6

DEALER: ‘I HAVE PICKED UP A FEW LITTLE THINGS’

Since collecting began, there have been people who would move between the artist and the collector to obtain the best possible price for the object, and a pretty good wedge for themselves. The go-between is an ancient species, early evolved to perfection, like the horseshoe crab. In the seventeenth century William Petty acted as agent for the Earl of Arundel, buying sculpture for him abroad; in the mid-eighteenth Thomas Jenkins intriguingly slipped thousands of pounds’ worth of treasures in and out of Rome for clients in Britain, Russia and elsewhere. There were countless dealers, many of them artists, trading in Jenkins’s shadow. Later in the century, and into the nineteenth, Michael Bryan sold old master paintings from his galleries in Pall Mall and Savile Row; Noel Desenfans bought for the king of Poland; John Smith made frames and a fortune selling paintings of high value in Piccadilly and Mayfair; and William Buchanan developed a buoyant and prodigious business importing old master paintings to Britain.

Other enterprising individuals, such as Samuel Woodburn in St Martin’s Lane, grew into companies through insider knowledge and opportunity. Smith acted for William Beckford, who had many agents including Henry Tresham and William Clark on the lookout for him from London to Amsterdam to Rome. Across the range and ambitions of collectors, Sir John Leicester relied on William Carey, Sir George Colebrooke on Caleb Whitefoord, and in the first decade of the nineteenth century the Scottish artist James Irvine bought extensively in Italy for clients who were both dealers and collectors. Later, in the 1820s and 1830s, another Scottish artist in Italy, Andrew Wilson, bought and sent home old master paintings which were to form the basis of the collection of the National Gallery of Scotland. Once, and once only so far as we know, Lord Egremont depended – when he bought a piece of antique statuary in Rome – on Turner. Artist as dealer, dealer as artist, collector as dealer, it was a chaotic process, a cut-throat survival of the fittest in quest of rich prizes. Picture-buying opportunities emerged from social and political chaos in Europe, and from the inability of the formerly rich and powerful to hold on to portable property of value. Touching on the opportunities thrown up by the turbulence of the Napoleonic Wars, Buchanan remarked ‘in troubled waters we catch the most fish’.

Dealers and their commercial activities are fundamental to the development of the history of art. Knowledge of who owns what in any one period, how a work passed from owner to owner, and where and by whom it might have been seen is critical to a clear drafting of art history in the same way that the properties of two reactive chemicals is required knowledge before they are put into the same bottle. Had the paintings of Claude and Poussin been somehow invisible to young British artists in the late eighteenth century, the history of British art would have been very different. Claude’s and Poussin’s paintings, and their imitations and fakes, came in bulk to Britain through the activities of Grand Tourists, agents and art dealers. It is the market, display and exhibition systems that these people created that gradually enabled a wide public to see art from the continent, and for a rich culture to develop out of it through the insight and energy of a new generation of artists.

Britain’s private art collections had grown rich since the seventeenth century on imports of art from Europe, whether of works bought in the auction rooms, or direct from artists and dealers abroad, or as bargain spoils of war or revolution. Works were bought and resold; attributed and re-attributed: nothing new there. Some of the finest ‘bargain spoils’ came from the collection built up by Charles I, auctioned off after the king’s death during the Commonwealth (1649–60) and eventually bought back in part by British collectors after revolution had scorched Europe. By the early nineteenth century, the walls of the great houses of England and Scotland were well lined with sumptuous gold-framed canvases by Raphael and Veronese, Poussin and Claude, Rembrandt and Rubens, spoils both of revolution and violence, and of the comparatively peaceful art market of the Grand Tour. Of course works by such faked and invented artists as ‘Og of Bassan’, ‘Watersouchy of Amsterdam’ and ‘Blunderbussiana of Venice’, as enthusiastically created by the housekeeper at Fonthill, were up there too, in their legions, and that is the point. Wealth and opportunity in England drew the art market to London and, driven by fashion and rarity value, it took the predictable route in embracing the art of Europe at the expense of native artists living or dead, and at the high risk of admitting fakes. Many collectors felt the force of the satires of Samuel Foote:

Why, now, there’s your ‘Susannah’; it could not have produced you above twenty [pounds] at most: and, by the addition of your lumber-room dirt, and the salutary application of the ’spaltham pot, it became a Guido, worth a hundred and thirty pounds . . . Praise be to Folly and Fashion, there are, in this town, dupes enough to gratify the avarice of all.

By the first decades of the nineteenth century two or three generations of Grand Tourists – men and women of means accompanied by their valets, coachmen, hairdressers and tutors, and the occasional comfortable cow to produce reminders of home – had crossed the Alps or sailed the Bay of Genoa to experience the potent mix of ruin and renaissance that only Italy could adequately supply. The Society of Dilettanti – young men who gathered together for wine, conversation, song and a good time – shared a common experience of the Grand Tour and a determination to publish volumes recording classical remains and history: ‘Esto praeclara; esto perpetua’ [‘Let it be noble; let it endure forever’], they proclaimed together when they toasted themselves at the end of their meetings. Travelling in hope and enthusiasm, many brought home debt, others syphilis, while yet others, less indebted or diseased, ensured that by judicious purchase their great houses would be admired by their peers and treasured by their descendants. The influx by the cart-load of art and antiquities buoyed the art market, encouraged the businesses of engravers and stimulated fakers, while at the same time it both encouraged and dismayed native and British artists. Joseph Wright remarked grimly to his sister, by letter from Rome in 1775, on the general hike in living costs he was experiencing: ‘the Tour of Italy is now become so fashionable and the English Cavaliers so profuse with their money that the Artists suffer for their prodigality.’

Products of the Grand Tour also, of course, impressed country-house visitors, as the housekeeper at Fonthill instinctively knew when proudly ad-libbing about the splendour of Beckford’s collection of paintings by Og, Watersouchy and Blunderbussiana. When the poet Thomas Moore stayed at Lord Methuen’s great house at Corsham near Bath, he expressed his wonder at the treasures he saw around him. At first Moore ‘had only the time to look at the two fine Claudes’, but a few days later he was able to take a closer look at the collection, finding:

a fine head of the Salvator Mundi by Carlo Dolci; Rubens and his Mistress hunting, a fine picture; Rubens and his three wives, which showed (Mrs M[ethuen] said) he had more taste in his wives than in his mistresses. Always makes himself so handsome, though he was by no means so, and was very carrotty-headed.

Paris rivalled London as the European centre for the display of art when, from 1796, Napoleon’s armies looted the ducal, princely and ecclesiastical collections of the European nations and states that they had conquered. The spoils of war that were carried back to Paris in carts in their thousands included much that today is seen as the great masterpieces of ancient, Renaissance and post-Renaissance European art, to say nothing of irreplaceable archives and much scientific equipment and specimens. To pick just one work, the complex, delicate and compelling Roman marble sculpture of Laocoon and his sons entwined by sea-serpents was stolen from the Vatican, carried to Livorno in horse-, ox- and buffalo-drawn carts, and shipped to Marseilles. Among so much else, Raphael’s Transfiguration was also taken from the Vatican, Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb from Ghent, Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child from Bruges, and on and on – eighty-six carts were needed to carry the loot taken from Bologna alone. Europe was, effectively, stripped. It is a blot on the reputation of some British artists that they regretted the eventual repatriation of the treasures. Thomas Lawrence was heard to remark:

Every artist must lament the breaking up of a collection in a place so centrical to Europe where everything was laid open to the public with a degree of liberality unknown elsewhere.

However, for the few years that the treasures were on show in the Louvre – renamed by the emperor ‘Musée Napoléon’ – Paris was the place to go to see art. During the short-lived Peace of Amiens (1802–3), Britons flocked across the Channel, smug only in the knowledge that their nation had not been ransacked. When the war was over and the allies occupied Paris, Antonio Canova was one of the leaders in negotiating the repatriation of the works, and for his pains was abused and threatened with death for daring to disperse the ‘collection’. Napoleon was no art dealer, but he was an astoundingly successful museum supremo. What he and his officers created in the Louvre was a temporary art exhibition of a richness and majesty that has never been seen before or since. Napoleon’s director of the Louvre, Dominique Vivant-Denon, reported to his committee in 1804: ‘One hundred cases have been opened: not one accident, not one fracture has diminished our happiness in acquiring these rare treasures.’ The problem was that it had all been stolen.

