The Taste for Titian in Nineteenth-Century Britain
From 1793 to 1815 Britain was almost constantly at war with France, a country with almost three times the population and far superior military resources. The fact that she survived this unprecedented period of warfare and emerged victorious over a nation led by the greatest general of the age and one of the most brilliant men in European history, demonstrates the tenacity of the British and the country’s underlying economic strength. The fleets of Nelson and later the armies of Wellington played a crucial role, but what is equally impressive is the way that Britain had the financial resources to cope with the expense of a war lasting almost without interruption for over 20 years. It was this capacity for survival and the role that the country played as paymaster to France’s many continental enemies that ensured Napoleon’s ultimate defeat.
Unlike the French government, whose inability to reform the nation’s finances had been a major cause in the downfall of the Ancien Régime, in Britain William Pitt the Younger, the most able prime minister of the century (1783–1801 and 1804–6), introduced far-sighted financial reforms. His most important success was to increase the collection of much-needed revenue. Pitt had three methods of doing this: by increasing taxation, notably through the introduction of Income Tax in 1798; by reducing import duties, which led to the decrease in smuggling; and by cutting government spending by the abolition of numerous profitable sinecures.
These financial reforms, together with Britain’s maritime supremacy, which enabled trade to be maintained throughout the British Empire during the Napoleonic Wars, greatly strengthened the economy. At the same time a series of inventions in generating new manufacturing processes was transforming industrial production. It came to be called the Industrial Revolution and was to make Britain the richest nation on earth. England possessed plentiful, natural resources, with rich coal and iron ore deposits and swiftly flowing rivers. A series of new spinning and weaving machines, using these natural resources, initially powered by water and later by steam (James Watt invented a highly efficient steam engine), meant that the dramatic increase in the production of textiles gave Britain a significant advantage over her economic rivals.
The Agricultural Revolution in the early eighteenth century, improving crop production, had resulted in an increase in population, and a gradual migration from the countryside into urban centres. The construction of canals, improved roads and railways (George Stephenson built the first railway line to use steam locomotives), enabled manufactured goods to be moved to the cities where there was a ready market. Many of the increased population lived in the new industrial cities in the north of England, where they worked in mills mass-producing textiles which were distributed, using the new forms of transport, both at home and abroad. For most of the nineteenth century it was be British industry, British ships, British capital and British financial institutions that dominated world trade. It was not until the end of the century that other nations, in particular Germany and the United States, which had also, belatedly, enjoyed their own Industrial Revolutions, began to catch up and then overtake Britain’s economic output.
It is fascinating to look at the link between industry and art during the heyday of Britain’s economic supremacy. Magnates such as Coke of Norfolk, a great patron of the arts, had pioneering new agricultural methods, but the profits he made from increased agricultural output bore no comparison with those generated by the Industrial Revolution. The grandee who benefited most was Francis Egerton, Third Duke of Bridgewater. Following an Act of Parliament the duke had commissioned the construction of the Bridgewater Canal in 1759 to transport coal from his mines at Worsley to Manchester. He followed this by commissioning a second canal in 1762 from Liverpool to Manchester, thus beginning what was to be known as Canal Mania. Barges on canals could transport goods more effectively than packhorses or horses and carts on badly-maintained roads (Thomas Telford, ‘the Colossus of Roads’, was to revolutionize road-building in the early nineteenth century). The Bridgewater Canal cost a staggering £168,000, almost four times the £43,000 the consortium led by Bridgewater paid for the Orléans paintings over 30 years later, but Bridgewater was far-sighted enough to take the risk. From the moment the canal opened, the price of coal in Manchester halved, and the duke was soon earning himself a fortune, reputedly as much as £80,000 a year, and became the richest nobleman in England.
Bridgewater was not known for his interest in art but he sensed a wonderful business opportunity in the sale of the Orléans Collection. The Dutch and Flemish paintings purchased by Thomas Moore Slade had soon found ready buyers. The Italian and French paintings, on the other hand, remained for several years in the hands of Laborde-Mereville, who had brought them over to England, while various attempts were made by leading collectors to buy them. King George III, who had observed that ‘all his noblemen were now picture dealers’, was himself interested and tried to purchase 150 paintings for the nation with the help of his prime minister, William Pitt, and the President of the Royal Academy, the American painter Benjamin West. In the event, it was the art dealer Michael Bryan who acquired them in 1798 for £43,500 on behalf of a syndicate composed of three leading noblemen: the Duke of Bridgewater, the principal investor, his nephew and heir Earl Gower (later Second Marquess of Stafford and First Duke of Sutherland), who knew the Orléans Collection from his time as ambassador in Paris in 1790–2, and Gower’s brother-in-law the Fifth Earl of Carlisle.
Under Bryan’s guidance, the sales made by the syndicate were spectacularly successful. Having purchased the whole collection, the paintings were then valued independently which almost doubled their value to £72,000. Bridgewater, Gower and Carlisle retained 94 pictures for themselves and disposed of the rest. Bridgewater’s eclectic taste echoed that of the Duke of Orléans who had formed the original collection, and included two Madonnas by Raphael, the two paintings of Diana from Titian’s poesie, as well as Poussin’s Seven Sacraments. Gower and Carlisle had more classical taste and preferred the works of Annibale Carracci, the chief seventeenth-century Bolognese painter working in the style of Raphael.
Regardless of the duke’s motives, which were regarded merely as a matter of commercial speculation, in the opinion of a writer on the Notice Historique in Paris, this was a wonderful opportunity for British art collectors. The Italian paintings that the Bridgewater Syndicate purchased were of better quality than anything seen in England for many years. Grand Tourists, on the whole, had had few opportunities to buy major Italian Old Masters and had tended to purchase works by contemporary painters instead: views of Venice and Rome by Canaletto and Giovanni Paolo Panini, and portraits by Pompeo Batoni. Now Bridgewater and his fellow aristocrats were being offered examples by the greatest masters of the Renaissance and the Baroque.
Of the remaining Orléans paintings, 135 were sold immediately, and a further 66 at auction, for a total of 41,000 guineas. They were exhibited in Bryan’s Galleries in Pall Mall and the Lyceum in the Strand from December 1798 to July 1799, with the public being charged 2s. 6d for admittance, compared with the normal 1s. Public exhibitions had been held in London since 1760, notably at the Royal Academy, but few people attended, and still fewer had access to the major collections in grand country houses, so the public had very little knowledge of great Old Master paintings.
The exhibition created a sensation. The essayist and critic William Hazlitt, already an admirer of Titian, was quite overcome by the Orléans Collection, in particular the group of works by the Venetian master, and wrote in the London magazine: ‘I was staggered when I saw the works there collected and looked at them with wondering and longing eyes. A mist passed away from my sight: the scales fell off … We had heard the names of Titian, Raphael, Guido, Domenichino, the Carracci – but to see them face to face, to be in the same room with their deathless productions, was like breaking some mighty spell – was almost an effect of necromancy.’ Mary Berry, who had formed a circle including the leading literary figures of the day (similar to that of Félicité de Genlis in the Palais-Royal), put it more succinctly: this was ‘by far the finest, indeed the only real display of the excellency of Italian school of painting that I ever remember in this country’. The prices these paintings fetched demonstrate this enthusiasm. Raphael’s Holy Family, known as La Belle Vierge, went to the Duke of Bridgewater for 3,000 guineas, while Annibale Carracci’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ fetched an astonishing 4,000 guineas.
