Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (29 page)

As yet, Liverpool had no permanent collection of antiquities or decorative art; this Mayer decided to change. In May 1852, he opened his new museum at Number VIII Colquitt Street, a few doors down from the Liverpool Royal Institution, at one of the town's most reputable addresses. Everything was done properly. He sought advice from many of his friends about what to display, and he drew on Franks' expertise to create a cataloguing system. He appointed a full-time curator who lived on the top floor of the building, charged a shilling entrance fee to contribute towards basic costs, and filled the rooms with the most precious and lovely things from his collection.

Perhaps because he could not shake off the memory of the moment in the British Museum galleries when the inspiration came to him, Mayer called his new project the ‘Egyptian Museum'. The name usefully brought to mind not only the British Museum but also other successful private ventures, including Bullock's Egyptian Hall in London which had built on the original collection from Liverpool to put on a number of spectacular, and profitable, shows in the early years of the century, including a display in 1816 of Napoleonic relics which attracted over 200,000 visitors. The name also focused attention on at least some of the objects on display, which included ancient Egyptian inscribed tablets, carved figures and bronzes, as well as a designated ‘mummy room' on the ground floor. More than anything, however, it was a way of enticing visitors. The name ‘Egyptian' exuded mystery and romance; it was the buzzword of its day, a marketing phenomenon. By calling his new project the ‘Egyptian Museum', Mayer was associating his collection with everything that was fashionable, stimulating and glamorous.

In the eighteenth century, and earlier, when travel in the Middle East was difficult and hazardous, only a trickle of Egyptian relics reached Europe, and there were consequently few collectors. In Britain, the Revd Robert Huntington, chaplain to the Levant Company in Aleppo for ten years from 1671 to 1681, had collected manuscripts and some antiquities. In the 1760s, Edmund Wortley Montagu (son of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the renowned eighteenth-century lady of letters) sent back a painted wooden coffin and mummy which became one of the earliest Egyptian exhibits at the newly opened British Museum. But, on the whole, few people were willing to brave the dangers of Middle Eastern travel in search of pieces to collect. It was after Napoleon unexpectedly occupied Egypt in 1798 that things changed. Suddenly the country was modernized and opened up to European travellers and entrepreneurs. Collectors poured into the ancient sites, flooding the markets with objects and sparking a fashion for things Egyptian.

The novelty of travelling in Egypt, and the promise of what could be collected there, drew men from a variety of backgrounds: George Annesley, Viscount Valentia, who amassed an enormous Egyptian collection at Arley Castle in Staffordshire in the early nineteenth century; Joseph Sams, a Darlington bookseller who visited Egypt and Palestine in the 1820s and brought back antiquities which he sold to the British Museum; and Henry Stobart, a clergyman who travelled extensively during the 1850s. The market in Egyptian objects boomed and private collections were soon appearing around the country. But the obsession was not confined to Britain. Expeditions to Egypt were funded by most European monarchs or governments. The most notable, led by Karl Richard Lepsius, was funded by the King of Prussia and sent back 15,000 antiquities and plaster casts for the Royal Museum in Berlin. Across the Continent, mummies were publicly unwrapped in staged spectacles that nodded only in passing
to the interests of science, and publications proliferated, from the downright sensationalist to such scholarly works as the encyclopaedic, five-volume
Egypt's Place in Universal History
, written in German by Christian Bunsen but also translated into English and published between 1848 and 1857. The visit of the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) with his new bride, Princess Alexandra, to Egypt in 1868–9, and international politicking around the opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869, only consolidated the impression that an interest in Egyptian history and affairs was quite the right thing for a person of fashion, good standing and sound education.

