Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (25 page)

In some respects, Charlotte's collecting derived from the genteel habits of the past. Born into a wealthy, aristocratic family, she had the benefits of a decent education and she always mixed in elite circles. She was a rich woman with the time and money to indulge her hobbies. But her collecting could also have been restricted by such a background: she could have been a wealthy connoisseur with a fine aesthetic appreciation, or a fashionable society figure with a collection to catch the eye, or a woman at home, her collecting mediocre in scope and modest in ambition. Charlotte was much more than this. Using money from her marriage into the industrial, and industrious, middle classes, she helped show the way for new generations of collectors whose enthusiasm would be supported by erudition. She challenged the conventions about how female collectors could act and what they could achieve. She took collecting out of the drawing rooms of her aristocratic heritage and on to the streets of a changing Europe.

J
OSEPH
M
AYER

J
oseph Mayer was having his portrait painted. It was around 1840 and he was in his late thirties, a successful silversmith and Liverpool businessman, socially secure, reasonably wealthy, a man of fashion – and an emerging collector.
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This portrait, the first Mayer had ever commissioned, was a way of marking how far he had come, and where he was going. His business was thriving: he was a partner in his brother-in-law's jewellers in Lord Street, at the heart of the flourishing Victorian town. He lived in considerable ease and some splendour in a townhouse on Clarence Terrace, Everton Road (since demolished), establishing himself as a member of Liverpool society. But this was not just another standard Victorian portrait, reinforcing respectability and professional success. It was a statement about Mayer's passions and ambitions, a portrait of an aspiring connoisseur. Surrounded by vases and busts, sculpture, classical marbles, Greek and Etruscan antiquities, Mayer was showing off the part of him that mattered – his collection.

When it came to choosing an artist for the commission, Mayer
needed someone who would depict the story of his life in the objects around him, its bonds with the past and its potential for the future; someone who would pay as much attention to portraying the artefacts crowding the edges of the painting as to the man at its centre. He chose William Daniels. Daniels was ten years younger than Mayer, but was already becoming known in local circles. He was everything a painter should be: proud and eccentric, unreliable, passionate and poor. The town's middle classes delighted to hear how he had been discovered as a boy in a ditch in the brickfields, modelling figures from the clay; how he had been adopted out of the notorious Scotland Road district, Liverpool's poorest and roughest area, and introduced to the Liverpool Academy of Art by one of the masters, Alexander Mosses, and how he had learned so well and so quickly that he had won first prize for a drawing of a dying gladiator. Ashamed to clatter on to the wooden platform to receive his award in his clogs, Daniels had apparently borrowed a pair of boots from a gentleman's son. This poignant tale of talent in adversity further charmed Liverpool society when the penniless Daniels fell in love with a pretty girl called Mary Owen, who was also penniless and whom he painted as a rosy-cheeked gypsy pedlar in an attempt to raise money for a wedding. When the portrait was immediately bought by Sir Joshua Walmsley, MP and Mayor of Liverpool, Daniels had secured a future. He had a patron, and, better still, a romantic reputation.

It was not necessarily a straightforward commission. Daniels could be tetchy, puffed up by his sudden success and celebrity. He drank heavily, and, if he was in a sensitive mood, he would rage against the humiliation and sterility of being asked to paint to order; ‘his inspiration was always fleeting,' explained one of his early Liverpool patrons, ‘and when out of temper he would slash a partly completed canvas or daub it with aimless strokes'.
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But for Mayer, Daniels seemed willing to cooperate. Perhaps
Mayer adopted a ruse that had helped some of Daniels' other customers manage the temperamental artist: one explained how he carefully displayed a ‘few guineas on a convenient mantelshelf in the hope of attracting him, thus doling out the price as the picture went on'.
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However it was, the portrait was completed. Daniels painted the dim light idling through heavy curtains, throwing the room into shadow so that it seems something more than a study or even a museum, something like a great ancient tomb, newly opened and packed with objects. He lets the papers twist open under the table, a glove fall to the floor, and Mayer's spaniel peer, half-curious, from under his chair. The atmosphere is homely and relaxed, yet simultaneously strange and distant, as though Daniels is attempting to capture the sense of the past accumulating in the heavy quiet. And at the very centre is Mayer, contemplative and still; smaller than his sculptures and busts and the huge carved chair in which he sits, another piece in the collection, not separate from it but alive within it, a natural part of the things with which he is surrounded.

It was a portrait of its time, evoking the idea of the chaotic, romantic antiquarian study that had been made popular by writers like Walter Scott and which was the height of fashion when Daniels was completing the commission for Mayer in the early 1840s. In Scott's 1816 novel
The Antiquary
, he describes the ‘sort of den' in which the collector might be found:

It was a lofty room of middling size, obscurely lighted by high narrow latticed windows. One end was entirely occupied by book-shelves, greatly too limited in space for the number of volumes placed upon them. . . while numberless others littered the floor and the tables amid a chaos of maps, engravings, scraps of parchment, bundles of papers, pieces of old armour, swords, dirks, helmets, and Highland targets. . . The top of this cabinet was covered with busts, and Roman lamps and
paterae, intermingled with one or two bronze figures. . . A large old-fashioned oaken table was covered with a profusion of papers, parchments, books and nondescript trinkets and gewgaws, which seemed to have little to recommend them, besides rust and the antiquity which it indicates. . . The floor, as well as the table and chairs, was overflowed by the same
mare magnum
of miscellaneous trumpery, where it would have been as impossible to find any individual article wanted, as to put it to any use when discovered.