The sale was not, however, universally successful. On entering the Lyceum, the viewer was confronted on the right-hand wall by the Raising of Lazarus by Sebastiano del Piombo, a Venetian contemporary of Titian, flanked by Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, with the Rape of Europa and Perseus and Andromeda as companion pieces. The Sebastiano was immediately purchased by John Julius Angerstein for £3,500 on 26 December, the opening day of the exhibition (Angerstein was to be one of the founders of the National Gallery and the Sebastiano is listed as no. 1 in the inventory), and the Duke of Bridgewater kept the two Diana paintings at the asking price of 2,500 guineas each, but neither the Rape of Europa nor Perseus and Andromeda attracted a bidder.
There were a number of reasons for this. Britain had been at war with Revolutionary France since 1793, but this does not seem to have been a major factor, particularly after Nelson’s recent, decisive victory at Aboukir Bay, at the mouth of the Nile, at the beginning of August 1798, destroying the French navy and leaving the French army stranded in Egypt (its ruthless commander Napoleon sailed home to France shortly afterwards, leaving his soldiers to their fate). A more prosaic reason for the lack of bidders was the distance of the Lyceum from the clubs and fashionable shops of the West End (the organizers eventually halved the entry price to encourage buyers). Amabel Lucas, who had admired Titian’s poesie in Paris, complained that their ‘colouring [which] looked so fine at the Palais Royal, did not appear so beautiful here’. Contemporary artists were worried that the amount of Old Masters would affect prices for their own work. The Irish painter James Barry was to be seen lingering at the Lyceum, loudly criticizing the works on view while privately writing to the prestigious Dilettanti Society recommending that it should purchase Titian’s Diana and Actaeon.
The most likely reason, however, was simply that there was a glut of top quality art on the market and consequently buyers were spoilt for choice. There were 27 works by Titian in the Orléans Collection (modern expertise has downgraded these to 11), including the Rape of Europa and three other of Titian’s poesie, plus the Death of Actaeon which relates closely to the series. There were also other important collections coming on to the market. The impact of the French Revolution had led to the dispersal of art collections, both within France itself and in the countries that the French armies had conquered. In Italy Napoleon’s defeat of the Austrians in Northern Italy in 1796 was followed by the overthrow of the Venetian Republic, and the subjugation of the Papal States.
At the Treaty of Tolentino in 1797 between France and the Papacy, the French took many of the finest paintings and sculpture from the Vatican back to France, where they were installed in the Louvre Museum. They formed part of one of the most extraordinary collections of art ever seen, organized by the dynamic director of the Louvre, Dominique Vivant Denon, who displayed works taken from countries the French had conquered in Europe and beyond, notably Egypt. However, when Napoleon was finally defeated in 1815, the most important paintings and sculpture were returned to their countries of origin. It was now the British collectors which were to be the envy of European connoisseurs, and they were to prove the main beneficiaries from the sale of the Orléans Collection.
The noble families of Italy, who had watched these developments with horror, and had been reduced to near penury by the French invasion, were compelled to sell the priceless masterpieces they still owned to raise money. In Britain unscrupulous dealers such as William Buchanan, William Young Ottley, Alexander Day and Andrew Wilson were only too happy to take advantage of this opportunity to buy, and were soon busy organizing the export of paintings from Italy. As Anna Jameson, a pioneer female art historian of the Italian Renaissance, wrote in her Companion to the Most Celebrated Private Galleries of Art: ‘Carraccis, Claudes, Poussins, arrived by ship-loads. One stands amazed at the number of pictures introduced by the enterprise of private dealers into England between 1795 and 1815, during the hottest time of the war.’
For the wealthy connoisseur it was a marvellous time to collect paintings, with some truly superb examples appearing on the market. To give an example, the treasures on offer at Alexander Day’s exhibition in 1800 included two Titians and a Gaspard Poussin from the Colonna Gallery, sold jointly for 6,000 guineas, a Leonardo da Vinci and an Annibale Carracci from the Aldobrandini Cabinet valued at 3,000 and 2,000 guineas respectively, another Carracci from Genoa valued at 2,500 guineas, and a Raphael from the Borghese Gallery, also valued at 2,500 guineas.
In the case of major artists like Titian, however, there were simply too many works attributed to the master. The Orléans paintings had an established provenance but the attribution of other paintings was much less certain. Anna Jameson was very scathing, commenting:
We must take it for granted, that in many cases, a Titian, a Paul Veronese, etc. means simply a Venetian picture, of the style and time of Titian or Veronese. I firmly believe, for instance, that half the pictures which bear Titian’s name, were painted by Bonifazio [Veronese], or Girolamo de Tiziano, or Paris Bordone, or some other of the Capi of the Venetian school, which produced such a swarm of painters in the sixteenth century.
In addition, the prevailing neo-classical taste preferred works by the leading classical artists, strongly influenced by the art of antiquity. There was nothing available by Michelangelo, who had painted almost exclusively in fresco, i.e. directly on to the wall, so it was Raphael who was the most sought after artist (his Sistine Madonna was reputed to have been bought by the King of Saxony in 1754 for £8,500, by far the highest price paid for any work of art at that date). Coincidentally, in November 1798, a number of important works by Raphael, which had been brought back by the French from Italy, were unveiled at the Salon in Paris. These works, including his late masterpiece the Transfiguration, cemented Raphael’s reputation as the supreme master. The catalogue of the exhibition waxed lyrical over ‘the immortal Raphael’ and ‘the perfection we see in the Transfiguration’.
Unless a collector was as rich as William Beckford, whose family had made a fortune from sugar plantations in Jamaica, or the Duke of Bridgewater, it was extremely unlikely that he would be able to acquire a genuine Raphael. Most collectors had to content themselves with works by seventeenth-century Bolognese masters such as Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni and Domenichino, all strongly influenced by the master. Alternatively, paintings by the two leading French artists of the classical school, Nicholas Poussin and Claude Lorraine, both working in Rome in the seventeenth century, were much sought after. Poussin’s austere compositions were deeply influenced by the art of antiquity while Claude’s Arcadian landscapes were filled with classical ruins. Two Claudes from the Altieri Collection caused a sensation when they were brought back to England by Admiral Nelson, and were purchased by William Beckford for the staggering price of £6,825 in 1799. He was to resell them less than a decade later for 10,000 guineas (they now hang in Anglesey Abbey).
These classical artists were highly regarded by Sir Joshua Reynolds, first President of the Royal Academy, and his championship of the art of Michelangelo, Raphael and Carracci, chief representatives of what he regarded as the ‘three great schools of the world [the Roman, Florentine and Bolognese]’, formed the central thesis of his influential Discourses on Art, delivered in the 1770s. In his own painting, however, Reynolds strove to emulate Titian’s technique; his portraits were strongly influenced by Van Dyck, who took so many of his ideas from Titian, and he owned 29 works attributed to the Venetian artist, including a copy of the Rape of Europa, now in the Wallace Collection.
Reynolds, like other late eighteenth-century British artists, had copied a number of works by Titian when visiting Italy on the Grand Tour (his works in the Spanish royal collection were virtually unknown). It is interesting to note those contemporary British artists’ view of Titian. Many of them made copies of his work, choosing those that dated from the middle stages of the painter’s career, particularly the 1530s and 1540s, when his style was most receptive to the Roman and Florentine idea of disegno, as championed by Reynolds (and indeed Vasari back in the sixteenth century) rather than the much freer, late style characteristic of the Rape of Europa. The words these artists most commonly used to describe these works by Titian were balance and harmony.
