Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (2 page)

None of my five collectors is well known. Even John Charles Robinson has been little studied; in comparison to his colleague at the South Kensington Museum, Henry Cole, his work has been overlooked. Only some of the objects from their collections were important and valuable; some were just as much a demonstration of individual taste or little more than a frivolous purchase. None of the collections survives intact to be seen now. But each one was significant in its own time; some were even famed. And, taken together, these five histories give an insight into a Victorian phenomenon that went much further than just a handful of extraordinary lives, revealing a passion for collecting that helped shape how we see the nineteenth century and the legacy it has bequeathed to us today.

I
t was a hot June day in 1862. South Kensington was bustle and dust and noise, as it had been for months. Horses, carriages and omnibuses moved slowly in the packed streets. On Exhibition Road, on a site that would, in twenty years' time, become home to the terracotta columns of the Natural History Museum, two great glass domes shone in the sun. They formed the extravagant centrepiece of the London International Exhibition of Industry and Art, an enormous fair of artworks and manufactures from across the world in the tradition of the 1851 Great Exhibition. Visitors queued at the entrances, eager to see what was on show, crowds inside pushed their way through the glittering displays and Victorian London was, once again, in thrall to the excitement of spectacle

Sponsored by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, the new exhibition boasted 28,000 exhibitors from thirty-six countries. The specially erected building, designed by government engineer and architect Captain Francis Fowke, covered 23 acres of land, with two huge wings
set aside for large-scale agricultural equipment and machinery, including a cotton mill and maritime engines, and a façade almost 1,200 feet long, of high arched windows, corner pavilions, columns and flags. At a cost of almost half a million pounds, the exhibition was intended to dazzle and impress even those who had visited the Crystal Palace extravaganza a decade earlier, and the two crystal domes of Fowke's design, each 260 feet high and 160 feet in diameter, were then the largest domes in the world, wider than (although not quite as high as) both St Paul's in London and St Peter's in Rome.

Not everyone liked the building. The popular press seemed to think the vast domes resembled nothing so much as colossal overturned soup bowls;
Building News
joined other national papers in describing it as ‘one of the ugliest public buildings that was ever raised'.
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But the exhibition inside was very much an attraction. In the six months of its life, between 1 May and 1 November 1862, over 6 million visitors paid between a shilling and a pound, depending on the day, to see new inventions, industrial machinery, home wares, works of art and the occasional splendid folly, such as the huge pillar of gold sent from the Australian gold rush. Not to be put off by a touch of architectural vulgarity, the London crowds flocked to the display galleries where bootmakers rubbed shoulders with baronets; young designers sketched ideas; whiskered manufacturers confided trade secrets; pickpockets, no doubt, flourished, and everyone had a good time.

The taste for this kind of event was by now well established; most visitors already knew how to negotiate the vast spaces and overwhelming displays. They liked the bewildering array of exhibits, the crowded corridors and the chance to see and be seen. Not only the 1851 Great Exhibition, but other international exhibitions such as the 1855 Paris Exhibition and, closer to home, the 1857 Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester, had accustomed
the Victorians to the idea of huge and eclectic displays, sparkling showcases for the most beautiful, the most efficient and the most innovative. Even those who had never before visited such an exhibition would have read about them in the newspapers, and seen all kinds of prints and photographs of what they had been missing. This new event filled the front pages of the press: the
Illustrated London News
was just one of the papers to issue a special event supplement, and to use its editorials to update readers with news of the exhibition's progress. Visitors came to the International Exhibition at South Kensington expecting to be amazed and entertained by the practical, the pioneering and the extraordinary.

The objects brought together under Fowke's clumsy crystal domes included everything from a working forge to sewing machines, from slates and rock salt to the Brazilian ‘Star of the South' diamond. The exhibition was a symbol of mid-Victorian aspiration, manufacturing success and consumer confidence. It was a message to the world about the ambition of Britain and its Empire. But to the millions of visitors that pushed through the crowded galleries, it was also, quite simply, a chance to admire and desire beautiful and unusual things. It evoked, on an enormous scale, the Victorian idea of the collection and what it might mean to bring things together, to compare them, to own and value them, to present them in public with pride.

It was not only the brightly painted and lavishly ornamented arcades of the International Exhibition that hummed with activity. On the other side of Exhibition Road, more objects and more collections were attracting public interest. The new South Kensington Museum, which had been emerging since 1857 in a mish-mash of temporary buildings, was also noisy and crowded. The recently opened permanent galleries of the North and South Courts – also designed by Francis Fowke – more than rivalled the
glamour and glitter across the road. Here, too, there was a glass roof to let in light and air. Boldly painted walls in deep blood-red and purple grey prepared the eye for corridors packed with elaborate highly coloured arrays of patterned wallpapers, mosaics, friezes and stained glass. Here, too, visitors clustered close together around cases of fascinating and attractive things, preening, laughing and flirting, enjoying the buzz. Voices, and the chink of fine china, drifted from the mock-Tudor refreshment rooms where colourful flocks of women took afternoon tea; in the new display spaces collectors, connoisseurs and the simply curious marvelled at some of the world's finest art objects brought together for the delight of the public.

