Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves Read online

  Robinson relished the independence of collecting on the move. His days took on the rhythms common to collectors across the Continent: bursts of enthusiastic buying, long hours of frustrated travelling and the enduring desire to discover more and better things. If there were gaps in his knowledge, he plugged them with scholarly reading and conversation, so that he could hunt out and identify the best objects. Alongside his study of sculpture, he launched into the appreciation of bookbinding and manuscripts, textiles, metalwork, furniture and jewellery. He travelled quickly and bought extensively. He felt liberated again. He could ignore the irritations of the museum, and what he viewed as Henry Cole’s attempts to limit him.

  But such freedom was not to last. Robinson, with his nose on the trail of prestigious collections, perhaps misread the mood back at South Kensington. The museum, installed in its new site, was becoming more professional, and Henry Cole, free of the burden of the building project, was turning his attention to improving administration; there was a growing realisation that the museum should provide a model of what could be done, a blueprint for budding municipal projects up and down the country, and, indeed, across the world. In the years after the opening of the South Kensington Museum, a number of institutions were established along similar lines, with an emphasis on educating and developing public taste, raising the quality of manufactures and providing a showcase for craftsmanship. In Vienna, the Museum of Applied Arts opened in 1864, and in Berlin and Hamburg, two large and ambitious museums began assertively collecting the decorative arts during the 1860s with such success that by 1878 The Athenaeum was proud to announce that ‘Art and Industrial Museums, humble copies of our own parent establishment in South Kensington, continue to spring up all over Germany.’14 And it was perhaps in the USA that the specific example provided by South Kensington was most admired and emulated. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine claimed that the founding of museums in Cincinnati, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston was in direct and admiring imitation of the London model and hoped that this new generation of public institutions would be as successful as South Kensington in ‘widening waves of taste and love of beauty through the country’.15 Meanwhile, the New York Herald looked forward to the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in early 1872 by explaining that it would be modelled on ‘the splendid South Kensington Gardens London [sic], which is probably the most perfect thing of the kind in the world. . . a great work in behalf of civilization and education’.16

  In the light of such praise, Cole was no doubt aware that others were scrutinizing his models of curating and display. With the management of the British Museum and the National Gallery drawing such frequent criticism, he may well have seen a further chance to impress. Public discussion of the National Gallery had singled out the museum at South Kensington – as well as his leadership – for commendation: ‘We cannot refrain from bearing testimony to the ability, knowledge, and devotion displayed by Mr Cole in the management of the Kensington Museum,’ suggested an article in Quarterly Review. ‘The varied and admirably arranged collections exhibited there now form one of the most useful and interesting exhibitions of the metropolis, and are a convincing proof of what may be accomplished in a short space of time by well-directed and unfettered energy.’17 With such approval from the critics, and as the museum matured, Cole turned his attention more and more to securing its administration. Creative collecting and active educating needed reinforcing with clear and accountable day-to-day systems. This meant the careful management of staff and finances – and it meant keeping a close rein on Robinson.

  In Rome in 1859, Robinson sat down to write again to the museum from the cramped cold of his winter lodgings. This letter was swiftly scribbled, the tone urgent and sure. Robinson had his mind firmly on collecting and not on museum administration. He wanted to buy fifteen key pieces from the collection of Giampietro Campana who had spent years leading archaeological expeditions and bringing together Etruscan, Roman and Greek art, as well as Renaissance masterpieces. Campana was well connected – he was adviser to the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar, and his wife’s family was related to Napoleon III. He was also responsible for the papal Monte di Pietà, a system offering financial loans. It worked almost like a pawn shop: wealthy patrons contributed to a central fund, without the expectation that their money would be returned. Those needing a loan could apply to the fund, exchanging an object of value for ready cash. In 1857, however, Campana was arrested for using the Monte di Pietà to finance his own collecting. He was stripped of his collection and imprisoned. Almost immediately a scramble began across Europe to take advantage of his disgrace. Collectors poured into Rome, and Robinson was just one of the international connoisseurs negotiating for the best pieces as they came on sale. Campana’s magnificent collection finally raised about £207,000, the largest amount ever realized, to that date, for a single collection.

  Robinson also wanted over half of the collection (almost seventy pieces) which had belonged to Campana’s agent, who had also found the Monte di Pietà funds a useful way of supporting his personal collecting and who had been caught up in Campana’s downfall. He believed he had negotiated a fair price. He wrote to the museum and made the case for the purchase plainly, requesting that the money be sent without delay so that he would not have to risk fending off rival collectors. But again, Robinson had to wait and, when an answer finally came, it infuriated him: there would be no funds forthcoming, he was told, and he was to make no immediate purchases. The Campana treasures went elsewhere – many were bought by Stepan Gedeonov on behalf of the Imperial Hermitage in St Petersburg and by Napoleon III for the French collections – and Robinson had no choice but to return to London empty-handed.