While Napoleon stole his exhibits, historical figures of microbial size by comparison, such as John Boydell and Robert Bowyer, bought artists’ copyrights. Until they closed in 1804 and 1806 respectively, Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and Robert Bowyer’s Historic Gallery were lively outlets for new paintings which followed specific themes; other even shorter-lived themed enterprises included Thomas Macklin’s Poet’s Gallery and Henry Fuseli’s Milton Gallery. They and entrepreneurial successors such as Josiah Wedgwood, Rudolf Ackermann and Paolo Colnaghi picked up and reformed the market for painting, prints, pottery and decorative objects, while frame-making – always a measure of the health of the picture-dealing trade – developed into a lucrative craft industry drawing together carpentry, carving, plasterwork, polishing and gilding. All of these were (and remain) transferable skills of value throughout the building and manufacturing economy. The mechanization of printing and of paper, ceramic and metalwork production through the steam-engine transformed trade in ornamental goods that were beautiful, decorative and useful. This rate of evolution in volume and scale would only come to be challenged effectively at the end of the century by the Arts and Crafts movement.

An art dealer might prefer to specialize in either the living or the dead. Dealing in old master paintings had its danger areas: provenance, authenticity, condition, ownership – all presented areas of potential doubt which would affect price. Michael Bryan made a fortune buying paintings in Holland, France and Italy and selling them to collectors in England and Scotland. The acquisition of the greatest of all European private collections, assembled in the eighteenth century by the Duke of Orléans and sold in the aftermath of the French Revolution, was a classic piece of clever dealing. Handled by Bryan, the collection was sold on in 1798 to a syndicate comprising the Duke of Bridgewater, the Marquess of Stafford George Leveson-Gower, and the Earl of Carlisle, the owner of Castle Howard. The price was £43,000, though the collection was later valued at £72,000. Retaining ninety-four pictures including works by Titian, Veronese, Poussin, Rembrandt, Rubens and Tintoretto, which they shared out between them, the trio of noblemen disposed of the rest for a total of 41,000 guineas. Thus were the foundations of three magnificent old master collections established for peanuts, while many of the other paintings came to find homes elsewhere in England and Scotland.

The travels of one painting, Titian’s Noli Me Tangere (‘Do not touch me’), illuminates one thread of the story of how paintings ebbed and flowed from Europe, to London, to the far counties of Britain and back to London again. Painted in Venice around 1514, this modestly sized and easily portable painting of Christ and Mary Magdalene was owned by the Muselli family in Verona, and had been taken to France before the seventeenth century, where it eventually joined the Orléans collection. Coming to London and sold by Michael Bryan to the Marquess of Stafford, it was sold on in 1802 for £330 to Arthur Champernowne of Dartington Hall, Devon. Champernowne was a speculator and dealer in pictures, as well as a collector, operating as a marchand amateur in that grey area of the trade where it is rarely clear who is the final buyer. Noli Me Tangere may have been at Dartington Hall in 1809 when Joseph Farington visited, though Farington’s observation that Champernowne’s paintings were ‘poor and hung without order’ perhaps suggests otherwise. When Champernowne’s collection came itself to be sold in 1820, the Titian was bought by Samuel Rogers for 315 guineas. He in due course bequeathed it to the National Gallery. Like a migrating bird tagged by an ornithologist, Noli Me Tangere can be followed from Venice to Verona, to Paris, to London, possibly down to Devon, and back to London again. London, then, provided the nest and shelter for this and so many other colourful birds as they travelled the world.

Writing home from Italy, James Irvine offered an insight into the luck and thrill of dealing:

That I purchase for others I keep a secret here to prevent the dealers raising the prices upon me as they probably would did they know I bought for some amateur . . . I was so fortunate as [to] procure a capital allegorical picture of Rubens from a branch of the Doria family, on the back of which was found on taking off the lining on its arrival in England, the initials of King Charles 1^st . . . This has been sold to Lord Gower for £3000 . . . At the same time I sent over three other Rubens’s from another collection . . . [one] bought by Mr Champernowne for £800 . . . [another] to Sir George Beaumont for £1500.

William Buchanan, hard to please, urged Irvine to try yet harder:

I have been pretty well able to judge of the English taste of late – that I find lies more in the Landscapes of Claude, the Poussins, Titian, Rubens, and Salvator Rosa, than in Historical Compositions . . . Subjects of Saints etc. etc. are not thought of here at all, it is lively and pleasing Compositions are altogether the rage or the great and grand in Landscape principally. Could a few Landscapes of Titian be procured these would command attention.

As John Pye put it, ‘scarcely was a country overrun by the French than Englishmen skilled in the arts were at hand with their guineas’. The money Michael Bryan made from art dealing, and the knowledge and experience he accrued, enabled him to retire in the 1810s to write his Biographical and Critical Dictionary of Painters and Engravers (1813–16), a work that remained a pioneering source of information well into the twentieth century. John Smith, in his turn, wrote a nine-volume Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters (1829–42). In England the early art historians – those with easy access to their sources – were art dealers.

The successes of Bryan, Irvine and Buchanan can be set against the commercial disaster that befell Noel Desenfans, a French-born art dealer who bought at the top of the market and sold works on from his private address near Portland Place. He was disliked by his fellow dealers, being considered an amateur in the trade. However, he was honest enough to admit to having been duped at times:

Many pictures have been made to acquire the appearance of age, even to a complete deception: and I remember, at the commencement of my collecting . . . having purchased some . . . Whatever uncertainty I might have been in as to their originality, I had not the least doubt as to their antiquity. I sent for a picture cleaner, who made use of spirits of wine, and, in a moment, that which he worked upon was totally ruined . . . which made the cleaner say, those pictures had been in the Westminster oven. He then informed me that there was . . . in Westminster a manufactory where several persons were employed making copies, which, after having been soiled with dirt and varnish, were thrown into an oven built for the purpose, and moderately warmed, where, in the course of an hour or two, they became cracked, and acquired the appearance of age . . . I will venture to assert that many of our superficial collectors have been caught, as I have been, with this snare, and have preferred to the best modern productions those of the Westminster oven.

Desenfans was embraced as an agent by the Polish royal family, who in 1790 engaged him to create a founding collection of European painting for a proposed Polish national gallery in Warsaw. However, King Stanislaw of Poland abdicated when his nation was overrun by Russia in 1795, and Desenfans was left with the pictures, a vanished client and a huge debt. While Desenfans survived this ordeal financially, he was left a broken, sick and derided figure – evidence that anticipated profits from art dealing could rapidly be set at risk by sudden changes of fortune in politics, trade, economics or taste. Desenfans urged the British government to buy his paintings as the beginnings of a national collection, his being an early attempt to get such an organization founded, preceding Truchsess, Leicester, Beaumont and Angerstein. In the event, after auctioning nearly 200 works at a heavy loss, much of the collection was kept together and came to form the nucleus of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, where they remain.

A gallery that floated in and then floated out of the world of art in London was created by the optimistic Viennese Count Joseph Truchsess, who claimed to have been a victim of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and had lost all his money. However, he had somehow retained about a thousand old master paintings, and with the help of Viennese bankers and associates he sailed these on barges up the Elbe and over the sea to England. When he opened his eight-room purpose-built gallery on the New Road (now Marylebone Road) opposite Portland Place in 1803, many were deeply impressed. None more so than William Blake, who told William Hayley, his friend and Flaxman’s, ‘I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me.’ A young American traveller Benjamin Silliman, who would become a pioneering chemist, was equally impressed, dubbing Truchsess’s collection ‘one of the finest . . . in England’. Not all were taken in by this collection of works, however: it largely consisted of studio copies. Thomas Lawrence decided with some authority that there was ‘scarcely an original picture of a great master among them’. Truchsess’s overriding purpose was to persuade the British government to buy the whole lot as the basis of a national gallery, but like Desenfans before him, he failed.

