Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (20 page)

Clubs and galleries and organizations brought collectors together across Britain and Europe, but collecting in the mid-nineteenth century was as much about competition as about cooperation. As an expression of state prestige on a national level, museums were anxious to lead the way for their country – or indeed within their country. J. C. Robinson always asserted that there was no conflict between his collecting at South Kensington and the medieval and Renaissance treasures being accumulated at the British Museum
by Augustus Franks, but there was little doubt that the two men were at times competing for the best pieces. In 1855, it was the rivalry between the two institutions which put a stop to the idea of acquiring the Bernal collection in its entirety for one or the other. Instead, the grant had to be shared. Robinson at once recognized what this meant: ‘the state virtually committed itself to the formation of two concurrent new undertakings of the same character. . . with little co-operation betwixt the managers of the separate establishments, if not indeed with tacit rivalry betwixt them.' Fortunately, he and Franks came to an understanding for dividing the Bernal spoils, but the rivalry went further than just the two principal collectors. Henry Cole had a distinctly predatory attitude towards the British Museum: in 1852, he proposed bringing ‘the overflowings of the Brit Mus' to South Kensington, and after the Bernal sale he was delighted to hear Antonio Panizzi, who was soon to be appointed Principal Librarian of the British Museum, suggest that ‘the whole shd be handed over [to South Kensington] & even Franks with them'.
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By 1859, Cole was talking to Panizzi about taking long-term loans from the British Museum, which would in effect strip the Great Russell Street galleries of their entire medieval collections. After Henry Cole's retirement, the rivalry continued but it was the British Museum that appeared now to have the upper hand: a Select Committee investigating the relationship between the two museums in 1873 proposed that the South Kensington Museum should be subsumed into its older rival. The autonomy of South Kensington was, for a while, under real threat, but the move was fiercely opposed by staff there, and by the mid-1870s it had been agreed that the two museums should continue to coexist. As the collections at South Kensington turned their attention even more from manufactures and towards precious objects, however, there were inevitably areas in which interests clashed.

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Among individual collectors, the instinct to be first was compelling. Despite constant weariness and not infrequent ill-health, the Schreibers took night trains and battled with omnibuses when easier options were available, not just to reduce costs, but also because they needed to pounce quickly on objects. In many cases, they were successful: in March 1874, for example, they ‘espied a printed Battersea box, very handsome' in an auction in Brussels, and stepped in to buy it before it was offered to the gathered dealers, ‘coming away well pleased with our bargain'.
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They took the competition seriously, and had the advantage over many collectors in that they travelled almost everywhere together. This meant that, when one of them, as was not unusual, felt too tired or sick to be out of their hotel, the other could continue the constant round of shopping that marked their days. In Duveen, however, as Charlotte's journal suggests, the Schreibers felt they had found their match.

In 1873, when Charlotte was writing, Joseph Joel Duveen was thirty years old, energetic, astute and beginning to establish a dealership that, in the hands of his successors, would influence the markets for generations to come. It was his son, also Joseph, who would in time become one of the wealthiest and most prominent dealers ever known, shipping paintings across the Atlantic to the American millionaires of the early twentieth century and funding celebrated extensions to the British Museum and the Tate Gallery. In the early 1870s, however, all this was just beginning. Joseph Joel, sent by his Dutch family to launch an import business in Hull specializing in Delft porcelain, was still in the throes of establishing himself as a dealer, drawing on his connections across Europe and familiarizing himself with the machinations of the market.

Duveen had learned his lessons as an apprentice in an ordinary porcelain merchant in Hull. The shop he joined as a young man was not doing well. European suppliers were pulling out of deals, apparently without explanation; objects which were expected
from Europe would fail to arrive and then turn up days or weeks later in competitors' showrooms. Somehow, information was leaking out, making the business increasingly vulnerable. And so the young Duveen took himself off early one weekday to the town's busy docks and watched as shipments were loaded and unloaded in the morning half-light. He stood amongst the soot and the salt and the baffling noise, watching as papers were signed and consignments counted; and, against the cranking of the machinery, the dull hooting of the ships and the shouting of dockers on the wharf, he listened. Gradually, things became clear. He heard details of the shop's transactions – its trade secrets – flung from one part of the dockside to another. He saw confidential lists sold on. He heard new, rival, deals struck. By the end of the morning, he knew exactly how information was escaping, who was betraying the company, and just how important it was to know exactly what was going on, all the time, everywhere.

Duveen immediately booked himself a berth on a fishing boat to Holland so that he could visit personally the company's old suppliers and win back lost business. He was handsomely rewarded for his initiative: within a year, his salary was raised by his grateful employers from fifteen shillings to fifteen pounds a week, making him the highest-paid employee in the Hull import business. But this was not enough. It was not money that drove Duveen's ambitions – it was the thrill of competition. He soon began trading for himself, setting up a company with a colleague called Barney Barnett and using what he had learned in the commotion of Hull docks to make it thrive. With a network of friends and family acting as informants across Europe, he would pursue the whisper of a deal quickly and decisively, making the gathering of information as critical to his activity as the amassing of objects. He was, as Charlotte found out, first off the mark and first to the spoils. He had a superb memory for people, places and, above all, things, and, while at home his wife Rosetta was busy
raising fifteen children and his brother Henry was establishing family showrooms in Boston and New York, Joseph Joel was slipping quietly from one European town to the next, following his precious tip-offs and outstripping competitors.