  It is easy to imagine the gloom of the journey. It was a wet spring and tensions were running high among the various Italian factions vying for power as unification loomed. Roads were frequently blockaded and travellers stopped and searched. Progress was slow. And all Robinson had to think about as he waited at barriers was the humiliation and disappointment of having his advice spurned by the museum. He was not a man to doubt himself and he could see no satisfactory reason why his acquisitions should have been blocked. The museum was clearly mistaken and short-sighted in its refusal to buy the Italian works. He felt that his ambition for the collections was being wasted, and his vision for their future distorted. He was burning with a sense of injustice and grievance that was to smoulder inside him for a very long time. And on his return to South Kensington in the autumn of 1859 there was a furious row.

  Both Robinson and Henry Cole, it seems, were tired of playing cat and mouse with each other. Their rumbling complaints and accusations cracked open in a series of irate exchanges. Robinson bemoaned the uncertainty of his position, his poor salary and the lack of trust the museum appeared to have in his judgement. Belligerent and cantankerous, he stamped and puffed and hollered. In return, Cole, who was more than able to hold his own in an argument, prodded away at Robinson’s administrative shortcomings. He demanded to know why Robinson was not keeping any record of his movements and transactions and why his official diary was little better than blank.

  Robinson’s old-fashioned, self-reliant way of collecting was finally colliding with Cole’s administrative priorities and the growing sense of the curator as a public servant instead of a free-wheeling connoisseur. Robinson’s habits of collecting for the museum were much the same as the habits of a gentleman collector spending his own money. He believed that the justification for buying the best things was self-evident, and he could not understand the need to constrict or explain his activities by means of record-keeping. There was a sense in which he saw himself as some kind of crusader, travelling Europe to liberate the most beautiful treasures, like those of Campana’s collection, and bringing them back to safety. The spheres of private and public collecting were intimately entangled during the Victorian period, more so than ever before or since: the collection being developed at South Kensington was so much a part of Robinson’s characte
r and had his identity so clearly written into it that it was difficult to see any distinction between his personal choices and those he was making on behalf of the nation. He took advantage of the ambiguities of a role that was still evolving, letting his personal collecting priorities drive what existed of a public policy.

  Cole’s accusations only acted to entrench Robinson yet further in his ways, and to reignite the continuing battle over the philosophical basis for the collections. The two men seemed to be moving ever further apart. Robinson complained that the office accommodation was cramped and uncomfortable, moaning that ‘we are all packed close as pigs’ in the square rooms. But alongside his physical discomfort he also started to complain about the ‘ceaseless tramp’ of visitors to the popular new galleries.18 It seemed as though the practicalities of open public access were beginning to grate on Robinson’s sensibilities. His discontent with Cole’s mish-mash of modern collections at South Kensington was becoming identified with a wider disillusion with the way the museum was developing. Robinson’s interests remained with Europe’s elite collectors, and, as his contacts grew among the members of the Fine Arts Club and his own collecting became increasingly expensive and erudite, he was perhaps beginning to feel superior to the populist approach at South Kensington. His sense of what was right for the museum was constantly being offended: in 1861, funds for Robinson to take another planned trip to Italy to study Renaissance sculpture were diverted instead for Cole to go to the International Exhibition in Florence to buy objects for the less refined museum displays, including food and animal products as well as examples of contemporary design. Cole’s new attack about record-keeping only added to Robinson’s feeling that policy was heading in the wrong direction. He was desperate to prove that Cole was wrong – and that he was right.

  It was a relief, in the end, to close the 1862 exhibition and to be able to walk through the galleries again in the heavy quiet, with the visitors gone and the noise of activity in the rest of the museum somehow distant and without meaning. Robinson could take a moment now to breathe deeply in the calm, catching the scent of the past. The exhibition had proved a success, and had reasserted his position as the champion of the rare and the beautiful. It had boosted the collections: many of the lenders had been persuaded to donate their objects permanently to the museum. And it had cemented Robinson’s role at the heart of the Fine Arts Club, and at the heart of British collecting.

  Robinson had founded the Fine Arts Club just six years earlier in 1856, dedicating it to helping collections grow and improve, and to finding the best objects. The Club, which was later rechristened the Burlington Fine Arts Club, began quietly enough with evening receptions in Marlborough House, ‘frequently’, as Robinson boasted, ‘of the most elaborate and costly character’: fine wines and fine food shared among those who enjoyed talking about art.19 But it soon became extremely popular and membership had to be limited to two hundred, to make it manageable.