This was the ‘Special Exhibition of Works of Art of the Medieval, Renaissance, and more Recent Periods, on loan at the South Kensington Museum', a complementary – or perhaps rival – attraction to the more manufacturing-based displays across the road. The catalogue played down the ambition of the exhibition, describing it simply as ‘fine works of bygone periods', which had been made possible with ‘the assistance of noblemen and gentlemen, eminent for their knowledge of art'.
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In fact, the displays featured some of the rarest and most beautiful objects ever set before the British general public, over 9,000 works of art from over 500 of the country's richest and most influential owners, from the Queen, aristocracy and the Church, to London livery companies, municipal corporations and public schools. These were private treasures, not normally on open display, brought together for the first and only time – a triumph of negotiation and diplomacy.

The exhibition covered over 500 years of art production, and included all kinds of media, from painting, ceramic and glass, to metal, ivory and textiles. Objects were organized in the catalogue into forty categories, which more or less corresponded to the layout of the galleries. There was no chronological
arrangement to the displays, which were bewildering in their haphazard glamour and sheer abundance. Beginning with sculptures in marble and terracotta, the exhibition moved on to nearly 300 carvings in ivory, bronzes, furniture, Anglo-Saxon metalwork, enamels, jewellery and glass, textiles and illuminated manuscripts. There was a Sèvres porcelain vase in the form of a ship painted with cupids and flowers; a Limoges enamel casket, one of the many enamels on display from the collection of the Duke of Hamilton; a silver-gilt handbell which ‘doubtless' came from the chamber of Mary Queen of Scots; and a modest pair of Plymouth porcelain salt cellars, in the form of shells, belonging to the Right Honourable William Gladstone MP.

Contributors had loaned not only individual objects but sometimes entire collections, often with ancient family roots. This was particularly true in the case of bookbindings, portrait miniatures, jewellery and cameos, the popular mainstays of country-house collections: ‘The Devonshire Gems', for example, assembled in the eighteenth century by William Cavendish, 3rd Duke of Devonshire, was displayed in its entirety, apart from eighty-eight of the cameos which had already been committed to the International Exhibition. So extensive and unique was the collection, and so difficult to assess in the short period of time that had been given over to organizing the exhibition, that the catalogue was forced to confine itself to listing just a few ‘of the finest gems'.

The show was designed to delight and amaze, without reference to the grind of manufacture and industrial production that was the backbone of the displays at the International Exhibition. Its emphasis was on the romantic and the historic, and it focused public attention on the beauty of medieval and Renaissance objects for the first time, introducing unknown styles and techniques. The press marvelled at a display that was ‘unequalled in the world' and ‘rich
beyond all compute and precedent', and the chance to see rare works of art drew visitors from across the country.
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But this was not just a splendid art exhibition: with objects from over 500 collectors, each of whom was named on labels and in the catalogue, the resplendent galleries were specifically designed to bear witness to the richness and variety of British collecting. The packed cases clearly showed how deeply embedded was the idea of the collection, both in national institutions like the monarchy and in the private lives of many of the country's wealthiest and most influential men and women. And over a million visitors – more than a third of the population of London – came to the new museum to see the displays, suggesting how great was the public appetite for the beautiful and quirky, and how widespread the curiosity about, and commitment to, collecting.

Making all this possible was one man – John Charles Robinson. Robinson was a collector himself, a connoisseur, but he was also Librarian-Curator at the South Kensington Museum where he had responsibility for buying objects, researching the collections and, as the exhibition triumphantly demonstrated, creating public displays. Crucial to all of this activity, for Robinson, was nurturing a community of collectors, creating an intimate mutual relationship between individuals and the museum that would benefit everyone. And at the heart of this community, he put himself. He knew all the most active and influential collectors, dealers and scholars; he made some of the most glamorous and talked-about transactions. It was Robinson's influential network of contacts that turned the Special Exhibition from a modest display of private loans to the stunning art show that greeted the South Kensington visitors.

Robinson was a founder member of the Fine Arts Club, a London-based club of wealthy collectors. In 1858, he wrote to his superiors at South Kensington to suggest that he and his collecting colleagues should organize a small and select display
of historical art, as an adjunct to the forthcoming International Exhibition. It would provide something extra, he suggested, for those whose tastes inclined towards older and more refined pieces than would be included in the trade-based displays at the International Exhibition; it would recognize that the public's interest in all kinds of art had been stimulated by events like the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition in the previous year, when over a million visitors, from royalty to cotton-mill workers, had clamoured to see everything from sculpture and armour to photographic montages and Limoges enamels. Permission for the loan show was given, but there were plenty of sceptics who were quick to dismiss the proposal, and members of the press warned that Robinson's enterprise would be ‘overshadowed by its imposing and all-absorbing neighbour, and. . . be recognized only by the connoisseur'.
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Robinson, however, had other ideas. Through the Fine Arts Club, he formed a committee of seventy of the nation's most influential collectors, including the aristocracy and clergy, eight Members of Parliament and Sir Charles Eastlake, President of the Royal Academy and Director of the National Gallery. Between them, these men knew almost every collector in the land. Robinson's exhibition became a rallying point, a prestigious and glamorous event that celebrated collecting. ‘Private cabinets were thrown open with an alacrity which showed that the only offence to be feared was not rifling them enough. . .' marvelled the
Quarterly Review
. ‘The great floodgate was opened.'
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Over the coming months, more and more treasures were pledged to the exhibition until the organizers were swamped by both the sheer volume of objects they were being offered and the practical demands of getting everything safely to the London galleries.