Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (13 page)

Educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge (where he spent much of his time collecting and pursuing his own architecture and archaeology projects), Franks was keen from the outset to develop an intellectual environment at the British Museum. His sympathies lay with the scholar: he would countenance general visitors to the museum if he had to, but he outlawed children, who could, he was sure, ‘derive no benefit from seeing the collections'.
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He became an expert on a range of subjects from Japanese flint instruments and Anglo-Saxon ivories to Indian sculpture and English ceramics. He wrote original and learned articles (though he did not publish very much), kept up an energetic correspondence with other collectors and travelled widely, becoming an important member of an international group of scholars who met throughout Europe to discuss anthropology
and archaeology. Like Robinson, he combined a commitment to public collections with a private collecting habit. Alongside his curatorial work, he amassed an encyclopaedic personal collection, some of which was left to the British Museum in a vast bequest that included 3,300 finger rings, over 500 pieces of highquality European porcelain, 1,500 netsuke (miniature Japanese sculptures), 30,000 bookplates and other pieces of jewellery. ‘Collecting,' he admitted, ‘is a hereditary disease, and I fear incurable.'
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Franks' drive to collect – for himself, his friends and colleagues and his museum – meant that his activities often occupied the grey area of confusion between the public and private. Like Robinson, the strength of his personality seemed to be the cohesive force that often made sense of what and how he collected, although to modern eyes the failure to delineate between his personal and public roles can seem strange. Objects came and went freely between his own collection and the museum displays. In 1885, for example, Franks was cataloguing a ‘painted figure of a bald person' brought from Japan for the British Museum, when he decided to swap it for a better one of his own: ‘in place of this, removed by me from the collection, has been substituted a much finer wooden figure', he noted. Between 1864 and 1883, when Franks was looking after part of the British Museum's collections in a store in Victoria Street, Westminster, he explained that ‘I paid myself the clerk or secretary who worked at it with me', rather than burdening the museum with extra costs.
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There is no doubt that he saw little difference between the different aspects of his collecting; to him, the priority was to amass the finest things, however that might happen. To Franks' advantage was that he was a more conscientious administrator than Robinson and so his decisions and acquisitions were better documented.

On his arrival at the British Museum, Franks, like Robinson, soon began to reshape the collections. The British Museum had
been dominated by the library departments, with the Director also being Librarian, and it was objects from the classical world that mostly filled the galleries. Almost single-handedly, Franks created collections from other countries and other periods that established whole new areas of interest: instead of classical pottery, he bought Japanese porcelain; he introduced English pre-historic material; and he invested in Chinese bronzes and objects from European archaeological excavations. Just as Robinson was challenging Cole's vision for South Kensington, so Franks was circumventing the traditions and bureaucracy in Bloomsbury to achieve what he wanted.

Unlike Robinson, however, Franks was also a skilled politician. After some initial sparring about the direction in which he seemed to be steering the museum, those above and around him came to respect and support his work. He was friendly with many of the museum's trustees. Coming from a distinguished aristocratic and banking family, the grandson of a baronet and cousin to the Earl of Harewood, and being a man of considerable fortune (although it is unclear exactly where this came from), Franks was also in the enviable position of being able to sweeten his politicking with generous, practical gestures. He gave over 7,000 objects to the museum during the time he was a curator there. With this kind of incentive, it is perhaps no surprise that his work was so widely admired by those above him in the hierarchy, nor that, unlike Robinson's superiors, they never cast doubt on whether public money was being siphoned off to feed Franks' personal collecting habits. No matter how he disguised it, Robinson could not escape the fact of his humble provincial origins. The leeway Franks was given, in contrast, was a reflection of his upper-class background and the consequent, instinctive, assumption that he could be trusted. It appeared to be taken for granted that Franks should be allowed to collect, obsessively, and that in the
end the British Museum would benefit; there seemed to be little need to bother Franks with discussions about a conflict of interest.

Franks became a mainstay of Victorian collecting, the epitome of the scholar-collector. And the work he undertook to move the British Museum towards a more scholarly, collections-based approach was not unlike Robinson's crusade at South Kensington. For Robinson, however, it was the nature of the collections at South Kensington – as well as his clash with Henry Cole – that meant progress was particularly tortuous. South Kensington embodied a new and largely untried idea of a museum that might collect neither antiquities nor paintings, but something from the vast number of objects that fell somewhere beyond and between such categories. It is little surprise that the politics were complicated and fiery, nor that the identity of the collection was sometimes vague and confusing. The work both Robinson and Franks were doing, however, showed the increasing importance and influence of professional collectors. Working with large sums of public money, among a community that stretched across Europe, these new collector-curators were very much at the heart of things, forging a new vision for collecting that would last for generations.

D
espite Robinson's spirited defence, and the board's retraction, the notion that he had, for some while, been combining his work for the South Kensington Museum with work for private collectors proved hard to shake. There were plenty of people who marvelled at his ability to run his smart household on a curator's salary alone, and the conspicuous blanks in his museum diaries, especially when travelling abroad, were commonly held to conceal all kinds of private transactions. The belief that he had been using his knowledge and contacts as a collector to make money from dealing was widespread – and the idea stuck because there was truth in it. Travelling for the museum across Europe, Robinson was ideally placed to know where and when pieces were coming on to the market. From his discussions at the Fine Arts Club, he also knew exactly what people were collecting, and which works they were eager to acquire. It was not difficult to put the two together for profit. Robinson was a collector who revelled in the thrill of collecting, the sport of it, the hunting out and tracking down, the negotiations, intrigues and manoeuvrings; he
also had a voracious appetite for acquisition. Funding this was desperately expensive. Adding to his museum salary seemed to make sense, either by buying directly for friends or by speculating on pieces that he knew he could sell on himself for a reasonable profit at auction.