The Irish painter James Barry dismissed Titian’s late St Sebastian in the Palazzo Barbarigo in Venice: ‘to me [it] appears nothing more than a most disorderly mass of colours, jumbled together by the jumbling and slobbering of a pencil’. For William Hazlitt, however, it was precisely this subtle use of colour that gave these late works their unique quality, which he characterized as gusto (the Italian for taste). The colours in the Bridgewater poesie were:
dazzling with their force but blended, softened, woven together into a woof … and then a third object, a piece of drapery, an uplifted arm, a bow and arrows, a straggling weed, is introduced to make an intermediate tone, or carry the harmony. Every colour is melted, impasted into every other.
With so much disagreement, it is not surprising that it was not until several years after its arrival in England that the Rape of Europa finally found a buyer. The Fifth Earl of Carlisle, a major stake-holder in the Bridgewater consortium, and a notable collector in his own right on the Grand Tour, expressed an interest in acquiring the painting, but withdrew from the sale, and it was not until 1804 that it was acquired for 700 guineas by the Second Baron Berwick, a fraction of the valuation of £5,250 for Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto paid by the Duke of Bridgewater. Berwick’s interest may have been stimulated by reports brought back by tourists who had flocked to Paris following the Treaty of Amiens in 1802–3 between Britain and France. Visitors were astonished by the quality of works on display in the Louvre Museum, created by its director Vincent Denon as a temple to the arts, and featuring a number of Titians looted by the victorious French from Italy.
Berwick had inherited a fortune from his father, who was ennobled by Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger for his help in restructuring the immensely profitable East India Company, a source of seemingly limitless wealth in the fast-expanding British Empire. The baron proceeded to employ the architect George Steuart to remodel Attingham Park in 1782 in the neo-classical style. Steuart produced a formal design for the house with two sets of apartments for Berwick and his wife, an idea often used for royal palaces, where the king and the queen would live separately. At Attingham the two apartments were united in an Entrance Hall with a top-lit staircase, providing a grand effect.
Berwick died in 1789 and the baronetcy and his estate were inherited by his 18-year-old son Thomas Noel Hill, who had just gone up to Jesus College, Cambridge. Three years later, on leaving university, the Second Baron Berwick pursued his artistic studies by going on the Grand Tour to Germany, Switzerland and Italy, taking as his travelling companion the knowledgeable Edward Daniel Clarke, later to become a brilliant scientist, professor of mineralogy at Cambridge and one of the founding members of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. As soon as the two men reached Rome in November 1792, Berwick began to commission works of art, relying on his friend for advice. He ‘is employing Angelica Kauffmann [a popular female artist later to work extensively in England] in painting,’ wrote Clarke, ‘and I am now selecting passages from the poets for her to paint for his house at Attingham, he has left me to follow my own taste in painting and sculpture.’
Clarke made Berwick aware of the perils of the art market, drawing his friend’s attention to the unscrupulous dealers and salesmen who profited from the naivety of rich English Grand Tourists: ‘The greatest of these Romans carry cheating to such a degree of ingenuity that it becomes a science; but in baking legs, arms, and noses, they really surpass belief.’
Clarke took full credit for the purchases Berwick made, commenting: ‘I have ordered for him two superb copies of the Venus de Medicis and the Belvedere Apollo [famous Roman statues in the Uffizi Gallery and the Vatican], as large as the originals; they will cost near £1,000.’ Berwick and Clarke continued their Grand Tour to Naples where they were to spend over a year. Grand Tourists often used their time abroad, far from parental discipline, to sow their wild oats, and the baron combined his efforts to buy works of art, acquiring a set of fine views by Jacob Philipp Hackert, with an attempt to seduce Lady Plymouth. The success of his Grand Tour led Berwick to revisit Italy in 1797, where he purchased ‘some very fine statues’ in Rome. In recognition of his knowledge of the arts, Berwick was made a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1801.
Many of Berwick’s early purchases had been works of sculpture, but his acquisition of the Rape of Europa showed his intention to make a serious collection of Old Master paintings. The subject was a serious one, taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but the voluptuous princess lying astride the bull must also have appealed to the racier side of his lordship’s character. Berwick was soon to become infatuated with the 17-year-old Sophia Dubouchet, one of four sisters, all of whom were courtesans. At first Sophia showed little interest in his advances, describing Berwick as a ‘very nasty, poking, old, dry man’. But this did not prevent her from following the baron to Brighton in 1811, rendered fashionable by the Prince Regent, where she was described as parading ‘the remains of her rather shaky virtue’. On returning to London shortly afterwards she was soon comfortably installed by Berwick in a house in Montague Square and, within a year, had become his wife.
Swiftly adapting to her new, respectable lifestyle, Sophia retired to Attingham Park, Berwick’s splendid house in Shropshire, where she followed her husband’s instructions and refused to see her sisters. Her behaviour may account for the unflattering account of the Berwicks by Sophia’s sister Harriete, who was to become the leading courtesan of the Regency period, practising her trade under the name Harriete Wilson and numbering among her clients the Prince of Wales, the Lord Chancellor and four future prime ministers. Harriete described Berwick in her Memoirs as ‘a nervous, selfish, odd man, and afraid to drive his own horses’. But she saved up her real venom for Sophia, who had set her sights at a cobbler at the tender age of 13, before throwing ‘herself into the arms of the most disgusting profligate in England aged fourteen, with her eyes open, knowing what he was; then offers herself for sale at a price to Colonel Berkeley, and when his terms were refused with scorn and contempt, she throws herself into the arms of age and ugliness [Lord Berwick] for a yearly stipend, and at length, by good luck, without one atom of virtue, becomes a wife.’
Harriete used the same racy style in her Memoirs to describe her famous clients, or ‘protectors’ as she preferred to call them. She determined to publish her Memoirs despite efforts by one of her more notable clients to prevent this. Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, victor of Waterloo and the most famous soldier in Europe, was used to giving orders. When Harriete refused his request, the Iron Duke is said to have uttered his famous comment: ‘Publish, and be damned.’ Harriete duly went ahead, ignoring the duke’s objections, and her Memoirs appeared in a broadsheet in 1825. Each week crowds would gather outside her publisher John Stockdale’s shop, which had become a salon for the political classes (Stockdale’s was frequented by Tories, while Whigs preferred Debrett’s). Londoners would pretend to express their strong disapproval while on tenterhooks to find out the graphically described sexual peccadilloes of the rich and the famous in the current issue. The enduring popularity of the Memoirs has ensured that they remain in print to this day.
Since going on the Grand Tour Lord Berwick had determined to make his country seat one of the most splendid in England, a worthy place to house his magnificent collection of works of art. As well as the Rape of Europa (referred to as Jupiter and Europa in Bryan’s sale catalogue), he acquired other masterpieces from the Orléans Sale: St John in the Wilderness and the Vision of Ezekiel by Raphael, purchased for 1,500 and 800 guineas respectively, and Annibale Carracci’s Toilet of Venus and Rubens’ Continence of Scipio for 800 guineas each. Berwick’s taste was eclectic, and his purchases included Van Dyck’s Balbi Children (National Gallery) and works by Poussin, Claude, Cuyp and other masters of the Dutch School. The most expensive of these, showing the growing interest in the Spanish School, was Murillo’s Virgin and Child, was bought for £2,500, more even than Raphael’s St John at 1,500 guineas, and over three times the price paid for the Rape of Europa.
