When the director of the Berlin Museum, Gustav Friedrich Waagen, made his first crossing of the North Sea in 1835, the paddle-steamer from Hamburg creaked and rolled, and he was as sick as a dog. In the roundabout way characteristic of his writing he observed that in his sea-sickness he was on classic ground:
the powerful sea-god Neptune belongs to the family of Aesculapius, and in his own element shamefully meddles in the profession of his relation, by administering powerful emetics.
Such baroque circumlocution about bodily functions on the first page of his three-volume work on art collections in England sets the scene for the detail and chromatics of the observation and writing to come. It was first published in Germany in 1837, and in England the following year; a revised and expanded edition appeared in English in 1854, translated by Elizabeth Eastlake, the wife of the director of the National Gallery. While this was not the first survey of art collections in Britain – Waagen was preceded four years earlier by the German painter and author J. D. Passavant – it was the most thorough and influential to date, and set a standard of research on the subject which was followed until far into the next century.
As director of a great and ambitious museum, Waagen was the prototype for the profession of museum curator that spread worldwide across the succeeding 150 years, into our own time. He combined the disciplines of art history, of which he was a pioneer in Germany, with sociability, splendid contacts, a talent for gaining admittance to fine houses, and a way with words. Further, he had an eye for the opportunity of making judicious purchases for the ambitious Prussian government of art collections from declining aristocratic families and impoverished churches throughout Europe. As a young man he had lived and studied in Rome, where he associated with ex-patriate German artists, and having served in the Prussian army from 1813, he was able to study the looted collections in the Louvre when the allied armies occupied Paris from 1814. He would not have known the London diarist Emilia Venn’s shocked reaction when she heard how Field Marshal Blücher had behaved in the Louvre in 1815, soon after Waterloo. On her visit to the battlefield less than eight weeks after the slaughter, she heard gossip that all the Prussian field marshal could say, as he clomped around the galleries in his high boots, was ‘I’ll have that!’ The curator of which Waagen was the prototype required skills that could distil the rapacity of a Napoleon and the determination of a Blücher into an acquisitiveness for the public benefit that anticipated both a national glory and a humane civic outcome.
Waagen’s was a spectacular and successful career in which he helped to lay the pathways required to make great art accessible to the public in Germany. However, to get a full understanding of the subject a visit to England was essential. When he arrived in London, Waagen was already a living foundation stone for a new profession whose purpose he would exemplify. Like all foreign visitors arriving in London by water, Waagen was overwhelmed by the volume of shipping on the Thames, its forest of masts, its pavement of decks, its polyglot nationhood. The river sparkled in the sun, and he was soon translating the scene into familiar territory and preparing himself mentally for his task by finding paintings everywhere:
Now, for the first time, I fully understood the truth of [Dutch marine] pictures, in the varied undulations of the water, and the refined art with which, by shadows of clouds, intervening dashes of sunshine . . . and ships to animate the scene, they produce such a charming variety in the uniform surface of the sea.
Observing, as he was driven to his hotel, how like Dutch paintings were the workshops open to the London streets, he remarked how such paintings ‘far surpassed by their naiveté the artfully arranged living pictures’.
While the National Gallery had been open in Pall Mall since 1824 and would move to its own new building in Trafalgar Square in 1838, Britain was still a nation of private collections. The most comfortable places in London to see pictures remained the grand houses of the great – the old money. Waagen visited them all, and visited also the town houses of gentlemen whose comparatively new wealth came out of manufacturing and industry, banking and agriculture, minerals and transport. He enjoyed his quest hugely: ‘my life is here filled with a succession of rich and interesting enjoyments!’ Waagen received generous hospitality to the extent that his book is also a hymn to English cooking, one that Maria Rundell might have appreciated:
The celebrated and truly excellent national dish, the plum pudding . . . forcibly calls to mind the petrified primeval fluid mass, the conglomerate of the mountains, aptly called pudding-stone. It is likewise a symbol of the English language, in which the flour very properly represents the German, and the plums the French part.
Enjoying the display of Spanish paintings in the collection of the historian of Spain, Richard Ford, Waagen was treated to another fine dinner:
A succession of savoury and characteristic dishes initiated us gradually and agreeably into the mysteries of the Spanish cuisine, while a complete harmony of keeping was further insured by the accompaniment of most legitimate Spanish wines.
As much as Waagen’s volumes are about the treasures in Britain, they are also a travelogue exploring British life and manners, setting the nation’s artistic wealth into its rich social context. It took a German art historian to suggest it, but plum pudding with Spanish cuisine is a pretty good, if unintentional, metaphor for the variety of art collecting in Britain in the nineteenth century.
Touring the grand palaces of the West End of London and out into the country, Waagen was able to marvel at the accumulation. He noted how the English ruthlessly took advantage ‘of the circumstances of the times’ – wars, revolution and social unrest – to collect works of art from the continent. Drawings, engravings, manuscripts, gold and silver objects and sculpture – anything, indeed, that could be moved and had beauty and value – were harvested by English collectors, creating what Waagen saw as an ‘embarras de richesses’. He wished he had had ‘the hundred eyes of Argus’ to take it all in. It is these avid, enthusiastic and ruthless instincts that marked British collectors out, and without them Britain’s rich public art collections would never have come together. Waagen greatly enjoyed meeting the grandees, for there is none so grand as an English grandee. He got up as far as the prime minister, the collector-politician son of a cotton king, Sir Robert Peel, who he found had ‘engaging manners and the most refined and polished address’. Among Peel’s pictures was The Chapeau de Paille by Rubens, now in the National Gallery. This was one of Rubens’s own favourite works, which he had refused to part with during his lifetime. It was sold at auction in Antwerp in 1822, and then to the picture dealer John Smith for £3,000. Failing to sell it to George IV, Smith displayed the painting the following year in Old Bond Street, where 20,000 people saw it – among them Turner, who drew a sketch with colour notes. Peel bought the painting for £3,500.
Another collector, the horticulturalist founder of Westonbirt arboretum, Gloucestershire, Robert Stayner Holford, gave admission to his collection ‘with the greatest liberality to all lovers of art’. Holford’s wealth came from an unexpected source:
Hereditary thrift, along with a cache of bullion buried on the estate of an uncle in the Isle of Wight during the threat of Napoleonic invasion, contributed to the fortune which enabled Robert Holford to accomplish his life’s work.
Holford came to build Westonbirt House in Gloucestershire, and from 1849 he built Dorchester House in Park Lane. Waagen saw Holford’s manuscripts, sculpture, paintings and other treasures at the collector’s then home in Russell Square, the house formerly owned by Sir Thomas Lawrence, where he was left alone to study the works, ‘a kindness contrasting favourably with the habits of other owners of MSS in England’. Waagen needed time with the treasures:
I always endeavour if possible, to see pictures of . . . excellence twice; surprise and admiration not allowing me at first that calm, composed enjoyment which is necessary to penetrate into the essential and fundamental properties of important works of art.
