Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (12 page)

Robinson did not respond. It was clear that the line between
his public and private collecting was becoming increasingly blurred, and that his enthusiasm for collecting was apt to override all other concerns, but in reply he simply repeated his own grievances: he complained again about the trouble he had getting his purchases sanctioned, about the heating of the cranky building and about the poor lighting in the galleries. Cole's question remained unanswered and, as the cold days dragged on, so too did the series of bitter exchanges. Cole could not break down Robinson's cantankerous self-confidence; Robinson continued to make it clear that he regarded much of the museum's achievement as his own work. Inevitably, the dispute leeched into the wider workings of the museum, drawing the staff and authorities into the venomous quarrel. During March 1863, Robinson bombarded two of the museum board members, Lord Granville and Lord Lowe, with a series of letters. In reply, the board registered its strong disapproval of Robinson's ragged financial paperwork and bristled at the news that he had made purchases in Italy without waiting for permission, taking the decisions on behalf of the museum ‘on his own responsibility'. It noted that Robinson's accounting from the 1862 loan exhibition was ‘loose and unsatisfactory' and in desperation withheld the cash gratuity Robinson was due as a reward for his hard work.
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The unending squabbles took their toll on Robinson's health. He suffered from almost permanent indigestion, headaches stopped him working and he found he was getting unusually confused by even quite simple tasks. But he would not give up the fight. His tone was confrontational, contemptuous and bitter. His irresistible ambition for the collections was at the heart of his continuing complaints, but his subject matter, more often than not, was Henry Cole. He continued to send a string of disparaging notes to individual board members, damning Cole's ‘administrative talents and practical energy' with faint praise and openly challenging his superior: ‘his specific knowledge of Art', he wrote
on one occasion, ‘is in my opinion not equal to the actual work of forming and technically directing a public Collection of such a varied and comprehensive nature'. As if that was not condemnation enough, more was in store. Cole was, Robinson claimed, unfit to make decisions or negotiate deals on the museum's behalf: ‘Unfortunately, Mr Cole's selections were rarely either timely or judicious, made on the spur of the moment by accident or momentary impulse,' he alleged.
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Robinson's accusations were not without precedent elsewhere. In November 1853, William Gladstone, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, had bought sixty-four German paintings for the National Gallery. By the summer of 1854, William Dyce, an established artist and previously the head of the government School of Design in London, had looked at the paintings and found that most of them were of low quality. Only seventeen were worth keeping for the national collection. On this occasion, it was the gallery, rather than Gladstone, that attracted criticism: the incident was used as further evidence that the trustees were failing and that public money was being ill-spent. By directing a similar attack at Henry Cole – perhaps with the Gladstone incident firmly in mind – Robinson was reminding the board members that they were likely to be held to account if Cole's alleged incompetence came to light. He was clearly hoping to use the board's discomfort for his own ends. His concern for the use of public funds seems ironic, given his habitual free-spending on the museum's behalf, and it was more likely that he was hoping for a fundamental change in leadership that would allow him to take charge, or at least rid him of an irritant.

As spring arrived in South Kensington, the leaves splitting green on the trees and the rotten mud in the streets beginning to harden, the internecine war at the museum was at its most vicious. Cole was at his wits' end with his subordinate's defiance, and Lord Lowe, on behalf of the board, proclaimed angrily that Robinson's
letters must stop. Robinson, however, remained in rebellious mood and, when the museum failed to allocate him one of four new purpose-built staff residences, he took it as the final slight. By Easter, as a flush of warm weather blew into the city, things were at boiling point.

