3

PATRON NEW STYLE: ‘THE DELICATE LIPS OF A HORSE’

A Boston sugar merchant, Isaac Schofield, on business in London in 1840, found himself stuck in a traffic jam extending down the Strand and Fleet Street, ‘amongst carts, omnibuses, phaetons, livery coaches &c &c.’. The coachman who took Schofield slowly through the crush, ‘making his calculations to an inch and threatening me momentarily with instant annihilation’, was as much a beneficiary of the new rich, turbulent economy as were the entrepreneurs who created it. This chapter will look at the new entrepreneurial generation coming to London, making money there and elsewhere, and spending their fraction on art. While there are a multitude of possible approaches to this subject – through the collecting practices of bankers, of younger-generation aristocrats, of property developers, of technologists – the common thread here, if only for the sake of breaking new ground like the railway navvies, will be transport.

The London Schofield arrived in was very different to the London of Leicester or Fawkes. Principally, it now had a highway running from its edge to its heart: John Nash the architect had designed and masterminded the construction of Regent Street in the 1810s, cutting through medieval streets and flattening communities, offering smoother traffic flow and new commercial opportunity. Destruction of inner cities by road construction and the insertion of shopping malls, as experienced in the late twentieth century, is nothing new. Regent Street, an initiative of the Crown not the City, tore into London, echoing urban developments in Paris and Berlin. The railway stations, when they came, settled at London’s edge, in the villages of Paddington and St Pancras, and at Euston Square. This was not out of courtesy or respect for the capital, but because of immemorially tangled property rights. As Schofield experienced only too vividly, London’s road infrastructure developed through pressure from the economic growth that he himself participated in. The fortunes of the coach-building industry profited from the resulting demand at the same time as they helped to create it. Schofield observed:

Occasionally the road [Strand and Fleet Street] was so completely blocked up that we were obliged to stand still for a moment or two. If I looked out of the window to see what the matter was, my cheeks would be saluted by the delicate lips of a horse, and when you consider that the dray horses here are as large as Elephants you may judge that it is not pleasant to be kissed by them . . . It is truly wonderful to see the skill of driving and the infrequency of accident.

Among the immediate beneficiaries of the demand for improved road transport were Benjamin Windus, Robert Vernon, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Joseph Gillott. They built the vehicles that filled the roads; supplied the horses that pulled the vehicles; designed the bridges that carried the traffic; manufactured the pens that wrote the orders to supply the horses to pull the vehicles to fill the roads, to cross the bridges, and so on. From his father, the owner of a coach-building company in Bishopsgate, Benjamin Godfrey Windus had inherited in 1832 a ‘unique and elegant cottage residence’, or as John Ruskin called it, a ‘cheerful little villa’ in Tottenham. One of his first actions on moving in was to add a library to the side of the house, where he shelved his books and displayed his growing collection of pictures. Windus commissioned in 1835 a watercolour from John Scarlett Davis to celebrate the delights of his picture room: ranged around in gold frames, and painted in clear detail, are some of the hundreds of contemporary watercolours that Windus had collected, including works by Turner, William Cattermole, J. F. Lewis and David Roberts. On the left-hand side of Scarlett Davis’s watercolour is a generous pile of leather-bound, gold-tooled albums, some of large (folio) size, lying horizontally, with other smaller quarto volumes tucked into the bookshelves. The two children depicted, Windus’s own, were perhaps a too perfect youthful audience, attentive, engrossed and well behaved; but nevertheless a clear suggestion that here was the object of all this creative and considered investment, the coming generation, their education and enlightenment.

Benjamin’s uncle, Thomas Windus, a character as cerebral as Benjamin himself and a particularly active partner in the family coach-building company, lived nearby in Gothic Hall, Hackney. There he accommodated his museum of antiquities in a new wing which may have been the inspiration for Benjamin’s library; certainly, museum extension building seemed to be a family practice. The two Windus collections were fruits of the labour of three generations of coach-builders whose company supplied some of the better carriages that were sold and rented out, perhaps to Robert Vernon, and jammed the streets of the capital. The name ‘coachbuilder’ is still used by manufacturers of buses and railway carriages, the vocabulary remaining static as the technology moves on. Britain, a small connectable island with a benign climate and geography, was a nation of inland travellers, by coach, carriage, barge, omnibus and rail. As a consequence, the industry of coach-building, harness-making, upholstery, painting and polishing prospered to maintain the healthy momentum of supply and demand for comfortable travel to suit every pocket and engage every shire. Additional crumbs of profit were left over for investment by entrepreneurs in art. The Winduses were particularly successful and respected in their business, being the company engaged to keep the Lord Mayor of London’s coach in good repair and to maintain its appearance with fresh crimson velvet for public display. The family provided four Winduses as Master of the Worshipful Guild of Coachmakers from 1794 to 1826, when Benjamin had that honour.

