2
PATRON OLD STYLE: ‘BUSINESS IS OFTEN FRIENDSHIP’S END’
The patronage of art in the nineteenth century was expensive and exhilarating, dangerous and disappointing in various and mixed measure for all involved. ‘Business is often friendship’s end’, wrote the politician and brewer Samuel Whitbread in 1806 in an encomium on Henry Holland, the architect he employed to remodel and enlarge Southill, in Bedfordshire, the house his father had bought from the bankrupt Viscount Torrington. For Whitbread, however, architectural business with the efficient, well-organized Holland led happily and surprisingly to deep friendship, which closed only with death.
The social revolution consequent upon the revolutions of the steam-engine burst upon art patronage and the business of art in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Callcott/Horsley/Brunel interface in the 1830s was merely a continuation of the process whereby art and architecture played their part in local economies that were the warp in the national tapestry: not disposable decoration but an essential structural part in the system that allowed wealth to display itself and confidence to follow. The naturalist Sir Joseph Banks expressed this early on: ‘the Arts will always flourish in Proportion to the Patronage given by the Rich.’
Whitbread used modern methods to keep his business in production and profit: Boulton and Watt steam-engines to pump the water and grind the malt; iron girders to enlarge his warehouse; and management methods that ensured efficient use of labour. The art he commissioned came as a direct result of the success of his business, and was its signal.
Nevertheless, there were always the personal difficulties. Choosing unreliable or headstrong artists and allowing misunderstandings to get out of hand were mistakes that presented dangers; so too did over-involvement and association with an individual artist, thus risking a distorted relationship. Additional irritations for a wealthy collector were obsequious middle-men who had to be dealt with patiently and courteously, ‘persons of worship’, as John Opie called them dismissively. Choosing the wrong kind of artist in defiance of prevailing taste was a further danger, while taking poor advice added yet more risk. One of Reynolds’s sitters, Sir Walter Blackett, could only watch as year by year his portrait sank away through the use of ill-chosen materials (see page 188). He wrote with dismay:
Painting of old was surely well designed
To keep the features of the dead in mind,
But this great rascal has reversed the plan,
And made his pictures die before the man.
While the dangers of patronage were real, its pleasures might include the growth of life-long friendship between patron and artist, as with the Yorkshire landowner Walter Fawkes and Turner, and all too briefly between Whitbread and Holland. They might encompass the stimulating decoration of a fine house, as for Sir John Leicester in both Mayfair and his Cheshire mansion at Tabley; they might breathe new life into an old family house, as Henry, Third Marquess of Lansdowne found when he inherited the tabula rasa of a sale-ravaged Bowood, Wiltshire, in 1809; and further, they might allow access to and enjoyment of an unfamiliar social milieu, as in the case of Lord Egremont with his artist friends at Petworth. A charming letter from Lord Egremont to Francis Chantrey reflects the friendship that always preceded Egremont’s patronage:
I shall be happy if Mrs Chantrey & you will let me have the pleasure of your company here. Turner is here catching fish by the Hundreds & there is plenty of pheasants for you.
Patronage of artists should always bring the satisfaction of seeing a reflection of one’s wealth on one’s walls – a pleasure shared by so many patrons across the nation, from Sir George Beaumont in Leicestershire and London to the energetic pen manufacturer Joseph Gillott of Birmingham in the following generation, the coach-builder Benjamin Godfrey Windus of Tottenham and the pharmaceutical supplier John Hornby Maw.
Whitbread’s Southill, Fawkes’s Farnley and Beaumont’s Coleorton are modest houses compared to vast piles such as Althorp, Blenheim, Bowood, Broughton, Castle Howard, Chatsworth, Fonthill, Holkham, Ickworth, Kedleston, Longleat, Stowe, Woburn, Wrest . . . the list moves at length from one end of the alphabet to the other. For these, the collecting of paintings was a necessity, not a luxury, for how else are such wall acreages to be covered if not by distemper (boring), frescoes (expensive) or tapestries (very expensive indeed)? A picture collection with focus, purpose and direction, driven by intelligence, was much more satisfying to procure, particularly when it ventured beyond the bounds of family portraiture, or moved further than such special-interest subjects as sporting paintings, naval subjects and paintings of livestock.
There is a distinct divide between the taste, attitude and activity of collectors from the generation of Egremont, Fawkes and Whitbread, and those of Windus, Maw, Gillott and many others including Bicknell, Sheepshanks and Vernon. Walter Fawkes derived his income largely from his 15,000 acres north of Leeds, while his expenditure went out on his grand Wharfedale house, Farnley Hall, his London mansion in Grosvenor Place, his collection of paintings mostly by Turner, and his financial support for hungry Whiggite causes such as anti-slavery and political reform and for his own successful but brief election to Parliament in 1806. ‘I have been a Whig, a Great big Whig all my life,’ he wrote to the political diarist Thomas Creevey in 1806, ‘ever since I was a reasonable being, in defiance of advice, or persecution, of hostility of every kind, I have stuck to my text.’ Artist and patron discovered one another early in Turner’s career. By 1808 Fawkes had bought Turner’s The ‘Victory’ Returning from Trafalgar, in Three Positions, and was building up a peerless collection of the artist’s watercolours, including scenes in the Alps made during or soon after Turner’s 1802 journey. As time went on, he was to buy fifty more watercolours painted on and around the Rhine in 1817.