Robinson bought and sold furiously. It was not necessarily unusual at this time for the distinction between collector and dealer to appear hazy. Dealers could end up amassing far more stock than they could sell, and so metamorphosed into collectors; the lively and extensive interaction between collectors meant that it was common for prized objects to change hands between them. But Robinson's official status at the South Kensington Museum made his situation sensitive; his foray into dealing, especially while on official trips abroad, was a disquieting complication of his role as a public servant with responsibility for public money. On top of this, there was also a lingering sense among some collectors that collecting and dealing should remain separate.

When Augustus Franks applied to join the British Museum in 1851, there was much discussion among his family as to whether a gentleman of his standing should be considering paid work. He had a ready entrée into high society and the reputation of being a keen member of his prestigious gentleman's club, the Athenaeum. He was certainly wealthy enough to be dismissive of the salary on offer, regarding it as pocket money. In these circumstances, the idea of a ‘job' was distinctly uncomfortable. In the end, however, Franks managed to construct a philosophical basis for his work that satisfied his family's sensitivities, while allowing him to continue professional collecting: he positioned himself very clearly as a public servant, in the same way as other gentlemen of means in the Foreign Office, Parliament or the Church. He accepted a paid role at the museum, but also managed to keep himself apart from the usual administrators and workers. He made frequent purchases from his own money that he then
donated to the museum, amounting to a value of around £50,000 (which would correspond to as much as £2 million today). This alone set him apart, reinforcing the impression that he was a gentleman of rank.

Robinson, it was clear, was treading a tricky path. Dealers were men of trade, while collectors were gentlemen. It would not do for the two to be confused. Austen Henry Layard, a diplomat, MP and archaeological pioneer, as well as a trustee of the National Gallery, voiced the concerns of the establishment. Robinson, he snorted, was ‘bumptious and odious. . . the more I hear of Mr Robinson the less I like him. He is nothing but a dealer – up to every trick of the trade.'
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Layard was, like Robinson, a collector. He was an excellent draughtsman and a scholarly historian and writer, specializing in European art. The two men's interests intersected particularly in their enthusiasm for Italy – where Layard was born and where he was to retire in the 1880s to write on Italian art and to develop his collection. They should, perhaps, have been friends. But Layard's assessment of Robinson, and his easy dismissal of dealers in general, was a clear indication that in many minds there remained a gulf between collecting and dealing. To be ‘nothing but a dealer', Layard implied, was to be nothing much at all.

Robinson may well have harboured similar reservations himself. He was now a man with excellent social connections, a reputation for scholarship and a first-rate collection, and he was surely loath to sully any of these with the suggestion of commercial coarseness. But in 1868, with his tenure at the museum now at an end, he needed funds more than ever. He put fifty-six paintings and seventy-one Old Master drawings into a sale in Paris in May, but still money was tight. He could not afford to ignore the potential for using his knowledge to make a living. Moreover, he was distinguished, energetic and, at forty-three, still young. He was well equipped to deal with the demands of a new
challenge, and well placed for forging a new career. If he was obliged to reinvent himself, what could be better than becoming a helping hand for other collectors, an expert friend, a seeker out of bargains and a stalwart at the sales? He would, at least, be free from the restrictions of public administration and accountability.

In 1871, Robinson was put forward for the directorship of the National Gallery, but when this fell through it seemed certain that his formal connection with British museums was over. His new life trading objects had begun in earnest. Nevertheless, it was likely that Robinson regarded himself as a successful collector, rather than as an outright dealer. He never owned a shop and he only worked with a range of refined, high-quality objects. But in practice the outcome was the same: collecting was making a profit, and Robinson's new career flourished rapidly. In 1873, just five years after leaving the South Kensington Museum, he had made enough money to begin looking around at suitable properties to supplement his London townhouse at York Place in Portman Square. He chose Newton Manor, near Swanage in Dorset, a secluded seventeenth-century house with walls of local Purbeck limestone, nestling among tall elms that creaked in summer winds.

When Robinson first discovered the old manor house, it had been used for years as a farm store and was putrid, neglected and shabby. Nonetheless, he was immediately taken with it and quickly set to work clearing the mess of low agricultural buildings and lean-tos from the back, and emptying the rooms of their animal inhabitants. ‘Bats, rats and mice occupied the bedrooms, a colony of owls was established in one of the stone chimneys, and a swarm of bees was installed. . . at the other end of the roof,' he noted delightedly in a pamphlet of his reminiscences. Even better, ‘we possess a private breed of spiders, fine, big, long-legged creatures, as active as race horses. One of their amiable customs is to drop down on the shoulders of our lady guests at dinner
time.'
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Robinson improved land on the estate, building new roads and planting trees, and discovered an interest in horticulture. He took to spending time outdoors and became fond of the many fine views stretching away across England's south coast.