In Daniels' new portrait, Mayer's study fitted the model perfectly. It would have been immediately clear to anyone seeing the painting, just what kind of man Mayer was (or at least how he wished to present himself); the viewer would have understood that by surrounding himself with objects in this way he was displaying himself as both fashionable and apparently learned. Daniels painted Mayer to look exactly how most Victorians thought a collector should look.

In one hand Mayer holds a book. This is both serious and fitting, an indication of his connoisseurship. But when it came to selecting something particular for him to hold in his other hand, there was perhaps more of a problem. The random selection of objects in the painting aptly illustrates the haphazard and eclectic nature of Mayer's collecting, which was enthusiastic rather than particularly knowledgeable. Although he no doubt wished to appear studious and erudite in his portrait, he was in fact much more likely to be guided by his instincts than by learning. He was not, as he admitted himself, particularly scholarly. He was the product of an average education at a local grammar school and his classical, historical and scientific understanding was limited and uneven. He could show Daniels an intriguing jumble of things to be painted but not the ordered, comprehensive collection of an intellectual. Some of his pieces were significant and historic; others were merely curiosities, and a few were little more than
household junk. Mayer liked all sorts: rare antique objects from the ancient civilizations of Rome, Greece and Egypt, and broken archaeological finds from Anglo-Saxon burial sites; arms and armour, swords, guns and all things military; manuscripts from Burma, scraps from German prayerbooks, illuminated medieval missals, books of hours and fine bindings; Napoleonic memorabilia; gems, ivories and enamels; engravings, cartoons, the occasional oil painting and examples of local Liverpool pottery. There were few things he could resist if they had the scent of history about them.

Mayer's table was littered with Roman and Etruscan antiquities, with candlesticks and antique figurines. But what he chose to hold in the portrait, in the end, was a miniature vase, shaped like an ancient Greek urn and set on a pedestal. It was small enough to fit comfortably in one hand, light enough for him to hold up through the long sittings, and pretty enough to hold Daniels' attention. But, in fact, it was a very ordinary piece, an example of English pottery from the Wedgwood works and unfashionable. It was not a status symbol; it did not testify to wealth or learning; it had not been unearthed during a risky foreign voyage. It was just something Mayer liked and apparently it did not disturb him that it was relatively new, or that in the 1840s no one else seemed to share his taste in china. Wedgwood pieces pleased him; he admired their colours and forms and their strong references to the ceramics of the past. It was, he thought, a fitting object to include in his portrait.

Within a few years, the room which Daniels had so carefully depicted had disappeared. By 1844, Mayer had given up the smart house in Clarence Terrace, and the gentleman's study, and had moved instead into modest and simple accommodation above his business on one of Liverpool's busy shopping streets. He had been apprenticed at the age of nineteen to his brother-in-law James
Wordley and had been a successful partner in the business since the early 1830s, but now he was looking for change and greater independence. In 1843, he broke the partnership with Wordley, acquired premises a few doors down, and set up alone. Without ties, he could do as he pleased. He could try his hand at designing and making his own silver, and he could begin to establish his own name in the trade.

Mayer's new workshop flourished. He became highly skilled in designing large, often ceremonial pieces of gold and silver plate, spectacular trophies and civic regalia, and he studied innovative techniques, exploring the commercial potential of affordable new processes like electroplating. The business became respected and thriving; the shop imposing and magnificent. Mayer presented himself within the tradition of Renaissance silversmithing, and he designed a new building to invoke a sense of monumental art and of continuum with an impressive past. Either side of the entrance door were two massive frescos, one of the Renaissance smith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, and one of the seventeenth-century goldsmith and royal jeweller George Heriot. Two huge busts, one male and one female, gazed down from the balustraded façade on to the shoppers below. Immense plate-glass windows were piled high with objects to the height of three or four men, and Mayer's name was emblazoned, twice, above the display. Inside, watches and clocks, cameos, precious stones, heraldic engravings and a glittering array of silver and gold were all carefully arranged in specially designed showcases.

With such a prosperous showroom, it was not enforced economies that persuaded Mayer to give up the ease of the Clarence Terrace house. It was the lure of collecting. All his energies and resources became focused on finding and buying objects: it became his obsession, his life's purpose. Unlike J. C. Robinson, he could not bear to have the distractions of fashionable living divert his attention, and his money. He was fascinated by
the past, and the objects it had left behind, and he did not mind giving up the comforts of the present if it meant bringing him closer to history.

While Mayer contented himself with simple living in the rooms above his shop, he was anything but reclusive. He was naturally a sociable man, but, more than this, he understood that to be a successful collector he needed to explore new places and meet new people. He travelled whenever he could, sending frequent parcels and crates back to England. He made his first trip, at the age of twenty-five, in 1828, and he spent the next few decades exploring the archaeological sites of Italy and the ruins of the ancient world, steaming down the Rhône to the towns of Southern France, and uncovering objects in Bavaria, Austria, Bohemia and Prussia. Mayer was only nine years older than Charlotte Schreiber, but was setting out on his journeys when she was busy at Dowlais, long before she had begun to collect; twenty years the senior of J. C. Robinson, he was beginning to explore the treasures of the Continent at a time when popular Victorian collectors' routes were still being etched into the European map. In the 1820s and 1830s, collecting off the beaten track of the established Grand Tour had a sense of trailblazing; it seemed exciting, daring and new. Mayer travelled for business, to buy stock, make deals and keep abreast of fashionable trends. But his journeys soon became about much more than the demands of trade. His moment of conversion to collecting, he always maintained, came when he was convalescing from fever during a business trip to Dijon, and had time to wander around the town's museum and picture gallery. The antiquities he saw there captivated him, and suddenly turned his journey from business to pleasure; from commerce to collecting.
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