Benjamin Windus’s inheritance was not solely derived from his paternal grandfather’s coach-building business, however. His mother’s father, Benjamin Godfrey, had built up a fortune making and selling Godfrey’s Cordial, a mixture of opium, treacle, brandy, caraway and spices, prescribed for fretful babies (and their mothers). Known colloquially as ‘Mother’s Friend’, Godfrey’s Cordial was one of a number of patent variations marketed all over the country. Having sold his grandfather’s cordial business, finding it as distasteful as the medicine he manufactured, Benjamin Windus managed to live his collecting life on the proceeds of both cordial and carriages, and from his directorship of Globe Insurance. Windus was buying watercolours when he was still a young man: he lent his Turner watercolour Margate to an exhibition organized by the engraver and publisher George Cooke in 1823, and thereafter, in particular since he built his library, he was generous and welcoming in allowing visitors to see the collection, by ticket, on Tuesdays. In this he followed the practice of collectors of the previous generation including Stafford, Hope and Leicester. Ruskin was an early and regular visitor:

I believe the really first sight [of a Turner watercolour] must have been the bewildering one of the great collection at Mr. Windus’s . . . bewilderment repeating itself every time I entered the house, and at last expanding and losing itself in the general knowledge to which it led.

Immersing himself in Windus’s collection was one of the prompts that encouraged Ruskin to embark on writing Modern Painters in the late 1830s. Scarlett Davis’s watercolour shows the collection at its height, when Windus owned more than 160 Turners and dozens of works by other contemporary watercolour painters. Davis confided to a friend about the complexity of the task that Windus had put before him:

I am now engaged on a very difficult subject, the interior of the Library of Mr Windus, who has filled it with about fifty Turners . . . there are parts of some of them wonderful, and by G–d all other drawings look heavy and vulgar, even Callcott and Stanfield and even the immortal Alfred Vickers, J. D. Harding and J. B. Pyne.

Turner had himself seen Davis’s drawing and spoke ‘in the highest terms’ of it. The majority of the Turners that Windus bought were works that had been through the engraving process, having been commissioned by engravers including the Cooke brothers and Charles Heath specifically to be published as engraved illustrations. The originals had fulfilled their first purpose, and so entered the market. Walter Fawkes had amassed his collection of watercolours during the first two decades of the century, before Turner had become such a juicy target for the expression of publishers’ commercial instincts, and on the strength of his own uninfluenced eye. Windus’s collection, on the other hand, was the direct product of the new commercial direction for art, a collecting attitude which had a contained reassurance in the presence of a buoyant art market, and further added value in the circulating presence of hosts of engravings after the originals. While he bought in quantity and with some rapidity, Windus was a man of his time and had a dealer’s instinct, knowing what to buy and when to sell. So in the 1850s he had little hesitation in trading his watercolour collection more or less entirely to buy important Pre-Raphaelite paintings, including Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat and Millais’ Vale of Rest.

Benjamin Windus is one classic example of a manufacturing businessman who relaxed with his paintings. Another is the Birmingham pen-nib manufacturer Joseph Gillott, who does not appear to have been the relaxing kind; a third is Elhanan Bicknell, whale-oil merchant of Herne Hill; a fourth is William Gibbs of Tyntesfield near Bristol, a bulk importer of guano from South America; a fifth is John Hornby Maw, the son of a druggist and pill-maker of Cripplegate. Entering his father’s trade in the early 1820s, Maw ran it so successfully by diversifying into the lucrative field of surgical instrument and prosthetics manufacturing that he had taken full control of the company by the end of the decade. Maw had ‘the very brightest of blue eyes . . . and an enormous capacity for and love of hard work for its own sake, inventive genius and wonderful powers of acquiring general information’. Maw’s energy, fuelled by the money he made, enabled him to buy a modest estate near Roydon, Essex, fill it with artists, clients, friends and relations, throw parties, organize country trips, arrange art exhibitions in his house, and live a life of comfortable fulfilment. Like Windus, he collected watercolours, many bought from artists who became friends, such as John Varley, David Cox, John Sell Cotman, William Henry Hunt, J. D. Harding, Samuel Prout and Turner, and from friends who became artists as a result of the many trips Maw took into the country with Cox and Hunt as tutors. Cotman, indeed, also supplied Maw with paints, from his informal colour manufactory, Cotman & Co., established at his house in Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, in London. Cotman had a friendly correspondence with Maw in the 1830s, when he was a well-known if not too financially successful artist who had moved to London from his native Norwich.

I have duly entered your order for Dabs of all colors, an article I have long wished to speculate in, from their know[n] quality of exhibiting if well executed the essential spirit of the Raw Material. Not that I mean to build a Gin Palace, nor one quite of air, therefore I think the price for such dabs as I shall send you will be two guineas each, Half a dozen of which shall be sent to you forthwith as a sample.

The correspondence between artists and Maw demonstrates the close business and personal friendships that he and his family enjoyed. Having made his fortune, Maw retired aged thirty-seven and moved to Hastings, where he directed his energies to improving his own skill as a watercolour painter under the eyes of Cotman, Cox and Hunt. The latter was assiduous in providing a service to Maw and his other clients, chasing payment, offering to remake a favourite subject, giving attention to his pupils. ‘I shall feel greatly obliged,’ Hunt told Maw,

if you will let me know if you are in the same mind that you was at the Exhibition Room when something was said about my making you a similar drawing to the one of the Boy tickling the Girl. If so I am going to the same spot and would make something as near like it as possible. The drawing you purchased of mine at the Exhibition . . . I shall feel greatly obliged if you will let me have the amount as soon as convenient.

