Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (14 page)

There was just one disappointment – the house lacked a ghost. It certainly looked as though it should be haunted but, no matter how hard Robinson listened out for tell-tale bumps and moans, the ghosts failed to appear. To make matters worse, the little cottage at the edge of the estate, which had traditionally been used as the dower house, was notoriously haunted. Robinson could not suppress his envy: ‘my house has not got a ghost whilst the cottage rejoices in the possession of a first-rate one,' he complained.
³
Despite this cause for regret, however, Robinson was in his element at Newton. He would be intense and emotional to the end of his days – without his ‘extreme enthusiasm', noted his wife patiently, he would be a lesser man, a ‘Samson with shorn locks' – but Newton Manor provided a sanctuary from the worst of life's irritations.
⁴
The angry days at South Kensington seemed to have passed.

Newton Manor was also the perfect location for an intimate, informal showroom. Robinson was keen to maintain the distinction between what he was doing and the tradition of the shopkeeping dealers pressed into Europe's major cities. Here he could create an environment that established him as the country gentleman. He could fill the house with his collection in the tradition of the aristocratic elite and create tasteful, elegant displays that had the illusion of being completely divorced from the financial realities of trade. Over the years, Robinson made a small fortune out of his knowledge of the art markets, but he spent much of it making Newton Manor beautiful. The house and its grounds became an extension of his collection. The garden was filled with Venetian sculpture, columns and fountains, including a life-size statue of Sylvanus, a muscular Roman woodland god, which puzzled and
apparently alarmed locals passing by on the road. The dining room was hung with sixteenth-century Spanish panelling, Italian fireplaces and heavy carved wooden doors which gave it the sombre magnificence of an ancient ancestral home. Seventeenth-century suits of armour stood guard in the corridors; Roman busts gazed out across the estate and all kinds of fine paintings lined the walls of the old house, including a full-scale portrait of a nameless
Dutch Gentleman
. At Newton Manor, Robinson displayed his learning and scholarship, his eye for grace and refinement, his collector's instincts and his exquisite taste – everything his clients wanted in someone buying and selling works on their behalf. But Newton Manor had the added advantage of conveniently obscuring the fact that Robinson was a first-rate dealer and not a very wealthy private collector. In the simple solid walls of an old manor, Robinson set up a complicated illusion, a house of mirrors, the perfect salve for Victorian anxieties about class and the changing world of trade.

The genteel lifestyle at Newton Manor was as important to the way Robinson saw himself as to how he wanted others to see him. He bemoaned the break-up of the English country-house collections of the past and there is little doubt that he admired the tradition of collecting that had its roots in the aristocracy. As a dealer, he drew on his conservative credentials to emphasize the discretion and sheer class of the service he was offering. He tried to tempt even the most wary of men with his promise of prudent and tactful dealing, and he was able to count society heavy-weights such as William Gladstone, who somehow found time to be a ceramics collector, among his most honoured customers. Gladstone, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, sent Robinson a speculative £2 in 1869 for the purchase of ‘an interesting piece of Italian ware' and, suitably reassured by the return on his investment, continued to patronize Robinson from time to time.
⁵

Not all of Robinson's clients were society figures, but they were all influential or wealthy, or both. Nearly six hundred works, including some by renowned artists such as Michelangelo and Raphael, passed through his hands to John Malcolm, the 14th Laird of Poltalloch, in Argyll, Scotland, who inherited three houses in 1857. He traded energetically for Robert Napier from Dunbartonshire, who had made a fortune patenting a new naval engineering method, and for Sir Francis Cook, a textile trader, who was left more than £2 million by his father. Abroad, he worked for influential collectors such as Wilhelm von Bode, the creator of the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum who shared Robinson's taste for the Italian Renaissance, and the art historian Stephan Bourgeois. He even managed to establish himself as a royal dealer, cultivating the business of the Kaiserin Victoria, more familiarly known as Princess Vicky, the Empress of Germany, eldest daughter of Queen Victoria and wife of the German Emperor Frederick III. Shrewdly recognizing the value of such exclusive clients, Robinson seemed content to use high-profile royal transactions as a loss leader: he sold the Princess a still life of
Dead Game and Fruit
by Frans Snyders in 1877 for nothing more than the price he had paid for it, generously adding a complementary new frame, and during their long association as dealer and client he carefully adhered to a non-profit policy. He even presented a number of valuable works as gifts to celebrate the silver wedding anniversary of Vicky's marriage to the Kaiser in 1883, including a
Sketch of Hampstead Heath
by Constable and Reynolds'
A Portrait of a Child with Doll
.