The ‘contemporary art’ dealer, ubiquitous in the twentieth century, is a product of the mid and late nineteenth century, coming to the fore out of the previous generation of art patrons. Thus Lord Egremont, Sir George Beaumont, Sir John Leicester or Walter Fawkes might favour particular living artists for personal reasons, and buy their work direct and in quantity. Beaumont made his own decisions; Leicester heard advice from William Carey, though he generally took his own; Egremont and Fawkes made friends with their artists. Of those artists who could not rely on regular patronage, Haydon bobbed just below the surface of financial stability, occasionally rising up like a happy trout, but more often half-drowned in debt and family responsibilities, making enemies, and in and out of the King’s Bench Prison. Money rolled in for John Martin, who ran his own business, after success followed success in his practice as a painter of biblical and cataclysmic subjects and an engraver of the same. However, Martin spoilt it all for himself and his bankers when, during a personal crusade in the 1840s in which he must have felt he was the only crusader around, he spent all his money on developing and promoting a doomed and premature scheme to supply London constantly with fresh water from the Hertfordshire hills and to sweep away its sewage.

Caleb Whitefoord, a transitional and prototypical figure, for whom buying art for others was just one of many activities, channelled money to artists from multiple sources. In the 1760s this young Scot, who had rebelled against his father’s wish that he become a minister of the Church of Scotland, emigrated to London and set up as a wine merchant. Success in that business gave him the opportunity to travel in Spain and Portugal and to taste the good life. On the suggestion of Benjamin Franklin, then in London, Whitefoord joined William Shipley’s Society of Arts. Thereafter he became closely involved in the Society’s management as the chairman of its Committee of Polite Arts, where he was responsible for handing out money and medals to aspiring artists and manufacturers. Through that position he came into contact with many of the coming generation of artists who would drive the taste of the nation, and also with the patrons whose money would fund it: he ate turtle with Sir John Leicester, banked with Thomas Coutts, gossiped with James Christie, and put in a good word for Warren Hastings. The young artists who came into his ken included the hopeful David Wilkie and a hopeless George Wilson. The former he helped on his way with introductions when the aspiring young Scot came to London in 1805; Whitefoord was rewarded for his pains by being featured as a portrait in Wilkie’s semi-autobiographical painting Letter of Introduction (1813). ‘Give me leave to introduce to your notice & protection Mr David Wilkie’, Whitefoord was asked:

[Wilkie is] a young artist who proposes to spend some time in London in the prosecution of those studies, and the improvement of those talents that have already brought him into some notice in this his Native Land & which I can not help believing will with proper culture raise him to eminence . . . I need not solicit your good offices in behalf of this young and unprotected adventurer because I well know the pleasure you have ever felt in befriending merit.

Balanced against such rising stars as Wilkie were those who failed to strike the right note with so busy and influential a figure as Whitefoord. George Wilson of St Martin’s Lane reminded him:

About 2 years ago I presented to you as a small mark of my respect 2 drawings, representing a Boys & a Girls School, & did propose taking your advice on a little scheme I had laid out for the employment of my time in a manner congenial to my taste, & wishes . . . I have formed a desire to take up the Pencil, & to try if Painting . . . can procure me a little reputation & bread . . . If you should not think it too great a trouble to pay me a visit, I should be happy to see you . . . [p.s.] Upon enquiry I find Sir you left Town this day – this is rather unlucky as I had fixed my mind on you as my principle [sic] Arbiter & Adviser.

Whitefoord put up with such presumption, probably because he saw it as part of his role at the Society of Arts to handle approaching talent, whether promising or not. He also gave solace in 1801 to the once famous and sought-after engraver Valentine Green, now miserable, indebted and world-weary:

The casual visit Mrs Whitefoord and you have been so kind [as] to make to us in the New Road, since my retreat from thence, has so far anticipated the communication of that occurrence to you by Letter, which I had intended. Doomed to be assailed by misfortune in every vulnerable part whilst I remained a visible and tangible object, I determined on a removal that should at least place me out of the reach of further attacks [from creditors]. It must strike with surprise those who remember the extent, the consequence, the rank, the opulence of the numerous circle to whom I had been for many years known, that I have been sick & in prison, and they visited me not . . . after three years most ardent struggle . . . I have . . . discharged upwards of 500£ debt, and am at last beat out of the Ranks of Life, an Exile for an Eggshell, an Outcast for the value of the Breakfast of an Alderman!

J. T. Smith, in his biography of Nollekens, poked fun at Whitefoord’s dandyish side:

Whitefoord, who never ventured abroad but with a full determination to be noticed, dressed himself foppishly, particularly so in some instances. It is true he did not, upon trivial occasions, sport the strawberry embroidery of Cosway, yet he was considered extravagantly dashing in a sparkling black button, which for many years he continued to display within a loop upon a rosette on his three-cornered hat, which he was sure to take off whenever he considered bowing politically essential. The wig worn by him for years when he was at the summit of his notoriety, had five curls on each side, and he was one of the last gentlemen who wore the true Garrick-cut [a wig with five curls on each side].

Whitefoord was a new kind of dealer and patron, one who occupied neither position very clearly, but was nevertheless the prototype of the publicly accountable arts administrator of the mid to late twentieth century. He fought off criticism directed by artists at Noel Desenfans, who asked him:

Will you be so good as to submit the two Pamphlets & the Catalogue I now send, to the Society for the encouragement of arts & commerce? I beg the committee of the fine arts, will examine them & determine whether I had in view, the rise or the downfall of painting, & if their opinion is favourable to me, it will serve to make my peace with the artists.

As a dealer or an agent, Whitefoord was on the lookout for pictures for friends, among them Sir George Colebrooke, Bart, a former banker, MP and one-time director of the East India Company. Colebrooke was clawing his way back to respectability in Bath, having overseen the financial collapse of the East India Company and having lost a fortune in bad investments in minerals. Bankruptcy forced him into temporary exile in Boulogne. Clearly, Colebrooke had a rubber constitution, bouncing back into society with enthusiasm and vigour. ‘As sales are coming to London,’ he wrote to Whitefoord,

it may happen that something will be presented that will tempt you for me, either a large upright picture, to hang on one side of the Door of Entrance of the Drawing Room . . . or a long oblong picture or pictures with a view of hanging smaller pictures underneath to fill up the vacancy. The space between Door & wall is eight feet five Inches . . . I am disposed to lay out a sum of between one & two hundred, either in one picture or more.

Whitefoord’s personal resources were relatively modest; his importance was as an enabler and a fixer. The unlimited pockets of Beckford, Egremont, Whitbread, Gillott and Vernon, however – five patrons as different from each other as they were from Whitefoord – kept artists jumping to their tunes with the prospect of money. The artist–patron interface was roughly ground and insecure, and could easily come to a painful stop. While Haydon, Gandy, Baily and Rossi lived from hand to mouth, Martin, Turner, Northcote, Flaxman and Chantrey all coolly built up enough personal capital across their careers to maintain their independence, to finance (in Martin’s case) their dreams, and to maintain too their desirability to their patrons. Although the charitable funds available to poorer artists could begin to ease poverty, it was nevertheless, and ruthlessly, feast for some and famine for many.

By the 1820s relationships between artist, dealer and patron were becoming systematized through precedent and contractual agreements. This had to be particularly clear when an engraver was involved in what was often a four-way deal linking artist, patron/owner, dealer and engraver. The system owes its early development to John Boydell, who found richer pickings by abandoning his own modest talent as an engraver in favour of marshalling the resources of others. Having himself trained under indentures with the engraver William Toms, he discovered new prospects by starting his own business as a dealer in artists’ prints. He put down further personal foundations in the London business and political world by becoming a councillor for the Cheapside ward. Boydell developed and increased the market in print-selling, finding new outlets by publishing prints of paintings which had won prizes under Whitefoord’s aegis at the Society of Arts. Boydell was highly innovative in his business methods and entrepreneurial in the way he harnessed old and new engraving talent, such as the esteemed and reliable William Woollett and the initially buoyant Valentine Green. Boydell encouraged these engravers to produce images that he was convinced would sell – and, from the 1760s to 1790s, sell they did. Prints after paintings by Claude, Richard Wilson, Joseph Wright of Derby, Reynolds, West and Zoffany emerged from his shop and were sold as bound collections for subscribers and as individual prints to be framed and hung at home. It was Boydell’s initiative and commercial courage that fostered the fashion for history painting that remained lucrative for decades. Sixty years later Turner looked back on the glory days, when he mused in a letter on the pros and cons of a potential engraving contract:

Whether we can in the present day contend with such powerful antagonists as Wilson and Woollett would be at least tried by size, security against risk, and some remuneration for the time of painting . . . To succeed would perhaps form another epoch in the English school; and, if we fall, we fall by contending with giant strength.