It was just before the Easter of 1863 that Henry Cole asked to see Robinson. Cole had had enough of his irritating curator and had decided to act: ‘never keep a man who is dissatisfied, he is mischievous. . . this would perhaps apply to J.C.R.', he admitted to his diary.
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He told Robinson that he would have to leave his post as curator. The museum was changing; it needed a new staff structure, and Robinson was being offered the role of salaried consultant or ‘Art Referee', without control of the collections but still with a remit to give advice on purchases. Robinson was taken by surprise. At first, he was convinced that he would find a way to overturn the decision against him – and get rid of Cole in the process. But in the end there was nothing to be done. The board told him firmly that ‘he must submit or go' and for a while – and against his natural instincts – Robinson chose submission.
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But he was uncomfortable in his new role and his wounded pride blistered. He soon found there were to be three art referees, and he was not even destined to be the most senior of them: that role was to be filled by an old friend of Cole's from the Schools of Design, Richard Redgrave. Pushed further down the hierarchy, Robinson felt that his vision was being purposely slighted.

Beyond the museum, Robinson's expertise was already being missed and his demotion noted with alarm. His fellow collectors knew all too well that they were determining the shape of the national collection at South Kensington just as much as the utilitarian creed of Cole and the board, and Robinson's network soon began to rumble with the discontent of losing their linchpin. At the Fine Arts Club, influential members were dismayed to find
that their interests were being sidelined and the discussion at meetings regularly slipped away from the objects on display to an animated discussion of Robinson's fate. A stinging piece in the influential
Art Journal
publicly voiced the growing dissatisfaction. In an opinionated article that was read by all the most important collectors, dealers and curators, the magazine took a snipe at Cole's leadership and lauded Robinson. ‘It is to his [Robinson's] indefatigable industry, no less than to his sound and matured knowledge, that we are mainly indebted for the value of the Museum,'
Art Journal
announced. The article made its loyalties plain and recognized, too, where the real power lay – not with the museum or with its administrators, but with individual collectors up and down the country. Collectors mattered, and Robinson, it claimed, ‘has the confidence of every collector in the kingdom'. As the journal warmed to its subject, its attack on Cole became increasingly spiteful. Cole's abilities, it noted scathingly, were ‘not at all equal' to Robinson's scholarly connoisseurship and it was with distinct pleasure that it offered a final, damning judgement: ‘it is not pleasant for a colonel to know that a corporal he commands is a better soldier than himself '.
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With the backing of his collectors, and in defiance of his real lack of influence, Robinson harried and annoyed the museum staff and directors, and Cole, of course, in particular. For four years, he goaded and bothered and griped. Minutes of the museum board meetings noted, wearily, that Robinson still needed constantly reminding of the limits of his duties, but, even in the face of persistent reprimands, he still could not believe that he would not make progress.
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He continually tried to conjure up authority for himself, anxious to make it appear that he retained the vestiges of power. Even in the face of a Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1867, he raged against Cole's commitment to purchasing examples of contemporary design for the museum, arguing fearlessly and
proudly that the works he had been buying were ‘vastly more important'.
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It became clear to Cole that even at arm's length Robinson was making a nuisance of himself. He decided to act before he was undermined by Robinson's constant sniping and the distressing criticism from his allies. He looked around for something – anything – that would give him the excuse he needed to make the final break. And in his neat piles of paperwork and closely written documents, he found it.

It was Christmas 1867. The windows of the small stores along the Brompton Road, a short stroll from the South Kensington site – including the premises of the rapidly expanding Harrods – were bright with gifts and treats and lights. Delivery boys pushed their barrows and carts anxiously through the traffic as the ladies of the fashionable middle classes, bobbing within the frames of their wide crinolines, shopped diligently and, if they could, stylishly. Robinson's seven children were no doubt lightheaded with the excitement, with the promise of change from their strict routine, with the soft smells drifting through from the kitchen and with the thought of puddings and sweets and oranges.

Alone in the museum, Henry Cole was reading a museum staffing report written two years earlier for the Treasury. The language was formal and elaborate, the tone sombre. There was nothing festive about it. But contained within the convoluted sentences was the ammunition he needed to rid himself of Robinson for good. The report proposed saving money by reducing the museum staff to its general administrators. Specialist expertise, it suggested, could be bought in temporarily, as and when it was needed. The idea of art referees drawing a salary for consultancy work was, perhaps unsurprisingly, highlighted as uneconomic. A committee, drafted in to look at the implications of restructuring, agreed. Two days before Christmas, on 23 December 1867, Robinson's post was abolished. ‘Request that Mr
Robinson's superannuation may date from 1 April 1868. He is to have notice from 1 January,' noted the official memo blandly.
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Robinson's life was about to change irrevocably. As he celebrated the close of the year at home with his family, the unaccustomed lightness and gaiety of the season lifted, for a moment, his disappointment and frustration. But there was no escaping the bleak realization that his tenure at South Kensington was over. On 10 January 1868, the board wrote to Robinson again, reaffirming their decision, and he was forced to accept that things were really at an end. He would have to leave.