Samuel Prout also had drawings to sell, and told Maw that ‘I have finished several small drawings which I mean to exhibit . . . I will endeavour to obtain your opinion of them at the first opportunity.’ Cotman declined with regret an invitation to one of Maw’s many parties, referring as he did so to the astrological obsession of their mutual friend John Varley (see page 82):

I am sorry to say I am too ill to be with you & your delightful party this evening. You know well my disappointment! If John Varley was by my side I would send you a luminous reason for this. As it is, I know no more than the Man in the Moon whether it’s Jupiter, Mars, Leo or Saturn that are active in the ascendant against my poor Taurus . . . Why the next time he serves me so why I will ring his nose for him in the very face of his Horns.

Fed up perhaps with the constant attention of artists needing something from him, and tiring of retirement, Maw found a new interest in the manufacture of ceramic tiles. He bought in 1850 the stock and patents belonging to the pioneering ceramicists Herbert Minton of Stoke-on-Trent and Walter Chamberlain of Worcester, and reinvigorated the companies to produce the intricate and inventive encaustic tiles that decorate churches, public buildings, hotels and homes all over Britain. John Betjeman, among many, was touched as a young man by the terracotta and buff tiles of the kind that were produced through the entrepreneurship of Maw at his Jackfield Tile Works. In his poem ‘St Saviour’s, Aberdeen Park’ Betjeman speaks of ‘solid Italianate houses for the solid commercial mind’, and recalls his parents and the church where ‘over these same encaustics they and their parents trod’. This interest in decorative pattern led Maw naturally to enquire about mosaics, and to open a correspondence with the painter Charles West Cope, who had himself designed mosaics. Cope responded:

[I will do] anything in my power to assist you in your experiments in mosaic decoration & I should be glad to see this branch of art take root in the country . . . giving employment to many persons it would be a great means for retrieving our public buildings & private dwellings of their present colourless & sombre dullness.

Transport was the key to the development of art patronage in nineteenth-century Britain. Its pace of change continued inexorably, providing the networks that Maw needed to distribute his tiles and the income that both he and Windus required to create their collections. The carriage-building industry, of which Windus was a leading figure, depended on the transport industry in all its manifestations to buy its production of vehicles, while the transport industry, before, during and after the coming of the railways, required good roads to run on. The dealer Thomas Griffith, who sold paintings to both Maw and Benjamin Windus, was a member of the wide-reaching circle of artists and collectors in which conversazioni were regular events and difficult road journeys were undertaken to maintain contact and to keep the circles in motion. Cotman had one particularly bad journey, when returning from a visit to Maw in Guildford. He spilled out his experience for therapy:

I left your house at ½ past 2 o’clock AM & by mistake got upon the outside (no inside place) of a Van, a coach looking affair as far as a dark night wd allow me to see it, but soon, very soon found out my mistake to my severe cost. The Mail in about ¾ of an Hour passed us like a blazing meteor – and the Rocket in about 10 minutes after that did the same at the same rapidity – and by this I had taken my place. Well my dear Sir – a cold & wet ride of no less than Six hours. Six long, long hours brought me into Blackfriars Street, to my great, great joy, I being almost dead I could be said to feel anything but cold & wretchedness – and that night to a sick bed, of a violent & dangerous inflammation of the bowels from which I am but just recovered.

So the circles rotated, one within the other. Cotman urged Maw to encourage Griffith to call on Cotman: ‘at all events I have invited that gentleman for Tuesday though I own it to be a great piece of presumption in me to do so & so I said in my Note to him.’

Successful businessmen, who had made their fortunes in trade or manufacture on the back of scientific discovery and technical improvement during the first years of Victoria’s reign, were among those who filled their villas in Ealing and Hackney, Blackheath and Roydon, Herne Hill and Tottenham, Birmingham, Bristol and Hastings, with glowing collections of watercolours. What was it about large, bluff, secure men like Fawkes in his generation, and Windus, Maw, Gillott and Gibbs in theirs, that drew them to the fragile art of watercolour? All would know to their cost that daylight fades watercolour, robs it of its life, turns blue to grey, green to brown, and steals away with red. They would not put up with that kind of behaviour in their business dealings; they might indeed bankrupt a rival who threatened the value of their investments, the colour of their reputation. Watercolour collections need nurturing, protecting, keeping like mushrooms in the dark. They are fleeting in their effect and delicate in transmission, and like a book can really only be read by one person at a time. An oil painting will dominate a room and can overwhelm all present; a watercolour, on the other hand, has to be approached with care and humility, the meeting sometimes akin to a séance. Artists knew this only too well, and it was this difference that many had sought to diminish by exhibiting watercolours that aped oil paintings in their size, subject and treatment. Indeed, an entire exhibiting circuit grew up on the back of it, and fade-resistant paint manufacture developed to counter it. Nevertheless, the attraction of riches to watercolour may be that watercolour touches the quiet, feminine side of the alpha male of business, and suggests that he does have a care.