To house his collection, Berwick employed John Nash, the most fashionable architect of the day, to remodel Attingham. Berwick had already employed Humphrey Repton, the leading landscape gardener, on his park, to provide a worthy setting for the house, and it seems probable that Repton, who was in partnership with Nash, introduced patron and architect. Although Nash described himself as a ‘thick, squat, dwarf figure, with a round head, snub nose and little eyes’, he had great charm. In the words of Repton: ‘He had the power to fascinate, beyond any man in England.’ Like Berwick, he aspired to a place in the elite of Regency society, working for the Prince Regent at Brighton Pavilion and Buckingham Palace. In 1805 Berwick gave Nash the commission to build a grander staircase off the Entrance Hall. The most original feature was a top-lit Picture Gallery to display Berwick’s collection of Old Master paintings. The architect was not afraid to use new technology, and the roof of the Gallery had curved cast iron ribs supporting continuous glazing, a highly original feature.
Nash’s use of cast iron demonstrates the willingness of architects and their aristocratic patrons to make use of new technology. The cast iron came from nearby Ironbridge Gorge, one of the key pioneering points of the Industrial Revolution. This was where the iron-founder Abraham Darby had successfully set up a coke-fired blast furnace in the village of Coalbrookdale in the early 1700s, using coal from the mines in the sides of the valley. The iron ore that Darby produced by a process of smelting was of very high quality and was used to produce cast iron cooking pots, kettles and domestic articles. By the late eighteenth century, the technology was considerably more sophisticated and Coalbrookdale was producing structural ironwork. Following Abraham Darby III’s construction of Iron Bridge, the first cast iron bridge in the world, in 1780, the Scottish civil engineer Thomas Telford, soon to become the greatest engineer and road-builder of the day, began the Longdon aqueduct, which carried the Shrewsbury Canal over the River Tern on cast-iron columns.
However, despite Nash’s originality in the use of cast iron, the material was very expensive, costing Berwick £13,000. In addition, Nash tended to be slap-dash in his architectural projects and his workmanship was often shoddy. The small panes of glass in the roof were soon leaking and Berwick found himself paying for their repair and to the scagliola (imitation stone) columns which had been damaged by the water. This rather ruined the magnificent effect of the interior, with its walls in the Chinese style, porphyry scagliola columns and marbleized door-cases, and a white marble fireplace in the Egyptian style. Lady Berwick, now happily ensconced at Attingham, was keen that her quarters should be designed in the latest style. In 1812 her husband commissioned the fashionable firm of Gillows of Lancashire to fit out a suite of rooms on the first floor.
Keeping Berwick and his wife in the lifestyle to which they were accustomed came at a hefty price. As early as 1810 the baron wrote to his brother William Hill, later Third Lord Berwick and himself a passionate collector, lamenting: ‘I can not afford to retain a seat [country house] in Salop … blame me for not living more prudently, and not having the resolution to abstain from Building and Picture buying’. There is a certain irony in this letter, as William was also deeply in debt due to all the works of art he had been purchasing. A year later Richard Williams, a rich lawyer based in London’s Lincoln’s Inn, was offering Berwick £1,000 for his Rubens, or £3,000 for the Rubens and his Raphael. The majority of Berwick’s collection was sold in the 1820s but it appears that the Rape of Europa was sold before 1816, when J. Watton’s A Stranger in Shrewsbury gave a very complete account of Attingham, but omitted any mention of Titian. Having described the position of the house, and the ‘lofty and spacious hall’, the author continued with a detailed description of the paintings in the Picture Gallery:
The picture gallery is a spacious room 78 feet and 6 inches long, by 25 feet 6 inches wide, and 24 feet high. It contains many chef d’oeuvres of the old masters, particularly some valuable ones by Raffaello – Parmigianino – Paolo Veronese – Annibale Carracci – Rubens – Vandyck – Poussin – Kuyp – the Ostade’s – Murillo – Salvator Rosa – Berchem. The walls of this elegant room are of a deep lake colour; the ceiling supported by porphyry columns of the Corinthian order, the capitals and bases of which are beautifully gilded. Underneath the cornice of this extensive room is a gold fringe of great depth. The floor is inlaid with rich Mosaic work, and the grand staircase is finished in a corresponding style of magnificence.
Watton continues with a detailed description of the rest of the interior, showing why Berwick’s costly passion for collecting and his determination to decorate Attingham in the best possible taste led him into acute financial trouble:
The suite of drawing rooms is superbly furnished with immense plate glasses and burnished gold furniture, and the ceilings are richly gilt. The boudoir is a beautiful small circular room, the panels of which are decorated by the pencil of one of our first artists. The library is in the west wing, and is a very extensive and lofty room, the cornice is supported by rich Corinthian pilasters; and besides a very valuable collection of books, it contains several rare specimens of art from the antique. Among those most worthy of notice will be found a font from Hadrian’s Villa; on the basso relievo on its exterior the story of Narcissus is beautifully told. A rich candelabra from the antique, of exquisite workmanship, near ten feet high – a fine colossal statue of Apollo Belvedere [a notable purchase on Berwick’s Grand Tour] – a beautiful small Esculapius – with a splendid collection of Etruscan vases from Herculaneum, busts, chimeras, & c. The rooms on the first floor correspond in the grandeur and magnificence of their furniture with those on the ground floor.
By this date it appears that John Bligh, Fifth Earl of Darnley, was already the owner of the Rape of Europa, for which he paid considerably less than Berwick had paid for it just a few years earlier, when it was exhibited at the British Institution (most of the main beneficiaries of the Orléans Sale were directors of the Institution). The Institution had been set up in 1805 with the aim of encouraging native talent, with the idea that it should show both living artists and great works from the past, with the latter, it was hoped, providing inspiration for the former. The idea proved a great success and artists flocked to display their paintings. Some contemporary artists felt that too many works by ‘Dead Artists’ were hung in the exhibitions, and this may account for the ironic comment made about the Rape of Europa by one critic: ‘When a lady is permitted to exhibit herself in this pickle, it would be indecent to insist on her putting on clean linen.’
The British Institution was a private society but its success was instrumental in the founding of the National Gallery in 1824. One of the initial subscribers had been the Russian émigré, banker and collector John Julius Angerstein (most of the money he spent on his art collection was made from his slave estates in Grenada), and it was the acquisition of his 38 paintings for £57,000 that formed the core of the National Gallery. Angerstein believed that early sixteenth-century Italian painting marked the apogee of taste, and his collection included three works by Titian: the Concert, Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Ganymede. His paintings were installed at his London house at 100 Pall Mall, where they were hung frame to frame, from floor to ceiling. Two years later the gallery managed to buy Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, the finest of his early mythological works painted for the Duke of Ferrara. The paintings continued to be exhibited at these premises until the new building in Trafalgar Square was opened to the public in 1838. In the following year the new gallery attracted 768,244 visitors.
Darnley’s important collection of paintings was housed in his country house at Cobham Hall in Kent and contained a number of works by Titian. As well as his Rape of Europa, Darnley owned Titian’s Portrait of Ariosto (National Gallery, where it is called Portrait of a Man with a Blue Sleeve, possibly a self-portrait), and two further works from the Orléans Collection: Venus admiring herself and a version of Venus and Adonis. They hung alongside Rubens’ Continence of Scipio and Annibale Carracci’s Toilet of Venus, which Darnley had acquired from Lord Berwick for 800 guineas each. Other major works were Annibale Carracci’s Martyrdom of St Stephen, Rubens’ Thomiris, Giorgione’s Milon, Pordenone’s Hercules and Ribera’s Democritus.