This was a business relationship which became a friendship, and a friendship which went on to develop into Turner becoming one of the family. Eventually Fawkes was to own five of Turner’s oil paintings, more than one hundred watercolours and, in albums variously, a set of bird drawings now in Leeds Art Gallery and, extraordinarily, a detailed pageant of English history, the Fairfaxiana, illustrated from Fawkes’s ancestral history and his family’s evolving political viewpoint. Fawkes drew from Turner art and direction that might otherwise never have occurred to him: there is the benefit of patronage – it can take even the greatest artists further than they might otherwise have dreamed.
Given Fawkes’s increasingly imperilled financial state in the early 1820s, due to falling income and over-expenditure, and Turner’s characteristic generosity towards people who were special to him, it is likely that some of these works were never actually paid for. Fawkes organized a public exhibition of his watercolour collection in the months before Turner went to Italy in 1819, an event that was the source of great pleasure and pride to Turner, and which prefigured in its popularity the national passion for the artist in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Inviting the architectural draughtsman John Buckler to Farnley to make some drawings of the house, Fawkes added:
you must stay a few days with me, as I must have a few of your beautiful & masterly sketches – and I can shew you such a collection of Turner’s drawings – all such a treat to any man who knows any thing about the matter.
Fawkes wrote feelingly to Turner in 1819, in an open letter that was printed and read by many, of the ‘delight I have experienced, during the greater part of my life, from the exercise of your talent and the pleasure of your society’. So close indeed were they that Turner was one of the very few people Fawkes wanted to see during his final illness in 1825. Thus a generous patron became in return the focus of the generosity of the artist, a creative and enduring relationship that has all the hallmarks of the purest virtue. This echoed down the generations, as Walter’s son Hawkesworth became Turner’s friend, his prop in old age, an executor, and the enthusiastic if not entirely successful catalyst for a new way of reproducing Turner’s works photographically (see page 229).
Samuel Whitbread, educated at Eton, Cambridge and Oxford, had been groomed within the strict orthodoxy of the late eighteenth century to succeed his father, the elder Samuel Whitbread, as a landowner and brewer of great wealth. In this, and in his Whiggish convictions, young Samuel had much more in common with Walter Fawkes than he had with his Tory father: while he and Fawkes may have known each other as collectors, they were colleagues in the 1806–7 parliament and spoke together in the House of Commons. The Whitbread family’s riches came in abundance from their brewery in Chiswell Street, City of London, the largest brewery in England, which the elder Samuel had founded in 1749. Wherever Whitbread’s ale flowed, more wealth rolled into London and Bedfordshire on its froth. Some of Whitbread’s beer may have made it to France, where it challenged the primacy of wine. Samuel Rogers recalled that he had seen at a dinner party in Paris, given by a French nobleman, ‘a black bottle of English porter set on the table as a great rarity, and drunk out of small glasses’.
Samuel Whitbread the elder had nursed his brewery’s annual production over nearly half a century from 18,000 barrels of porter in its first year to 200,000 in 1796, the year of his death. A serious, god-fearing, level-headed businessman from a low-church Anglican family, this Samuel Whitbread saw early opportunities for bringing modern technology to bear on the ancient art of brewing. But his confidence in modern technology ran hand in hand with his deep-rooted religious belief: as he watched the beer slowly bubble and froth in its vats, he would, in the brewery’s early days, read the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. In 1785 Whitbread installed one of the first Boulton and Watt steam-engines in London to grind the malt and to pump the water from a deep natural well. He also began the process of building and extending the brewery complex: he bought up neighbouring properties and used new iron construction to build a warehouse with an unsupported roof that spanned 65 feet and could hold 5,700 barrels. This was production on the grand scale required to keep the population of London watered and nourished in a period when the only readily available drinking water came from the sewage-polluted Thames. The elder Samuel’s assistant Joseph Delafield wrote of the brewery that it had become ‘the wonder of everybody, by which means our pride is become very troublesome, being almost daily resorted to by visitors’.
The skilled and loyal team of managers and brewers that the elder Samuel Whitbread had assembled at Chiswell Street was perhaps the most useful treasure that he left to his son. As a measure of their worth, and of his appreciation, the elder Samuel commissioned portraits of the most senior among them by Romney and Gainsborough, while to paint himself he took the risk of his image deteriorating and engaged Sir Joshua Reynolds. The portraits are all at Southill. It was the capable staff on whom Whitbread could rely to keep the brewery running while he served his country yet further as Member of Parliament in the Tory cause for Bedford. His humanity and good sense nevertheless took him away from the party line, to fight political corruption and to become an early anti-slavery campaigner. The younger Samuel relied on his brewers even more heavily than his father had, as he too turned his eye to politics, embracing the Whigs.
The emotional distance between Reynolds’s portrait of the elder Whitbread and Gainsborough’s of the younger speaks volumes for the difference in outlook and ambition between them. The former portrait, commissioned in 1786 and painted, unusually, on a large sheet of copper, is bulky and red-faced, and looks out sternly with an inkwell and document to hand. The latter is lithe, revealing a flickering good humour, and presenting a taut, curved pose that portends a spring into action; this was commissioned by the son in 1788. So close are the portraits in time that they are uniquely clear in their portrayal of generational change in ambition and attitude. Throughout the latter years of the father’s life, the chasm between their characters and ambition yawned wider and wider. In the elder Samuel’s seventieth year, when at the 1790 general election he unexpectedly faced a contest for his long-held parliamentary seat, young Samuel ruthlessly pushed him aside and won the constituency for the Whigs. Reflecting on the event, the elder man felt he had ‘lost by too much kindness’, and experienced a ‘storm to my soul . . . my son is not kind nor respectful’.