Boydell expanded rapidly – too rapidly. From a large premises in Cheapside with a 70-foot-long upper showroom, which he rented from 1770 to 1789, he devised a new scheme whereby he would employ armies of engravers to make prints from paintings of Shakespearean subjects. These were to be published in volume form, with the texts of the plays, and also sold as individual prints or in sets. The scale of the project demanded a larger, more central gallery, and this Boydell – by now an alderman of the City of London – built at 52 Pall Mall to the designs of George Dance the Younger. His ‘Shakespeare Gallery’ opened in 1789. The financial demands that the Shakespeare Gallery made on him were enormous; so too were the demands of the artists. Boydell paid £500 to Reynolds in 1786 for Macbeth and the Witches; he had Gainsborough walk away because he (Boydell) would not pay £1,000 for a Shakespeare subject; and Joseph Wright delivered a Romeo and Juliet that Boydell would not accept. On being turned down, Wright accused Boydell of creating a class system among his artists: he would pay Reynolds and West more than he might pay Northcote, and that would be more than he might offer Wright. ‘Is not my picture as large as Mr West’s?’ Wright demanded of Boydell:

Has it not equal, nay much more work in it? Is it not as highly finished? And has not the public spoken as well of it? Then why should you attempt to make any difference in our prices?

To which Boydell replied sharply:

Had I ever presum’d to have classed the Historical painters of this country, perhaps Mr Wright’s name would not have stood exactly where [he] has been pleased to place himself.

Boydell took on artists of far lesser talent than Reynolds and Wright: painters William Hamilton and Matthew Peters; engravers George and John Facius; his own nephew Josiah Boydell. Some of these were not up to the job, and Boydell saw the supply of engravers talented enough to take on the work dwindle. It became, in short, a disaster. With hindsight it is extraordinary that such a large capital investment should have been made to supply so particular and volatile a product, a prey to changes in fashion and fortune. Riding on the back of Garrick’s Shakespeare revival of the mid-eighteenth century, Boydell’s grand Shakespeare publishing scheme went the way of the five-curl Garrick-cut wig, as worn by the foppish Whitefoord but by nobody else.

When France invaded the Netherlands and the Rhine valley in 1792, the continental market that Boydell so relied upon shrank away and the debts piled up. Tipping on the edge of bankruptcy and feeling the tentacles of the debtors’ prison reaching out to him, Boydell lobbied government to permit a lottery to raise the money required to pay off his bank loan and other debts and to get rid of the millstone of his Pall Mall gallery. Conveniently, just as the lottery draw was about to take place in 1804, Boydell died, leaving the ruins of the business and his artists’ odium to his nephew Josiah. When Green wrote ruefully about being ‘an Outcast for the value of the Breakfast of an Alderman’, he was referring specifically to John Boydell. Petitioning Parliament for permission to hold a lottery to dispose of the Shakespeare Gallery, Boydell claimed that he had spent more than £350,000 in promoting ‘the commerce of the fine arts in this country’. The engraving plates had cost him in excess of £300,000, the paintings and drawings nearly £70,000, and the gallery itself over £30,000. By the day of his death all 22,000 lottery tickets had been sold at 3 guineas each. The lucky ticket was owned by William Tassie, the modeller of wax portraits and medals of Leicester Square, who auctioned everything off again the following year. Tassie sold the sixty years left on the lease of the gallery to the British Institution for £4,500 and went home very happy.

Caleb Whitefoord was asked in 1806 to assist with the lottery sale of John Singleton Copley’s enormous, hagiographic painting The Death of the Earl of Chatham. It was premature to call it a ‘death’, as the Earl of Chatham, the former prime minister William Pitt the Elder, was only hit by a stroke in the House of Lords and lived on for a month. Nevertheless, this was the Enlightenment’s secular answer to the Counter-Reformation depiction of martyrdoms of saints or deaths of popes. When he suffered his stroke in April 1778, Chatham was speaking passionately in favour of taking direct action to retain the American colonies and to prevent their independence from Britain: thus the painting depicted the death of a political ideal, as well as the death of an individual. Henry Hope, collector brother of Thomas Hope, asked Whitefoord a favour. He wanted to take part in the lottery but could not possibly cope with winning Copley’s painting:

By the inclosed from Mr Copley you will see that his plan for the sale of his picture has so far succeeded as to induce him to put up with 20 subscribers, & a most respectable list it is . . . [M]ay I request the favour of you to appear for & represent me, in concurring with what the majority may find proper to decide on, in regard to the mode of settling who shall have the Picture, taking care not to draw the prize for me with which I should be more embarrassed.

It was won eventually by Alexander Davison, a government contractor who had made vast sums of money supplying the army and furnishing barracks. The Scottish painter Andrew Wilson also valued Whitefoord’s counsel on the matter of lottery:

I wish to dispose of the Brazen Serpent by Rubens in the same manner as the Death of Lord Chatham by Copley was sold . . . For a work such as the Rubens I should hope that in good hands there would be little difficulty in obtaining 20 subscribers, for 100 guineas would be no great object to any nobleman or gentleman who had so great a chance of possessing such a Picture.

William Beckford had a lively time commissioning picture dealers and book-buying agents to bring him treasures of the quality of Rubens’s Brazen Serpent from Europe to Fonthill. Henry Tresham, a member of the generation that had grown fat on the art trade surrounding the Grand Tour, was one of Beckford’s regular dealers. Tresham, an Associate of the Royal Academy, was an uninspiring painter but a regular committee man of the kind that finds welcome distraction in trivial pursuits. He first sold his own paintings to Beckford, addressing him in the obsequious manner so characteristic of the eighteenth century:

The pleasure you expressed last Year on seeing a Figure painted by me was highly Flattering, especially as your Approbation was confirmed by your purchasing the picture . . . I am ambitious of having the [pair of] pictures seen together in your possession, the price of this [Ophelia] as the former sixty pounds . . . I hope Sir that my proceeding will be interpreted as it really is – the Ambition of a Young Artist who is anxious to Merit the Approbation of Men whose Taste & Judgement Stamp a currency on Merit.

Within a few years, Tresham was buying old masters for Beckford out in the field, including works purporting to be by Guido Reni, Gaspard Poussin, Salvator Rosa, Raphael and Leonardo. In trying to attract Beckford’s interest in buying the so-called ‘Altieri Claudes’ from the Orléans Collection, Tresham reveals something of the cut and thrust of the art business during a period of war and political turmoil:

I waited but for a sight of the Clauds and the hearing of the sentiment of the person to whom they were consigned . . . [T]hey are in the possession of Mr Long a surgeon in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, who has the power of disposing of them . . . asking £7000 . . . I told him that I had the intention of bidding a very handsome price, but nothing like his demand . . . the high prices [at] which the Orleans pictures have been sold encouraged Mr Long to advance in the demand . . . I waited on Mr Wyatt this morning . . . he advised me to send you immediately . . . the pictures in my opinion being invaluable; and the opportunity such as nothing but the extraordinary revolution of things could have brought about.

Beckford secured the Claudes for £6,825. All this was against the background of Beckford’s coming sale of the contents of his father’s house, Fonthill Splendens, soon to be demolished. Beckford himself described the current state of affairs to another of his dealers:

Many of the pictures at Fonthill House will be disposed of about the latter end of next August in the general sale which will take place of the furniture & materials. The others will be removed to the gothic building I have been employed several years in erecting. When properly arranged I shall be happy in submitting them to your judicious inspection; but I cannot fix the period, as some considerable time will be yet required to perfect the edifice.