Waagen’s task of reporting back to the Prussian government on art and artists in England, and on collecting habits across the North Sea, came at the time when the aristocratic connoisseurs of the Grand Tour generations were being joined in the hunt by the heirs of fortunes from trade and commerce, such as Robert Peel, Robert Holford and Robert Vernon. Money flowing through the agency of dealers buying for private clients was to be joined in the 1850s by money allocated to such figures as Charles Eastlake and Henry Cole, director of the South Kensington Museum, later the Victoria and Albert Museum, who were buying for the nation. They were able to continue to travel around Britain and the continent and bring a harvest home. On being made director of the National Gallery in 1854, Eastlake was given ‘carte blanche’ by the then prime minister, Lord Aberdeen, to reinvigorate the collections. With £10,000 a year allocated to him by the government to spend on works of art, Eastlake crossed Europe in search of old master paintings.
Collections are by their nature personal and severely temporal. The melancholy of a collection dispersed was evoked by Peter Patmore, writing of the empty walls of Fonthill after Beckford’s sale in 1823:
The works which composed its principal ornaments exist, and will even (in imagination) keep their places on the walls where they have once hung . . . there they will continue to hang, till we shall chance to see them in some other place; as the image of a lost friend for ever occupies the spot where we last saw him.
Few collections are complete, requiring countless routes via the agent, the banker and the address book to approach a wholeness that can never come. The art critic and dealer William Carey, a character on the edge of the art world in the first decades of the nineteenth century, acted as agent for Sir John Leicester. He satirized the blind fashion for collecting art from the continent by observing that British collectors tended to reject the evidence of their eyes ‘as unfit to be trusted, and looked at pictures with their ears’. Carey was a member of the unreconstructed English school of curatorship, involving himself less in rigorous art history and strategic acquisition in the Waagen manner, but variously in opportunist art dealing from premises in Piccadilly, in published criticism, and in taking instruction from Leicester on managing a great man’s art collection.
Carey’s career began in Dublin, where as an art critic he wrote under the pseudonym Scriblerus Murtough O’Pindar, thus demonstrating that art critics such as Carey and his contemporary Thomas Wainewright the Poisoner (a.k.a. Janus Weathercock, Egomet Bonmot, Cornelius van Vinckbooms) had a lively sense of the ridiculous. He had tried to be a painter, but an accident to his eye put paid to that ambition. Moving from Ireland to London, taking the long route via Philadelphia, he fearlessly banged the drum for British art by British artists, commending for example the work of the young Francis Chantrey in the Sheffield press, and mocked the prejudice of the connoisseur. A collector in London, ‘of rank’, he averred,
would have considered his character as a Connoisseur irretrievably forfeited, by having a landscape or an historical picture, by an English painter, hung up in his apartments. With a very few exceptions, this humiliating and groundless prejudice continued to prevail among the higher classes.
Carey made enemies: he was described in print as ‘one of the greatest pests in English art’. Nevertheless, he stuck to his guns and opined that the measure of a painting to British collectors was not what it looked like, but what tribulations it had experienced, how wild and incredible a history it had had:
The how many Royal, Princely, and Noble Galleries and Cabinets it had passed through; the miraculous good fortune by which it had been obtained on the Continent; the when it had arrived in England; the dangers which it had escaped in its voyages and travels; the awful care with which it had been enshrined and kept up from the profanation of vulgar eyes after its arrival; all of these important particulars, which were wholly extrinsic of the picture or statue, formed the tale of mystery, the source of admiration, and the true value of the purchase.
Sir John Leicester called upon Carey in the development of his collection, but nevertheless muddles occurred. Writing to James Northcote, Leicester apologized for slow payment:
I regret . . . very much your Angelic Picture [listed as ‘A Group of Angels’] should have remained so long unsettled for, but it always [..?..] in my Head that it had been settled for by Carey. I enclose 40 gns which I believe was the sum.
Leicester steered clear of the art of the continent in bringing together his pioneering collection of British painting. Carey campaigned in support of Leicester’s taste, remarking on the state of collecting in Britain:
Nothing could be more prosaic and dull to a true Anti-British Absentee accustomed to judge of pictures by a tale of wonder, than the simple information, – this picture was painted only a few months ago, by Mr. Hogarth, or by Mr. Wilson, or by Mr. Gainsborough, or by Mr. West, each of which is an English Painter, living within half an hour’s walk in London, in such and such a street, lane, or alley.
Carey was a driving force behind Leicester’s championing of Turner. He saw Turner as
the enchanter, whose magic pencil had created the chief wonders of this temple . . . Nature, in endowing his mind, appears to have been indifferent to his person; but his brow is a page on which the traits of his high calling are stamped in capital letters, and his dark eyes sparkle with the fires of inspiration . . . It is more than seven years since I saw this extraordinary exhibition; and even now the remembrance affects me. It is as the sound of thunder, above me, in the firmament, and my blood is moved. It is as the coming of one in clouds and lightning, and I feel a lifting up of my spirit. I see the sublime and beautiful of the mighty master! The powerful spell of the modern Titian is upon me! I own I am an enthusiastic worshipper of Turner’s genius; and I would never quit the attitude of adoration; but that I am sometimes obliged to start from my knees, and to strain my eyes down the immeasurable descent to which he is occasionally hurried, by the glorious, but dangerous ambition of extending the circle of his fame and the dominion of his science.
Temporary art exhibitions were largely outside Waagen’s remit. These had come together since the late eighteenth century through the energy of entrepreneurs and artist-organizers, working both together and in rivalry to create a dynamic exhibition network as a means to sell pictures. Earlier in our period individuals such as John Boydell, Count Truchsess and Michael Bryan ran galleries that rose and fell according to the market and the pattern of taste. By the mid-nineteenth century commercial and cultural evolution had produced a mix of exhibition species that were at once vivid, raucous, humdrum and inventive. Among the inhabitants of the exhibition world from the 1810s to the 1830s were William Bullock, the owner of the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly; the publishers and engravers Charles Heath and the Cooke brothers, who mounted exhibitions of paintings and the engravings after them; the collector John Hornby Maw, who dabbled in curatorship; artists such as Turner, Martin and Benjamin West, George Garrard, Flaxman and Chantrey, whose studios were more or less open for interested people to call by appointment; institutions, principally the Royal Academy and the British Institution, which mounted truly public exhibitions for all comers at advertised times; and the promoters of panoramas, which were open daily. All public exhibitions of this kind charged an entrance fee, or one disguised as an obligatory catalogue purchase. Turner described something of their plethora in a letter of 1827 to James Holworthy:
Come and see all the shows of the great town . . . The water colour opens next Monday, the British artists last Monday, the roundabout Monday week, the shop Monday fortnight. The lions are fed every night at eight o’clock and bones made use of every Thursday and Monday evenings at Somerset House during the winter season.
The exhibitions Turner refers to are the Old Water-Colour Society, of which John Varley was a stalwart, the British Institution, the Royal Academy (‘the roundabout’), and the lions at Exeter ’Change (see pages 311–12). The ‘bones’ are the ivory free-entry tickets to the Royal Academy, issued to members for their friends, while ‘the shop’ was his own gallery in Queen Anne Street West.