It was his connections in Holland that were most active and effective, and it was here in the spring of 1873 that Duveen first heard rumours of some valuable pieces of china. It was not quite clear what the pieces were, only that they were old and rare and in pristine condition. Duveen did not need to know more: immediately, he set off to buy them. But the journey was far from straightforward. Duveen's informant had been travelling through small, remote villages, making inquiries about anything local families might be willing to sell, and the pieces that had come to light were in an old house in a tiny hamlet deep in the Dutch countryside, miles from the railway or a town of any size. The only means of travel was by heavy carriage on the country tracks that wound their way slowly through woods and farmland. It was a long and tedious journey. Duveen spent hours rattling past isolated settlements, the carriage wheels dragging through the mud of the lanes. There were no inns to provide refreshment and nothing to see but flat fields stretching out bare to the horizon. It was with enormous relief that, finally, he caught sight of the roofs of the houses in the village where he was heading and knew that his journey was nearly over. He would negotiate quickly, clinch the sale and return to civilization as soon as he could.

But just as the tired horses were pulling the final half-mile, Duveen spotted a fast-moving fly coming towards him from the village. With just two large wheels and a cabin for the passenger, the fly was lighter and quicker than a normal carriage and could cover the uneven ground at greater speed. It was not the kind of vehicle Duveen expected to see in such an out-of-the-way place and he was puzzled. Perhaps he even had an inkling that, for once, he had been outdone. Because as the fly came rumbling towards
him, he saw Charlotte Schreiber, bumping along with the quick jolting rhythm, a large red bag safely snuggled in her lap. As he was to tell amused listeners for many years to come, it soon became all too clear that he had been defeated: Charlotte ‘had snatched the prize, which she was carrying off with her'; and Duveen was left to face the monotonous return journey in the knowledge that his efforts had been thoroughly wasted.
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There is no exact record of what Charlotte managed to snatch from under Duveen's nose – he remembered it only, rather vaguely, as being ‘objets d'art'. I find it surprising that Charlotte herself does not mention the victory in her journal, but she was probably unaware that Duveen was behind her and, with her new objects to savour, failed to notice him rattling past in his carriage. If so, it seems a shame. Such a triumph would surely have been sweet to her and would have reassured her that she was winning a place among the competitive community of collectors. There can be little doubt that the story added to Charlotte's reputation among her rivals scouring Europe for the best pieces. The very fact that Duveen dined out on the tale, passing it on with admiration as proof of her ability to outwit the opposition, shows just how seriously she was regarded by her colleagues, and how widely her name was becoming known.

From the very beginning of her collecting career, however, Charlotte was at a disadvantage: she was a woman pursuing a distinctly male occupation. Most of the collectors and dealers were men, with easy access to learned societies, social clubs and the male hierarchies of the museums. Despite her obvious enthusiasm and knowledge, and even with her husband at her side, Charlotte sometimes found relations with the more misogynistic of European shopkeepers difficult. Among her family and friends, too, her collecting was regarded by many as a bizarre idiosyncrasy that distracted from her role as wife and
mother and prevented her from attending to the essential demands of running a household. For the Victorian middle and upper classes, the home was a sanctuary from the uncertain social and economic forces of the world beyond, a still point in the changing, and increasingly commercial, environment of modern life. The royal couple of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert with their obvious devotion to each other and their children, and a public domestic life built round a clear sense of duty, offered an embodiment of respectability to which those below them could aspire. Within this ideal, the woman's place was to anchor the home and provide a safe private space that would reassure and fortify her husband, however buffeted he was by public life.

This was not Charlotte's way. Her collecting was not confined to Europe – she spent weeks and months tracking down objects in Britain, too – but it always required travel, and most of her attention. Her son, Montague Guest, remembered that she would ‘come back, after weeks on the Continent to Langham House, where she lived, rich with the fruits of her expeditions', and, once reinstalled, she would spend a great deal of time and energy sorting, cleaning, assessing and cataloguing what she had acquired.
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In the eyes of conventional upper- and middle-class Victorians, these were not the actions of a sane and proper woman; instead, such behaviour suggested neglect of her family and household, and a disregard for her social position. For nineteenth-century women of the middle and upper classes, some knowledge of art, and the formation of an artistic taste, might be valued as a fashionable accomplishment, but it was expected to remain an amateur hobby. Engaging with dealers while researching and financing a substantial collection was unusual, and, in devoting herself to her collecting, Charlotte was openly flouting convention.

Such expectations did not mean women were prevented entirely from collecting, but they certainly restricted the aspirations of
most female collectors. The growing enthusiasm for natural history and science collections, for example, threw up few successful female role models. The celebrated Mary Anning was a skilled fossil hunter, palaeontologist and dealer in Lyme Regis during the 1820s and 1830s, but not only was she a woman, she was also a poor woman from a working-class, dissenting family. Despite being well known in geological circles, and winning a certain degree of respect from many of her male colleagues, she remained an outsider and was never given full credit for her contributions to a scientific community that was dominated by wealthy Anglican gentlemen. Similarly, with the development of disciplines such as botany and zoology over the course of the nineteenth century, many women found themselves increasingly excluded and marginalized, forced to study, collect and draw informally, as amateurs based at home, rather than being included in the developing hierarchies of professionalized practice.

Women also often found themselves excluded from areas such as painting, sculpture and antiques, which were all very much embedded in a male tradition that had, for generations, governed the stately homes, scholarly clubs and even schools, where the habit of collecting often began. Women were not admitted to the Society of Antiquaries until 1920, and of the two nineteenth-century archaeological clubs only one, the Royal Archaeological Institute of Great Britain, was open to women. Despite a petition to admit women in 1859, the august schools of the Royal Academy did not allow female members until 1922 (even though two women had been founder members in 1768); women students were admitted from 1861, but only under restrictive rules that insisted on their drawing from draped models. Similarly, the Royal College of Art shunted its women students into a special ‘Female School' where life drawing classes featured a series of well-clothed dummies. It was not until the end of the century that many conservative
societies began to extend membership to include women: the Royal Society of Painters in Water-colours, for example, did not give full membership rights to women until 1890.