Collectors have widely varying impulse, taste and purpose: Windus the coach-builder, volatile enough in his collecting to sell up his watercolours entirely to buy Pre-Raphaelite oils; Maw the surgical instrument maker, then tile manufacturer. These are two prominent figures in art collecting in the mid-nineteenth century, both of the meritocratic generation, emerging from traditional but reindustrialized trades. Another was Elhanan Bicknell, whose income derived from highly prized spermaceti oil, used in cosmetics and candles and found only above the eyes of sperm whales. One large whale, hunted in the North or South Atlantic, might produce four tons of oil, enough to soften the cheeks of a million women, or to light up London for a weekend. Bicknell’s income derived from his company which managed whaling fleets and the purchase and sale of their cargo, while his expenditure went on his succession of four wives, on his five (or more) children, on his houses in London and Herne Hill, and on his passion for collecting British painting and sculpture. Among his artists were Clarkson Stanfield, David Roberts, Augustus Wall Callcott and E. H. Baily. Turner, who was one of Bicknell’s friends and confidants, made one of his few business errors when in the mid-1840s he produced a series of four uncharacteristic paintings on the theme of the South Atlantic whaling fleet, in the apparent hope that Bicknell might buy them. Bicknell seems to have bought only one, which he soon got rid of, while the other three remained with the artist.

Yet another major collector, one whose collection has come down to us more or less intact, was Robert Vernon, a horse-and-carriage dealer in London who had inherited from his father his successful business selling and renting equine transport. Royalty, aristocracy, the army, business and trade formed a client base of such affluence that the father was able to collect seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, and the son capped that with one of the most important collections of contemporary British painting of the period, including works by Gainsborough, Turner, Constable and Landseer. He made money so efficiently and effectively, principally out of supplying horses to the army, that in 1832 he bought the lease of 50 Pall Mall, the grand London street in which Gainsborough, Cosway and Angerstein had lived, where Christie’s had been, and where the British Institution still drew the crowds. Vernon was an enthusiastic and perceptive collector, displaying his paintings both at his country house, Ardington, south of Oxford, and in Pall Mall, with the rapid effect that Vernon’s collection tended to echo the popularity and purpose of Angerstein’s collection, by then reborn as the infant National Gallery at number 100. Next door to Vernon in Pall Mall lived Samuel Carter Hall, the proprietor of the journal Art-Union, which published a through-the-keyhole article on his collection in its first issue in 1839:

Every room in his mansion is filled with [pictures] . . . there is no gaudy drapery or gilded furniture to attract the eye and distract the attention . . . Even the brass rods that hang the pictures are painted over.

The aim of Art-Union was, inter alia, to bring engraved reproductions of works of art to a wide public. Prints were distributed by lottery to subscribers, who were kept abreast of art-world news and gossip through editorials and chit-chat. In sum, the journal was a vital tool in maintaining the circulation of information and money in the art trade. Every volume had engravings and lithographs bound into it, each 11½ by 8½ inches, printed on heavy paper, and inscribed ‘Published exclusively in the Art Union Journal’. These the subscribers could cut out and frame. Vernon and Hall made a business partnership with a lucrative deal in which Art-Union reproduced and distributed Vernon’s paintings by engraving, thus increasing public knowledge and raising the value of Vernon’s collection. This was a reverse of the system in which Turner’s watercolours were engraved on completion and then sold off to collectors. Among the backers of Art-Union were the engraver John Landseer, Edwin Landseer’s father, and the print publishers Hodgson and Graves. This early form of co-operation set the tone for a range of business developments in the arts, the intention of which was not only to broadcast works of art more widely, but to make large sums of money. Samuel Rogers caustically and characteristically objected:

The Art Union is a perfect curse: it buys and engraves very inferior pictures, and consequently encourages mediocrity of talent; it makes younger men, who have no genius, abandon the desk and counter, and set up for painters.

Angerstein’s collection was removed from 100 Pall Mall to the new National Gallery in Trafalgar Square in advance of its opening in 1838. Ten years later Vernon’s collection embarked on a similar short journey along Pall Mall to Marlborough House, when it was accepted as a gift as the foundation of a national collection of British art. The bulk of it is now in Tate Britain.

The robust Birmingham pen manufacturer Joseph Gillott rose from a family background of cutlery-making in Sheffield to become the wealthiest and most successful maker and supplier of pen-nibs in the world. Gillott cleverly grasped the obvious – that written records for trade were essential and would only grow; that growth in education demanded writing; and that expansion of the opportunities in travel required at the very least that somebody write out a ticket for somebody else. The common factor here was the pen-nib, and Gillott joined the competition to make and improve pens and their nibs. No network of goose farms could possibly hope to produce enough quills to meet the exponential rise in demand for a reliable instrument to transfer ink to paper, so a small shaped piece of treated metal at the end of a fashioned stick was the answer. When Dickens’s Mr Merdle killed himself with a penknife – that is, a knife designed to trim goose quills into pens – the ‘Man of the Age’ was employing old technology.

Gillott moved to Birmingham aged twenty-two in 1821. Beginning in the buckle-making trade, his grasp of miniature metalworking and his cutlery background gave him a rich understanding of the qualities of flat metal. With the availability of thin sheet steel, he was able to develop means to stamp out nib forms, give them a simple lateral curve, and, crucially, split them lengthways to create a channel and a small reservoir for ink. This is not a complex industrial process; its simplicity allowed the pen-nib to evolve from primitive appendage to near-perfection in a few short stages. While a goose-quill pen might hold enough ink to write two or three words and make a blot, a steel pen, properly curved and cut, could hold enough for a complete sentence – and not blot.