Until 1806 the most popular and best-known institution for showing art publicly in London was the Royal Academy in Somerset House. There, each year from late April until the end of June, the members and associates of the Academy opened their doors to all comers to show the paintings, sculpture and architectural designs that they had created over the preceding year. By the end of the century this event had evolved into the annual Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy, which runs still. An alternative and rival emerged when the ‘British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts in the United Kingdom’ was formed and moved into the former Shakespeare Gallery at 52 Pall Mall. The failure of John Boydell’s business in 1805 after sixteen years of trading had left the building vacant, and it was sold by lottery (see pages 151–52). A consortium of connoisseurs bought the lease from the lottery winner William Tassie for £4,500 as the home for their new counterpoint to the Royal Academy. These ‘angels’, who balanced a constructive concept for the public appreciation of art and an art school with a healthy self-interest, included the bankers Sir John Julius Angerstein and Thomas Baring, and collectors and taste-makers Sir John Leicester, Sir George Beaumont, Sir Richard Payne Knight, Lord Lowther, Samuel Whitbread, Caleb Whitefoord and the Rev. William Holwell Carr. They were attempting to echo the purpose of the Royal Institution for science in Albemarle Street and to create an institution which aimed to
improve and extend our Manufactures, by that taste and elegance of design, which are to be exclusively derived from the cultivation of the Fine Arts, and thereby to promote the general prosperity and resources of the Empire.
This altruism also allowed collectors to exercise a refreshed influence over the production of art and its public demand. An additional purpose behind the British Institution was to counter the perceived excess of power held by artists, through their creature the Royal Academy, which for the previous three decades had been the only effective institutional link between artists and patrons.
Sir Joseph Banks was a leading advocate of the British Institution. He expressed his trenchant and considered view that three great schools of painting of the past were the direct result of the ‘moneyed prosperity of the three countries in which they flourished’:
The Venetian School arose when that Town was the Emporium of the East; the Flemish when Antwerp was that of the Western World; and the Roman when appeals to the Roman Ecclesiastical Courts made their Lawyers almost as rich as our Civilians are now . . . In this Point of view the time is come when England has the means through her commercial prosperity to foster a fourth school . . . If half of the money that has of Late years been lavished upon Repainted originals had been divided among our artists, the business would by this time have been done . . . The Arts will always flourish in Proportion to the patronage given them by the Rich.
Beginning with a series of annual selling exhibitions of the work of living British artists, diplomatically organized to open in January and to close in late April so as not to clash with the Academy, the British Institution also developed a programme of exhibiting ‘Ancient Masters and other deceased artists’, drawn from the collections of subscribers, in various configurations of nationality and period. The British Institution did not claim directly to be a rival of the Royal Academy, but from the beginning it nevertheless made sideswipes at Somerset House, proclaiming itself to be the most patriotic of art institutions. A thoroughly partisan article in The Times in 1806 put its case, asserting extraordinarily that ‘the Royal Academy has given some éclat to the Arts, but done them no service’:
It has been asserted carelessly, unreflectingly, and, we might add, impudently, by the Abbé Du Bos, and other superficial writers on the Fine Arts, that the English nation, from its character and climate, would never form a School of Painting.
Jean-Baptiste Dubos, the French Enlightenment historian and critic, had died over sixty years earlier, but his criticisms in Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1719) still seemed to carry a sting, which was the more potent during these decades of war with France. The writer in The Times went on to observe maliciously that the arts have ‘certainly wanted encouragement in Great Britain’, and that a characteristic of British patronage was that it came ‘principally through commerce, of a nature by no means calculated to advance their progress towards perfection’. The phrase ‘principally through commerce’, which evokes the purpose of the Society of Arts, was intended here to drive a wedge between the old money and the new. Still leaning towards the old money, The Times declared that the British Institution was
formed on such principles, governed by such regulations, supported by such munificent liberality, and patronised by persons of such high distinction, superior knowledge, and refined taste, that everything is to be expected from it, in favour of the Fine Arts in the United Kingdom.
The first exhibition at the British Institution was a celebration of living British art, with over 250 works both lent for sale by artists and loaned by subscribers. This emphasis on, indeed celebration of, rich men’s property defined the difference in stance between the Institution and the Royal Academy. So did the public face of the Institution: their porter was dressed up in a scarlet gown trimmed with blue and he wore a gold-laced hat. In co-operation with the Academy, the time-tabling of the Institution’s exhibitions ensured that they did not show living artists at the same time. While the Institution encouraged copying of ‘ancient Masters’ from its walls, was developing its own collection, and had its own art school, the Academy considered itself to be the nation’s leading school of art, responsible for training and nurturing artists from youth. The Academy’s income came from exhibition entry fees and sales of catalogues, and its prestige from the talents of its past pupils, its present Academicians, and the promise and prospect of current and future students. The British Institution, however, initially had the ready money it needed because its sponsors – bankers, businessmen and aristocrats – ensured it, and these connections were all the social and financial prestige it needed at first to match that of the Academy. But the Academy also had a royal charter, something that the Institution lacked. Thus, for the good health of art it was essential that the two powerful organizations should find a way of working together.
In its early years, the exhibitions at the British Institution covered subjects that touched on Academy territory. Thus in 1813 there was an exhibition of 143 paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and in 1814 an exhibition featuring works by Gainsborough, Hogarth, Wilson and Zoffany – all artists safely dead, but nevertheless closely aligned with Academy interests. In the following two years there were exhibitions of Flemish and Dutch art (1815) and Spanish and Italian (1816), and following those a series that tended to rehash old topics with ‘Deceased British’ (1817), and ‘Italian, Flemish, Dutch and French’, and so on. It was an ambitious mix and match, climaxing with two exhibitions from the Royal Collection lent from Carlton House in 1826 and 1827, but one which drew on a diminishing supply as owners increasingly refused to risk or repeat the loan of their treasures. The rise of the British Institution took place against a background of severe difficulty for the Academy and partisan dismissal of its achievements. The British Institution’s first keeper, or curator, Valentine Green, rescued now from poverty by an annual salary of £100, oversaw the exhibitions and sales, while his successor, John Young, produced catalogues of the collections of a number of the Institution’s supporters, including Leicester, Lord Grosvenor and the Marquess of Stafford. Young wrote in the introduction to his catalogue of Sir John Leicester’s collection that ‘the establishment of the British Institution was the first public demonstration in favour of modern artists’. That was patently not the case. He went on to say:
This institution having solely in view the promotion of art, by bestowing bounties, purchasing pictures, and providing, through the medium of an annual exhibition, a Mart for the disposal of works of Art, has been the means of producing performances of the highest class.
