Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (22 page)

Charlotte's women friends clearly recognized that she had battled her way into the male bastions of the collecting world. Her collecting was undertaken on a different scale from almost any other woman of her time, and this was what set her apart. She herself often refers to her collecting in her journals as ‘work', an indication of just how serious and consuming a matter she considered it. And the male establishment certainly did not view her collecting simply as a genteel lady's hobby. Augustus Franks was a close friend and collecting confidant. The two shared regular discussions about their objects, and frequently bought and sold pieces between themselves. Franks was, according to Charlotte's son Montague, ‘a constant visitor at her house'. When she was abroad, Charlotte mixed as an equal with museum professionals: in Tarragona in 1870, the director of the museum took time to show her personally ‘all over the antiquities collected there', and in November 1874 she was shown around the Utrecht Museum by its founder, Monsieur Van Huckelm, ‘a most well-informed and agreeable man. . . making this collection. . . quite wonderful'.
¹⁴
In the 1870s, when the china craze was at its height, the London dealers Mortlocks, based in Oxford Street, even relied on Charlotte as a ‘runner', asking her to use her European connections to purchase blue-and-white ceramics on their behalf. Mortlock openly admitted ‘that nearly all he knew about China he learned from her', something which, as Charlotte's son
acknowledged, was ‘a marvellous tribute indeed, from the professional to the amateur'.
¹⁵
In spite of being a woman, Charlotte was respected, and even feted, as a collector. So completely did she challenge the conventions of what female collectors could achieve that few of her companions, male or female, could boast such success. Few kept up such an energetic life of travelling, research and bartering; few made so many confident and profitable deals; and few demonstrated such commitment to collecting as a way of life.

C
harlotte and Charles Schreiber made twenty-three foreign trips between 1869 and 1882, spending around half of each year, and sometimes more, travelling in Europe. This had the advantage of being cheaper than maintaining an appropriately large and fashionable household in England, and they were eager to see the sights in the towns and cities they visited. But the driving force by far was their collecting. Prices abroad tended to be more reasonable, even for British wares, and Charlotte's journals reveal how the Schreibers sought out shops and dealers, private collectors and museums, in a constant rush to view, compare, buy and sell objects. Whatever the length and tribulations of a journey, it was usually just a matter of minutes before Charlotte was out into the streets of a new destination, continuing her search: in August 1869, for example, she bemoans arriving so late in Gouda that they were ‘barely in time to save daylight to ransack the old dealers' stock'; on 8 March 1872, they disembarked from the night train in Amsterdam and immediately ‘took a carriage and went straight to Van Houtum's to see what he might have'.
¹
The Schreibers continued their collecting at a similarly frantic pace during the months back in England, but the
attention given to the European crusade in Charlotte's journals indicates just how absorbing and exciting it was to be collecting abroad at this time.

As we have seen, Europe was ready for collectors. Thanks to the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, the revolutions and political instability that accompanied nationalist movements in Italy, Germany, Denmark, Hungary and Poland; changes to the old structures of royalty, nobility and the church; growing urbanization; shifting patterns of wealth; fashionable commercialism and economic fluctuation, there had never been a better time to be collecting. In Holland, the Schreibers hoped to pick up the distinctive blue-and-white ceramics of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century delftware, or even ‘original' blue-and-white that had been imported from China. Such pieces had been popular as domestic furnishings in the seventeenth century but had since dropped out of fashion and been relegated to back rooms and store cupboards, junkshops, auctions and markets. In Dresden, the Schreibers were on the trail of more ceramics, in particular from the renowned Meissen works, but they were also offered ecclesiastical relics and the entire interior decoration of a local church. In Belgium, they were shown choice examples of oriental china, imported from Japan, Chelsea ware that had made its way from Britain, and an ornamental metal picture frame that had once graced the palace of Louis XIII of France. All over Europe, objects that had been hidden away in homes, castles and churches were coming on to the open market, while new and expanding trade routes were moving objects across the Continent, and even the world.

The Schreibers travelled from north to south, taking advantage of a changing Europe. But for all the riches to be had elsewhere, it was in France that the network for collectors offered most. As Robinson had discovered as a student in Paris during the 1840s, by the middle of the century, the French had already discovered
a widespread interest in collecting. In Germany, in contrast, undisturbed collections of treasures from the Middle Ages and Renaissance continued to languish quietly in the houses of the nobility. But in France, in the aftermath of the Revolution, greater instability created a much more vigorous marketplace in which similarly impressive objects changed hands frequently. ‘The French Revolution,' according to writer and critic Jules Janin, ‘began to break everything, to destroy books, to cut paintings in pieces. . . to melt gold and silver. . . to sell – at auction even – the marbles of tombs.' This, however, was not the end of the story. What was cast out was usually immediately rescued, Janin went on to explain, by ‘a whole army of antiquarians. . . whose life and fortune are spent in collecting these scarce remains, in saving from oblivion these precious remembrances'.
²
Medieval and Renaissance art works could be picked up cheaply in junkshops and market stalls – everything from sixteenth-century furniture to prints by Dürer or Rembrandt, from armour and ceramics to marriage caskets. Across France, church silver pulled from the altars now appeared in auction rooms, and family collections were broken up and sold. Within a generation, a treasure trove of previously hidden, often completely unknown, objects became available: silver and tableware that had belonged to princes and nobles; paintings, tapestries and jewellery; precious religious objects and even entire walls, altarpieces and massive doorways torn from churches, private chapels and monasteries. Some of Europe's most beautiful and valuable pieces were now appearing for sale to anyone who could afford them.