By 1829 Gillott was advertising his pen-nibs and assorted calligraphiana, and had set up in Newhall Street, amidst a plethora of small trades in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter. By the end of the 1830s he had expanded into his new factory, the Victoria Works on Newhall Hill. From there he turned out 490,361 gross of pen-nibs in 1842, a figure that nearly doubled the next year. One gross is 144 individual units, so his factory was making more than 70 million nibs in 1842, and more than 100 million the following year – that is, a quarter of a million pen-nibs a day. Gillott’s pens sold across the nation, filling goods wagons on the railway lines now beginning to fan out from Birmingham, and barges on the canals. He was among the earliest entrepreneurs to travel on Brunel’s steamship the Great Britain to New York, where he opened first an agency in Chambers Street and then a US manufacturing base in New Jersey. Gillott’s profits were monumental – his personal income beyond the dreams of avarice, the tentacles of his trade drawn in long, thin pen-and-ink lines across the world’s map.

Picture collecting could be, for Gillott, a hobby limited only by the reach of his taste. He did not, for example, buy Pre-Raphaelite paintings, not because he could not afford them, but because he did not like them. His house in Westbourne Road, in the Birmingham suburb of Edgbaston, had three picture galleries; other rooms also had pictures in them, of course, as did his town house in Newhall Street. His houses were filled by the schools Gillott liked best: Dutch seventeenth-century painting, eighteenth-century French and nineteenth-century British. In the latter category Gillott collected Callcott, Constable, Danby, Etty, Frith, Goodall, Hunt, Landseer, all the way through the alphabet to Turner, Varley and Ward. For a short time in 1866 he owned Constable’s Landscape: Noon, better known as The Hay Wain (1821), before selling it on to Henry Vaughan. He tried unsuccessfully to persuade Landseer to paint exclusively for him by giving him £5,000 over and above his usual earnings; he bought from Etty and carried on a long and familiar, even intimate, correspondence with him from 1843 until Etty’s death six years later. The Turners Gillott owned included View of the Temple of Jupiter Panellenius (1816), Calais Sands (1830) and Schloss Rosenau (1841). ‘Turner’s a rum chap,’ Etty remarked to Gillott, ‘but a kind heart at bottom.’

For Gillott, collecting shaded very sharply towards dealing. His enjoyment of art was not only in the thrill of making a successful purchase; what he also enjoyed was buying and selling, sometimes quite quickly. The Hay Wain he sold again within weeks, sharing the relatively modest profit of £273 with his adviser William Cox. Buying dozens of nudes from Etty in 1847, he rapidly sold many of them on, and he owned some of his Turners for a remarkably short time. Not wholly satisfied with the bland market in pen-nibs, Gillott got his kicks in the art world. Inevitably, Gillott had intensive trade activities with dealers, including established companies such as Agnew’s, Ernest Gambart and Henry Graves, and chancers such as Serjeant Ralph Thomas, a lawyer who inhabited the fringe of the art-dealing world. Thomas, ‘a most voracious collector of every sort of object from pictures to warming pans’, knew John Martin well enough to write extensive notes on his life, patronized the young John Everett Millais with irritating small payments, and came to write the first comprehensive catalogue of Whistler’s etchings. Gillott bought property including, from Gambart in 1862, the lease on 62 Avenue Road, St John’s Wood, and in 1867 the jewel in the crown of the art world of the past seventy or eighty years, the former Boydell’s Gallery in Pall Mall, when the British Institution was dissolved by its directors on the termination of the lease.

We can reasonably reflect on the idea that it was the taste for extensive collections of paintings in the nineteenth century that generated the need for art galleries in large ground-hungry houses and consequent suburban development. Architecture followed art: houses may not have needed paintings to function; but paintings needed houses. Gillott was so prominent as a collector that he attracted the attention of Gustav Waagen, the director of the Berlin Museum, on his fact-finding tours of England in the 1850s. Visiting Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham, Waagen remarked that ‘the good star which had presided, with few exceptions, over my various excursions in England, was more especially in the ascendant during my visit to Birmingham’. Waagen had first been to England in 1835, and on his 1850s visits he could see how collecting by the new industrialist generation would compare with the practices of the aristocracy (see chapter 10).

The railways were, in the 1840s, a catalyst for a rapid change of step and of perspective for both patrons and artists. The movement around the country of cooking pots and calico, papers and pen-nibs, may have been made swifter and more regular by rail; but so too, by rail, were artists and their patrons able to get together faster, carry on their businesses, and get on with the next thing. Haydon bumped uncomfortably back to London in a horse-drawn stage-coach in 1809 after some days paying court to Beaumont in Leicestershire; thirty-four years later, in 1843, the portrait painter John Lucas could nip up to Tamworth on the steam train to call on the then prime minister and see his portrait gallery at Drayton Manor. Finding time from domestic and world affairs, Sir Robert Peel told Lucas how to get there: ‘trains from Euston Square . . . bring you to Tamworth 2 miles only . . . in five or six hours. The eleven o’clock is the best.’ Patterns were changing. The year 1843 was the moment when Turner conceived his painting Rain, Steam, and Speed – the Great Western Railway (exhibited 1844) in which a steam train flies at an unconscionable speed across Brunel’s railway bridge, and eats up the miles to Bristol.