When the Institution’s first exhibition closed in July 1806, The Times announced that 5,000 guineas’ worth of paintings had been sold, ‘a sum thus distributed in the encouragement of the Arts, and in the promotion of taste and talent in the manufactures of this country’. While it was attempting to promote itself as a more effective way of channelling money to artists than the Royal Academy, it is nevertheless clear that this grand gesture masked the level of mediocrity of those artists whose work had been bought by grandee purchasers. The British Institution’s president, Lord Dartmouth, bought a cottage scene by William Owen; and the Earls of Stafford, Carlisle and Egremont bought works by William Westall. The comparison to be made here is that at home these aristocrats hung paintings by Rubens, Rembrandt and Van Dyck, ludicrously strong competition for Owen and Westall, to the extent that one might suspect that at the British Institution they were just marking time. Other artists purchased at the British Institution in 1806 included Academicians Robert Smirke, John Opie, James Northcote, Sir William Beechey, John Singleton Copley and George Dawe. Only Opie and Copley had a level of merit that shows them in the twenty-first century to be significant of their period. That some Academicians, notably Turner, exhibited at both the British Institution and the Royal Academy indicates that the rivalry between the two institutions was carried on at managerial rather than practitioner level.
The subscribers and directors of the British Institution really did seem to believe in 1807 that they were saving the nation’s artistic soul:
This laudable zeal on the part of our Nobility and Gentry Amateurs, which appears to be now bursting forth to rescue the National character from the aspersions cast upon it by several foreign writers, cannot fail of exciting the gratitude of every Englishman who possesses the happiness of being able to appreciate the dignity and importance of the Fine Arts, whether considered either in an individual or political, point of view . . . we trust that this splendid patronage will stimulate the best exertions of British artists to meet this honourable encouragement.
Within ten years, however, the level of enthusiasm for the British Institution had dropped as the Royal Academy found renewed strength. ‘We entered the rooms of the British Gallery [sic]’, wrote The Times of the current exhibition of Paintings by Deceased British Artists,
with tremulous expectations. We came away with disappointed hopes and feelings . . . the general effect is painful and unsatisfactory. The pictures which are at present exhibited of the best of English artists – we mean Hogarth, Reynolds and Wilson – are in truth little more than the refuse of the works of those artists which were omitted in the late exhibitions. The rest are, in general, inferior even to these.
Terse comments rounded on individual works. Of John Hamilton Mortimer’s Bacchanalian Dance the critic wrote: ‘Mortimer was in his day called the English Poussin. Those who saw the pictures of Poussin in the Gallery last year, and who see Mortimer’s in the present collection, will not insist very strenuously on the comparison.’ And of the great Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Holy Family, painted in Italy: ‘It is well Sir Joshua left this manner behind him when he left Italy.’
As the years went on, the exhibitions at the British Institution began to falter as public demand for a continuous exhibition programme coincided with an increasing disinclination of owners to lend their paintings for display. Most of the lenders were subscribers to, if not directors of, the British Institution, and while they were all collectors, or had inherited art collections, they evidently came gradually to feel that enough was enough, as the value and rarity of their possessions increased and as transport risks grew greater. The Times began to notice a fall-off in quality and put its finger on the reasons when reviewing the British Institution’s exhibition of Italian, Spanish and French masters in 1824:
The collection appears to be less numerous than usual, but this we are not surprised at; the only wonder is that the directors should be able to go on year after year furnishing as they do a fresh supply of food for the increasing appetite for works of art. It is evident, however, that they find it more difficult to procure specimens of excellence than of novelty, and, small as the collection is, we would rather see it reduced to one-third of its extent than made up as it is in great measure of works that can neither be profitable to the arts nor creditable to the artists whose names they bear. We are satisfied that there are many works in this and other galleries which were never even seen by the great masters to whom they are attributed.
In the later 1820s The Times uncovered what it saw to be serious malpractices and collusion between the British Institution and the National Gallery nearby in Pall Mall. Both institutions employed the art dealer and picture cleaner William Seguier: at the British Institution he had succeeded John Young as keeper, while at the National Gallery he was also keeper. In addition, Seguier was Surveyor of the King’s Pictures. This was an elegantly tight monopoly of all the top jobs in the field. Seguier had been trained as a painter, and appears to have gone into picture dealing and cleaning when he married money. Over the years he bought paintings for Henry Hope, Samuel Rogers, George Watson Taylor MP, Sir George Beaumont, Lord Grosvenor, the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel. The list of his clients ran long and deep into influential territory, leading eventually to unrest amongst interested members of the public and accusations of collusion. Seguier was described by John Constable to the young C. R. Leslie thus:
When your pictures arrive at that state to deserve patronage, Seguier will provide it for you, as he is hand in glove with all the picture-buyers in England.
The Times published a series of letters from an unidentified correspondent, ‘Alfred’, complaining about the ‘ruin of the British Institution . . . which had declined with the increased influence of [a director] Sir Charles Long and the “picture cleaner” engaged by the National Gallery, William Seguier’. Alfred was convinced that jobbery and humbug were already influencing the management of both the British Institution and the National Gallery, and revealed that Seguier and Long were advising both institutions. Seguier, as Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, also advised George IV on purchases. He was behind the acquisition by the National Gallery of Parmigianino’s Madonna and Child with SS. John the Baptist and Jerome, which, as Alfred alleged, ‘was originally . . . in the possession of a frame-maker in Conduit Street, but at length found a purchaser at the price of 40 guineas’. This is bizarre, as Farington had long before reported that the painting had been bought in Rome in 1795 by Lord Abercorn for 1,500 guineas. It eventually entered the collection of George Watson Taylor, at whose sale in 1823 its price had multiplied over seventy times from the alleged 40 guineas to £3,050, and was purchased by the Rev. William Holwell Carr. Holwell Carr lent it to the British Institution and then in 1826 presented it to the National Gallery:
Here is an increase in value without example! The reason shall appear as I proceed, to the full development of the system, and total discomfiture of picture-jobbing.
Holwell Carr was an ordained priest less attached to his flock in Menheniot, Cornwall, than he was to his life as an art collector and dealer in London. Paid well by his rich Cornish living (which he delegated to a curate), Carr bought and sold paintings, to some of which he gave optimistic attributions, and others which he improved: ‘priest patcher and picture dealer’, as he was described in 1816. Nevertheless, he was an early and supreme benefactor to the National Gallery, bequeathing thirty-five paintings, including Rembrandt’s Woman Bathing in a Stream and Tintoretto’s St George and the Dragon. Another of Seguier’s clients was the collector and sometime MP George Watson Taylor, whose riches ebbed and flowed in concert with the fortunes of his plantations in the West Indies. As he sowed, so he reaped: having married money and collecting further riches from the sugar trade, Watson Taylor took a decidedly pro-slavery stance in Parliament. His extravagance went uncontrolled until he approached bankruptcy in 1832 and his collection at Erlestoke, Devizes, was sold over twenty-one days. Among the paintings he owned was Hogarth’s Shrimp Girl. Watson Taylor, Holwell Carr, Robert Peel and many other clients of Seguier, and Seguier himself, appear proprietorially among their paintings in the composite portrait The Imaginary Picture Gallery painted by the Dutch artist P. C. Wonder in the late 1820s.