The Whitbreads are a classic case, like the Leeds cloth manufacturer Joseph Sheepshanks and his son John, of the father making the money through industry, and the son spending it on art. There was indeed some doubt between the Whitbreads whether the son would want to inherit the brewery. The thoughtful and reflective elder Samuel offered his 21-year-old son a way out:
You express yourself handsomely and feelingly on the subject of trade. But pray don’t make a burden of it to hurt your spirits, for it is a matter that you and myself can part with. And you would have two reasons to give; one that it would take too much of your time from other employment in life that you are from education more inclined to yourself. The second is that you have as much affluence as would make a reasonable man happy.
Young, radical, Whiggish politics had put an unquiet pulse into the Whitbread brew to the extent that Samuel the elder thought it was all over, and in 1796 drew up an agreement to sell the brewery for £300,000. However, he died before it could be signed, and the deal was off. Like it or not, Samuel the younger inherited Chiswell Street, beer barrels, shire horses, employee portraits, goodwill and all.
The younger Samuel found brewing to be ‘a tolerably easy source of income without making too many demands on my time’. Daily demands of business he passed on to his faithful staff. He could never inhabit the mantle of the stout brewer that au fond his father had been, but became instead a compassionate and liberal landed gentleman with friends of a profoundly different kind to the Tory-leaning county landlords with whom his father had mixed. The elder Samuel observed of his son, as he sat opposite him across the chamber of a stormy House of Commons, where, eventually, he secured a seat, that he was ‘very very very much with Fox and co.’. Younger Samuel’s circle centred on the ‘Devonshire House Set’ – Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Charles James Fox, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Charles Grey, Sam’s brother-in-law, the suave young politician who in 1830 would become the nation’s reforming prime minister, the First Earl Grey.
Politics apart, what occupied young Samuel Whitbread’s time was his setting out of plans to form a collection of British art, and remodelling the house and estate of Southill Park near Biggleswade. This his father had bought in 1795 for £85,500 from the ruin of the Fourth Viscount Torrington. The elder Samuel Whitbread cast a long shadow over his son, not only by buying Southill the year before he died, but also by giving young Samuel the framework, foundation and setting for his collecting ambitions. The landscape designer Capability Brown, left unpaid by Torrington’s employment, had to be wooed back to remodel the Southill landscape, while Brown’s son-in-law Henry Holland was engaged to develop a vision for the house. Holland, an architect with Whiggish allegiance, was already famous from London to Bedfordshire, having designed Carlton House for the Prince of Wales, and having worked at Althorp for Lord Spencer and at Woburn Abbey for the Fifth Duke of Bedford. Pulling down walls, remodelling rooms and throwing out wings, the entire grand projet had cost over £54,000 by the time work was finished in 1802.
While rebuilding a great house was an ambition of a kind shared by many of his generation and class, in his ambition to make a collection of determinedly British art in Bedfordshire Whitbread was one of the collector-pioneers across the country in the early years of the nineteenth century. With others such as Walter Fawkes in Yorkshire, Sir George Beaumont in Leicestershire, the Third Marquess of Lansdowne in Wiltshire and Sir John Leicester in Cheshire, he shared a determination to see British art given the status it deserved on the walls of the wealthy. Only a fortnight after his father’s death Samuel Whitbread let it be known that he proposed ‘to make a collection of the works of English Artists’. This came to the ear of Joseph Farington, who added that Whitbread’s ‘father lately dead is said to have left him a million of property’. Telling Farington was tantamount to telling the world, and it was clear to Farington that this was no sudden decision. Samuel had already bought Romney’s colossal and troubling canvas Blind Milton Dictating to his Daughters for Southill, and had had a grand frame made for it to mark the occasion and to celebrate its acquisition. By the time of his death in 1815, Whitbread had acquired nearly eighty paintings by British artists, fifty or more of them directly from the artists themselves, and nineteen pieces of lead statuary from the posthumous workshop sale of the sculptor John Cheere.
However, unlike Leicester, who bought controversial artists including John Martin, Turner and James Ward to decorate his ‘British Gallery’ in Mayfair and his country house in Cheshire, and Fawkes whose collection in London and Yorkshire was overwhelmingly directed towards Turner, Whitbread kept carefully within the conservative waters of taste by commissioning portraits from John Hoppner, John Opie and James Northcote, and subject paintings by George Garrard, Sawrey Gilpin and S. W. Reynolds. While Gainsborough in his day was an artist of advanced and uncompromising authority, he was in the final year of his life when his portrait of Samuel was commissioned. However, while the choice of artists that Samuel Whitbread the younger patronized broke no new ground, the manner and extent of his generosity to his artist friends was remarkable. The engraver S. W. Reynolds came under Whitbread’s wing in 1801 when he was ‘nearly bankrupt in hope’ and unable to maintain his engraving commitments. Within a year Reynolds’s bills were being sent to Southill for Whitbread to settle, and the artist himself was being manfully encouraged by his patron to pull himself together and take up a new career in landscape gardening and architecture. Setting this less-than-organized Reynolds (not of course to be confused with the busy but dead-by-now Sir Joshua) to work in the country, Whitbread parcelled him out to Sir George Beaumont to carry out landscape design and building alterations at Coleorton, and to other grand estates, including Woburn and Colworth in Bedfordshire and Ashburnham in Sussex. At Southill Reynolds oversaw changes to the landscaping of the park, and the installation there at focal points of the John Cheere lead figure groups.