William Gibbs, of Tyntesfield, whose imported South American guano provided raw material for both explosives and fertilizer, invested his time and money generously in Brunel’s Great Western Railway. Gibbs clearly saw the commercial and social value of a railway line connecting London with the west of England, and the further benefits of Brunel’s giant leap of imagination in linking Bristol with New York by the Great Britain steamship. For Tyntesfield, the neo-Gothic house he built out of guano profits, Gibbs collected paintings by Clarkson Stanfield, Callcott, John Phillip, and many other artists in oil and watercolour. The year after William Gibbs’ death, his son Anthony, heir to the fortune, bought Turner’s grand visionary landscape celebrating Greek history, myth and independence, The Temple of Jupiter Panellenius Restored (1816), the pair to Gillott’s View of the Temple of Jupiter Panellenius. This hung at Tyntesfield until 1982, when it was sold to America. Thus these two hymns to Greek independence were owned out of the profits of independent free trade: one from pens, the other from bird droppings.

Gillott may be seen as the kind of collector who enjoyed the process of collecting as much as he enjoyed the collection itself. Gibbs bought relatively calmly, seeing his paintings as but one part of an integrated whole with architecture, furniture and fittings. Maw, on the other hand, relished the multiple engagements that collecting brought him: his own amateur painting, tuition from his artist friends and gossipy friendships in which he experienced the rough and tumble of the artistic temperament – with an easy exit via the salerooms always available if required. Gillott and Maw in particular clung to their amateur status while trying to run with the professionals. Windus, though happy to get out of one particular stock, watercolour, when oil painting seemed to be more satisfactory, had a more straightforward approach to collecting, a simple one-to-one act of buying, enjoying, sharing and then selling. He was one kind of transport entrepreneur who used his business income to fuel his collecting habits; others, however, notably Joseph Baxendale and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, were developing businesses elsewhere in the transport network and making profits that kept the wheels of the art market turning. Joseph Baxendale was the director of the cartage company Pickfords; Brunel was the man who built the ship that took Gillott to America, and whose genius made possible transport initiatives and their infrastructures on land and sea. These confident, opinionated and powerful men together personify the changes that had taken place in patronage in Britain. Samuel Carter Hall writing in 1847 in the Art-Union observed:

Amongst our wealthy manufacturers there exists an appreciation of the artist and patronage not dissimilar to that which was once the pride of the citizens of Florence, Genoa and Venice . . . Nor is this patronage indiscriminate.

Elizabeth Eastlake, the writer and critic, was a particularly well-connected woman who noticed the social and financial trend by which art patronage had begun to move down the social scale, to the enrichment of British art. Eastlake’s connections lay deep in the literary world: she wrote for the publisher John Murray and was a regular guest at his Albemarle Street conversazioni, while her husband, Sir Charles Eastlake, had been both the president of the Royal Academy and the director of the National Gallery since 1854. The generation of landed patrons was being followed ‘by a wealthy and intelligent class, chiefly enriched by commerce and trade’, as Lady Eastlake put it. The painter Thomas Uwins expressed this trend more directly:

The old nobility and land proprietors are gone out. Their place is supplied by railroad speculators, iron mine men, and grinders from Sheffield etc., Liverpool and Manchester merchants and traders.

As a consequence, the pocket book that an artist might carry, ‘while it exhibited lowlier names, show[ed] henceforth higher prices’. Lady Eastlake went on to propose an explanation, which is as sweeping as it is patronizing:

For one sign of the good sense of the nouveau riche consisted in a consciousness of his ignorance upon matters of connoisseurship. This led him to seek an article fresh from the painter’s loom, in preference to any hazardous attempts at the discrimination of older fabrics.

Pickfords, still in the early twenty-first century a thriving transport company, was already a prominent name in the industry in the 1840s and 1850s. In 1858, when he was forty-six years old, Charles Dickens travelled to his childhood home of Rochester to see how it had got on since he was a lad. He remembered the playing fields, but they had been swallowed up by the railway station; he remembered the horse-drawn coach that had carried him off to London, Timpson’s Blue-Eyed Maid, but that had now been replaced by a locomotive ‘called severely No. 97, spitting ashes and hot water over the blighted ground’. And he remembered Timpson’s small town coach-office, ‘with an oval transparency in the window, which looked beautiful by night, representing one of Timpson’s coaches in the act of passing a milestone on the London road with great velocity, completely full inside and out, and all the passengers dressed in the first style of fashion, and enjoying themselves tremendously’. In Dickens’s heart-felt regret at the changes in things, Rochester becomes ‘Dullborough’, Timpson’s he notes is now Pickford’s, ‘one great establishment with a pair of big gates’, and the illustrated window has vanished. ‘He is not Napoleon Bonaparte’, Dickens observed of Pickford, referring to Napoleon’s looting of works of art from conquered nations. ‘When he took down the transparent stage-coach he ought to have given the town a transparent van. With gloomy conviction that Pickford is wholly utilitarian and unimaginative, I proceeded on my way.’