The Bligh family originated in Ireland where they had extensive land holdings. They came to prominence in the eighteenth century when John Bligh was awarded the earldom of Darnley in 1725 and acquired large estates in Kent, based around his seat of Cobham Hall. The house had a distinguished history, playing host to a series of royal visitors including Elizabeth I in 1559 and Charles I and his new bride Henrietta Maria in 1625 (whom he had married instead of the Spanish Infanta – see Chapter 4). Later in the seventeeth century the Duke of Richmond lived here with his beautiful wife Frances Stuart, a great favourite of Charles II and the model for Britannia when the image was chosen to adorn British coins.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the fourth earl carried out extensive additions and alterations to the existing Elizabethan house, which had been remodelled in the seventeenth century. Like Berwick at Attingham, he chose a fashionable architect, James Wyatt, who designed a Picture Gallery in 1806–9 to replace the Tudor Long Gallery. It consisted of two vestibules with a connecting gallery. The windows in the vestibules and those in the north side of the gallery were blocked out by screen walls to provide wall space for the display of Darnley’s collection of paintings.
An early nineteenth century guidebook to Kent gives a detailed description of ‘this ancient baronial mansion taken from a late publication’. Surprisingly, the Rape of Europa does not appear to have hung in the picture gallery. The author praised the sculpture in the vestibule and music-room, which he described in some detail, before continuing:
Thence you proceed to the picture-gallery, 134 feet long, lined with paintings by the first masters. The four chimney-pieces, in common with all the rest in the old parts of the house, are beautifully wrought in white and black marble, bearing the Cobham arms, and date 1587. In an adjoining chamber Queen Elizabeth was lodged, during her visit to William, Lord Cobham, in the first year of her reign, and her arms are still on the ceiling … In the apartments of the south wing are many fine pictures, by Titian, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Salvator Rosa, &c. and a particularly fine and valuable one by Rubens, representing the death of Cyrus.
There is a tantalizing dearth of accounts of the Rape of Europa by visitors to Cobham Hall in the nineteenth century. One distinguished visitor was the Duchess of Kent in May 1819. Lord Darnley (the fourth earl) described her stay in a letter to his second son who was up at Oxford: ‘Our Royal Visitors [the Duchess of Kent and her doctor] have just set off in a continual pour of rain in the phaeton, after having eaten and drunk and slept well … and with every prospect that HRH will speedily produce a healthy heir to the throne.’ A week later the nation was celebrating the birth of Princess Victoria. She was to become queen aged just 18 in 1837.
In the 1820s Prince von Pückler-Muskau was a regular visitor, and gave a comprehensive account of his visits to Cobham Hall, but was more interested in the way Humphrey Repton had landscaped the park noting that ‘nothing can exceed the incomparable skill with which the walls of wood within the park are planted in masterly imitation of nature’. Doubtless used to a more formal way of life in his native Germany, the prince was surprised by the manner of eating, the guests appearing for breakfast in ‘neglige’. He was even allowed into his hostess’ boudoir on departure: ‘I took leave of Lady D[arnley] in her own room; a little sanctuary furnished with delightful disorder and profusion:– the walls full of “consoles”, surmounted with mirrors and crowded with choice curiosities: and the floor covered with splendid camellias, in baskets, looking as if they grew there.’
Even more tantalizing is the house’s association with Charles Dickens. The writer spent a lot of time in the vicinity, staying at the Leathern Bottle in the village, and Cobham features in a number of his works, particularly the immensely popular Pickwick Papers, published in 1836–7, where Pickwick, Winkle and Snodgrass liked to walk in the neighbourhood. Lord Darnley gave Dickens keys to the gates to the park, and the two men obviously got on well. To quote Percy Fitzgerald, in his Memories of Charles Dickens: ‘We then walked over to Cobham, when he [Dickens] told me a good deal about Lord Darnley, whom he said he liked, and showed me the chain drawn across the avenue never removed except for a funeral.’ Dickens made numerous references in his letters to the beauty of the trees in the park, with deer grazing beneath them, and described the house as ‘displaying the quaint and picturesque architecture of Elizabeth’s time’, showing his appreciation of one of the best examples of Elizabethan architecture in the country, with additions made in the seventeenth century by John Webb to designs by Inigo Jones.
However, sadly, Dickens left no description of the interior of the house. The writer was surprisingly knowledgeable about painting. He had been to Italy and written up an account of all he had seen, particularly in Rome, and one can only suppose that he was never invited in by Lord Darnley or he would almost certainly have left some description of the beautiful paintings in the interior. The only direct reference he made to the interior is in a ghost story related by the character of Mary Weller in Pickwick Papers.
One of the few visitors to Cobham to comment on the collection of paintings was the German art historian Dr Gustav Waagen, Director of the Royal Picture Gallery (later the Kaiser Friedrich Museum) in Berlin. The doctor had already published a series of clear, concise and highly informative catalogues of the Berlin collection, the first major picture gallery where the paintings were hung systematically according to their individual schools. To increase his knowledge, he made frequent study tours abroad which he recorded in meticulous notes, letters, diaries, official reports and sketches. Waagen ranged far afield, visiting the main art centres in Europe: Italy, France, England, the Netherlands, Spain and even Russia, as well as his native Germany.
The small, bespectacled doctor visited England for the first time in May 1835. Already a noted connoisseur, with an acute visual memory, Waagen availed himself of a mass of contacts with the owners of the great collections throughout the country. He had, with typical Germanic thoroughness, drawn up a list of the most notable art collectors in England, ranking them in order, starting with the three main beneficiaries of the Orléans Sale: the Duke of Bridgewater, the Marquis of Stafford and the Earl of Carlisle, with the Earl of Darnley, owner of the Rape of Europa, in fifth place.
On a peregrination lasting six months the doctor discovered that the English were using their great wealth, gained from their possessions overseas and their participation in the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, to form unrivalled collections of art, exceeding anything on the continent. As he commented: ‘Scarcely was a country overrun by the French when Englishmen skilled in the art were at hand with their guineas.’ The description of Waagen’s journey was published in three volumes by John Murray in Works of Art and Artists in England in 1838. He noted how the British were unique in their desire to live among their possessions, unlike other countries, where art was more usually confined to special cabinets and galleries.
In eighteenth-century France, nobles such as the Dukes of Orléans, although they owned châteaux all over the country, chose to live entirely in Paris and Versailles, the centre of power which was based on the king. It was therefore natural that the Orléans Collection should have been housed in the family’s main Parisian residence. In Britain, in contrast, the aristocracy divided their time between their town and country houses. Political power was centred on Parliament, rather than the royal court, and since Parliament sat for less than half the year, this allowed nobles considerable time on their country estates. These land holdings were also a source of much of their wealth, and so they preferred to hang many of their finest works of art in their country houses.
Waagen needed endless perseverance in his attempts to visit these houses, overcoming the problems of absentee landlords, grudging housekeepers reluctant to admit a foreigner into their domain, and poor viewing conditions. This was a perennial handicap for curious sightseers, especially if they were foreign. Even as distinguished a visitor as the exiled Comte d’Artois, the future Louis XVIII (as the younger brother of Louis XVI he had prudently fled to England during the French Revolution), was treated with scant civility. W. T. Whitley recorded the count’s visit to Blenheim Palace:
The Cicerone performing this delicate task was the ordinary showman dressed out in the tawdry livery of his office; flippantly sporting his ‘Mounsheers’, his ‘Lewis’s’ and other John Bullisms, and vaunting about the thousands of Mounsheers who were killed, taken prisoners, etc, in every battle. In vain did I take him aside and appraise him that the decencies of hospitality and the quality and intelligence of the visitors rendered fewer explanations necessary. ‘I likes it’, he said, ‘I likes to tell him the truth’, winking his eye at the same instant and smiling excessively.