Whitbread was godfather and protector to his artists, commissioning and collecting with his heart rather than his head. This tends to set him apart from most patrons, who, like Leicester and Beaumont, paid out large sums, but nevertheless took little interest in their artists’ subsequent welfare. None of Whitbread’s artists would make advanced artistic statements; instead his patronage was a close expression of his political instincts and aspirations. Thus, it was the subject of Romney’s Milton, the radical poet and voice of liberty, as much as its status as a work of art, that directed Whitbread’s intention to buy it. Further, in acquiring John Opie’s portrait of the artist’s second wife, Whitbread was not just adding a handsome woman to his walls, but buying a fine portrait of the courageous leading anti-slavery campaigner Amelia Opie; and in commissioning at length the sculptor and painter George Garrard, Whitbread, as his father before him, was displaying his pride in agricultural improvement on his Bedfordshire estates and in the inexorable growth through good management of the brewery. Garrard was a regular visitor to Southill, for which he painted views of the house under reconstruction, to add to the oil portraits of trees and lively canvases of industry which he had painted for the elder Whitbread. ‘Garrard is a very ingenious little fellow,’ young Samuel wrote kindly in 1811, ‘who has been patronized by me and my father for more than five and twenty years.’
The most interesting aspect of Garrard’s work at Southill is the dozen or more white plaster models of cattle displayed in various life-like attitudes in rank after rank of glass cases. These are the result of a mid-career change of course in which Garrard became a sculptor and a highly competent maker of plaster models of animals, singly and in groups, in active, static or anatomical arrangements. The new secretary to the Board of Agriculture, Arthur Young, whose travels in England, Ireland and France had brought him to an intimate knowledge of the state of agricultural economy, encouraged Garrard in his work and in the scientific accuracy of his models. Agricultural improvement was gathering pace through scientific research and land management to such an extent that Garrard sensed a lucrative opportunity, a new interest and market in images of farm animals. He published his aquatints A Description of the Different Varieties of Oxen Common in the British Isles in 1800, and opened an agricultural museum at his home and studio in George Street, London. There, according to the art dealer Rudolph Ackermann, he ‘formed a collection of models that have raised him in this department to a competition with the greatest statuaries of Greece’. That is somewhat exaggerated, a salesman speaking, and a view which was balanced by the direct and argumentative sculptor Joseph Nollekens RA, who described Garrard dismissively but with some accuracy as a ‘jack-of-all-trades’. Garrard spread his talents thinly; he also moved into the carving of portrait busts in which, with some help from the easy-going Whitbread, he found commissions to make busts of Whitbread himself, Sir Joseph Banks, Arthur Young, Charles James Fox, the Earl of Egremont and Henry Holland. Across these years he made nearly ninety busts, a whole menagerie of farm and exotic animals, church monuments and architectural sculpture. Garrard’s was a busy studio from around 1800 until his death, so it is likely that his ultimate fall into poverty came through inadequate studio management, a real danger for many sculptors (see chapter 5). The point about Garrard and Whitbread is that the business of art, when seen in the perspective of the time, does not always reflect the course of art history as perceived 200 years later.
Garrard’s bust of Henry Holland, commissioned by Whitbread soon after the architect’s death in 1806, carries touching lines written by the patron himself, expressing mixed delight and regret at the ending of a long partnership during the remodelling of Southill:
Business is often friendship’s end:
From business once there rose a friend;
Holland! That friend I found in thee:
Thy loss I feel, whene’er I see
The labours of thy polished mind;
Thy loss I feel whene’er I find
The comforts of this happy place;
Thy loss I feel whene’er I trace,
In house, in garden, or in ground
The scene of every social round,
Farewell! In life I honour’d thee;
In death thy name respected be!
Whitbread’s central purpose was politics, however, not art, and it was this blurred focus that would draw him to commission artists of the modest standing of Garrard, whose art had its own appealing political angle. Whitbread was himself the rallying point of extreme Whig opinion that saw Napoleon as a hero figure, and the champion of anti-royalist liberty. Against popular opinion Whitbread campaigned for a peace deal to be struck with the French emperor in the early 1810s, and became a vehement opponent of the war with America in 1814.