After he had left Fonthill to its imminent collapse, Beckford continued to buy on the art market. The dealer William Clark told him in 1824 of a recent bid for prints and drawings in Amsterdam, in terms of a campaign characterized by seduction and derring-do:

I shall not come away empty-handed – the three magnificent volumes of Vandyke’s Heads with numerous proofs, and several extremely rare portraits, have fallen to my lot, for 1180 gns – about two hundred less than I had intended to give . . . The young Canon offered me twenty pounds for one portrait – no! no! no! no picking and plucking out the precious tulips; they shall be planted in our garden in the state I receive them. I have also bought the great and small Lands[cape] by Rubens, with some proofs and variations, that you may have no regrets on that score. In my rambles, by scrambling up perpendicular stair cases, and swinging by ropes into cellars, I have picked up a few little things.

Beckford’s grand projet on the plains of Wiltshire attracted artists to draw and publishers to engrave view after view of his spiky Gothic madhouse. The entrepreneur and pioneer of topographical publishing John Britton, who believed himself to be thick with Beckford, chose the route of extreme sycophancy in his dealings over Fonthill. ‘I have made arrangements to leave town for Fonthill on Friday & shall take two artists in my suite,’ he told Beckford in 1822:

These I expect & hope will make such drawings as will please you, & these I need not fear pleasing the first connoisseur in the country . . . I am anxious to profit by your advice respecting subjects for drawings – points of view &c. Your eye & mind must be familiar with every point & the most favourable times for taking them . . . it would be of infinite advantage to my projected work.

Britton was a middleman, an engraver of brilliance himself, but one who also gave employment to artists and published their collected and processed work. He was soon making his way still further into Beckford’s favour:

I cannot forget that you already complain of being nearly ‘suffocated with the incense of adulation’: & I should ever reproach myself were I to increase that incense, & thus augment the danger . . . The breezes[?] of authors & sycophants you have cause to suspect – for too many of them are heartless, selfish, dishonest. Of course I flatter myself that I am not one of this class: perhaps you know – by that unusual sagacity which you evince on many occasions, what I am and what I mean. I hope you know me then you will give me full credit in assuring you I am Most gratefully your obliged and humble servt. (& I wish I might presume to add friend), John Britton.

His wife poured yet more honey into Beckford’s ear:

You will, I fear, deem me presumptuous in daring to intrude upon you anything so truly insignificant as my thoughts, which have forced themselves from me during my residence under your splendid and Princely Mansion. Permit me, Sir, to offer my most grateful thanks for this favor – above all price – which you have conferred in allowing me the enviable privilege of remaining as a part of your establishment for several days.

Sickly-sweet though they seem today, such encomiums were probably received so regularly by Beckford that they passed him by. Even after Fonthill had collapsed into a pile of rubble, Britton harped on about its glories to Beckford – perhaps not so tactful a course to take:

Having lately enjoyed a most delectable, familiar colloquy with you – listened to, and been gratified by your interesting, animated converse – having gone over former reminiscences – seen you – heard you – & sympathised with your witty, satirical-ironical discussion & profound eloquence, I cannot resist the impulse of thanking you, on paper: and to say that I saw Fonthill . . . in my ‘mind’s eye’ as plainly & fully as ever vision appeared to mortal man.

Long after Beckford’s dreams had been ruined, Britton pressed on in praise. When Brunel won the competition to design a suspension bridge over the Avon Gorge at Clifton, Britton mused to Beckford: ‘What a grand thing may be made in Bridge at Clifton? Oh that a Beckford had the execution of such a work.’ Just as well he did not – the Clifton Suspension Bridge might have fallen down as well. While dealing patiently over the years with Britton, Beckford had little to say to him, except to dismiss him as ‘that highly ridiculous, highly impertinent Britton, the Cathedral fellow’.

While Britton irritated Beckford profoundly, he had an even more negative effect on the notoriously unpleasant John Soane. When writing a memoir of the architect in Fisher’s Portrait Gallery, Britton found that Soane

suppressed many material facts . . . One of the vainest and most self-sufficient of men, he courted praise and adulation from every person and source, but dreaded, and was even maddened by anything like impartial and discriminating criticism . . . [the] memoir, though sufficiently complimentary for any reasonable man, so displeased him, that he was never afterwards cordial, and scarcely courteous towards its writer.

Up to the day he died in 1857 Britton was showing and trading from his collection, undoubtedly still displaying the character traits noticed by the publisher Charles Knight – ‘indefatigable, good-tempered, self-satisfied, pushing and puffing’. The architect A. W. N. Pugin, however, found a different, disgruntled side to Britton’s character, indicative perhaps of the huge financial pressures that he bore:

He seems Exactly the same man as ever only rather thinner & shorter, complains of want of encouragement, wishes he never had attached himself to Literary pursuits, and rings the sovereigns in his pockets with the exclamation of horrid bad times.

The American clergyman and collector the Rev. Elias Lyman Magoon visited England in 1854 and called on Britton, whose works Magoon had been buying from dealers in America. Writing in the third person, Magoon described a visit to the aged Britton, when he bought and carried off an edition of the History and Antiquities of the Cathedral Church of Exeter, interleaved with drawings and proofs from the publication’s production:

Just previous to his death, in his own home, many of the originals were bought and begged by a highly favoured American [Magoon]. One volume alone, with all the precious original pictures facing the engravings of the same cost the enthusiastic and generous antiquarian a hundred dollars. Other originals, in the same lots, cost over fourteen hundred dollars.

Magoon, a Baptist minister well known in the eastern United States, had a particular purpose in seeking out Britton, whose work was already spreading across the Atlantic. The engravings and the texts that accompanied them were so detailed and reliable that they became the source material for new churches and other buildings in the States.

Rudolf Ackermann, one of the early heroes of the art trade in Europe, was more personally detached and easier-going, and ran a more diversified business than Britton. Unlike Britton, he was a man not given to vacant flattery, but like Britton he found in Beckford’s Fonthill a rich seam of subjects for illustration. Magoon had come to England to buy; Ackermann came from Germany to make and to sell. London, the city in which all the trappings of Fonthill could be bought and sold, was the international hub of the business of art. Ackermann was born in Leipzig, Saxony, the son of a saddler. He came to London aged twenty-three, having served apprenticeships both in his father’s trade and, later, as a coach-builder in Dresden, Basle and Paris. Trained in saddlery to work with leather and in coach design to work with practically everything else – mechanical design, metals, carpentry, fine furniture, upholstery, paint, enamel, glass, horses, people – Ackermann had all the tools he needed to prosper in the luxury trades. London in the 1790s was blossoming with the production of objects of fine and decorative art, the building of new squares and terraces, and the development of the demonstration and instrumentation of science. Ackermann’s rigorous and rare business sense, which created new opportunities for manufacture, commerce and employment, initially expressed itself in the carriage trade. Long Acre, with Covent Garden nearby, where he first settled, was the centre of coach-making in London: there Robert Vernon and his father might have struck deals, and later the Winduses also. Ackermann’s flair for design and his talent for self-promotion soon won him a contract to design and make a model for the ceremonial coach for the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, Lord FitzGibbon; he was paid £200 for it. From this he turned his skills to general purposes, helping an embryonic London transport system to develop by designing the Royal Sailor, an eight-wheeled omnibus built to carry passengers between Charing Cross and Greenwich. Specializing in carriages as he did, Ackermann demonstrated how he could turn round a complicated order at incredible speed by designing and building the catafalque and coffin for Lord Nelson’s funeral in January 1806.