Many of the archaeologists and antiquarians exploring Egypt were respectable men of the gentry, government and the church. But they often employed ‘colourful' agents to rummage, cheat and steal on their behalf. One of the most active of these early collectors was the British Consul-General in Cairo, Henry Salt, himself a portrait painter, whose agents Giovanni d'Athanasi and Giovanni Belzoni ransacked ancient sites such as Thebes, the Pyramids and the Sphinx at Giza in a series of ‘excavations'. Among the objects they removed was a colossal granite bust of Rameses II, and enough material to form three huge collections: one was acquired by the British Museum, another was sold to King Charles X of France for £10,000, and a third was auctioned at Sotheby's in over 1,000 lots (some of which Mayer later acquired) after Salt's death in 1827. The enormous popularity of Egyptian objects, and the prestige attached to discovering them, meant that many early collectors and their agents would stop at nothing to secure the pieces they wanted. Excavation methods were violently destructive, obliterating as much as they uncovered. Digs, explained Lepsius, often took place ‘hurriedly and by night and with bribed assistance'.
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There was ferocious rivalry, and the competitors could frequently be seen clambering over stones and broken sarcophagi, rooting through rubble and bartering with
boys whose pockets were stuffed with ancient remains. There was little attempt at documentation and the contexts for the objects, as well as the opportunities for studying them on site, were almost always lost.

In his early travels, Mayer himself was not above such instant archaeology. There was undoubtedly a thrill to be had from hands-on intervention, and, at a time when European empires were expanding, there were few who would have questioned the right of British collectors to pieces from more ‘primitive' cultures. What is now regarded as looting was seen by the Victorians as, at best, the rescue of historic objects for posterity and, at worst, little more than enthusiastic opportunism. In Britain, many expeditions were funded by the government, national and regional museums, or by respectable establishment organizations, and the pillaged artefacts were proudly displayed to an admiring public. Private and public collectors alike benefited from the free-for-all. As early as 1799, the Rosetta Stone was looted during Napoleon's Egypt campaign and eventually given over to the British, shown first at the Society of Antiquaries and then, from 1802, at the British Museum. Mayer's collection boasted numerous large pieces taken from Egypt, including the great granite sarcophagus of Bakenkhonsu, stolen from his tomb at Thebes, and thirty-three of the stone funerary tablets known as stelae.

But Egypt was not the only source of new objects. Lord Elgin's expeditions to Greece in the early nineteenth century famously resulted in the Parthenon Marbles finding a home in the British Museum; Austen Henry Layard sent the results of his excavations in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) to private enthusiasts like Charlotte Schreiber and also to the national collections. His looting was regarded as thoroughly respectable and his work was recognized with a trusteeship of the British Museum in 1866. In the 1860s, British troops sent to Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) took sacred wooden tablets, religious manuscripts, ceremonial crosses, a solid
gold crown, chalices, textiles and jewellery from the imperial palaces in an operation that is said to have required 15 elephants and 200 mules as transport. Again, the British establishment openly condoned the thievery: the hoard, known as the Magdala Treasure, was largely divided between the Queen, the British Museum, the South Kensington Museum and the British Library. The remaining pieces were auctioned to private owners.

As the century moved on, however, there were signs that the consequences of such widespread looting were beginning to be acknowledged. In June 1871, less than four years after the arrival of the Magdala Treasure in Britain, Prime Minister William Gladstone conceded to the House of Commons that the whole affair had been ‘unsatisfactory. . . from first to last' and that he ‘deeply regretted that those articles were ever brought from Abyssinia and could not conceive why they were so brought'. Gladstone was, as we have seen, a collector himself, and his observation points towards a growing change of heart in some collecting circles. Clearly, there would remain unscrupulous and profiteering individuals, buying, selling and collecting objects thoughtlessly. The driving political imperatives of Empire still remained, but the increasing influence of scholarly curators such as Franks and Robinson, and of expert private collectors such as Charlotte Schreiber, meant that the emphasis was gradually shifting from acquiring objects at any cost and ripping them from their ancient sites to valuing and understanding them within their original contexts.