Whitbread’s point of view in the House of Commons was characteristically contrary, and little supported. His friend Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the playwright, theatrical impresario and extraordinarily active Whig MP of no fixed abode, drew Whitbread into his own private cause when in 1809 a calamitous fire destroyed the Drury Lane Theatre. Sheridan, the theatre’s unpredictable manager and chief shareholder, walked a fine line between financial success and disaster, while usually putting on a good show. In 1809 the theatre was only about fifteen years old, having been designed (by Henry Holland) to the most modern specifications. These included a large water tank in the attic, to be released in the event of fire, and other splendid precautions such as iron columns and an iron safety curtain. Nevertheless, when the theatre burnt down, none of the much-trumpeted fire precautions could save it. Sitting in a chop-house across the road from the theatre, Sheridan watched the blaze with a glass of wine in his hand, musing: ‘a man can surely be allowed to take a glass of wine before his own fireside’. On the day of the fire the theatre owed nearly £44,000 in unpaid dividends to its subscribers. The perks given to these ‘New Renters’, as they were called, included free admission to any performance, and two shillings and sixpence in rent payable to each from every performance. As a consequence, up to 475 people were admitted free each night, cutting significantly into nightly income of the 3,600-seat theatre, and this income was already heavily mortgaged. To balance the books, takings had to reach £330 a performance, but at the end they were languishing at an average of around £70. In the weeks after the fire, Samuel Whitbread was expected to sort all this out.
With characteristic energy Whitbread eventually raised enough capital through the sale of £100 shares in the new building, inviting architects to submit designs and overseeing the construction up to the opening night, 10 October 1812. The appointed architect, Benjamin Dean Wyatt, was a member of the ubiquitous and proliferating Wyatt family of architects, the son of James Wyatt who was Beckford’s architect at Fonthill. The cartoonist Charles Williams followed the saga of money-raising and rebuilding, expressing the removal of Sheridan as ‘Rubbish of Old Drury’ and evoking the role played by the profits of the brewery in the process. Whitbread was seen publicly through these prints as the hero of the hour, depicted as fresh-faced and energetic, even though by now he was already heavily built, overweight and unwell. In one cartoon he wheels Sheridan away; in another he is chaired in triumph onto the building site, waving a foaming mug of ale and saying: ‘We . . . shall now have a Theatre as much like a Brewhouse as one Barrel is like another, which is certainly the most elegant of all buildings & what publican is there that thinks the same?’ Soon after the opening season began, George Cruikshank depicted the theatre’s stage alive with activity, with the central figure of Whitbread stirring a huge brewing vat with papers inscribed ‘Expectations’, ‘Subscriptions’ and ‘Promises’.
Despite the frenzy of the fund-raising, rebuilding and opening, the theatre’s finances remained complex and arcane. The burden of finance affected all involved in the theatre, as Joseph Farington noticed in 1814: ‘[Edmund] Kean . . . was puffed up beyond his claim, probably to fill the Drury Lane Theatre, which was reduced almost to bankruptcy.’ Whitbread’s anxieties were not restricted to his responsibilities for the theatre’s rebirth, but circled also around his unpopular political position. After spending the evening of 5 July 1815 in apparently intense discussions with lawyers about money, Whitbread fretted, tossed and turned in his bed, and the following morning killed himself by slitting his throat with a razor. His Whig supporter Lord Holland (not to be confused with the late architect Henry Holland) said of him afterwards:
It is no slight homage to his character that at a moment when the grief of everybody seemed to be engrossed by some loss in the battle of Waterloo, his death should have made so deep and so general an impression.
Whitbread spread himself very thin over his multifarious interests and responsibilities – politics, the brewery, Drury Lane Theatre, landscaping his grounds at Southill, charities in Bedford – to the extent that his collecting activities failed to show the courage of his early convictions. He was not a man for the new art. While John Constable had by 1815 barely emerged out of Suffolk and would not come to disturb the art scene for five more years at least, Turner was already exhibiting challenging paintings at the Royal Academy, as was John Martin at the British Institution and Augustus Wall Callcott at the Academy. The artists that Whitbread came up with were limited to Gainsborough, now dead, the down-at-heel engraver S. W. Reynolds, Sawrey Gilpin the elderly painter of horse flesh, and the multi-tasking cow-man George Garrard. The world was too much with Whitbread for him to become serious and effective as a patron of art.
Sir George Beaumont, ten years Whitbread’s senior, was diametrically opposed to Whitbread in his interests and approach as a patron. Where Whitbread followed his heart and had his purse open to others, Beaumont was dogmatic and certainly dictatorial in his tastes. Loved and loathed in equal measure, he was described by the topographical painter Thomas Hearne as ‘a supreme Dictator on works of art’. More recently the economic historian Gerald Reitlinger described him as ‘a sort of permanent public school prefect’. Beaumont knew very clearly which living artists he liked, and while his income was comparatively modest – the nosey Farington estimated it at £8,000 per year – he spent it extremely wisely in buying not only his British artists, but more particularly the finest available old masters: Claude, Poussin, Rembrandt, Rubens, and the spectacular Taddei Tondo by Michelangelo, which he bequeathed to the Royal Academy. These more than matched acquisitions of old masters made by infinitely richer contemporaries such as Sir John Angerstein, William Beckford and Samuel Rogers. By political cunning, public spirit and moral blackmail towards the end of his life, Beaumont devised that, even though he bequeathed them to the British Museum, his paintings would eventually contribute to the founding collection of the National Gallery.
However, rather than keeping his views to himself and quietly buying old masterpieces incognito, Beaumont took the noisier route of telling the world of connoisseurs which of the younger artists they should support: his protégés included Thomas Girtin, David Wilkie, Benjamin Robert Haydon, John Constable and John Gibson. He encouraged James Ward RA, more in word than deed, by assuring him that were he to paint his huge canvas Gordale Scar (1812–14) he would build a dining room in his new house at Coleorton large enough to accommodate it on an end wall; if he had done so, the wall would have had to have been at least 14 or 15 feet from floor to ceiling. The artists Beaumont loathed included above all Turner, whose high colouring even in the 1810s he felt to be a pernicious influence on the progress of art and apt to sap the moral fibre of younger artists such as Callcott.