To promote his business as a coach designer, Ackermann worked with the engraver Joseph C. Stadler on the publication of Imitations of Drawings of Fashionable Carriages (1791), and then moved on to publishing on his own account from his premises in Little Russell Street, Covent Garden. This was the beginning of an extraordinary rise in production, prestige and influence for Ackermann, who by 1795 had bought the lease of part of 96 Strand where the Savoy Hotel now stands. Within three years that had become too small for his ventures, and he moved to 101 Strand – or as he put it, ‘four doors nearer to Somerset House’, the home of the Royal Academy. With a thirty-year lease on this building, Ackermann showed himself to be the obvious supplier of artistic goods, publications and materials essential to members of the Royal Academy, and more particularly to the Academy’s thousands of visitors. He was particularly canny in moving close to Somerset House, creating at the eastern end of the Strand a commercial hub as a counterpoint to the scientific-instrument businesses developing on the other side of Temple Bar in and around Fleet Street. The instrument makers had grown in response to the presence nearby of the Royal Society in Crane Court, subsequently in Somerset House, and the equipment needs of its natural philosopher members. It was this newly engrossing centre of gravity that created a commercial force eastwards, away from royal and residential Pall Mall, where Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery was failing and where, in due course, the British Institution and the first National Gallery would open. The particular specializations in London’s trade and display districts developed not by chance, but organically, by evolution and opportunity, as one entrepreneur, like Ackermann, built on another to gain strength, competition, camaraderie and market share. One pigeon will fly down to peck seed, then a dozen will follow.

The Royal Academy did not teach painting in its Schools, so as an answer to this Ackermann provided a service to the public that he had always, with profit, served. His drawing school was held in the 65-footlong Great Room of his Strand building, where the Society of Virtuosi had once met and where William Shipley had recently held his own drawing school in conjunction with the Society of Arts. Ackermann was now developing an integrated commercial organism, combining a glittery shop on the ground floor with, above, a drawing school where eighty or more pupils could be taught by one master for the human figure, another for landscape, and a third for architecture. Stock for the shop was manufactured on the premises – the waxed papers, jujube boxes, firescreens, transparencies, card racks, flowerstands, quills and crackers, all painted, folded and glued by the nimble fingers of a small army of émigrés from revolutionary France and, like Ackermann himself, from Germany. Ackermann had ‘seldom less than fifty nobles, priests and ladies engaged upon . . . ornamental work’; he knew how to orchestrate large forces, and knew too where to find his people. The artist W. H. Pyne wrote of Ackermann that he employed ‘a multitude of ingenious and industrious persons, in the various branches of his great undertakings; a public benefit for which he is entitled to the esteem of the British people’. One among these, teaching watercolour painting from 1798, was the youthful John Sell Cotman, from Norwich.

Employing continental and local craft skills that were to transform and diversify the market in ‘fancy’ objects, Ackermann, crackerman, brought art and pretty things to (almost) every pocket, swiftly and in quantity. Diversifying yet further and seeing yet more lucrative and commercial opportunities, he entered an already crowded market to produce artists’ materials and manuals in competition with Reeves, Roberson, Rowney, and Winsor and Newton. As a result, students in his drawing academy could use Ackermann paints, brushes and paper upstairs, choose Ackermann materials from the shelves downstairs, and study from Ackermann-published instruction books when they went home to practise and to paint. Nevertheless, he had commercial foresight enough to close his drawing school in 1806 when he needed the space to expand his retail business upstairs. The Times put it succinctly: ‘Mr Ackermann . . . has it more in his power to display and to publish to the world “The Fine Arts” than any other man in the kingdom.’ Rudolf Ackermann was, as his contemporaries confirmed, generous and loyal, and a man who stood out in voice and bearing:

He retained a strongly marked German pronunciation of the English language, which was given additional flavour to the banters and jests uttered in his fine bass voice . . . The friendships made by Mr Ackermann were so firm that they were unaffected by the great dissolver of amity – rivalship.

Ackermann made money in plenty: his accounts at Coutts showed an annual turnover of £30,000 in the 1810s. This was accrued not only through his shop, in which he also pioneered sales by mail order, but through additional opportunities such as the profits from his tea-room, and the one shilling entrance charge to his ‘Gallery of Ancient and Modern Paintings and Drawings’, otherwise known as Ackermann’s Repository of Arts. Here he displayed and sold watercolours and engravings, in particular the prints in aquatint and, later, lithography that illustrated the many books and journals produced under his imprint. The most influential of these, The Microcosm of London (1808–10), was a collection in three volumes of illustrations of London architecture, landscape and life. Ackermann’s success, which lasted well beyond the firm’s 200th anniversary in 1983, was due to Rudolf and his immediate successors finding the pulse of nineteenthcentury taste and satisfying the desires and aspirations for decoration and ornament in the homes of the rising middle classes.

Rudolf Ackermann had the Midas touch. He also understood, like many, the power and reach of reproduced illustration. He appreciated, too, the importance of a good title for a work of art, and asked Caleb Whitefoord for his advice:

Mr Ackermann’s best compliments to Mr Whifford [sic] & has taken the liberty of consulting Mr W about an appropriate name for the little print herewith send [sic], Mr W will remember there is a Mother’s Hope, a Father’s Darling also another cal’d What’s that Mother, now any pretty but expressive name for this little print. A knows no body that is more likely to Baptise it than Mr Whitford & A will esteem [it] a particular favour to send him a few Ideas.

From the early nineteenth century to the twentieth the Ackermann name lived on through the appreciation of its products. As a young man apprenticed to a Marylebone bookbinder in 1813, Michael Faraday studied Ackermann’s Repository of Arts weekly journal and made drawings from it. Nearly 200 years later, the writer Alan Bennett was reminded of Ackermann when he recalled the nineteenth-century mental hospital in which his aunt had been incarcerated: ‘in any other circumstances one might take pleasure in it as an example of the picturesque, in particular the vast Gothic hall which, with its few scattered figures, could be out of an Ackermann print.’

In 1825 Ackermann set up his eldest son, Rudolph, in business in a print shop in John Nash’s newly completed Regent Street. This river of trade and promenade ran from the fashionable and expensive residential and shopping district of Oxford Street, Portland Place and Regent’s Park, to the busier, more constrained urban spaces of Piccadilly, Soho and Charing Cross. Ackermann, father and son, now had a foot in both camps. Two years later, Rudolf the elder moved from 101 Strand back to his former address at number 96, where the architect J. B. Papworth, fresh from working for William Bullock at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly and Boodles’ Club in St James’s, had designed a new emporium for him on four floors. In the meantime the publishing side of the Ackermann business was growing. Beautiful, decorated books illustrated by the new process of lithography, and sumptuous books of coloured aquatints, including the popular Dr Syntax series, issued from its premises. One famous volume, with richly coloured pictures of the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, was published in 1826 in conjunction with the Pavilion’s architect John Nash. Another, the three-volume History of the Royal Residences (1815–19), had such high production costs that it bankrupted W. H. Pyne, who had been so rash as to commission 100 aquatints before he had any chance of getting his money back. So insecure was the creative end of the fine-book market that Pyne, like Haydon, Gandy and Varley, became a regular in the debtors’ prison. Ackermann, however, had no such failings. He introduced in 1822 the German tradition of ‘gift-books’, with the annual Forget-Me-Not, a small-format, highly decorated publication of poems and short, flowery illustrated articles. This sold around 20,000 copies a year.

Rudolf’s second son, George, had tougher land to plough. He had studied drawing in his father’s school and had learned the family trade at 101 Strand; but when the firm moved back to 96 Strand in 1827, he was sent by his father to Mexico City principally to sell Ackermann prints and books translated into Spanish and to make new publishing businesses work on the other side of the ocean. This western extremity of the Ackermann empire had grown out of Rudolf’s decision, in a rare moment of allowing his heart to rule his head, to invest in the emerging revolutionary movements of South and Central America after the collapse of Spanish influence following the Peninsula War. Rudolf had given money to Simón Bolívar’s uprising against Spanish rule and began to issue Spanish-language books for export to the young nations. George was directed to make these initiatives work as businesses, overseeing shops also in Guatemala, Colombia, Argentina and Peru. His attention, however, became waylaid not only by the effects of falling in love with the sixteen-year-old daughter of the Dutch consul to Guatemala, but also by becoming fascinated by the flora of Central America. He came home in 1829 when his father fell ill with worry after the news of his plummeting South American investments and the piracy of his Spanish publications. In his luggage George carried home drawings and watercolours of exotic landscapes and botanical subjects, as well as unfamiliar plant specimens, some new to botany. The now ubiquitous red cactus orchid, Epiphyllum ackermannii, was one of the specimens that George brought home and gave to the Society of Apothecaries’ garden at Chelsea, now the Chelsea Physic Garden.