Working out his notice was frustrating and painful. His fifteen years as a curator had shaped him. He had started as an eager and knowledgeable young man, ambitious to succeed in London, but naïve and obscure. He was leaving as an established connoisseur and scholar, respected at home and abroad, and with a reputation for clever and imaginative collecting. He had become integral to the growth of the South Kensington Museum from a few borrowed rooms in Marlborough House to an important international collection in purpose-built galleries. He had developed the first British collection of medieval and Renaissance decorative art and, in doing so, helped create a whole new field for British collectors. His spiky relationship with Henry Cole and his bitter exchanges with the board had sharpened his determination and clarified his sense of purpose. His self-belief had swelled and his confidence matured. Now everything was crumbling.

Suspicions and accusations that had been grumbling poisonously in the background for months, and even years, came bubbling to the fore now that it was certain that Robinson was leaving. There were plenty of disgruntled colleagues willing to step forward to tell tales. Robinson was not an easy man to work with and he was not afraid to offend those he regarded simply as clerks, bureaucrats and charlatans. Now, with his power draining from him, he found he was prey to the
spite of gossip and unconstrained resentment. And the museum authorities, thoroughly weary of Robinson's defiance, seemed eager to make it clear just how right they were in dismissing him. Cole's long-held allegation that Robinson had been using his position at the museum to make money as a dealer – that he had been buying and selling on his own behalf when he was travelling on museum business – resurfaced with unpleasant vigour: ‘An Art Referee has not considered himself precluded when abroad from purchasing objects of art for friends,' noted the board brusquely in early January.
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Robinson responded to the allegation with his usual energy. He may have been out of favour, but he remained defiant. As far as he was concerned, his name was being slandered and his work belittled. So furious did he become that the board backtracked, perhaps unwilling to get too embroiled when it was only a matter of weeks until they were free of Robinson's bickering: ‘It is not intended to cast any imputation or reflection on your honour and fidelity as a public servant,' the museum reassured Robinson on the 20th.
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But it was a small victory, and a chilly valediction. By the spring of 1868, Robinson was gone.

Cole and Robinson seemed to enshrine two possible futures for the museum at South Kensington, with Cole's breadth of activity and administrative professionalism standing in contrast to Robinson as the scholar and collector. Cole was committed to the principles of public service and was eager to explore all kinds of different projects from inventing commercial Christmas cards to mounting international trade fairs; Robinson could not be shaken from his independent habits and was happiest at the heart of his collection. But the sense of the two philosophies being completely irreconcilable was largely illusory. Across Britain and Europe, at other museums, the same principles were being debated and the same changes were being worked through as the ideas and practice of curating collections evolved. It was largely as a result
of the clash of two belligerent and opinionated men that the process at South Kensington was so painful.

A few miles away at the British Museum, another collector, Augustus Wollaston Franks, was making his own personal mark, creating an environment of professionalism and scholarship that evolved a little more peaceably than at South Kensington. He joined the staff at the British Museum in 1851 (two years before Robinson first took up his post at Marlborough House), with responsibility for developing the neglected collections of British objects, and he remained at the museum for almost half a century, until his death in 1897. Determined and strong-willed, and occasionally temperamental, he completely changed the collecting policy and departmental structure. He made significant personal contributions to the collections, and oversaw the growth of the British galleries from 154 feet of wall cases and a handful of table cases to 2,250 feet of wall cases, 90 table cases and 31 upright cases. He is regarded by many as the founder of the modern British Museum.