Problems such as dealing with obnoxious servants were not enough to put off an indefatigable sightseer like Waagen in his quest to discover the masterpieces hidden in country houses. He returned to England throughout the 1850s, and the summary of his painstaking research, entitled Treasures of Art in Great Britain, was published in 1854 (a supplementary volume was entitled Galleries and Cabinets of Art). Waagen was highly regarded in England and was appointed a juror for the Great Exhibition in 1851, partly at the instigation of Prince Albert, who fully appreciated the good doctor’s devotion to hard work and his high-minded principles.
It was on his tour that year that Waagen visited Cobham Hall in the company of Charles Eastlake, soon to be Director of the National Gallery, who shared the doctor’s scientific approach to art history. They were probably the two greatest connoisseurs in Europe, both perceptive and immensely scholarly, while Eastlake, in addition, was also a distinguished painter in his own right. Waagen described the Rape of Europa as ‘unquestionably the pearl’ of the Darnley collection, although ‘the great warmth and power of the colouring is somewhat lost in the present neglected state of the picture’. At the end of his tour the earl presented him with a copy of A Day’s Excursion to Cobham, a guidebook written by Felix Summerly, the nom-de-plume of Sir Henry Cole, Director of the fledgling South Kensington Museum (funded with the proceeds of the Great Exhibition and soon to become the Victoria and Albert Museum). Waagen was less than appreciative of this gift, commenting loftily that it ‘was the more acceptable to me in that I find the writer agreeing in most of my conclusions’.
Waagen had a high opinion of his own talents, but he was not always right. In view of his complimentary description of the Rape of Europa it is fascinating to record his impression of Perseus and Andromeda, the pendant to Europa, which he saw in Hertford House, the home of Sir Richard Wallace (now the Wallace Collection), illegitimate son of the Fourth Marquess of Hertford. The painting was stored in a crate and, when it was produced for the great man’s approval, he pronounced it to be the work of Veronese. Having been downgraded by the great connoisseur, it subsequently languished for years above a bath in Wallace’s dressing room. The Third Marquess of Hertford had acquired the painting in 1815, and it seems probable that the Fourth Marquess, whose extensive collection today forms the basis of the Wallace Collection, bought a reduced copy of the Rape of Europa in 1857 to hang alongside Perseus and Andromeda (the two poesie by Titian had been paired together during the time of Philip II).
The marquess’s copy of the Rape of Europa had been owned by the neo-classical painter Gavin Hamilton, and by the notable collector William Young Ottley, and was generally considered to be a sketch for the Europa in Darnley’s collection. Hertford’s agent Samuel Mawson described it as ‘much finer than the finished picture’ when it appeared for sale in 1857, and Hertford concurred, writing that ‘the Titian is only a study but I dare say very desirable.’ The marquess, like Philip II before him, seems to have much enjoyed the subjects chosen by Titian, with their highly charged erotic content, since he also bought a late eighteenth-century copy of Danae with Cupid (another of the poesie) in 1856.
Waagen selected Darnley’s Rape of Europa for the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, in which he played a key role. The city was an ideal choice, representing the new-found wealth that had transformed Britain. A century earlier the Duke of Bridgewater’s canal had begun the process by dramatically lowering the price of coal transported from Worsley into the city. But the true wealth of Manchester relied on the manufacture of cotton, which was mass produced in the city’s water-powered cotton mills. Entrepreneurs such as Richard Arkwright, who owned the first of these mills, made fortunes on the proceeds. The cotton was then taken by railway to Liverpool from where it was distributed in British ships all over the world.
By the 1850s Manchester was one of the most prosperous cities in Europe. Visitors to the exhibition had the chance to see a magnificent display of art in a setting that summed up the extraordinary success of Victorian Britain, though they had little idea of the poverty and squalid lifestyle of many of the workers whose hard labour had created this urban metropolis. One of those who noticed this exploitation of the working classes was Friedrich Engels, but it was for aesthetic pleasure, rather than the plight of the proletariat, that he urged his friend Karl Marx to visit Manchester: ‘Everyone up here is an art lover just now and the talk is all of the pictures at the exhibition … Among the finest is a magnificent portrait of Ariosto by Titian [belonging to Lord Darnley] … you and your wife ought to come up this summer and see the thing.’
The exhibition proved to be one of the most extraordinary gatherings of art ever recorded in England, with over 16,000 works of art on display, including 1,173 Old Master paintings and 689 works by contemporary artists, a unique chance for the public to see what collectors had been buying over the previous 50 years. The Prince Consort, in his high-minded way, hoped that the public’s response to seeing these great works of art would both be educational and help to raise the standard of design in manufacture (Manchester being at the heart of the Industrial Revolution).
Buyers at the Orléans Sale were predominantly a small circle of aristocratic collectors, whose preference of Renaissance and Baroque Old Masters broadly echoed that of Philippe, Duke of Orléans, who had formed the collection. At Manchester, traditional Old Masters were still much in evidence, with 27 paintings by Titian including the Rape of Europa, and numerous works of the Eclectic School, as the great Bolognese artists of the seventeenth century were known, but there was an increasing number of viewers prepared to admire other schools of art.
The exhibition featured a number of Italian Primitives, many of them lent by Prince Albert, who had proved an enthusiastic collector of early Florentine painting. Popular and influential books such as John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in North Italy, Lord Lindsay’s Sketches of the History of Christian Art and Anna Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art had persuaded their readers of the merits of Giotto, Fra Angelico and Botticelli, stressing the religious feeling imbuing their works. Now they were able to see the works in the flesh.
Botticelli, in particular, had been virtually ignored in the early nineteenth century, but now, following the lead given by Eastlake at the National Gallery, he was about to become the most sought after of all Florentine artists of the Quattrocento. One of the most perceptive scholars to view the exhibition was the American Charles Eliot Norton, who was particularly taken with paintings by the Italian Primitives, which related to his life-long love of Dante. Norton was to exert a profound influence on the artistic and literary taste of Isabella Stewart Gardner, who was to purchase the Rape of Europa from Lord Darnley some 40 years later.
Other schools were also well represented, showing the diverse interests of the leading collectors. French paintings by Watteau and his followers appealed to the Third and Fourth Marquesses of Hertford, the tenth Duke of Hamilton (the dispersal of his collection at the Hamilton Palace Sale was to be greatest sale of the 1880s), and the Rothschilds, who lived in great splendour at Mentmore Towers and Waddesdon Manor (the latter a neo-French Renaissance chateau). Following the Duke of Wellington’s lead (a grateful Spanish government gave him magnificent Spanish paintings for his part in defeating the French in the Peninsular War of 1808–12), a number of collectors had acquired works by Velázquez, Murillo and Goya. Sir Robert Peel, prime minister (1834–5 and 1841–6) and one of the founders of the National Gallery, had formed perhaps the finest collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings in England, which was to be purchased en bloc by the Gallery in 1871.
But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the exhibition was the prominence given to contemporary British art. Turner and Constable had earned a European reputation for the brilliance of their landscape painting, and there were 100 works by Turner on view. In Britain, Victorian genre painting was all the rage and works such as Life at the Seaside, Ramsgate Sands by William Powell Frith had been bought by Queen Victoria (his Derby Day, painted immediately after the exhibition, was so popular that a rail had to be installed at the Royal Academy to hold back the crowds that flocked to admire it). Apart from a few exceptions, however, such as the Third Earl of Egremont, a great patron of Turner, most of the aristocracy tended to ignore native talent. The most original school of painting was the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, formed in 1848, whose members, as their name indicated, were looking for a new, purer form of art inspired by preceding those works of the High Renaissance and the Baroque that represented the prevailing taste.