Seguier ‘cleans, buys and sells pictures’, ‘Alfred’ alleged:
If a nobleman or collector dies, who values his collection but Mr Seguier? When they are brought to the hammer, who names the price to be given for them but Mr Seguier? He formed Mr George Watson Taylor’s collection, and it was in his interest that they should sell at high prices.
Alfred’s fury at the state of affairs at the British Institution had been roused by the recent decision of the directors to spend £4,000 to build an extension to the Boydell building to house its own ‘National Gallery’, in rivalry to the real one down the road.
Was there ever such a misapplication of funds? An institution, established, according to their own showing, for the encouragement of native talent in Great Britain, but which has declined into a broker’s mart for the interested display of old pictures! This, I presume, was with the advice of the picture cleaner [William Seguier], or perhaps the rev gentleman [Rev. William Holwell Carr] who advised the purchase of the Parmegiano, presented to the National Gallery, at the enormous sum of £3,050. I shall take occasion to say more on that subject at a future time, as it happily illustrates the unfitness of the picture-broker for the place which he holds in the National Gallery, and may effectually expose the system of humbug adopted in the picture world at present.
Alfred concluded his correspondence by calling for the establishment of an organization in which the National Gallery and the Royal Academy could unite: this ‘must now appear an event in the highest degree desirable, not only to artists, but to the whole nation’. It came to be ten years later in 1838, when the Royal Academy and the National Gallery moved as joint occupants into the new building in Trafalgar Square, designed by William Wilkins.
A measure of the healthy appreciation of art is the published criticism that is engendered around it. The exhibition at the British Institution in 1830 honouring the life and work of the past president of the Royal Academy, Sir Thomas Lawrence, attracted opprobrium not for the manner of the show, which was assembled within nine months of Lawrence’s death, but on account of the fact that it was mounted to raise money to support Lawrence’s surviving family. Lawrence was forever in debt, largely because he would spend large sums on old master drawings, and despite the fact that he was always in work, charging the highest prices for his portraits. Further, according to the journalist Alaric Watts, he appears to have been paid £3,000 a year by the publishers Hurst and Robinson ‘for the privilege, which did not belong to him, of engraving his portraits’.
It is highly honourable to His late Majesty, and the liberal directors of this powerful institution, that the present exhibition was got up for the advantage of the surviving relatives of the distinguished artist; but it would have been better, and more creditable to Lawrence’s memory and fame, had there been no occasion for this call upon public favour; for no artist that ever exercised a pencil derived more emolument from his occupation while living than Lawrence, and we are sure that we do not exceed the amount when we state, that in every way he must have received, during his professional career, little short of a quarter of a million sterling. How it has disappeared seems utterly unaccountable, and excites surprise.
Criticism of the British Institution became relentless. Constable was scathing in 1830: ‘I recollect nothing in the Gallery but some women’s bums by Etty RA.’ Even in the relatively minor matter of exhibition catalogues the Institution faced the lash of a disgruntled visitor who found that, while the Old Water-Colour Society charged sixpence for a catalogue of sixteen pages listing 346 paintings, and the Royal Academy asked one shilling for fifty-eight pages listing 1,474 works, the British Institution demanded one shilling for seventeen pages listing only 181 paintings. Five of these pages carried a list of the governors, and a sixth spelled out fulsome praise to the directors and proprietors.
Moving pictures around from country house to exhibition was then a risky business. James Northcote commiserated with Sir William Pole, the owner and subject of one of his portraits, who had lent the work to an annual exhibition in Exeter in 1823:
After the kindness you had shown to the proprietor of the Exeter Exhibition I think the careless conduct in respect to your portrait is absolutely unpardonable and he ought to be told that if he is not more attentive to the packing and carriage of the picture when returned nobody will let him have any to exhibit in future . . . I shall be happy to have it again in my hands and will carefully restore it to its original state. I have always considered it as one of my very best portraits and if the picture is much hurt it will be best to have it backed or as it is called lined by a canvas on the back which will give it great strength and safety from injury. I am happy to find that the picture was much admired and it is said my pictures did credit to the Exhibition.
Northcote went further and recommended an emergency treatment for general purposes:
If at any time the picture gets a misty or cloudy appearance on its surface which the varnish is apt to get from our damp atmosphere you have nothing to do but with an old soft silk handkerchief made hot to wipe over the surface of the picture and it will then appear as well as if it had a fresh coat of varnish on it . . . [I]n respect to the present crudeness of the colours time will correct that much better than if it is in the power of the best artist to do it. And all those pictures which we look at with so much wonder have had infinite good done them by time alone as far as relates to colour.
The care of pictures was at best rough and ready: some picture cleaners might have been scrubbing floors. The painter W. R. Biggs RA was employed by collectors and dealers to make dull paintings look bright again. ‘I remember most of Turner’s early paintings [at Petworth]’, Constable recalled to Leslie,
as they came occasionally to be rubbed out at Mr Biggs; I must say however, some of them came to him in a most miserable state of filth, shined on in haste for the exhibition.
The moving of pictures gradually improved as the century progressed. In 1820 Haydon had his 13-by-15-foot canvas Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem carefully rolled up in his Lisson Grove studio and carried off to the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly by three large soldiers from the King’s Life Guard. However, on practically the same date a monstrously large canvas, 21 by 35 feet, James Ward’s Waterloo Allegory (now destroyed), suffered when being rolled up for moving. The artist wrote in his journal: ‘The figure of Belona cracked by rolling yesterday – obliged to scrap[e] it off but improve it. Good comes out of evil!’ Nearly thirty years later Etty considered all the curatorial requirements, and carried out a similar operation by rolling his colossal three-part painting Joan of Arc around a cylinder and sending it by wagon from his studio in Soho Square to the Royal Academy:
The cylinder for the great Picture was one foot in diameter . . . It was, of course, hollow: of deal, smoothly planed, then rubbed with sandpaper; so that the surface could not injure. The volume of the cylinder being so large, would take nearly a yard of canvas to go round it. We did not put paper on anything; but rolled the Picture face in, contrary to general recommendation: as I felt assured the contrary would be fatal.
By the 1850s and 1860s picture transport had become a speciality of its own, with vans being fitted with deep shelves so that a dozen or more paintings could be laid out flat in the same vehicle.
Exhibitions outside London, in Exeter, Birmingham, Liverpool or Manchester, were organized by local societies, while others came together on the initiative of collectors determined to promote a particular kind of art or to show their own collections as a social event. Walter Fawkes showed his large collection of watercolours in 1819 at his London house in Grosvenor Place. This attracted such fashionable crowds that in a crush on the stairs ‘rouge melted, teeth dropped, feathers broken, bonnets crushed’ as the guests tried to circulate. Turner himself was present, and although he was not the only artist with works on display, he made his presence known there, as William Carey noticed:
he leaned on the centre table in the great room, or slowly worked his rough way through the mass, he attracted every eye in the brilliant crowd, and seemed to me like a victorious Roman General, the principal figure in his own triumph.