While with one hand a Windus might welcome visitors to his collection, with another a transport entrepreneur like Pickford might dispose (according to Dickens) of a familiar public picture. While Dickens set pugnaciously upon ‘Mr Pickford’, the man who should have been in his sights was Joseph Baxendale. The Pickford family had long since sold out their company to Baxendale, a surgeon’s son from Lancaster, whose intuition and energy detected a synergy between road, canal and rail, and who saw how by using the three modes of transport in harmony he could create a flourishing business and keep commerce moving around the country. Further, he could make a fortune. His father had exhorted him to ‘make yourself a perfect master of Book-keeping . . . The advantage you will ultimately receive from it, there is no appreciating.’ Baxendale not only heeded his father’s advice, but gave advice to his staff, in the form of notices pinned up in Pickfords offices and warehouses around the country. These he called his ‘Run and Read Sermons’: ‘Method is the hinge of business, and there is no method without punctuality’; ‘Nothing without labour’; and ‘He who spends all he gets is on the way to beggary’. Sam Smiles devoted some pages to Pickfords in his popular book Thrift (1875), using Baxendale, whom he referred to as the Benjamin Franklin of business, as a paragon of business practice and entrepreneurial energy. He tells how Baxendale would travel between towns looking out for Pickfords vans, and double back on them to check if they were delayed, or if the driver was drunk in charge, or failing to carry a loaded blunderbuss against highwaymen. With his canal boat, named Joseph after himself, he carried out similar inspection routines on his water transport. Baxendale’s employees never knew where he might pop up, and with this prick of uncertainty always in the backs of their minds, Pickford drivers ensured the company’s success and longevity. Baxendale died a rich man, with a personal estate of £700,000, passing Pickfords securely, as far as he could tell, on to his three elder sons. One of these came to give to the nation an extraordinary and unique collection of portrait drawings of over a hundred leading contemporary cultural figures (see chapter 11).

The man whose name is never far from the surface whenever mid-nineteenth-century transport is discussed is Isambard Kingdom Brunel. As the creative and executive energy behind the Thames Tunnel, the Clifton Suspension Bridge, Saltash Bridge, the Great Western Railway with its embankments and tunnels, and the steamships Great Britain and Great Eastern, Brunel possessed all the courage, invention and bloodymindedness that was required in the development of Britain’s transport infrastructure. As a patron of art, however, he is less well known, despite the fact that he brought unfamiliar industrial production techniques to the commissioning of art.

Brunel had an engaging habit of noting down his own assessment of his life so far, and how he should improve or progress his career. He was short in stature and this troubled him – he was 5 feet 4 inches tall, about the height of Turner and Faraday, Napoleon and King Louis-Philippe of France. Reflecting on this in 1827, he wrote some frank self-analysis:

My self-conceit and love of glory or rather approbation vie with each other which shall govern me. The latter is so strong that even on a dark night riding home when I pass some unknown person who perhaps does not even look at me I catch myself trying to look big on my little pony . . . My self-conceit renders me domineering, intolerant nay even quarrelsome with those who do not flatter me in this case.

Brunel thrived on flattery and the cheers of the crowd, and sought to be lionized. His self-esteem was unmatched, and he knew that to be accepted into society he had to marry well. Engineers in the early nineteenth century, before engineering became organized as a profession, were considered to be horny-handed, grubby workmen, with little or no intellectual pretension, who could not be taken into a drawing room. ‘Shall I make a good husband?’ he asked himself:

Am doubtful. My ambition, or whatever it may be called (it is not the mere wish to be rich) is rather extensive, but still – I am not afraid I shall be unhappy if I do not reach the rank of Hero and Commander-in-Chief of His Majesty’s Forces in the steam (or Gaz) boat department . . . Build a splendid manufactory for Gaz engines, a yard for building the boats – and at last be rich, have a house built of which I have even made the drawings. Be the first Engineer and example for all future ones.

Eventually he found, courted and in 1836 married Mary Horsley, the daughter of the organist and composer William Horsley of Kensington, and part of Kensington society that so richly included Mary’s great-uncle Augustus Wall Callcott RA, his wife Maria Callcott, and Mary’s brother the painter John Callcott Horsley RA, an associate of the Pre-Raphaelites. The latter was known as ‘Clothes Horsley’, on account of the extraordinary and detailed costumes he made his models wear. Isambard, introduced to the Horsleys by a Brunel family friend, met Mary in the family music room over a grand piano that had been, or would be, played by other Horsley friends, giants in the musical world, including Brahms, Chopin, Joachim, Mendelssohn, Bellini and the violinist Paganini. The Callcotts and Horsleys were starry and self-regarding, a family of talent, social connection and aplomb that wove its spell around Isambard Kingdom Brunel. His own background of mud, oil and engineering was the antithesis of the Horsley–Callcott world, and Brunel was desperately attracted to this other ethereal magic.

Mary Horsley, though beautiful, had none of her family’s artistic talents and was aloof, haughty and unemotional. In marrying her, Brunel was associating himself publicly with the conventional art world of the metropolis. He was also procuring for himself a ‘trophy wife’, one who enjoyed the nickname ‘Duchess of Kensington’. Isambard and Mary Brunel went to live in Duke Street, St James’s, where he set up an office at number 18. One wonders why he bothered to marry, if not only for dynastic purposes. Totally engaged as he was by his engineering projects, Isambard was rarely at home, and Mary held salons alone: ‘my profession is after all my only fit wife’, Isambard had once written.

