‘a gloomy chamber hung round with frightful objects in curtains, carpets, clothes, lamps and whatnot', wrote one reviewer, a mess of decorative excess and offending aesthetics.
¹
By showing people how terrible the worst objects could be, this brash display was supposed to elevate public taste and put the moral case for design reform. It was a clear indication of what Cole thought the museum was about. But in his short time in post, Robinson had set to work
rearranging the galleries, reorganizing the showcases, making the exhibitions more varied and, quite deliberately, changing the emphasis of the museum from Cole's focus on educating artisans to his own vision of providing a more general public with the chance to admire the old, rare and beautiful. He was not without sympathy for Cole's general principles of education, but he wanted visitors to use works from history for ‘the gradual and progressive cultivation of the judgement, until it assumes almost the readiness and certainty of intuitive conviction'. In his view, the Chamber of Horrors had no part in a museum: ‘the object of the Museum is to illustrate the history, theory and practical application of decorative art,' he claimed, making sure that alongside ‘objects of utility' there were also ‘works avowedly decorative'.
²
He wanted to show the best – and not the worst – drawing visitors with the expectation of delight rather than from disgust or curiosity.

It was the beginning of a battle of philosophies that would divide Cole and Robinson throughout their work at the museum, and would finally highlight the gap between the museum's rhetoric about collecting, and what it collected in practice. Henry Cole displayed occasional enthusiasm for antiquarian objects and pieces of fine art, and he showed characteristic energy in acquiring some of these works for the museum. But, for him, they were always a means to an end. His acquisitions were always made with a view to the larger cause of design reform, and the museum displays were always created with an eye on education. Robinson delighted in beauty and craftsmanship – at heart he was a connoisseur. He wanted the museum to be more than a training ground; he hoped to create a collection that aimed to foster aesthetic appreciation rather than to deliver design rules.

Robinson argued that the museum he had in mind would serve not only the art student or the general public, but also ‘the collector, whose pursuit it is. . . clearly a national duty to
countenance and encourage'.
³
For Robinson and his friends, collecting needed to be at the heart of things. There was a sense in which it was much more than an individual preoccupation – it was ‘a national duty'. As we have seen, museums all over the country were emphasizing their public value; there is no doubt that Henry Cole viewed South Kensington as a national crusade. But Robinson was suggesting that it was not only beautiful objects themselves that were important, but also the very ‘pursuit' of collecting them. Tracking down objects, studying them, comparing and treasuring them was much more, for Robinson, than an enjoyable habit. It was at the root of the emerging museums network; it was the underlying mechanism that made everything else possible. In statements like this, Robinson was able to give his ransacking of European salerooms a gloss that highlighted its public benefit. But more than that, he was staking a claim for each and every collector, putting their activity into a wider context that gave them influence within the political, economic and social manoeuvring that was striving to make Victorian Britain great.

As Robinson watched the visitors come to Marlborough House, there was also some sadness. He could feel how things were changing. Just south of Hyde Park on quiet rural land, Henry Cole was working on his site for a grand project – the building of a permanent museum. He had the support of Prince Albert, who was hopeful that the new building in South Kensington would be the catalyst for the utopian Royal vision of a magnificent ‘Albertopolis', a series of striking buildings amid landscaped parkland, drawing together London's learned and artistic societies. So enthusiastic was the Prince, in fact, and so keen to play his part, that he had begun to design the new museum himself. And with his energy and influence, added to Cole's determination, things had progressed quickly. Plans had been
drawn up and measurements taken. In just a few more weeks, building would begin.

But Robinson was fond of the rooms at Marlborough House and did not want to relocate, particularly not to the backwater that was South Kensington. ‘Everyone predicts ill luck to the move to Kensington on the score of distance,' he grumbled in a letter to Cole, pointing out what the popular press had already highlighted: that the new site was unfamiliar, isolated, difficult to access and little more than ‘wilds and swamps'.
⁴
What's more, Cole's plans were so vast and disparate that it was not at all clear how it would all fit together. There were proposals for a Patent Museum and for manufacturing displays but also for an exhibition of exotic foods like French snails and Chinese birds' nests, and of animal products, including a case showing silkworms at work. There was to be a huge plaster cast of Michelangelo's
David
and an extraordinary range of objects that apparently could not find a home elsewhere. There was even to be space on the second floor for fish hatcheries, with the runs of salmon and trout announced in the newspapers. The proposed museum seemed a curious mix of the fairground atmosphere of the International Exhibitions and the old-fashioned jumble of curiosities that had inspired the
Wunderkammer
. It lacked a sense of historical progress and threatened to confuse, and overwhelm, the visitor. Once Cole's Chamber of Horrors had been put away, the rooms at Marlborough House were well focused, with planned collections and organized displays. For a museum of its time, it was remarkably clearsighted. It demonstrated the growing sense of professionalism among curators and rigorous principles of scholarship. Much of this was Robinson's work. He liked the intimacy and coherence of Marlborough House, and was sure that the new museum would be a disaster, nothing better than a ‘motley, medley chaos. . . assimilated in an illogical and bewildering manner'.
⁵