Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves Read online

  Robinson was fortunate to be in Paris at the beginning of a period of active expansion of the Louvre collections. From 1848, in particular, with the birth of the Second Republic, the government invested heavily in the building and the collections, allocating two million francs for repair work. And as the French economy grew during the middle of the century, so too did the number of works on display: over 20,000 works were added between 1852 and 1870. But even in the years before this, it was a unique resource for a young artist. The Revolution and its aftermath had made it possible to view, in one place, a range of artworks from many periods and in many styles arranged specifically to instruct students like Robinson. The emphasis was on works that could be usefully copied, and on hanging pictures chronologically and by national schools of artists (with French painting given pride of place) to explore the historical evolution of style and technique, ‘a character of order, instruction and classification’, as one of the early museum directors explained.3 This was a relatively untried way of displaying works, with only a handful of German galleries experimenting with similar principles; the National Gallery, in contrast, modelled its displays on the domestic traditions of private country-house collections.

  In Britain, art was crammed into rooms from floor to ceiling and displays were arranged according to the aesthetic judgements of the organizers, the size and shape of works – or just to accommodate the space. It was unlikely Robinson could have profited from the type of education he received in France. ‘Nothing has so much retarded the advance of art,’ suggested John Ruskin, ‘as our miserable habit of mixing the works of every master and every century. . . Few minds are strong enough first to abstract and then to generalise the characters of paintings hung at random.’4 Moreover, British royal and aristocratic collections were still fiercely private, and Robinson’s routine of drawing and studying from private collections could not have been easily achieved: ‘The country was indeed rich in works of art, richer perhaps than any other,’ Robinson admitted, ‘but these treasures were the possessions of private individuals, scattered broadcast in a thousand places and town and country houses, for the most part hidden treasures, often unappreciated by their possessors even, and but casually revealed to the world at large.’5 Even aside from such scattered country-house collections, there was very little for the student. Sweden had had a national gallery of art since 1794; in Amsterdam the Rijksmuseum opened in 1808; and in Madrid the Prado was founded eight years later. London’s National Gallery, in contrast, was in its infancy. It did not move into its permanent building until the late 1830s and even then, as we have seen, its development was unsteady; its slowly expanding collections remained a matter of debate and disagreement. In addition, the French Revolution, the turbulence of the Napoleonic Wars and the violence and revolt across Europe in 1848 were fresh in the Victorian imagination. The tendency to public access and universality that was evident in France was in stark contrast to something of a backlash among the English establishment. Haunted by the prospect of unrest and revolution spreading to Britain from the Continent – and further stoked by the progress of the working-class Chartist movement during the mid-century – the British ruling classes tended to tighten their grip on power. This showed itself in a variety of ways, from increasing restrictions on women to a greater emphasis on the doctrines of the established Church. It also meant that, while government select committees and initiatives like the Schools of Design voiced the ideals of greater public access to art, in reality those who owned or controlled most of the works were more interested in closing ranks against the perceived threat of the masses. The French model of universal access, born out of the principles of the First Republic, was still some way off across the Channel.

  The only real British alternative lay with a number of exhibition societies that flourished in the second half of the century. While these did not show historic masterpieces, they did offer support to many artists considered too progressive to please the conservative members of the Royal Academy, and they welcomed visitors who wanted to view new work in a sympathetic environment. Many of these societies had open membership and modest subscription rates: the Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts founded in 1858 held lectures and debates and organized visits to private galleries for an annual subscription of £1.1s. Several specialized in encouraging artists who worked outside the oil painting tradition favoured by the Royal Academy – these included the Photographic Salon which met at the Dudley Gallery Art Society in Piccadilly and the Bookplate Society based at the nearby John Baillie’s Gallery – while others provided studios, study rooms and drawing classes, or even allocated grants to young artists. But such opportunities were limited. The exhibition societies were largely confined to the capital and were without real influence or prestige. Perhaps more significantly, their open membership policy and resistance to selection meant that the quality of exhibits could be poor. Displays frequently failed to inspire the serious student, and Robinson would have stood little chance of seeing many significant works of art at first hand.

  In France, it was the Louvre’s Italian Renaissance masterpieces that most captivated Robinson’s interest. He learned quickly and before long he was an expert. Eventually, he studied other periods and schools of art – he particularly came to value the workmanship of the medieval craftsman and to admire the detail of eighteenth-century composition – but his first love was for the extravagance of the Renaissance. It was never to leave him. Inevitably, when his years at the Paris ateliers were over, he brought it with him back to England. In time, this enthusiasm would influence his work at the South Kensington Museum, and have an impact on the type of collections he developed there. But there was more to Paris than the Louvre, and alongside Robinson’s education in the public galleries he threw himself into the more informal training of the private collector. The lure of the hidden and the mysterious took him deep into the network of backstreets as well as into the smarter districts of the 7th arondissement where the curiosity shops were clustered. He became known to a number of successful and influential dealers, noting a preference for Monsieur Delange on the Quai Voltaire, opposite the Louvre and the Tuileries Gardens; he regularly bought the more reasonably priced wares of Mister Evans, who owned the next-door shop; and he was a frequent visitor to the small but packed showroom of Monsieur Couvreur, on the rue Notre Dame des Victoires, in the crisscross of streets around the fashionable Opéra.