Princess Vicky was a collector, from a family of collectors. Her father, Prince Albert, had thrown himself enthusiastically into raising the quality and reputation of the arts; the Royal Collection expanded in all areas under her mother's rule. Together, Victoria and Albert commissioned artists for all occasions, treated themselves and each other to sculpture for Christmas or birthdays,
shopped excitedly for decorative pieces to furnish their houses at Osborne House and Balmoral, and began to encourage scholars to publish about the Royal Collection, which was begun by Charles I. Growing up with this enthusiasm, and with unrivalled access to great works of art, Vicky was knowledgeable, cultured and sophisticated, if rather conventional in her tastes. During years of political machination in Germany, and three bitter wars of German unification during the 1860s and 1870s, the Princess's love of fine things had been a comfort and an inspiration. And the environment Robinson created at Newton Manor clearly offered her a retreat:
The Times
noted that she visited there with her four daughters.
⁶

Such a royal visit was a great achievement for Robinson. It linked him to collecting in the very highest circles and was a clear indication that his activities as a dealer had been accepted. He seemed to be offering a certain type of wealthy Victorian collector just the kind of refined and discreet personal service they demanded. And, in return, they seemed content to reward him with a great deal of money. Details of Robinson's account books reveal the considerable profit he made on reselling works to his elite network of collectors: he bought a Dutch painting of A
Lady at a Harpsichord
at a sale in May 1877 for £88, and sold it two months later for £320. Similarly, a Rubens portrait bought for £90 was sold a few weeks later for £300; a painting described simply in his notes as ‘Venus and Cupid' and acquired for just £5 was marked up to £375; and a
Rainbow Landscape
, again by an unknown artist, secured Robinson well over £500 profit. As his client list grew, and as he counted more and more obsessive collectors among his customers, Robinson was making transactions with impressive ease. He was working in London, travelling to Europe, entertaining at Newton Manor, networking through his cluster of clubs and societies, and making deals at every turn. He never tired of the adventure of finding the right
object for the right client and, during a typical three-month period of the 1870s, he made almost 800 sales of paintings alone, as well as the unrecorded business in his other diverse interests such as Old Master drawings, sculptured bronzes, oriental ceramics and glassware.
⁷

Robinson's energy and success as a dealer can be seen as a blueprint for other internationally renowned dealing careers at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Those that followed adopted Robinson's enthusiasm for mixing in influential circles, and combining erudition with a sharp business sense. Joseph Duveen, for example, one of the most well known and influential of British art dealers, began work in his father's business in 1886 and made a fortune by selling works to wealthy Americans and trading on the idea that owning pieces of art was a way to acquire social standing. Like Robinson, he had an eye for the art of the Renaissance and he too moved easily in the company of royalty and millionaires. He was also, like Robinson, confident, ambitious and single-minded. Before the First World War, he established a virtual monopoly on the trade in Old Masters and his talent for salesmanship allowed him to deal on an unprecedented scale. With his success assured, he donated money and paintings to many British galleries and funded the building of the Duveen gallery at the British Museum to house the Elgin Marbles. He was finally knighted for his philanthropy in 1919.

But Duveen was not alone. The growing number of collectors throughout the Victorian period meant a corresponding growth in the number of dealers who, in turn, created the kind of active, profitable market that later allowed men like Duveen to make a fortune. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the advertising pages of the daily papers teemed with colourful advertisements for dealers and their showrooms. Businesses such as Gladwell Brothers offered everything from ‘new and
choice etchings' to cornices and console tables; the family firm of William Dyer boosted trade as picture restorers by selling a few works on the side, while higher-class dealers such as Agnew's were responding to the growing market for Old Masters and eighteenth-century portraiture. Others were following more closely in Robinson's careful footsteps, negotiating the tricky boundaries between trade and social prestige: in the 1880s, for example, Marcus Huish combined his occupation as a barrister and a role as director of the Fine Arts Society with a profitable career in art dealing.
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In the late 1860s and early 1870s, Robinson was at the vanguard of this new profession. He was one of the first to take on the demands of dealing alongside his own collecting. Cloaked in the disguise of the gentlemanly amateur, he was forging new possibilities as a commercially minded professional, and in the process altering perceptions both of collectors and the markets in which they moved.