John Hornby Maw was another who organized drawing-room exhibitions of his collection and of works submitted by his artist friends. One show hosted by Maw in his Hastings house proved difficult for Samuel Prout, a Hastings man. Having a local reputation to protect, Prout became exceedingly upset at the way a drawing of his had been treated. He heaped his odium on fellow artist James Duffield Harding, who appears to have done most of the work in arranging the show. Prout’s drawing, of a shipwreck, had been hung in obscurity over the piano:
The disappointment at seeing it so heart-less-ly hung at the exhibn you know . . . I acknowledge that when I looked over the quantity of first-rate talent you had to dispose of in your drawing room, I saw but little probability of its finding a place; yet I had indulged the hope that in some way your estimation of it would have made him [Harding] blush to see the injustice he had done me.
I am persuaded it was your intention to do me honor, as you wish’d to have the drawing before the smaller ones could be arranged.
Had the affair happened at Guildford it would not have concerned me, being unknown in the place . . . No one values your friendship more than myself. I have been proud to discover congeniality of sentiment, especially with respect to art, & your residence at Hastings greatly quickened my restlessness to remove, as I had found in you what no other person in the town could give.
Prout went on about it in another letter:
I am ready to believe that you have done the best for my drawing, that, to you, Mr Harding is a gentleman, & that, to you, his observations were most respectful, but he has called me ‘mean, narrow-minded & unmanly’ & has ‘expressed his conviction that my tendency to crooked behaviour makes me shiftly persist in accusing others.’ You cannot but consider that these feelings still exist, from the injustice done to the picture in the late Exhbtn.
And on:
With a candour which I know you will readily allow, permit me to assure you that my not accepting the favour of Mrs Maw’s kind invitation, is far, very far from wanting personal respect, either to Mrs Maw or yourself.
It would have given me real pleasure to have joined your party as usual, but I feel that my drawing of the wreck, as it hangs, is unworthy of a place in your collection. It is unfortunate for me that you were obliged to give it the worst situation in the room & the only place where it could be disposed of.
As a proof that it was hid, the Lady & Gentm I accompanied to see your Turners noticed every drawing in the room but mine (which I was heartily glad of) & left the house without knowing that I was among the number.
William Seguier, the multi-tasking wheeler-dealing art dealer, picture cleaner, display arranger and curator, ‘that execrable Seguier’, as Beckford called him, died in 1843. His career trajectory was of a kind which would not survive long into the middle years of the nineteenth century, being largely dependent on volatile royal and private patronage at a time when the public purse was increasing its influence on the acquisition of art for the nation. The next generation was characterized by the work of Charles Eastlake, Seguier’s successor as keeper, who was appointed director of the National Gallery in 1854. This was despite some public discussion that Prince Albert had hoped to appoint Gustav Waagen to that post. Eastlake had already reached the pinnacle of the establishment as a knight of the realm and president of the Royal Academy, conveniently the National Gallery’s neighbour. By now he had ceased to paint, having fulfilled his ambitions as an artist, and directed his energies into committee work, management and travelling Europe in search of old master paintings to acquire for the nation. At home, running the gallery, was his reliable and highly responsible colleague Ralph Wornum, appointed keeper and secretary of the National Gallery in the following year.
Wornum had enjoyed an orthodox training before he began his pioneering career as an art gallery curator. His father had been a successful London piano-maker, and invented the machinery required in upright pianos at a time when every home had to have a piano. Ralph Wornum attempted to study law at University College, but soon abandoned that to become an artist. He studied at Henry Sass’s art school near the British Museum and took painting lessons from George Reinagle. Then, from 1834 to 1839, he travelled Europe, exploring many of the places that Charles Eastlake would come to trawl for paintings twenty years later. Writing long letters to his father from Germany in 1834, Wornum reflected on his life and purpose:
You wish me health. I really think of all things on Earth, health is the most desirable. At present thank God my health is furiously strong and I am getting broader and more Herculean every day.
He was robust in his opinions, as well as in his body, and was not a man to be pushed about in his later career by a difficult director:
I hate the Prussians, they are too much like the English for me – the most impudent, independent rascals you can imagine, but they are a fine people and I dare say the higher classes are most agreeable and pleasant company. Cologne is not worth a visit, it is composed of soldiers and pipe shops – they are all soldiers, every third man you meet is in uniform. There is nothing to see on the Rhine till you pass Bonn, I may say Coblenz Ehrenbreitstein is a most awful looking place, its full garrison is 18,000 men.
However, he firmly declared his early credentials in a way that would stand him in good stead as the nation’s first curator of Turner’s paintings:
The other day I told a man, who is considered to be a judge of the Arts, of our Turner. When I had finished, he coolly asked me ‘is he as good as our Rothman?’ Rothman!!! Said I, ‘Why Sir, Lorraine, Vernet, Salvator Rosa, are nothing to him, he is the only Landscape painter in the world. If I call the paintings of your Masters landscapes, I have no name for Turner’s, but if I call Turner’s Landscapes, your Masters are daubed canvases.’ I find the only way to make these fellows understand me is to come it strong – but that’s my real opinion of Turner.
Returning to London, Wornum began to paint portraits, but when that failed to go well enough, he turned to writing about art. His Outline of a General History of Painting among the Ancients, published in 1847, sold in large quantities and was later reissued as the popular text-book, Epochs of Painting. He lectured and taught drawing at the National School of Design, by now in the vacated former exhibition rooms at Somerset House, and was an early and productive junior curator at the developing South Kensington Museum.
Wornum kept a private diary from 13 August 1855, the day he received his appointment as keeper and secretary of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. The diary is a unique, touching and frank record of day-to-day gallery life; it is a foolscap suede-bound volume inscribed on its opening page ‘Not official. For my own use and ready information.’ After five days he notes that ‘Sir Charles Eastlake left for Italy’. By and by Eastlake came back to the gallery from his travels, and would then go off again; but, as the diary records, in the interim Wornum both held the fort and busied himself with radically revitalizing the displays in the gallery in a way that may not have been effectively achieved since the building opened eighteen years earlier. By the end of September Wornum had taken all the pictures down in groups both at Trafalgar Square and at Marlborough House, the gallery’s temporary outstation in Pall Mall. With the help of his staff, Mr Critchfield, Mr Bentley and other assistants, the paintings had, he reported, been dusted, rubbed with cotton wool and rehung. Dabbing with damp cotton wool, linen and sponge was a standard conservation and care technique for paintings, alongside the hot silk method used by James Northcote. The only pictures that left them daunted were three that would daunt any curator without access to lifting gear – the largest works in the gallery at that time, Sebastiano del Piombo’s Raising of Lazarus, Parmigianino’s Madonna and Child with SS. John the Baptist and Jerome, and Benjamin West’s Christ Healing the Sick.
Wornum writes jauntily about the refreshment that Eastlake’s appointment as director had brought to the gallery:
Apartments repaired and painted . . . 12 cwt of paint used in my rooms, and I was nearly poisoned by the smell.
Small landscape by Wilson (Garnons’ Bequest) hung at Marlboro’ House – rest of bequest rubbish.
Raising of Lazarus placed on the north wall . . . a much better lighting for it.