This was not, of course, as simple a matter as I might have made it sound. Attitudes were complex and progress was erratic. Some of the scholarship of the most learned of Victorian curators and collectors derived from studying looted objects; many early archaeologists like Layard combined a certain gung-ho acquisitiveness with a genuine spirit of inquiry; public and private collectors are, as we still see today, notoriously slow to agree to
the repatriation of other people's treasures. Nevertheless, the nineteenth century saw a movement towards more structured, scholarly and responsible collecting, and this was reflected in the changing attitudes of collectors like Joseph Mayer. Through discussions with other, often more learned, collectors, Mayer came to appreciate the importance of documentation, research and publication. Though his own methods were not necessarily scholarly, he grew to appreciate – and support – scholarship in those around him. His friendship with Roach Smith in particular taught him to value objects as much for the light they shed on history as for their status as treasure. Roach Smith, Mayer admitted, gave him a ‘valuable education', in which he learned how ‘all kinds of antiquarian subjects. . . gave an impetus' to study and acted as ‘corroborative help to written history'.
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Over the fifty years that he was collecting, Mayer's attitudes changed. The instant gratification of on-site rummaging which had excited him in his youth gave way to a more considered and respectful approach to objects. This may have had something to do with simply growing up, and becoming older, wealthier and more reputable, but personal circumstances do not explain it all. Joseph Mayer was part of a collecting age when new and intriguing objects, like those from Egypt, created different collecting habits. He was part of a generation that was discovering largely uncharted territory and, in turn, developing new ways of doing things, influencing attitudes and forming opinion.

As with Wedgwood, Mayer was fortunate to be collecting Egyptian objects at the right time, when interest was at its height and when pieces of unique variety, character and quality were first becoming available on the open market. Such good timing, allied with unerring enthusiasm, meant his lack of expertise hardly mattered: he was still able to amass important Egyptian pieces that had both scholarly and aesthetic significance, and that would
be valued in years to come. But callers at the Colquitt Street museum who came expecting no more than a display of Egyptian antiquities were both surprised and fascinated by what they found. There was a stuffed crocodile hung high over the ancient sarcophagi; there was Roman pottery; sculpture from Assyria and Babylonia; Anglo-Saxon metalwork; coins and commemorative medals; Burmese manuscripts; a range of fine Persian leather bindings; and examples of Chinese calligraphy. Visitors could browse an extensive reference library or study books in a dozen languages – none of which Mayer could read himself – before moving on to admire his collection of jewellery, or the artefacts of medieval life he had picked up while wandering the Wirral. The ground floor had a room set aside for the history of English pottery, especially local Liverpool ware and Wedgwood, and the first floor boasted a room devoted to Renaissance Italian majolica. On the stairs between the two floors hung a number of illustrations explaining the technical processes of engraving; a cartoon depicting a scene from Dante's
Divine Comedy
; and a painting of Noah's Ark breasting the rising waters of the biblical flood.

Most of all, though, Mayer valued objects that connected to famous lives of the past. Earlier generations would have dubbed him a ‘curio': the type of collector who chose things not for their intrinsic aesthetic value but for their rarity, novelty or romantic associations. In many ways, he was part of the tradition of collecting for a ‘cabinet of curiosities'; these cabinets of wealthy seventeenth-and early-eighteenth-century gentlemen embraced everything from geological specimens to coins. His museum owed much to eclectic forerunners such as John Tradescant, whose collection was described by a visitor in 1638 as including, among other things, ‘two ribs of a whale, also a very ingenious little boat of bark. . . foreign plants. . . a salamander, a chameleon, a pelican. . . the hand of a mermaid, the hand of a mummy. . . all kinds of precious stones, coins, a picture wrought in feathers, a small piece
of wood from the cross of Christ, pictures in perspective of Henry IV and Louis XIII of France. . . a scourge with which Charles V is said to have scourged himself and a hat band of snake bones'. Tradescant's collection was, according to another admirer, ‘where a Man might in one daye behold and collecte into one place more curiosities than hee should see if hee spent all his life in Travell'. It was a marvel to his contemporaries, and an inspiration to those that followed, eventually becoming the core of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
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In this tradition, Mayer's displays of genuinely significant objects at the Egyptian Museum were interspersed with a range of pieces of doubtful aesthetic value, but each of which came with a good story. There was a signet ring and a snuff box which Mayer claimed had belonged to Napoleon, as well as jewellery and another, gold-lined, snuff box which had apparently once been in the possession of the Empress Josephine. There was a ‘large wheel-lock Gun' which, the label proudly proclaimed, had been ‘used at the execution of Mary Queen of Scots', and, in the same room, ‘The Armoury', there was ‘a cocoa-nut Cup, set in silver, formerly belonging to Oliver Cromwell', as well as a pair of boots, also said to have been Cromwell's. Mayer also treated his visitors to the sight of a ‘Pair of Shoes, worn by her present Majesty, on the night of her marriage to Prince Albert'.