  By 1846, hopeful visits to the most promising dealers had already become an integral part of Robinson’s life. A young man of twenty-two, he was collecting in earnest, haggling over the spoils of war and revolution, travelling to Orléans and Tours as well as keeping an eye on bargains to be had in Paris. For the next sixty years, his letters, diaries and published articles, and even his account books and official museum minutes, would show a man completely captivated by the idea of collecting. In Paris, the opportunity to visit several thriving and inspiring collections rooted in private connoisseurship provided a touchstone for what he might go on to achieve, proving what could be done with dedication and commitment. Perhaps most important of these was the collection of Alexandre Du Sommerard in the atmospheric medieval Hôtel de Cluny. Open to the public on Sundays from 1832, the elaborate rooms drew on the influence of the Wunderkammer, evoking the cluttered, treasure-trove effect of the impassioned collector and drawing crowds as large as those at the Louvre.

  By the time of Robinson’s visits, the state had taken over the collection, arranging the pieces more systematically and allowing more frequent public access from 1844. The Musée de Cluny was already making news among English politicians and commentators as a resource for educating taste and encouraging the skills of artisans and manufacturers, being held up as a model for British projects like the Schools of Design. Robinson had probably heard of the collection in this light. But it was also a scholarly celebration of collecting the medieval and Renaissance decorative arts. Du Sommerard published a highly illustrated, five-volume catalogue (1838�
�46) with an emphasis on the pieces as ‘strange and rare history’ instead of as evidence of design standards, and it was this sense of the more idealistic possibilities of collecting that Robinson seems to have found most inspiring.6 Du Sommerard had a dull day job in the French Audit Office, but his heart was in collecting and for an impressionable young visitor like Robinson this enthusiasm was in itself exhilarating.

  Robinson was already finding his way into the circle of collectors. A recommendation from a fellow connoisseur would have granted him access, via three flights of steep stairs, to the tiny apartment of Charles Sauvageot, in rue du Faubourg-Poissonière in an outlying district of northern Paris. Sauvageot lived completely surrounded by his things. ‘The objects were so crowded that I tucked in my sleeves from fear,’ wrote another English visitor, clearly afraid of accidental breakage. ‘It is evident that he buys articles from real love of the beautiful.’7 Sauvageot, like Du Sommerard, had a ‘normal’ career, working at the Customs office, and his rooms were small and cramped. He had little money, but he was an indefatigable scavenger, alert to the possibilities for acquiring unusual and valuable works in the long aftermath of the Revolution. His collection showed that with patience and spirit it was possible to achieve a great deal. Robinson took such models to heart. He became acutely aware of the variety and beauty of the objects on offer. He developed a taste for Limoges enamels and an enduring fascination with textiles. He bought sixteenth- and seventeenth-century silks, with their colours still bold, an ornamental carpet and a magnificent altar cover. He became voracious in his collecting, developing a sense of urgency and competitiveness that was to last a lifetime. But late in 1846, after a period of intense collecting, Robinson’s money finally ran out. He was forced to return home to Nottingham in the middle of an English winter, complaining in his diary that the city was ‘desolate’.8

  Back in Nottingham, Robinson missed desperately the romance of Paris and the thrill of making contacts there. He continued to paint, but could not find a way of supporting himself as an artist. For a while, his life seemed dull and miserable. His years in France had made an enormous impact on him, inspiring his collecting and offering glimpses of what could be. Short of money and lonely, these possibilities suddenly seemed all too distant. But Robinson was lucky. On 1 June 1847, he was appointed to work at the Nottingham School of Art, before moving just two months later to a post as Assistant Master at the government School of Design in Hanley, where he doubled his salary to one hundred pounds a year. At first glance, teaching drawing skills in the industrial smog of the Midlands potteries was not a glamorous job. But one of Robinson’s first tasks was to return to France, to report on the state of pottery and design, and on the teaching of art. He was delighted to be back in Paris, and he was convinced that he had found a quick route to promotion. He was confident that, with his inside knowledge, his report would get him noticed, releasing him from the stagnancy of his provincial backwater and into a more vibrant life in London. In the meantime, he could stroll again by the Seine and rummage in junkshops.

  For the next few years, before starting at the South Kensington Museum in 1853, Robinson travelled as much as his job would allow – for work, for pleasure and to make himself an expert. In 1851, he discovered the pleasures of Italy, and found for the first time a beauty and romance to challenge anything he had seen in France. Apart from the ‘curse’ of mosquitoes, which he bemoaned in his letters, there was nothing to upset his enthusiasm. He was overwhelmed by the spectacular sculpture and the magnificent architecture of cities like Verona and Padua; in Florence the glories were so numerous that Robinson was ‘too excited to go to bed’; and then there was Venice. ‘I have just got in from a moonlight sail through Venice,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘The moon is at the full – brilliant – pouring down floods of light through a deep blue endless sky, such as you have never seen and never will til you come to Italy – Imagine, but you can’t imagine! – and I am too stupid to describe and no I can’t, I can’t begin, what an ass I am.’9

