Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves

MAGPIES, SQUIRRELS
&
THIEVES

HOW THE VICTORIANS COLLECTED THE WORLD

JACQUELINE YALLOP

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © 2011 by Jacqueline Yallop

The moral right of Jacqueline Yallop to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 1 84354 750 1

eBook ISBN: 978 0 85789 561 5

Printed in Great Britain

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An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
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‘Things' were, of course, the sum of the world.

Henry James,
The Spoils of Poynton
, 1897

List of Illustrations

Preface

Catching the Collecting Bug

1    Exhibition Road, London, 1862

2    The Useful and the Beautiful

3    A Public Duty and a Private Preoccupation

Making Museums: Collecting as a Career
J
OHN
C
HARLES
R
OBINSON

4    On the Banks of the Seine

5    The Battle of South Kensington

6    The Tricks of the Trade

7    Changing Times

Ransacking and Revolution: The European Crusade
C
HARLOTTE
S
CHREIBER

8    Mrs Schreiber's Big Red Bag

9    Pushing and Panting and Pinching their Way

10  The Gourd-shaped Bottle Gourd-shaped

Pride, Passion and Loss: Collecting for Love
J
OSEPH
M
AYER

11  Waiting for the Rain to Stop

12  Mummies, Crocodiles and Shoes for a Queen

13  The Treasures of the North

14  A Larger World

Fashion, Fine Dining and Forgeries: Dealing in Society
M
URRAY
M
ARKS

15  Rossetti's Peacock

16  A Notorious Squabble

17  The Fake
Flora

Collecting the Empire: In Pursuit of the Exotic
S
TEPHEN
W
OOTTON
B
USHELL

18  The Route to Peking

19  The Promise of the East

20  Collecting Without Boundaries

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

1.    
The South Court at the South Kensington Museum.
Illustrated London News
(6 December 1862). © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans.

2.    
Portrait of John Charles Robinson by J. J. Napier. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

3.    
Robinson's collection at Newton Manor. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

4.    
Portrait of Charlotte Schreiber by George Frederic Watts. From Charlotte Schreiber's
Journals: confidences of a collector of ceramics and antiques throughout Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Austria and Germany from the year 1869–1885
(1911).

5.    
Portrait of Charles Schreiber by George Frederic Watts. From Charlotte Schreiber's
Journals: confidences of a collector of ceramics and antiques throughout Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Austria and Germany from the year 1869–1885
(1911).

6.    
Gourd-shaped bottle. Courtesy of Sotheby's Picture Library.

7.    
Portrait of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Theodore Watts-Dunton by Henry Treffry Dunn. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

8.    
The Peacock Room. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1904.61.

9.    
Murray Marks. From George Charles Williamson's
Murray Marks and his Friends: A Tribute of Regard
(1919).

10.  
Murray Marks' trade card. From George Charles Williamson's
Murray Marks and his Friends: A Tribute of Regard
(1919).

11.  
Portrait of Joseph Mayer by William Daniels. Courtesy National Museum Liverpool.

12.  
The ‘Mummy Room' in Mayer's Egyptian Museum. Courtesy of Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool Libraries.

13.  
Stephen Wootton Bushell. Courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum, PH118-80.

14.  
The Bronze Pavilion at the Imperial Summer Palace. Reproduced by permission of Durham University Museums.

15.  
Satirical engravings by George du Maurier.
Punch Almanack
(December 1875). Courtesy of the author.

16.  
Aston Webb's South Kensington complex. Getty Images.

17.  
The glass palace of the Art Treasures Exhibition, Manchester.
Art-Treasures Examiner: A Pictorial, Critical and Historical Record of the Art-Treasures Exhibition
(1857). Reproduced by courtesy of the University Librarian and Director, The John Rylands University Library, The University of Manchester.

MAGPIES, SQUIRRELS
&
THIEVES

T
oday we are accustomed to the mechanisms that allow collectors to build a collection: auctions and antique dealers, car-boot sales and internet trading sites. We expect to have public collections in town and city museums, even if we rarely visit them. The motivations that drive collectors have frequently been examined by psychologists and psychoanalysts, and this has given us some understanding of why collecting is such a popular activity and how it can become so obsessive. What I want to do with this book is to take a step back, to a period during the nineteenth century when many of the aspects of collecting which we now take for granted were being newly explored, when collectors were emerging into the public eye and when the hunt for objects was at its most inventive and eccentric. The thrills and perils of Victorian collecting will, in some respects, appear very familiar; it was the collectors of the nineteenth century who laid the foundations for later collectors and many of their networks remain. In other ways, however, we will discover outlooks and experiences very different from those which collectors might expect today. Victorian collecting had a character of its own, and it is this robust and intrepid spirit of adventure that I hope to convey.

There was no single archetypal Victorian collector: individual tastes meant that one collection was very different from another. Some collections were ordered, scholarly or scientific; others were quirky, highly personal narratives. Changes in fashions, attitudes and economic climate also influenced the objects people chose to collect. This book presents the stories of five collectors to give some sense of this diversity and of the ways in which collecting evolved through the nineteenth century. It also uses these individual stories to explore more general issues about collecting. What is a ‘collection'? What kind of cultural, social and political factors influence the life of a collection? What drives the collector? What is the relationship between the private collector and the public museum?

Each of my five collectors left lively archives, letters or journals which document their collecting and each has a fascinating story to tell. Between them, they turned their attention to all kinds of art and historical objects. John Charles Robinson was an influential curator at the South Kensington Museum, which would be renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899, becoming one of the most famous public collections in the world. He collected both for the museum and for himself, indulging a taste for significant, and often expensive, pieces of art and becoming a specialist in the Italian Renaissance. Lady Charlotte Schreiber, the widow of a steel magnate and an intrepid traveller, sought out china and playing cards, fans and glass in showrooms and junkshops across Europe. Murray Marks, a dealer as well as a collector, used his connections in Holland to exploit the fashion for blue-and-white ceramics and his friendship with the Pre-Raphaelites to create elaborate domestic interiors. Liverpool jeweller Joseph Mayer had a taste for Roman remains, Egyptian antiquities, coins, Anglo-Saxon archaeology and quirky objects from history. Stephen Wootton Bushell was sent to China as doctor
to the British delegation and ended up becoming a pioneering expert on Chinese art.

The five individual stories offer a portrait of the collector, from the eccentric and obsessive to the scholarly and the professional. Together, they also show us how art-collecting changed during the Victorian period, moving away from the great pictures and sculpture that had fascinated the wealthy in the eighteenth century towards smaller, more varied decorative objects. Science and natural history collections, which were equally popular and active at this time, could not be covered within the scope of the book, but it is worth bearing in mind that this created yet another growing community of collectors, working alongside – and occasionally overlapping – with art collectors. For those whose tastes lay towards stuffed animals, geological specimens or mechanical instruments, there was a correspondingly influential and flourishing network of organizations, museums and collectors to feed their enthusiasm.