Not limiting himself to painters and sculptors, Beaumont encouraged and befriended writers including Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. Nevertheless, while his general perspective was backwards, and he installed a monument at Coleorton to Sir Joshua Reynolds flanked with Coade stone busts of Raphael and Michelangelo, he showed more than a spark of forward thinking by commissioning Constable to paint the scene of its setting. Beaumont did a bit of painting himself and considered himself to have notable talent. Others found it best to agree with him, to the extent that Wordsworth was so struck by Beaumont’s gloomy and old-fashioned Peele Castle in a Storm that he composed fifteen Elegiac Stanzas in praise of the work that brought back his own vivid memories of Peele Castle in what is now Cumbria. Its over-enthusiastic response suggests, however, that this might just have been flattery:
Oh ’tis a passionate Work! – yet wise and well;
Well chosen is the spirit that is here;
That Hulk which labours in the deadly swell,
This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear!
And this huge Castle, standing here sublime,
I love to see the look with which it braves,
Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time,
The light’ning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves.
Beaumont was the connoisseur’s connoisseur – perceptive, opinionated, astute and sharp-tongued, never short of a caustic put-down, but never short either of the odd fifty pounds to give to an artist whose work in his view deserved support. His nervous energy even got the better of the manically active painter Haydon: after an exhausting few days in Beaumont’s company at Coleorton in 1809, Haydon could only lie back and close his eyes in the coach as it trundled home to London, thinking, ‘they did nothing, morning, noon or night, but think of painting, talk of painting, dream of painting and wake to paint again’. Only an amateur could be so utterly obsessed. Beaumont was a magnet of critical anecdote and tittle-tattle, and went about his business in a manner which caused as much amusement as it did displeasure. Callcott had a story about him and his wife:
Sir George and Lady Beaumont are the greatest Lion hunters of the day. Every season produces its wonder, and every fresh wonder exceeds all the wonders that have preceded it. Their mode of puffing the powers of these wonders however is not always calculated to unlock their hearers with a conviction of the propriety of their judgement any more than the ten thousand wonders which they have exposed to the world and which are now forgotten.
The inability to maintain friendship successfully was a quality that Beaumont shared with Haydon. The latter became convinced in 1811 that Beaumont had reserved his Macbeth for £500. Beaumont recollected the matter differently, but offered Haydon compensation of £100 anyway. At this time Haydon was £616.10s in debt, so £100 meant little to him, with the result that he sent Beaumont a series of abusive letters for his pains. Their relationship hit rock bottom, and despite his acid words, one can only have a sneaking sympathy for Haydon over Beaumont:
It is over three years since I first became acquainted with Sir George Beaumont. I was at first flattered by his affability, his smiles, his flattery, his notice expressed & uttered with all the warmth of sincerity and regard . . . Sir G. Beaumont is a man who wishes to have the reputation of bringing forth Genius without much expense, if a young man promises any thing he immediately procures a slight sketch for a trifle; if this youth succeeds he has something to shew, to prove he first employed him, he first had acuteness to discover his talents – if on the contrary he fails, the sketch passes into oblivion, he denies all knowledge or recollection of him, and every thing relating to him is forgotten . . . Sir George never comes to Town, but he brings Doubt, Irresolution & Misery in his train.
When Sir John Leicester inherited Tabley House, it was hung with his father’s collection of eighteenth-century English paintings, including works by Wilson, Reynolds and Barrett. Buying also a London house, 24 Hill Street, Mayfair, he built his own private gallery in 1806 to display the collection of paintings by living British artists that he was himself gradually beginning to assemble. We have read how he missed acquiring Turner’s Opening of the Vintage of Macon, but he soon acquired that artist’s dramatic and terrifying Shipwreck to command centre stage in the new gallery. Leicester’s ‘British Gallery’ celebrated national achievement in painting, and was one of a clutch of rich men’s art galleries, including those of Thomas Hope, Lord Grosvenor and the Marquess of Stafford, that were open for restricted periods for restricted classes of people to visit. Leicester, however, was the first to display British art exclusively and, from 1818, to open it to the public. As a former Grand Tourist, travelling in and around Italy in 1785 and 1786, Leicester had developed his tastes in opposition to those of his contemporaries. He had no desire to fill his houses with gold-framed saints or prophets, gods or goddesses. Instead, as a poetic eulogy in the Literary Gazette put it in 1819:
. . . Leicester
Should feel that he when Britons all would roam
In search of graphic treasures far from home
That he was foremost with a patriot’s heart
To shew they need not roam in search of art.
He did not, however, please everybody, as one visitor to Hill Street complained:
The only thing we can say of this Gentleman is, that he possesses a fine house in the country, and a Picture Gallery which has been collected with more liberality than distinction.