Rudolph, George and their brothers took over the running of Ackermann & Co., as it became, after the pater familias finally retired in 1832. Diversifying and branching out as their father had done, the brothers took the company through cash-flow, liquidity and management crises, including a near bankruptcy in 1843, into new fashionable areas of print and object selling, to embrace railway prints and travel books, maps, games and photographs, and the continuing Forget-Me-Nots. They won royal appointment as Book and Printsellers to HM Queen Victoria and HRH Prince Albert, and in 1851 had a prominent display at the Great Exhibition. Their advertisement proclaimed that Ackermann’s had ‘the largest collection of exhibition prints and of London always on view: from 1s to 21s plain and coloured’. As publishers, Ackermann’s were leaders in the field of selling multi-coloured lithographic images when rapid changes in mass-printmaking technology brought such intricate images to the market. Rudolf Ackermann and his successors were generalists, creating a market and leading the way. Inevitably they attracted competitors, principally the Colnaghi family of art dealers, a development that demanded business decisions which led to the splitting apart of art dealing from the sale of pretty domestic objects. With high-value properties in the centre of London, the Ackermanns’ businesses could not afford to stagnate.

A specialist art dealer of a new kind, one with a large fortune, low overheads and a modern approach, was Thomas Griffith. He was the only child of another Thomas Griffith, a successful auctioneer with a large practice in Blackman Street, Southwark, and houses in Dulwich and Rye. Thomas Griffith the younger, who was at first an art collector and only later a dealer, went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, the year after his father’s death, graduating with an MA in 1824. Three years later he was admitted as a lawyer to the Inner Temple, but was not called to the bar. From his father, who had been grand enough in Southwark to be buried in the family vault beneath the vestry at St George’s Church, Griffith had inherited the Southwark and Dulwich properties, together with family plate and books. This was a substantial London trade family, widely known through their auctioneering business and sufficiently moneyed to allow the younger Thomas to develop a life in collecting.

By 1823, aged twenty-eight, Griffith had built up enough of a collection to lend twelve watercolours to an exhibition at the Old Water-Colour Society. Six years later he seems to have bought thirteen watercolours by Turner from the exhibition organized in June 1829 by Charles Heath at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, a clean sweep that astonished both Turner and Heath. The artist wrote to Heath at the time expressing some surprise at the size of the purchase and warning him against ‘creating any feeling of uneasiness’ in Griffith. This was the beginning of a business relationship between Turner and Griffith that lasted the rest of Turner’s life, and one which became fruitful for both men, the cause of friendship, mutual understanding and profit. The particular role that Griffith adopted, working from his home in Norwood and, from 1845, from his gallery in Pall Mall, was not only as a collector and art dealer, but also as an agent who brought artists and patrons together.

Within a few years on the art-collecting circuit, Griffith had developed friendships with artists and collectors widely spread in England. The painter Clarkson Stanfield, as much at home painting large theatrical backdrops as he was at making rapid studies of the erupting Vesuvius, received high praise from critics for his scene-painting for a production at the Drury Lane Theatre in January 1831. Stanfield told Griffith:

The short time I had to cover the canvas (little better than two days) led me to fear that the hurried manner that the greater portion of the work was done in would prove its failure and it has been a source of gratification to me to find my friends and the public so favourably inclined to what was certainly an incomplete performance on the first night.

By 1835 Griffith was every artist’s friend, receiving high praise from Edward Coleridge, a schoolmaster at Eton:

I entirely approve of your gallant endeavours to rescue the really deserving Artists from the tender mercies of the Dealers, and thus by quietly gagging those mercenary Harpies, who live by sucking the Brains of some, and poisoning the minds of others, to bring the ‘Artists’ into more immediate contact with their admirers, without any of the disagreeables generally attached to such meetings.

From Norwood and Pall Mall Griffith perfected the social side of art dealing. He was a smooth operator, close to patrons such as the novelist Frances Talbot, Countess of Morley, the collectors Benjamin Windus and Elhanan Bicknell, the socialite and artist Count d’Orsay, and the Ruskins. He was a friendly and staunch support for artists, and realistic to them about what he could achieve. When in 1842 Turner brought four magnificent new watercolours to him to sell, Griffith thought he could get 80 guineas each for them. ‘Aren’t they worth more?’ Turner retorted. ‘Yes, they are worth more,’ Griffith replied, ‘but I could not get more.’ To Windus he gave Turner’s watercolour Tynemouth, Northumberland. ‘You lay me under great obligations my friend,’ Windus wrote to Griffith in 1844:

But in accepting it believe me I shall truly value it & remember your kindness. I have written to Turner to ask him to meet you on Thursday, I should like to see him again at Tottenham. I hope he will come & we shall have a pleasant day.

The Countess of Morley, whom Griffith encouraged to paint, urged him and his wife to come to Saltram House, near Plymouth, to be entertained by her amateur ‘corps dramatique’:

We have a very large Saloon in the House in which we had a very pretty little Theatre constructed & we acted three nights to an audience of about 150 of our country neighbours each night.

So impressed and engaged were they by Griffith’s sales and support technique that a group of artists including Thomas Uwins, Henry Copley Fielding and David Roberts clubbed together to buy him a silver-plate tazza, a large flat dish on a single stem, with an inscription recognizing his services to art and artists. David Roberts wrote to say how delighted he was to be one of the number giving Griffith the testimonial of their appreciation, ‘knowing as I do, how much Art – as well as those who have a love of it – are endebted to you for its promotion’. Uwins was even more effusive:

In my fondest dreams of happy days I never ventured to imagine such an arrangement between artist and patron as your zeal & kindness has so effectually realised.

The Athenaeum gave the event high praise, at the same time throwing light on Griffith’s detached approach:

It is pleasant to find an amateur of pictures, whose fortune places him above the necessity of dealing, engaged in the delicate task of smoothing the difficulties which occasionally arise between painters and their patrons, and to see the artists manifesting their grateful sense of such liberal aid . . . To those purchasers of drawings who prefer negotiating with a third person, who is by circumstances independent of both parties, it may be satisfactory to know that the artist fixes and receives the whole price paid for his productions.

Griffith is a rare example, perhaps unique at his level, of the altruistic collector-dealer. He is indeed a throwback to an earlier generation when collectors such as Walter Fawkes, Lord Egremont and Sir John Leicester might buy works in quantity and liberally allow access to them. But even they did not give much away: Griffith, by contrast, was a genuine and disinterested go-between, concerned that works should be in the right hands. To Turner he wrote:

I have yielded to the pressing solicitations of Mr Windus and resigned your drawing of the Straits of Dover in his favour. He has paid me £50 for it, and as profit found no part of my purpose in this transaction, I enclose you a Cheque for the balance.

Dominic Colnaghi was a second-generation art dealer with family roots in Milan. His father Paolo Colnaghi had come, like his German contemporary Rudolf Ackermann, to England in the 1780s, after having first found work in Paris selling English prints in the Rue Saint-Honoré. There he was spotted as a coming man by Benjamin Franklin, who tried to persuade him to emigrate to America. As Franklin realized, the eve of the French Revolution was no time for a foreigner to run an art business in Paris, nor was Paris at that time a sensible place to design carriages for the aristocracy. Both he and Ackermann, by their own routes, came promptly to England.