It was leading Victorian industrialists from the Midlands and Northern England who broke new ground. Their wealth encouraged them to purchase works by contemporary British artists. Figures such as the textile manufacturer Thomas Coglan Horsfall from Manchester, Andrew Kurtz, a Liverpool industrialist, James Gillot, a manufacturer of steel pens in Birmingham, and James Leathart, a lead manufacturer from Newcastle, were all very active collectors. The politician Sir Thomas Fairbairn, had played a key role in fixing the exhibition. He had commissioned Holman Hunt’s Awakening Conscience, a moral fable where a fallen woman suddenly sees the light, which was prominently displayed in Manchester. Owing to their support, there was a growing movement to create a national collection of British art, and wealthy collectors such as Robert Vernon, a former horse dealer, the sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey and the clothing manufacturer John Sheepshanks left their collections to the South Kensington Museum with this intention (they were to join the sugar magnate Sir Henry Tate’s legacy when the Tate Gallery was opened in 1897).
The most persuasive advocate of contemporary British art was the art critic, social thinker and philanthropist John Ruskin, whose Modern Painters, published in five volumes between 1843 and 1860, argued that contemporary British artists were superior to the Old Masters, particularly in their accurate documentation of nature. Ruskin was a great champion of Turner, but also of the Pre-Raphaelites, despite the fact that John Everett Millais, one of the founders of the Brotherhood, eloped with his wife Effie.
Ruskin’s other great passion was Venice, and he published his magisterial three-volume Stones of Venice in 1851–3. Although he professed to prefer Tintoretto to Titian, like so many others Ruskin found the beauty of Titian’s paintings irresistible, and his memorable evocation of the Serenissima attracted thousands of his fellow countrymen to go to see the Titians in the painter’s native city (few travellers went to see the much superior collection of works by the artist in Madrid and the Escorial).
In the introduction to his work, Ruskin drew his readers’ attention to the parallel between Venice and Britain, two of the greatest maritime empires in history: ‘Since the first dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice and England.’
After describing Tyre, Ruskin launched into one of his most famous passages, a magical description of the fragile, evanescent beauty of Venice:
Her [Tyre’s] successor, like her in perfection of beauty, though less in endurance of dominion, is still left for our beholding in the final period of her decline: a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak – so quiet, – so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and which the Shadow.
I would endeavour to trace the lines of this image before it be for ever lost, and to record, as far as I may, the warning which seems to me to be uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves, that beat, like passing bells against the STONES OF VENICE.
Many British tourists were inspired by Ruskin’s words to visit Venice, and returned home determined to build houses for themselves in the Venetian style. Although not all the buildings they erected were always successful, and these pastiches of Venetian Gothic were dubbed by critics as ‘streaky bacon’, there was a growing interest in Venetian art. People wanted to learn more about the major artists. At Manchester, Waagen had provided a description of the Rape of Europa in his A Walk through the Art-Treasures Exhibition: ‘The action of Europa is very animated, the landscape very poetical, the colouring very warm and clear; the treatment, equally broad and spirited, indicates the later period of the master.’
But this was not enough for the reviewer of the exhibition in the Athenaeum magazine, looking for something more perceptive, who objected to Waagen’s verbiage, as he put it, ‘his use of phrases such as “graceful motives”, “juicy colour”, “silvery tone”, “warm and clear in the chiaroscuro”, “full body”, “juicy in golden tones” abound. This is the true dead language of the old time of the Georges, and which still abounds in Germany. These phrases save all thinking and apply to anything.’ George Scharf, the Art Secretary to the exhibition, in contrast, provided a more detailed technical analysis of Titian’s use of glazes in his Handbook, comparing his coat of transparent colour to the opaque paint used by an artist such as Frans Hals.
Scharf’s analysis was indicative of a growing interest in art history. There was widespread dismay among collectors at the large numbers of school pictures (paintings by artists working within the circle of a major master) masquerading as works by important artists, and this led to much confusion (not least over the price for these works). This was soon to change with the publication of a number of scholarly works by art historians, carefully discriminating between works by major masters and the far greater output of their followers.
In the case of Titian, James Northcote, a pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds, produced a Life of Titian in 1828, which recorded a series of anecdotes of the painter’s life. A much more interesting monograph appeared a year later, written by the MP Sir Abraham Hume. Hume’s family had made a fortune in the East India Company, and the baronet had purchased Titian’s Death of Actaeon at the Orléans Sale, a painting he described as ‘unfinished but very beautiful’. He therefore had an intimate knowledge of the artist’s work. In his monograph he provided a topographical catalogue of Titian’s major works, some of which he had seen (the works in British collections and those he saw in the Musée Napoleon in Paris in 1802), an essay on Titian’s use of colour, a list of his pupils and a catalogue of engravings after the master.
Since Hume’s monograph, little had appeared in print on Titian in English, but this was to change with the advent of two leading art historians: the English consular official Sir Joseph Archer Crowe and the Italian writer and art critic Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle. The two men became lifelong friends on a visit to Italy in 1846–7. They collaborated on two major works: Early Flemish Painters and the History of Painting in Italy before publishing Titian: His Life and Times in 1877. Crowe and Cavalcaselle were strongly influenced by Cavalcaselle’s fellow Italian Giovanni Morelli, who had created a new form of connoisseurship by making a careful comparison between individual paintings of a particular Old Master in order to ascertain their authenticity. This approach was to be of major importance in transforming the study of Old Master painting, and in the prices that discriminating collectors were willing to pay for paintings which had been authenticated by this process. Both Morelli and Cavalcaselle advised Eastlake on the purchase of Italian paintings for the National Gallery, with outstanding success.
Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s entry on the Rape of Europa shows their scholarship and sensitivity to the painting. The two art historians began with a very full description of Europa, comparing ‘the silvery light and deep brown shadows of the Europa’ with Veronese:
but the scene is depicted with much more elevation than Paolo [Veronese] was capable of feeling, and composed with much more thought than he usually bestowed on pictorial labours. Nothing betrays the aged character of Titian more than the inevitable looseness of drawing and the coarse delineation of realistic extremities, to which we must fain plead guilty in his name. But these defects are compensated by startling force of modelling and impaste, by lively effect of movement apparent in every part, by magic play of light and shade and colour, and a genial depth of atmosphere.
There follows a description of the ‘imposing and triumphant’ bull, with Europa ‘on the back of the beast whose seat she dare not leave, holding on with her left to one of his horns, parted from his white side by an orange cloth, of which a fold is waved by her outstretched right arm. As her face is thrown back it catches a shadow from her arm, and her glance may reach to the shores far away where her companions have been left … Eros clinging with expanded wings to a dolphin, and sporting along in the course of the bull, is a lovely fragment of Titianesque painting, representing, as finely as the two Cupids with their bows and arrows in the air, the idea of rapid going, already suggested by the swimming fishes and the surge of the bull’s breast.’
For Crowe and Cavalcaselle, ‘nothing can be more vigorous or brilliant than the touch which has all the breadth of that in the “Jupiter and Antiope” or the “Calisto,” without the abruptness of Paolo Veronese, the broader expanses of tinting being broken effectually with sparkling red or grey or black, toned off at last by glazing and calculated smirch to a splendid harmony.’
Almost as important as this detailed and poetic description of the Titian is the authors’ dismissal of various versions of Europa. In a footnote the authors make detailed reference to the painting owned by Sir Richard Wallace, which the owner regarded as a genuine sketch by Titian: ‘This copy is no doubt that which belonged to Dawson Turner, Esq, of Yarmouth (Waagen, Treasures, iii, 18), and has been characterised by some critics as a genuine sketch by Titian. It is, however, but a copy, and probably by Del Mazo [a follower of Velázquez]. A poor copy of the Cobham Hall Europa is in the Dulwich Gallery.’