The contradictions of Robinson's career at the South Kensington Museum were not entirely confined to the past, however. He could not shake off his attachment to the South Kensington collections, nor the idea that he should continue to play a part in shaping them. In 1873, little more than five years after Robinson's ignominious dismissal, Henry Cole retired from his post as Director, worn out by battles with the government and half a century of life as a civil servant. He was replaced by Philip Cunliffe-Owen, who had been primed by Cole as his successor: after a number of posts in the Science and Art Department, he was officially made Cole's deputy in 1860, taking particular responsibility for the British contributions to the International Exhibitions which took place all over Europe during the 1870s. He was efficient and shrewd, and praised by
The Times
for being ‘robust and capable of much hard work. . . the capable man of business'.
⁹
More significantly, he had no axe to grind with
Robinson. His work on the International Exhibitions had kept him largely out of Robinson's way, and he had spent so much time travelling that he had been able to maintain a healthy distance from the worst of the squabbles. Besides, he made no claims to be an expert on objects or collecting and so did not see Robinson as any kind of direct threat to his authority. He was content to be an organizer and, when he succeeded Cole as Director, he was happy to focus on administration. He was a man, noted
The Times
, of ‘little expert knowledge, [who]. . . had little to do with the actual purchases of objects'.
¹⁰

With Cole out of the way, Robinson launched something of a charm offensive. He kept an eye out at sales for lots that might tempt the museum and began offering some of his own pieces on loan in the hope that they might prove indispensable. He moved quickly and confidently. By 1879, over 300 of Robinson's objects were on display as loans, but with a view to a sale, including a stunning twelfth-century Flemish standing cross with a base inlaid with crystal; an elaborately decorated dress sword; a set of eighteenth-century Italian clerical vestments; strings of jewels, silver chalices, old Venetian glass, blue-and-white china, bronzes, wood carvings, ivories and books. The objects were magnificent and conspicuous and they filled gaps in the existing collections. But Cunliffe-Owen was wary about directing public money towards Robinson without being sure it was to the museum's advantage, and he drew on support and expertise from other national institutions to bolster his position. The pieces were scrupulously inspected by Franks at the British Museum, who found them ‘remarkable for the taste displayed in collecting them', and by the painter Edward J. Poynter, a member of the Royal Academy who was, at the time, Principal of the National Art Training School and who was later to become Director of the National Gallery. He too approved, writing to Cunliffe-Owen that ‘ALL the specimens appear to me to be admirably chosen for their
artistic value.'
¹¹
With the government establishment in accord, Robinson found his objects once again taking pride of place in the South Kensington galleries.

To consolidate the impression that he was still invaluable, Robinson offered the pieces as part of a deal which, he assured Cunliffe-Owen, would be ‘as advantageous as possible to you'. There would be no haggling over price: Robinson was prepared to offer the museum a bargain, selling the whole lot at a rate ‘very much smaller' than the market value.
¹²
This still amounted to the not inconsiderable sum of £6,800, and the museum, perhaps unsure about exactly how generous Robinson was inclined to be towards an institution that had sacked him, called on Poynter and Franks again for advice. When both advisers approved the price as being ‘very moderate', however, the deal was made.
¹³
It was a marked divergence from Cole's desire to concentrate on modern manufactures, a very obvious demonstration that after his retirement in 1873 the museum moved more rapidly to adopt a policy that owed much to Robinson's early collecting. The idea of making contemporary acquisitions was gradually abandoned, so much so that by 1880 the displays of modern manufactures that had been at the heart of the original museum were moved from the main building to an outpost in Bethnal Green. In their place, Cole's successors concentrated their efforts on creating a vibrant visual encyclopedia of connoisseurship. Potential acquisitions were no longer assessed on whether they could be used to improve public taste or as models for students but instead, as Poynter said, ‘for their artistic value'.