Sir John Leicester burnished the self-esteem of native artists and contributed greatly to the regard in which they were held by the world. He had extensive correspondences with ‘his’ artists, many of whom had the warm conviction that Leicester was their friend. The dealer and critic William Carey, who advised Leicester on his acquisitions, described Leicester’s ‘unclouded temper, his gaiety of spirit, his accomplishments . . . [which] rendered him an object of distinguished note in the high circles of fashion’. Leicester invited artists to stay at Tabley and clearly looked after them well. Callcott looked forward to a visit with anticipation, hoping to accept an invitation to Tabley ‘unless he is to be fattened like prize cattle, as [Henry] Thomson [RA] had been’.
Leicester owned nine Turners, and John Martin’s Destruction of Herculaneum and Pompeii, paintings by James Ward including a terrifyingly dramatic Fall of Phaeton, and works by Reynolds, Lawrence, Northcote, Fuseli and Benjamin West. A place in his gallery was a rich accolade, with artists jockeying for position to be included. Ward recalled grimly how ‘the Owen, Callcott and Thompson [sic] squad . . . for so many years took so much pain to keep me from the patronage of Sir John’. The dealer and publisher John Britton acknowledged Leicester’s primacy when offering the collector the opportunity to buy Thomas Gainsborough’s The Cottage Door. ‘I really wish to see it in your British Gallery: I am confident it will form a leading feature in it’: as indeed it did. He offered a commission to Benjamin Robert Haydon, but Haydon turned it down because he was too busy. Nevertheless the artist was bold enough to touch Sir John for a loan a few weeks later: ‘I well know the utter impropriety of asking a man of your rank to lend me money . . . but if you should be disposed to assist me . . .’ Just as there was nobody like Haydon, nor, for British art, was there anywhere else at the time like Sir John Leicester’s ‘British Gallery’.
Leicester is one of the forgotten heroes of nineteenth-century British art. Before he died in 1827, he offered his collection at a reasonable price to the then prime minister, Lord Liverpool, as the foundation of a national gallery of British art. He was turned down. However, he successfully sought other outlets for his generosity, presenting a large canvas by James Northcote, The Alpine Traveller, to the Royal Irish Institution:
It has often I confess given me pain to think my feeble efforts to promote the arts in this Country has never elicited even the slightest [. . . ?] from the Academy, but in Ireland how differently is it felt – Viz by the unanimous Vote of thanks & immediately electing me an honourable member of their Society.
There was an ulterior motive to this gift: the painting was of Leicester’s former mistress, passed over when the collector married another woman.
While Leicester’s entire collection would have been an asset to the nation, it would also have been a highly controversial, precedent-setting and unique purchase. It was one thing for the nation to buy Angerstein’s old master paintings during these years, all great artists, almost all safely dead; but to buy works in such bulk by living artists was quite another. The government could with circumspection commission portraits and statues to its heroes, and paintings of epic events; but to buy nine Turners, three Wards, a Martin and a bevy of works of merit, not genius, would show the government to be giving those artists in particular high official sanction, a step with unforeseeable consequences. In the event, Leicester’s finances had been so weakened by his expenditure on art and on his support for his local militia during the recent wars that his collection was sent by his heirs for auction after his death. Turner himself bought back his Country Blacksmith disputing upon the Price of Iron (1807) and Sun Rising through Vapour (1807), and both works eventually came to the nation through the Turner Bequest, as, by other routes, did five of Leicester’s other Turners.
A man who had at best perhaps ten times as much money to spend each year as Beaumont and Leicester put together was William Beckford. On inheriting from his father, Beckford began a complex and probably unfortunate life, with too much, too soon, too readily; but he made his own judgements. Beckford’s rich mix of talents as a writer, connoisseur, collector and party giver, his ambitions and his weaknesses, were fuelled by excess, and by a licence to indulge. Wealth can create outcasts, but Beckford, who lacked only the ability to control events, successfully managed to turn himself into an outcast. As a young married man with a child, he was shunned by the society of which he was a natural leader for suspected sodomy with one of the most beautiful boys, so it was said, in the land. So Beckford, wife and daughter found the need to travel thrust upon them, and off they went to Switzerland. The unfortunate event with the beautiful boy, with its allegations of horsewhipping and ‘some posture or other – strange story’, blighted Beckford’s life and reputation, and he never recovered from it. Over thirty years later the incident hung around him like the albatross around the neck of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. The Irish poet and songwriter Thomas Moore, who also had a difficult reputation, steered clear of Beckford, even after the latter had sung high praise for Moore’s exotic narrative poem Lalla Rookh:
Beckford wishes me to go to Fonthill with R[ogers] – is anxious that I should look over his Travels (which were printed some years ago, but afterwards suppressed by him) and prepare them for the Press – Rogers supposes he would give me something magnificent for it – a thousand pounds perhaps – but if he were to give me a hundred times that sum I would not have my name coupled with his – to be Beckford’s Sub. – not very desirable.
Beckford’s riches and his particular tastes fired him to write his Gothic novel Vathek, published in 1786, and to continue his voracious collecting and building plans. Beckford’s was real collecting: paintings by Raphael, Mantegna, Claude, Poussin, Rembrandt, Velázquez; tapestries, furniture and objets d’art; Cardinal Mazarin’s Japanese lacquer coffer; Greek and Roman sculpture; medieval enamels; books by the cart-load – enough stuff to fill the cavernous, massy and monstrous Fonthill Abbey that he was constructing on his inherited Wiltshire acres. Following the vaulting designs of the architect James Wyatt, strongly influenced and encouraged by Beckford’s own ideas, this came to replace the elder Beckford’s Fonthill Splendens, itself one of the most magnificent mansions in the land, which the younger Beckford tore down. Citizen Kane, in Orson Welles’s 1941 film, for all his mythical US newspaper wealth, was a mere child collecting matchboxes by comparison with the real-life Beckford.