  Robinson was inspired by Italian architecture and art, by the landscape, the language and the culture. He felt he had found a spiritual home, one which was to influence his collecting for the rest of his life. For several months during the summer of 1851, he went from city to city, from Milan to Brescia, Verona to Padua, Ferrara to Bologna. Italy was beginning to occupy a particular place in the Victorian imagination, and Robinson was at the heart of this impulse to celebrate, and romanticize, what could be experienced there. Since the eighteenth century, the British elite had shown a fascination with Italy and its art: half of the paintings sold for more than £40 at London auctions between 1711 and 1760 were by Italian masters, and the Italian towns were well-established highlights of the Grand Tour. Canaletto’s idealized paintings of Venice, showing aristocratic palaces alongside pristine canals, were hugely fashionable in eighteenth-century Britain. But travellers like Robinson were beginning to look beyond the well-trodden paths to the Grand Masters. In 1851, the same year as Robinson’s journey, John Ruskin published the first volume of The Stones of Venice, an influential book-length essay which held up Italian Gothic architecture, and the communities of craftsmanship from which it emerged, as a model for cultural and social reform. Ruskin’s campaign to save neglected and shabby Italian buildings, including St Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, took on the vehemence of a crusade, and he arranged for paintings, photographs and plaster casts to be taken of what he considered the most threatened architectural features. Works like The Stones of Venice, and the earlier Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), inspired the Victorian public to look at Italy in a new light, not just as the fashionable birthplace of Dante or a place of restless politics and retarded modernity, but as a medieval and Renaissance treasure.

  This was something Robinson was delighted to discover first-hand. But collecting in Italy during the middle of the century was not easy. Transport was unreliable, treasure-hunting was notoriously hit-and-miss, and armed scuffles were not at all uncommon. Since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the movement towards unification of the Italian states had gathered pace. The years 1848 and 1849, just before Robinson’s visit, marked the high point of revolutionary idealism with popular support from all classes: from Sicily in the south to Venice and Lombardy in the north, people took to the streets against both native rulers and the Austrian Habsburgs. Though the insurgency collapsed in the summer of 1849, through a combination of dynastic rivalry, foreign invasion and the withdrawal of key support from papal and Neapolitan forces, the movement rumbled on uncertainly and a series of internecine conflicts broke out, especially in the central Italian states. For travellers this could be disruptive and even dangerous: ‘We are expecting a battle every hour, and however exciting and romantic it might be, it would not be pleasant to be rolled amongst the debacle of a beaten army and a panic-stricken population,’ Robinson wrote during an eventful journey from Florence.10

  But there were advantages to such upheaval. Collecting in Italy had rarely been so rewarding. As the old structures of power were challenged, objects from both the aristocracy and the Church found their way on to the open market and into the hands of collectors. Charles Eastlake, the first Director of the National Gallery (1855–65), was just one of those who were drawn to the treasures made newly available by the troubled political climate. He made a series of collecting trips to Italy throughout the 1850s and 1860s; his acquisitions included Fra Angelico’s Adoration of the Magi and thirty other paintings from the Lombardi-Baldi collection in Florence in 1857. Whatever the risks, the allure of Italy, it seems, was too great to resist.

  Despite his eventful holidays, and his preoccupation with collecting, Robinson’s day job continued to go well. He was, as he had foreseen, creating an immediate impression at the School of Design and, by 1852, after just over five years, he had been promoted to Teachers’ Training Master. His timing could not have been better. It was the same year that Henry Cole began to reorganize and reinvigorate the government desig
n programme, and Robinson soon came to Cole’s notice, partly for his practical work, and partly because he put himself in Cole’s way by sending him, with characteristic confidence, a series of suggestions for improving the Schools. Less than a year later, in September 1853, Robinson was in London, at the heart of things, in a new position at the South Kensington Museum. It seemed like the perfect job. He could bring to bear all the art knowledge he had gleaned, he would have public money to spend and he could immerse himself in collecting. What began as a temporary post was confirmed as permanent on 8 July 1854, and Robinson took his place in the ranks of professional collectors.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Battle of South Kensington

  Within two years of starting work in London, John Charles Robinson was sitting at his desk, watching the tree tops scraping a bare spring sky. It was early March 1855 at the end of a particularly cold fortnight. Frosts had set hard in the city parks, making them shine white through the smoke-thick air, and the pavement corners were slippery with ice. From the window of his office in Marlborough House, on London’s Pall Mall, Robinson could see uniformed doormen stamping their feet to keep the chill from their bones. A discreet notice at the end of the closely raked gravel path tried to entice the public into the warmth to see the displays of ‘manufactures’, all that yet existed of what would eventually become the splendour of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Visitors made their way steadily into the striking redbrick building and up the marble stairs to peer into the heavy glass cases that lined the rooms inside. In the dignified Georgian townhouse which Sir Christopher Wren had designed for the first Duke of Marlborough and his wife Sarah, porcelain, glass and metalwork were displayed on the first floor; plaster casts were pushed into chimney niches, paintings hung high from the elegant coving and Indian textiles draped over couches. There was plenty to admire.