With his Parisian business partner Anthony Torre, Colnaghi set up shop first off Pall Mall, and then, as Pall Mall prospered as a residential and business street, he moved to number 132. By 1788 Paolo Colnaghi, now anglicized to ‘Paul’ and having become a naturalized Englishman, was running the company, moving in 1799 to Cockspur Street, where Colnaghi’s would remain for twenty-five years. Here, between Pall Mall and the Royal Mews, later Trafalgar Square, the company flourished, a particularly lucrative business line being the sale of engraved portraits of distinguished men and women. The rich contacts Colnaghi had developed with English printmakers when in France served him well in London. He was opportunistic, publishing an engraving of Hoppner’s portrait of Nelson a fortnight after the Battle of Trafalgar, and showed entrepreneurial flair. Realizing the commercial value of Francis Wheatley’s series of paintings The Cries of London, representing sounds he would hear outside his shop every day, Colnaghi commissioned Luigi Schiavonetti to reproduce them in coloured mezzotint. Two of his most productive artists, Schiavonetti and Francesco Bartolozzi, were, like him, of Italian extraction – each, with the colourman Sebastian Grandi, the marble dealers Giuseppe Fabbricotti and Egisippo Norchi, the sculptor Giovanni Battista Locatelli and Paul Colnaghi himself, contributing a fertile Italian accent to the supply side of the art world of London.

Colnaghi was only ten minutes’ walk away from Ackermann in the Strand. Customers who moved from one to the other would pass from the lilting Italian tones in Paul’s shop, through the raucous cries and rattle of Charing Cross, past the roars of the lions at Exeter ’Change, to the sober German accents heard at Rudolf’s emporium. London, as ever, was as colourful on the ear as on the eye. Like Ackermann, Colnaghi produced two sons to continue his name and trade: Dominic and Martin Colnaghi carried on the firm with relish and profit until 1824, when they quarrelled and Martin was bought out by father and elder brother. Dominic and pater familias Paul moved back to Pall Mall, and for some years the brothers bid against each other at auction with cunning and fury, until Martin faded into bankruptcy in 1843. There is a suggestion in one of his sketchbooks that Turner played Martin and Dominic off against each other at the height of their rivalry. In separate memoranda written on the same page, opposite ways up so that the first could be read only with difficulty by the writer of the other, Martin Colnaghi seems to offer one level of discount – presumably for prints – while Dominic offers another.

Paul and Dominic Colnaghi were at the forefront of art dealing in their day, championing John Constable’s paintings, publishing David Lucas’s mezzotints after his work, and supporting Constable in the diplomatic preliminaries required to show his Hay Wain at the 1824 Paris Salon. There it caused the kind of sensation that had greeted Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa when that huge painting was shown in London at the Egyptian Hall in 1820 (see page 286). The Hay Wain had failed to sell when first shown at the Royal Academy in 1821, after which Constable’s friend and patron Archdeacon John Fisher advised:

Let your . . . Hay Cart go to Paris by all means . . . I would (I think) let it go at less than its price for the sake of the éclat it may give you. The stupid English public, which has no judgement of its own, will begin to think there is something in you if the French make your works national property.

In the event the French did not buy The Hay Wain, but the National Gallery had to wait until 1886 to acquire it.

The Colnaghis were always good friends to Constable; he responded with some dismay to the discord in the firm, remarking at the time:

I hear there is quite a bustle at Colnaghi’s . . . They are all brisking up. Martin seems to be clearing the house of the old man & Dominic – but he is not quite liked himself – he is said to make love to all the ladies who look over prints there.

Constable was noticeably touchy, not the easiest character for art dealers to handle. He was burdened with financial insecurity and a growing family, worries Turner never had. In 1832 Constable sent a Lucas mezzotint to Lord Dover, who was a strong advocate for building a new National Gallery. When Dover sent by return a worn print of a painting in his own collection, Constable snorted to C. R. Leslie in response:

I find Lord Dover carries on no inconsiderable trade, with this private plate. This Colnaghi tells me. Colnaghi will not give more than a guinea for one – & that not in money . . . I do think that as his Lordship was too proud to receive a present from me, he should have sent me at least the equivalent, bearing the character of a gentleman – but Mr Burke said that he found the nobility ‘weak & mean beyond the allowance to be made for such people!!’

Colnaghi’s, like all art dealers, had to be constantly on the watch for pirate publishers who would steal subjects whose copyrights were owned by others, re-engrave them and pass them off as their own. The market for portraits and engravings after them was brisk and lucrative, and brought into particular public focus by the exhibition at the British Institution in 1820 of Portraits Representing Distinguished Persons in the History and Literature of the United Kingdom. The exhibition’s catalogue introduction asserted:

We never read of the actions of any distinguished individual, without feeling a desire to see a resemblance of his person; we often imagine that we can trace the character of the man in the expression of his countenance; and we retain a more correct recollection of his actions, by keeping in our minds a lively impression of his general appearance.

Such public demand encouraged piracy. The High Court heard in 1834 that two portraits engraved for Colnaghi’s – of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Eldon, and of the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel – had been pirated by William Darton. To much mirth in court, the judge remarked on what he took to be ‘a most execrable likeness’ of Peel. ‘I suppose . . . that the defendant’s print of Sir Robert Peel is now just brought out with a view to prevent the formation of a new administration?’ To laughter, Colnaghi’s counsel retorted: ‘I am sure no one would like to have such ministers as those represented by the defendant’s prints.’ And they all rocked with laughter at the thought that their boss, Lord Chancellor Eldon, could be the subject of ‘such a villainous production’.

By the 1830s and 1840s dealers were taking advantage of the huge profits to be made from the engraving of popular images and pricing the work of the artists they sold accordingly. Ernest Gambart, a Belgian art dealer with youthful experience of working in Paris, moved to England in 1840 to build a career selling prints. In doing so he was following the well-trodden path laid across the English Channel by entrepreneurial Europeans: where Ackermann and Colnaghi led, Gambart followed. When he arrived in London, a future of dealing in paintings was for Gambart still some way off: he had as yet no reputation, no secure premises and little capital. Prints, however, could be carried about, in rolls or portfolios, and taken from shop to shop. After two years of this kind of salesmanship, experiencing success, failure and a loose partnership with the Paris art dealers Goupil and Co., Gambart set up on his own, first in Pall Mall, and later in King Street, St James’s. He was fully aware of the money to be made in acquiring copyrights from artists whose paintings drew crowds in the Academy, and saw further the potential in buying and selling precious and covetable images in the new medium of photography: he bought in volume from Henry Fox Talbot’s photograph-printing establishment in Reading. Among the artists whose work he sold and with whom he made lucrative copyright agreements for engraving were Landseer, David Roberts, Frederick Goodall and William Holman Hunt. What may have been Gambart’s initial approach to Jacob Bell, as a route to Landseer, was described to Landseer by Count d’Orsay in a letter probably written in 1847:

I saw Gambart today – he told me that he saw our friend Bell to whom he explained what he could do for you . . . Be sure that Gambart will show you on paper that by this present picture and the two other that you have in hand, that you will make £10,000 by the Engraving alone, in 3 years.

Landseer’s correspondence reveals the level of detail and bile that emerges from complex negotiations between highly strung and intense individuals who were fellow spiders in the same financial web. This letter to Bell, probably written in 1848, carries a level of suspicion and mistrust that continued and characterized Landseer’s business affairs with Gambart:

Private. You know I am not very often mistaken as to character. (I don’t want to boast). We have no experience in Gambart except his presuming upon one transaction as being the key to all I am ever to do or ever have done . . . Has any one any knowledge of his real means? I quite see his merits which he exerts for his own benefit. You will excuse my being so plain with the dispositions of a man you trust, but he does not give me the idea of a Gentleman (I don’t mean a dandy). Take advantage of my doubts, but don’t show me or my opinions up to him. And remember he does not care one D— for Art.

The dealer’s role as a go-between had its price, and more than just as a commission fee or mark-up. As Landseer found, a dealer’s attitude to the art he sold, and the artists he represented, created a constant dilemma to artist and buyer alike as prices rocketed and pressure to produce increased. The commissioning and dealing in artists’ prints that Gambart also found so lucrative had an additional insurance factor: it protected the boundary between the old master trade and the trade in paintings by living artists by adding variety to the market and increasing the range of art available through modestly priced engravings. The old master trade had become untrustworthy and risky for the generation of collectors who entered the market in the 1820s and 1830s and who could be duped by fakes. To them, a picture by a living artist had a short, traceable history, and could be openly discussed as a pleasure shared. How much more reassuring it was to have a bright Landseer dog hanging above the fireplace than a gloomy Roman saint shrouded in the Westminster oven’s odour of sanctity.