Beckford sought grandeur, and he got what he sought. Wyatt proposed to create a first-floor living storey at Fonthill 60 feet from the ground, reached by a staircase so wide and graded that Beckford ‘might drive a coach and four [up it] and turn in the hall’. But Beckford knew neither prudence nor control, and on and on the objects came as Fonthill Abbey grew bloated and stupendous, devouring its acres and touching the clouds with its spire. It was perishing cold in winter: ‘There were 60 fires always kept busy, except in the hottest weather’, fuelled by ‘perfum’d coal that produced the brightest flame’. The envy of the nation, he shivered where he should have shone, haunted by the evaporation of his money. When Samuel Rogers visited, Beckford
led him thro’ numberless apartments all fitted up most splendidly, one with minerals, including precious stones; another the finest pictures; another Italian bronzes, china &c &c., till they came to a Gallery that surpassed all the rest from the richness and variety of its ornaments. It seemed clos’d by a crimson drapery held by a bronze statue, but on Mr B’s stamping and saying ‘Open!’ the statue flew back and the Gallery was seen extending 350 feet long.
Fonthill tended to send Beckford’s guests into silly trances. The wife of the sycophantic print publisher John Britton was one such:
This spot alone shall be my heaven of Heavens: I will worship it . . . All around me seems like the work of enchantment, and I can only gaze, and gaze, and wonder how the mind of man should have projected so gigantic a structure, and still more, how the mind of man could have so far, almost, outstretched itself, as to have organised and arranged each and every individual part in such true and perfect order & harmony.
Built on inadequate foundations, however, its central tower, made of wood and a sticky cement of Wyatt’s own invention, fell down in May 1800 and had to be quickly recreated in time for the planned triumphal visit the following December by the ménage à trois of Sir William Hamilton, his wife Emma and Horatio Nelson. Work lumbered on, with poor communication between architect and client; the construction was over schedule and over budget. The sugar market collapsed; Beckford’s Jamaican estates were mortgaged (as, by now, was Fonthill); his solicitors bled him dry; and in 1813 Wyatt was killed in a coach accident. That more or less spelled an end to Beckford’s dream. He sold up in 1823 and withdrew to Bath. Fonthill had been a bottomless pit which daunted, then defeated, even Beckford. In 1825, for the second and last time, its central tower fell down, taking part of the surrounding building with it: thus, posterity – which in reality would have meant English Heritage – was saved the impossible task of keeping Fonthill going.
Beckford spent most extravagantly on the work of dead artists, but while he also commissioned the living, he had a poor reputation for settling his bills with artists and suppliers, being both tight-fisted and generous by unpredictable turns. Nevertheless, Farington heard that Beckford ‘is disposed to encourage the English arts’, and that ‘he is to lay out £60,000 in purchasing Modern art’. He commissioned Turner in 1798 to paint watercolours of the abbey showing the building from distant points dominating the landscape, and bought for 150 guineas the artist’s turbulent Fifth Plague of Egypt (1800). Even in his years of retreat to his tower in Bath he continued to buy from artists who lived and breathed, in 1827 acquiring Francis Danby’s Opening of the Sixth Seal, ‘as mad a picture as ever was painted’, in Gerald Reitlinger’s view. However, over the decades of Fonthill’s long-drawn-out construction Beckford also provided income for furniture makers, stonemasons, carpenters, plumbers, decorators, drapers, potters, weavers and all the manifold building trade skills. His expenditure on Fonthill, however interrupted his payments might have been, created plenty of employment for the workshops and artisans of London and the south and west of England until it all fell down. Then it became a quarry providing building materials locally.
In the business of art in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the landscape of patronage was dominated by the land-owning classes, artists were left to decide their own tactics for breaking into the hearts and wallets of the rich. Haydon banged his nose repeatedly as one door after another slammed in his face; Turner kept tight control of what he exhibited, and when and where he did so, thus by controlling the supply making patrons hungry. He would sell his work and his services, but he was until the last decade of his life effectively his own agent. Before he attracted the interest of Thomas Griffith, the collector and dealer who encouraged him to create a series of watercolour masterpieces and took him commercially into the modern world, Turner contrived not always successfully to keep himself aloof from the mechanics of the market, while endeavouring to sell his work both to the highest bidder and to the highest in the land. He hoped indeed for a royal purchaser, and appears to have had a puppy-like affection for royalty, wanting its patronage though in almost every case failing to land it when close to success. Luck, with royalty, was never on his side. George IV was a reluctant and non-committal patron to him; when the young Victoria bought Landseer after Landseer, and made a fuss of Callcott and Westmacott by knighting them at the beginning of her reign, Turner felt the cold unfocused gaze of royal blindness as if he were absent from the room. John Constable described the chasm between artist and patron with a breathtaking directness that was all his own:
It is a bad thing to refuse the ‘Great’. They are always angered – and their reasoning powers being generally blinded by their rank, they have no other idea of a refusal than that it is telling them to kiss your bottom.