Eastlake returned to the gallery in March 1856 in time for a visit by Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and two of their daughters to mark the gallery’s new look. ‘Red cloth laid down – gallery kept quite clear’, Wornum reported. ‘Was presented to Her Majesty by Sir Charles Eastlake!’ Subsequently, when Eastlake disappeared like the White Rabbit into Europe once more, Wornum got on with glazing some of the pictures and having many of them backed for protection with glazed Holland, a material similar to that used today for roller-blinds. He had new bars and locks fitted in the gallery, doors given sheet-iron coverings, steps repaired, and the outside of the gallery painted – ‘two coats’. Now the National Gallery was spruce and smart and ready to welcome a new generation of visitors. It was ready also to welcome a new generation of pictures: on 25 September 1856, five years after the artist’s death, Wornum records the beginning of the love affair between Turner, his art and the nation. In the diary he wrote: ‘This day Mr [Phillip] Hardwick [one of Turner’s executors] broke the seal of the key of the Rooms containing the Turner pictures, and thereby gave those into my charge.’
There is a distinct air of disappointment in Wornum’s first response to the Turner Bequest, made available to the nation after a long-drawn-out court case had settled its future. He noted the numbers of works in his store:
Finished pictures, say 100; Unfinished pictures, including mere beginnings, and the majority worthless 182; Drawings and sketches of all kinds (about 400 superior) 19,049. Total 19,331. About 15,000 of these are small pencil sketches, mostly quite superfluous, and an annoying incumbrance.
For Wornum, the next few years are taken up with hanging the Turners and arranging the display of paintings from the Vernon, Sheepshanks and Jacob Bell (Landseer) collections at Marlborough House. In an important eight-page letter Hawkesworth Fawkes tells Thomas Griffith how this all came about, and describes the powerful impact that Turner’s paintings had even in storage:
All [Turner’s] pictures, drawings, sketches and prints are now safely deposited in the National Gallery; I was called away from my visit in Yorkshire to assist [George] Jones the RA in their removal; it occupied a long time but was ultimately effected without the slightest accident or injury, and although the object in placing them in their present receptacle is one exclusively of security & not exhibition, I am sure that Jones will be but too happy to shew them to you, if ever you dream of coming to town again. [T]hey occupy three of the Rooms formerly [appropriated ?] to the Vernon collection and such a blaze of Turner brightness [asterisk to the bottom of the page: ‘*in oil’] has never before been seen; it was thought better to divest them of their old frames – not so much on the score of shabbiness, as to make the most of the little wall-room allotted to us, and it is somewhat singular that not one of the pictures hanging up, was fastened by nail or otherwise in its frame, showing I think pretty clearly that Turner himself must always have been apprehensive of fire; this very much aided us in the removal as it was unnecessary to take any of the frames down, and there they hang in their old places like some unhappy Ghosts.
The first Turners from his bequest to be seen at Marlborough House included Snowstorm: Hannibal crossing the Alps (1812), Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (1829), The Fighting Téméraire (1839) and Snowstorm: Steamboat off a harbour’s mouth (1842). All had been sponged to clean off accumulated dust and dirt. By early December 1856 the number on show had risen to thirty-four, being joined by War: The exile and the rock limpet (1842), Undine (1846) and Angel Standing in the Sun (1846): these three Wornum had noted in his diary as ‘absurd’. Thus, almost simultaneously, there also appeared the beginning of the crack through the understanding of Turner’s work which divided those paintings which the public could readily enjoy and celebrate, and those which they would increasingly find to be puzzling, even, to use Wornum’s word, ‘absurd’. At this early stage in the Turner Bequest’s exhibition history, critics and public tended to occupy the same side of the divide, and it was a slow and difficult business to encourage even the most broad-minded of them to make the crossing.
Marlborough House did not remain long as the outstation of the National Gallery after the arrival of the Turner Bequest. Within three years the Turners, along with all the British School paintings in the National Gallery, the Vernon Bequest and the Jacob Bell collection, were displayed in six large galleries in the South Kensington Museum, each 50 feet by 25, adjacent to the Sheepshanks collection. Turner had three of these galleries to himself. British art had never before had such a spectacular and generous space for its display, either in private or public collections anywhere in the country. What John Leicester had begun in 1806 the nation was at last continuing fifty years later. The rooms were gas-lit, a system which caused teething problems:
The middle Turner Room at South Kensington lit up this evening, much gas escaped during the lighting causing a most disagreeable smell, and doubtless spreading all over the room and pictures.
Turner was not the only artist whose work would suffer agonies from mod cons. Holman Hunt remembered what the central heating did to Hogarth’s paintings in the 1840s:
Unfortunately, about twenty years since, they had to be removed to Marlborough House and to South Kensington, where, with hot air blown over the surfaces of the pictures, from pipes since changed, but then placed immediately below them, they were being treated like dishes rather than pictures.
The way pictures were being cared for and displayed began gradually to attract the attention of scientists and the opinion-forming professional classes. Their physical care progressed according to current scientific lights, while their display methods regressed at the expense of clarity. Michael Faraday, called in by Eastlake and Wornum to advise, objected to the glazed Holland cloth that Wornum had found so useful and recommended ‘common worsted stuff’ to be used to back paintings in preference. Faraday was also brought in to consider the effects of the new gas lighting on the pictures and their frames. John Ruskin wrote to The Times to condemn the lighting. ‘I suspect he is right,’ commented Wornum: ‘It dries the air too much.’ This may have exacerbated one of the curator’s constant anxieties, the worsening condition of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s paintings: ‘The cracks in Sir Joshua’s Holy Family appear to be progressing. Query, is this caused by the gas.’
Francis Fowke, a captain in the Royal Engineers, designed the new galleries at South Kensington. He was in the vanguard of modern gallery design, lending a new factory and military aspect to the classical style of country-house architects of the Wyatt, Holland and Soane generations. Describing the care he took over the lighting and heating of his buildings, Fowke identified a particular nuisance in picture galleries to be ‘glitter’, where light shone on the painted surface causing reflections which obscured the image. Fowke cured this by ensuring that the ‘opening for the admission of light be exactly half the floor area of the gallery’: a precise functional measurement that appeared to give clear glitter-free enjoyment of the paintings. The heating of the new gallery was effected by the method recently invented by Galsworthy Gurney for the Houses of Parliament: a fan of iron plates set in a circular trough of water surrounding the cylindrical coal-fired stoves. The cooling effect of the water on the iron gave a particular humidity to the air in the gallery, more efficiently than by simply exposing trays of water on top of the heaters. As Fowke described it, ‘instead of the air being roasted and then moistened, it is as it were moistened and then stewed.’ In the Victoria and Albert Museum science met art not only in the collections but also in gallery design.