By the 1850s, when the fashion for the leftovers of the French
ancien régime
had really taken off, Paris was the heart of the collectors' circuit. Calling at a renowned dealers in Utrecht in 1869, Charlotte found there was ‘absolutely nothing' because ‘he had 84 cases packed up for Paris', and visits to the curiosity shops of Alicante in March 1870 were equally unsuccessful because ‘the
best things' were all kept back to be sold to the French capital.
³
The violence of the Commune in 1871 interrupted Paris's preeminence but the setback was temporary. By May 1872, Charlotte was noting that ‘all the great English dealers' were again gathering at the Paris sales, and not long afterwards she was delighted to be finding so many promising shops. ‘We enjoyed our
chasse
very much,' she observed.
⁴

The Schreibers' peripatetic lifestyle was not always so enjoyable, however. Charlotte's journals include plenty of accounts of days when nothing was bought. The couple were sometimes ill, and frequently tired. The stock of worthwhile objects was often exhausted and dealers could be obstructive, rude or even mad. Disappointment was commonplace.

The story of Charlotte's gourd-shaped bottle at first appeared to be one such disappointment. It was February 1873 and, unusually, Charles was alone on a short trip to dealers in Holland, leaving his wife at home. We know very little about Charles as a partner in the couple's collecting. Charlotte's journals provide her point of view, and, although she sometimes records her husband's opinion – referring to him always as C. S. – we learn little of his character. We discover most about his often precarious state of health, the apparently constant headaches, sore throats, inflamed eyes, undefined pains and exhaustion that may have been symptoms of an underlying and untreated condition. He was clearly as enthusiastic about collecting as his wife, however, and it may even have been his encouragement which first inspired Charlotte's interest. Beyond this, it is difficult to be sure of the nature of his contribution.

As a scholar, it is likely that he shared in the research that made their collecting of such value, but he never published anything. The impressive catalogue of the collection of English ceramics at the Victoria and Albert was written after his death and bears his
wife's name. Like Charlotte, he clearly had an interest in politics and was elected MP for Cheltenham in 1865, but he lost the seat three years later and did not stand again until 1880, when he became MP for Poole without distinguishing himself on any particular political issue. Apart from his parliamentary role, he did not work. Charlotte herself suggests that he was often at a loose end: after a visit to the 1857 Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester, she noted: ‘Having no profession, no pursuit at this particular moment, I cannot describe how pleased I was to see how heartily he threw himself into the spirit of all around him.'
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I could find no other contemporary accounts of him and in his portrait he appears unremarkable, even insipid. It is only from his anecdotal role in incidents from Charlotte's collecting life, such as the story of the gourd-shaped bottle, that we get any sense of his perspicacity, dedication and skill as a collector.

The trouble with Charles Schreiber's Dutch trip was that he had bought too many things. His boxes and cases were full and heavy. Although he had already made arrangements to send as much as he could back to England, without Charlotte and her big red bag, he found he could not carry all the remaining purchases alone. Worse still, he found himself amongst the plinths and shelves of a cluttered showroom in Rotterdam known as Kryser's, and he wanted to buy more: a large Wedgwood bowl and cover, which had been partly decorated in Amsterdam in 1808, and a strange bottle, also apparently Wedgwood, but shaped like a gourd and decorated with a painted landscape bright with flowers. Charles clearly felt he had to have both pieces, even at the risk of leaving things behind, and so he negotiated with Kryser. But when it came to finding space for them in his already overstrained luggage, he realized that he had overreached himself. All he could do was ask Kryser to put the purchases to one side so that he could collect them on a future visit. It was not the ideal solution, because they were two of the finest pieces he had managed to unearth
during the trip, but he knew that he and Charlotte would be back in Rotterdam before the spring was out.

In the end, it was not until the beginning of April that the Schreibers managed to return. It was a few days before Easter, and in the warmer weather it was a pleasure to stroll together around the busy port and into the labyrinth of lanes behind. The town gardens were beginning to blossom, there was more life in the streets, and it was easy to spend the spring hours idling in front of shop windows. Doors were thrown open to the street, and the alluring treasure in the dark interiors twinkled in the spring sunlight. The Schreibers were not here to dawdle, however; their minds were fixed on retrieving their treasure from Kryser's. But, when they reached the shop, Kryser pretended that he had never seen either of them before, even though they had both shopped there on many previous occasions. Worse still, he denied all knowledge of the sale a few months earlier.

Puzzled and annoyed, the Schreibers clattered up the wooden steps to the top rooms of Kryser's shop and there found the bowl and bottle. Kryser's memory, however, still refused to be jogged. He was adamant that no previous transaction had ever taken place. The negotiation had to begin again. Finally, a sale was agreed. The Schreibers paid a sovereign, again, for the bottle, and carried it off with them at last. Back at the hotel, their purchases safely carried between them, it was the bottle that took pride of place. Charlotte did not know exactly what it was but she was sure it was uncommon and of the best quality. Perhaps it was Delft china, or perhaps something even rarer. Whatever it was, she was certain they had a bargain. Only a few days later, however, she was upset by a very different valuation. She was in The Hague, hosting a tea party for some friends, fellow travellers from England and old Dutch acquaintances. Charlotte proudly showed off her newly acquired bottle and it elicited a great deal of enthusiastic comment. Hardly anyone there had seen anything like it. They admired its
unusual pregnant form and the colours of the decoration. Almost everyone thought, like Charlotte, that it had been a good buy. But one of the guests, the painter Christoffel Bisschop, disagreed. He was an expert on fine Dutch china, so he said, and this was not fine Dutch china. It was German, cheap and ordinary. It was attractive, perhaps, but nothing more than a trinket and essentially worthless.