Crowe and Cavalcaselle may have been united in their praise for the Rape of Europa but its owner, Lord Darnley, was not to enjoy his painting for much longer. Darnley, like so many English aristocrats, had suffered acutely from the effects of the agricultural depression of the 1870s, and was considering selling the painting. Badly in need of funds, the earl’s holdings in Ireland had been affected by successive Land Acts which enabled tenants to buy their land from the owner. Darnley had also spotted the opportunities offered by the Settled Land Act of 1882, which permitted the break-up of entailed estates, allowing art and land to be turned into cash provided that the proceeds were held on trust for the heirs of the estates. The Act led to a series of major sales in the 1880s, beginning with the extensive 17-day Hamilton Palace Sale in 1882, and continuing with the great Old Master sale at Blenheim Palace in 1884–5. The pressure on owners to sell was increased by the introduction of death duties in 1894.
The trustees of the National Gallery were determined to try to buy the best paintings appearing on the art market. In 1884 they scored a major coup in raising £70,000 to purchase Raphael’s Ansidei Madonna, showing that, in monetary terms, he continued to be the artist against whom all others were measured. Six years later they bought a number of Venetian paintings belonging to Lord Darnley: the Origin of the Milky Way by Tintoretto for £1,310.10s, and the four Allegories of Love by Veronese for £5,000. All of these paintings had been exhibited in Manchester in 1857. In 1904 the National Gallery was once again successful in acquiring Titian’s superb Portrait of a Man with a Quilted Sleeve, thought to be a portrait of Ariosto, for the much greater sum of £30,000.
But, between those two dates, the trustees turned down the chance to buy the most important painting in Darnley’s collection: the Rape of Europa. In 1894 the owner’s uncle, the eminent art historian Lionel Cust, wrote to Lord Carlisle (whose ancestor had turned down the chance to buy the painting some 90 years earlier), a trustee of the National Gallery, informing him in confidence that Lord Darnley was prepared to offer the Gallery the painting for £15,000 to be paid in three instalments of £5,000 each. Carlisle passed on this information to the other trustees but, at a meeting held on 1 May, they decided that they were unable to pursue this offer, presumably judging the price to be too high.
This may seem surprising, considering the popularity of Titian in England. However, the gallery already possessed a good collection of works by the artist, including the Tribute Money, Noli me Tangere and Bacchus and Ariadne, the latter belonging to his first poesie series. In addition it appears that by the time the Rape of Europa appeared on the market the director and trustees favoured the artist’s earlier style, and showed little appreciation of what the former director, Dr Nicholas Penny, Director of the National Gallery (2008–15) has described as Titian’s ‘interest in rough and smudgy handling and deliberately blurred form’.
Darnley therefore determined to offer the painting elsewhere. The most likely candidate was Dr Wilhelm Bode, the extremely knowledgeable and acquisitive Director of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin (a post that had been held by Waagen until 1868). Bode had begun working for the picture department of the museum in 1872 and his abilities were soon spotted by the director, Julius Meyer, who authorized him to search out suitable paintings to add to the museum’s collection. In this he was outstandingly successful. Bode had joined the museum just one year after Berlin had become an imperial capital, following the defeat of France and the creation of the German Empire, dominated by Prussia. This triumph, aided by high indemnities which the French were forced to pay, resulted in an unprecedented economic boom.
The self-assured Bode was determined to take advantage of this and make the collection of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum the greatest in Europe. Coolly calculating and single-minded in his pursuit of great Old Masters, the doctor soon made a number of major acquisitions, at first concentrating on Italian Renaissance paintings (later on he was to form an extraordinary collection of works by Rembrandt, Durer and the Early Flemish Primitives), including Titian’s Portrait of the Daughter of Roberto Strozzi. Bode’s professional advice was much sought after by collectors throughout Europe, which he was willing to give, providing that these collectors were willing to donate paintings to the museum.
It was Bode to whom William McKay, senior partner of Colnaghi’s, an old, established firm of art dealers in London, turned when he heard that the Rape of Europa was coming on to the market. He wrote to the director on 1 June 1895: ‘Dear Dr Bode. I think I ought to let you know that Lord Darnley has approached me through a relation with a view to sell the famous picture of Europa by Titian. I understand that you have had the picture under consideration for some time.’ McKay was keen to offer Bode the painting, but was anxious that he should have a cut in any deal Bode was likely to make, adding: ‘I can certainly assist you greatly … I have no doubt I could buy it much cheaper than you’.
Later that month Dr Bode visited Cobham Hall with McKays’ junior partner Otto Gutekunst who had learned his trade dealing in art in Paris before joining Colnaghi’s in 1894. He was to play a major role in transforming the firm into a leading picture dealer in Old Masters. A restless opportunist and not one to waste any time, Gutekunst wrote the following day to thank the earl and, at the end of the letter, requesting an interview at Darnley’s earliest convenience. His next letter was designed to pave the way for the opening of negotiations but this was unsuccessful, probably because Bode, who was very careful in his use of his museum’s funds, like the National Gallery, baulked at the price.
Despite the fact that Darnley and other owners felt compelled to sell due to financial constraints, the mood in Britain in the 1890s was generally upbeat. London remained a great imperial capital, and the industrial cities in the Midlands and the north of England continued to benefit from the enormous wealth accrued during the Industrial Revolution. Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 was a chance for the nation to celebrate its success over the 60 years since the queen had ascended the throne, reigning over an empire that extended to every corner of the globe and included Canada, most of the islands in the Caribbean, great swathes of Africa, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand and India, where Victoria had been proclaimed empress in 1877. These far-flung territories were protected by the Royal Navy which had had undisputed control of the seas since Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar in 1805.
Nevertheless, other nations were catching up. In the late nineteenth century, as economic growth slowed in Britain, with arable farming, textiles, iron and steel, engineering, and consumer goods all facing difficulties, other nations, now enjoying increased economic production, were keen to compete. Germany and the United States enjoyed more abundant and cheaper supplies of energy and raw materials, and had erected tariff barriers to protect their trading interests, unlike Britain, which was still a believer in free trade.
Germany had enjoyed its own Industrial Revolution and had overtaken Britain by the end of the century in economic production. The country had also become the dominant military power in Europe, led by Kaiser Wilhelm II (1888–1918) and his domineering Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the architect of German Unification in 1870 and the driving force in promoting the German economy. Outside Europe, Germany belatedly sought to compete with Britain in acquiring an empire in Africa. More importantly, the Kaiser and Admiral von Tirpitz began to build a navy with the clear intention of challenging the hegemony of the Royal Navy.
The United States provided a less immediate threat to Britain but the sheer size of the country meant that it possessed far greater potential economic strength. In addition to the development of more competitive and advanced manufacturing processes, the building of railways across the continent meant that America began to take full advantage of her vast natural resources. Millions of the poorer working class throughout Europe emigrated to the New World, hoping to make their fortunes; it has been estimated that during the years 1875–1900 the United States doubled in population and trebled in wealth. Fortunes were made and a number of self-made millionaires sought to invest some of their new-found wealth in art.
The movement of the Rape of Europa had pursued a historical path, passing from Venice to Spain, on to France, before coming to Britain. In each case its movement had followed the economic and political fortunes of the rising nation. In 1895 Dr Bode, representing a resurgent Germany, had tried and failed to buy the painting. Now it was to fall to a representative of the new economic super-power across the Atlantic, a woman who had spent many summers living in a palace in Venice and had acquired a passion for Venetian art. She was also busy creating one of the finest collections of Old Master paintings in North America. Her name was Isabella Stewart Gardner.