The hanging method used at the National Gallery and by now at South Kensington favoured quantity over clarity, extolling what Giles Waterfield has described as the ‘cluttered hang’. In this style, paintings are spread all over the gallery wall in an attempt to fit everything in; frame avoids frame by a hair’s breadth. Other styles in Waterfield’s analysis include the ‘picturesque or decorative hang’, favoured by private collectors in large houses, in which paintings are hung more or less symmetrically around a large central canvas or pair; and the ‘historical hang’, which developed out of a growth in interest in art history among collectors, in which different schools are hung together – all the Italians, all the Dutch, all the French together, and so on. Later styles include the ‘single-row hang’, so beloved of late twentiethcentury public gallery curators, which was introduced by the Prince Regent in Carlton House. It is interesting to see that in the second decade of the twenty-first century the single-row hang is being abandoned in some public galleries in favour of a return to the cluttered hang. A further, rarer, hanging style, the ‘magnate hang’, still flourishes, perfectly exemplified in the West Gallery of the Frick Collection in New York, in which size and eminence are the measure. There, in order on the walls, like muddled chapters in a novel, we see Hals, Turner, Rembrandt, Constable, Velázquez and Vermeer, followed by Bronzino.
But gas or no gas, the new galleries at South Kensington were a triumph. When the museum’s governing committee, the Council on Education, invited MPs to see the displays, Wornum reported proudly that ‘many attended, with ladies, but I observed that while the iron building and lower rooms of the Museum were comparatively empty, the rooms of the National Gallery were crowded’. It was now time for another royal visit, and the queen and Prince Albert duly attended South Kensington Museum on 17 February 1860. This time Wornum was more than just another subject on the red carpet, for
I showed her majesty round. She observed on the excellence of the arrangement, and noticed that the Callcott Pisa and the Turner Golden Bow [sic] were very dirty.
Wornum adds that he ‘amused her by telling her some anecdotes about Turner. She was very gracious. Carried a catalogue away with her.’
There is no record of what ‘amusing anecdotes about Turner’ Wornum told the queen, but they are unlikely to have been wholly complimentary, and may have been among the early reinforced prejudices that continued to make the royal family shy away from fully acknowledging Turner’s genius into the early twentieth century. Nevertheless, the queen’s remark about the state of The Golden Bough had the desired and rapid effect: on 12 May Wornum writes: ‘Saw the Turner Golden Bough cleaned by Mr Bentley.’ Just over a year later the Turner oil paintings returned to Trafalgar Square, while two large galleries at South Kensington were hung with his sketches, 198 frames of them.
During Wornum’s tenure of the keepership of the National Gallery he sent long queues of paintings to the ‘Repairing Room’. They were careful but tough with the pictures, adopting robust ‘repairing’ practices to match the robust treatment paintings were subjected to in their travels. On returning to London from the 1857 Manchester Art Treasures exhibition James Ward’s Bull was found to be ‘covered with great cracks owing to its being folded . . . with the paint inwards – an absurd proceeding’. Not only absurd, but culpable in the light of the great efforts Etty went to in 1847 in rolling his Joan of Arc around a custom-made deal cylinder. Some Turners, a Wilkie and a Maclise were found to be ‘slightly damaged’ on their return from exhibition in Dublin in 1865, ‘owing to a Turner getting loose’ in the packing case and knocking the others. Then there were environmental problems to deal with: ‘Pictures at Kensington seem to be cracking generally – this must I think arise from changes of temperature – great heat with the gas and cold without.’
In the decades when science was triumphant, Eastlake and Wornum explored new patent picture-cleaning schemes inspired by science:
Mr Charles Vogt called by appointment, and explained and illustrated Professor Pettenkofer’s method of restoring the old varnish of pictures, which washed. Explained and permission given to use it without any other condition than that we should recommend it if approved. Not to be divulged. A small portion of Sir John May’s Ruysdael restored before Sir Charles Eastlake and myself.
The gallery’s practice in the 1860s included the washing of paintings with water and pea-meal, dried peas ground to a rough paste; four at least of Turner’s greatest paintings were treated in this way. Wornum and Eastlake, convinced by the efficacy of another new treatment, Professor Pettenkofer’s ‘method’ of restoring the varnish, submitted fifty-nine paintings to it in 1864, each one being carefully noted in the diary with the number of hours the treatment had taken. Thus:
Poussin Nursing of Bacchus |
3 hours |
Claude Death of Procris |
5 hours |
Rembrandt Jew Merchant |
13 hours |
Titian Venus and Adonis |
2½ hours |
Rubens Chateau de Steen |
4 hours |
Two years later, after Eastlake had died, Wornum and his new director William Boxall RA entertained yet another picture-cleaning method, one presented by Herr Hahn of Stettin, who
made some experiments with reference to the preservation of pictures. The regeneration of varnish. The removal of varnish without touching the paint. Also the straightening of curved panels.
Mr Hahn continuing his experiments. His straightening of panels and regeneration of varnish seem successful. Wants a thousand pounds! for his recipes.
Clearly the results from the Repairing Room were impressive, as Punch declared:
Bravo, Boxall! Well done, Wornum! They have dared to brave the bray of the noodles and the nincompoops . . . and have the dirt taken off some of the National Pictures! Not off all, unhappily, but off just enough to give us a relish of the beauty that lies drowned, fathom deep, under Sir George Beaumont’s liquorice-water and the late Mr Seguier’s favourite brown varnish. These men have actually had the pluck to dive to the bottom of these filthy brown standing pools, and to bring up the jewels of Rubens, and Poussin, and Salvator Rosa, as bright as when they left the hand that set them.
Gustav Waagen and Ralph Wornum began their careers after long periods of European travel and the careful but detached study of art and artists; they shared a desire to spend their working lives in the company of great art. Though of different kinds, Waagen the diplomat, Wornum the worker, both were pioneer scholar-curators, who appreciated the importance of clarity, order and interpretation in the way they organized public picture displays. William Carey and William Seguier came from the world of art sales, dealerships and shady transactions, publishing polemical articles and having the willingness and ability to take a chance. Their career pattern evolved, for Carey, into the profession of freelance critic-agent-curator, unattached, unbridled and loyal only to the subject; and for Seguier, into the dealer in the art trade. It is fairly safe to say that Seguier would never be employed as keeper of the National Gallery today. James Northcote, an artist typical of his period but of modest talent, was a practitioner of make-do-and-mend studio curatorship, while William Etty, who rolled his huge St Joan around a deal cylinder, is an example of the careful proto-modern artist who took sensible action to prevent damage to his work. Together, their technical innovations contributed to the development of the work that went on behind the door of the National Gallery’s Repairing Room, and beyond that into the picture-conservation expertise of the twentieth century.
Behind them in the studio or gallery workshop were cadres of loyal and reliable men and women who in an earlier generation might have been domestic servants. In his diary Ralph Wornum carefully and affectionately noted, with a heavy outline of ink, the deaths of National Gallery staff, from the director to the housemaid, recording their lengths of service – in a few cases this had been since the gallery’s foundation in 1824. These staff members grew with the job, beginning perhaps as a humble messenger and rising to be the uniformed public face of the gallery. For a classic case of a fine career in public art gallery management starting in the later nineteenth century, we need look no further than George Kirby of York, who announced:
Just a line to say that after 52 years service as Supt of the Exhibition Bldgs and Curator of the City Art Gallery, I have decided to retire at the age of 90 years.