  The club’s membership was erudite and varied, drawn from all kinds of professional backgrounds and crossing political affiliations. There were practising artists such as John Henderson, a gifted amateur painter and archaeologist, and Baron Carlo Marochetti, a sculptor. There were wealthy establishment figures such as Sir Henry Thompson, surgeon to the Queen. Politicians included Lord Overstone, a celebrated banker and High Sheriff of Warwickshire, and Alexander Beresford Hope, a vehement opponent of the 1867 Reform Bill which aimed to extend the vote to the urban working class. There were also, inevitably, representatives of the English aristocracy, such as the Duke of Hamilton and Sir William Holburne, whose renowned collection was displayed in his fashionable Bath townhouse. And there were members who were very much engaged in the debates about public education and access to art. Meetings were attended by both Charles Eastlake, director of the National Gallery, and John Ruskin. The membership also included the Liberal politician William Gladstone, who was to serve the first of his four terms as Prime Minister from 1868, and who managed to persuade Parliament to pass the Education Act of 1870, to establish public school boards. In a departure from the usual model of the gentleman’s club, women, too, were invited and by 1867 there were eight female members.

  The club’s mixed membership no doubt led to some lengthy discussions, but the emphasis was firmly on collecting, rather than politics, and members clearly relished the chance to meet, if only to keep an eye on what others were doing. It was an indication of the power of the collecting impulse that the club managed to draw together such a disparate crowd with one common aim. It was also a testament to Robinson’s diplomatic skills, and it demonstrated just how confident he was – as a curator from an ordinary background – mixing in such circles. Under Robinson’s guidance, meetings flourished and when the museum became established in South Kensington, so too did the Fine Arts Club. But in time meetings were also held increasingly in private houses. This clearly allowed members to show off their collections to each other, but it might also have signalled a growing closing of ranks, and a desire to create a more elite atmosphere. The election of members by invitation created a structure for excluding more modest collectors; the membership limit of two hundred could be seen in this light as a matter of policy as well as practicality, ensuring the club was reserved for a comfortable coterie of learned friends. Collecting at this level was still entangled with the traditions of social class, and many members of the Fine Arts Club were no doubt keen to differentiate their activity from populist spectacles like the Great Exhibition. Robinson himself was certainly alert to such distinctions: the 1851 event at Crystal Palace was, he recognized, ‘the apotheosis of commerce and the shopkeeper. The aristocratic and cultured classes had comparatively little sympathy with the great exhibition, and had little or nothing to do with it’, whereas the Fine Arts Club ‘comprised every connoisseur of note in the country’.20

  Despite some of the club members’ more liberal credentials, it was this atmosphere of exclusivity and culture for the privileged few that became an issue in the wake of the 1862 exhibition. Cole found he was having to fend off assaults from the press and Parliament who accused the museum of forgetting its original educational purpose. The splendour and refinement of the 1862 show – displaying, perhaps too clearly, the obvious wealth of those who organized it – reinforced the impression that the museum had abandoned its roots in favour of a more glamorous and elegant existence. Despite all of Cole’s hard work on the core principles of design education, many visitors were getting the impression that the South Kensington galleries were straying away from sound and useful practice. During one debate, MPs harangued Cole by name and claimed the museum was no longer fulfilling its express original purpose of providing examples for education and training and had become instead ‘nothing but a great toyshop for the amusement of the residents in the west-end’.21

  Although Cole vociferously defended the museum against such criticism, there was no disputing the fact that the evidence looked damning. Students themselves, at design schools both in London and the provinces, complained continually that the museum was letting them down and that the collections were inaccessible and of little use to their studies. A written statement from the students at the London School of Design in 1864 declared the displays of ‘limited utility’ and one Lambeth student claimed that the museum ‘might as well be in the moon’ for any use it was to him.22 Cole was under increasing pressure to justify the amounts that had been spent – mostly by Robinson – on paintings and other objects which were of only slight relevance to design education: ‘What use to the practical workmen of the present day is the reliquary purchased recently. . . in Paris for the enormous sum of £2,142?’ demanded Art Journal.23 And indeed, when the accounts were finally examined, it was found that most of the public money given to the museum by the government in the decade since its opening had been used for non-educational purposes: to fund the increasingly complicated administration, to develop and maintain the growing complex of buildings, to finance travel abroad and to buy
expensive works of art for the collections, in line with Robinson’s private tastes. Visitor numbers continued to be healthy: figures hovered around 40,000 to 50,000 a month, for admission on free days, with as many people coming after work during evening opening as during the day.24 But the purpose of the museum seemed, especially to those who were funding it, to be increasingly opaque and confused.

  Cole could not shake off the feeling that much of the criticism was Robinson’s fault. During the grey, smoggy days of January and February 1863, the mood at the museum became fierce and gladiatorial. Cole found a host of accusations to level at Robinson, complaining in particular about his unremitting insolence. Once again, he ripped into the state of Robinson’s record-keeping. This time, however, he had a new complaint. Cole suspected something other than just administrative incompetence. Robinson was not simply forgetting to record his movements and to write up his sales – he was apparently being purposely secretive. He was, Cole believed, ensuring that the museum could not trace his movements nor piece together his activities. With the wet sleet falling thickly on to the glass roofs of the new galleries, melting into the courtyards in heavy streams and stifling the rattle of the world beyond, Cole finally voiced the accusation that had been gnawing within him for so long: was Robinson collecting for the museum, or for himself ?