Living above the shop, as the Brunels did in the first few years of their marriage, they expanded by acquiring in 1848 the neighbouring house, number 17, as Isambard’s engineering business prospered and their family grew. At Duke Street Brunel employed a staff of up to forty men – engineers, draughtsmen, clerks and pupils, among the latter Joseph Baxendale’s nephew – with a constant ebb and flow of personnel as men were hired, fired or failed to cope with Brunel’s demanding management technique. ‘Your duty’, ‘our angry discussion’, ‘opinions differing very much from my own’ – these are phrases which crop up like tin-tacks in Brunel’s correspondence with his staff. But while fiery and challenging discussions went on in the office, upstairs Brunel established his new credentials as a collector and lover of art by commissioning a Shakespeare collection for his dining room with twenty-four paintings of scenes from Shakespeare by some of the leading painters of history and literature of the day, including his in-laws Augustus Wall Callcott and John Horsley, Edwin Landseer, David Roberts and Joseph Noel Paton. This was a reworking on a domestic scale of the disastrous Shakespeare Gallery project inaugurated at the end of the previous century by John Boydell (see chapter 6). In an act highly revealing of his characteristic expectation and need for command, Brunel invited these and seven other distinguished artists to a series of meetings so that he could describe his grand plan to them. Brunel knew what he wanted: he gave the orders and expected artists, like boilermen, to come up with a product that worked, on time and to budget. Astonishingly, the artists did as they were told.

The first meeting over dinner on 18 December 1847 saw Brunel outlining his vision for his Shakespeare Room. His goal was to make

the rendering . . . of one of our most National of English Poets of past times the occasion or means of obtaining a collection of the best examples of the first English Artists of the present time and I should wish to make the more apparent object – the illustrations of the Poet – subservient in each case to the second object.

In a letter to Landseer, encouraging his participation in the scheme, Brunel added: ‘If I am so fortunate to induce the several promising contributors to this collection to enter warmly into this view, the collection will become one of National interest.’ The contributors were instructed to meet Brunel a month later to discuss the way they would approach their proposed subjects, while at the third meeting Brunel looked over the artists’ sketches so that he could find and secure ‘harmony’ among the participants and launch the paintings ‘with a prospect of tolerably short voyages’. It was perfectly clear who was in charge. Brunel took the role of a chairman of the board and made it plain that success would depend on the painters’ commitment to the patron’s aims. Emulating Whitbread, Leicester, Fawkes, Beaumont, Gillott, Windus and Maw rolled together, Brunel desired to create in Duke Street a collection of British art of ‘National interest’. But more than any of these other patrons, Brunel kept tight artistic control.

Decorating and furnishing Duke Street provided Brunel with one of his rare opportunities to relax and take his mind off engineering. He was currently working on the design and construction of the Great Western Railway line from London to Bristol, on railways in Devon and Cornwall, Wales and Ireland, on Saltash Bridge, on Plymouth Dock and on a number of other initiatives, so he had no time to spare for artists failing to stick to agreements. Artists were to Brunel just another branch of the industrial supply chain. Horsley told Brunel’s son in 1870 that the engineer

passed, I believe, the pleasantest of leisure moments in decorating that house, and well do I remember our visits in search of rare furniture, china, bronzes &c, with which he filled it, till it became one of the most remarkable and attractive houses in London . . . In buying pictures [he] evinced a taste often found in men of refined mind and feeling – viz., a repugnance to works, however excellent in themselves, where violent action was represented. He preferred pictures where the subject partook more of the suggestive than the positive, and where considerable scope was left in which the imagination of the spectator might disport itself. This feeling was displayed in a great love of landscape art, and in the keenest appreciation of the beauties of nature.

Brunel’s ambition for his Shakespeare scheme echoed his many collector predecessors who had an eye to their cultural legacy: Sir John Leicester, Sir John Julius Angerstein, Sir George Beaumont, Robert Vernon – all had looked beyond the immediate task to the national interest when considering the growth of their art collections. In the event, Brunel’s Shakespeare Room fell apart after his death, just as Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery had, and was dismantled and the paintings sold. For nineteenth-century speculators Shakespeare was not an auspicious pairing with painting. The burden of the Bard’s language and legacy was so great that art orchestrated from many sources could rarely find the genius to balance it, certainly not in quantity. Nevertheless, as John Horsley recalled:

This room, hung with pictures, with its richly carved fireplace, doorways, and ceiling, its silken hangings and Venetian mirrors, lighted up on one of the many festive gatherings frequent in that hospitable house, formed a scene which none will forget who had the privilege of taking part in it.

While Brunel’s legacy as an engineer remains with us still, his legacy as a collector has blown away in the winds of chance and circumstance. A collection as solid, apparently, as Sir John Leicester’s evaporated in the salerooms to pay debts; Gillott’s collection was sold, as were Bicknell’s, Maw’s and the Windus collection. Those that remain largely intact – Angerstein, Beaumont, Stafford, Vernon, Sheepshanks, and many others – do so because of a combination of factors: a willing nation or city to accept them, generous collectors to offer them, well-rooted families to retain them, robust institutions to house and look after them, and an educated populace eager to enjoy them. We have moved from the Britain that George Eliot identified; a Britain where the ‘tread-mill attitude of the weaver’ had changed to one where ‘factory men and women stream for their mid-day meal’. As John Pye observed in the late 1840s:

It must be borne in mind that [in the mid to late eighteenth century] sources of rational pleasure and mental improvement, such as in the nineteenth century are afforded to the million by the British Museum, National Gallery, Royal Institution, exhibitions of various kinds, and scientific institutions in all parts of the town, were then only within the reach of the few whose wealth enabled them to travel, or otherwise to make great sacrifices to obtain them.

Times had changed; art was coming into general reach.