All the Best Rubbish

by Ivor Noel Hume

  It is easy enough to dismiss such observations as the product of an overindulgence in the rich fare of Dickens, Henry James, or Sheridan Le Fanu. Nevertheless, the gnomes of irrationality are locked within each of us, and it is fun, even a relief, to sometimes let them out—providing we can get them in again. There is nothing particularly odd, for example, about collecting furniture, or so my great-grandmother thought when the first wagons rolled up to the door. But when they kept coming, and coming, and coming, she realized that great-grandpapa had a problem. Finally, in a house stuffed with furniture, he shot himself. As a rule, however, nobody sees anything very peculiar about a collector of American eighteenth-century furniture. On the contrary, it is a pursuit that is looked upon as a sign of class in an allegedly classless society. Because it is virtually impossible to collect any category of antique without having at least some interest in the period to which it belonged, it is reasonable to assume that now and again our American furniture collector sits on his William Savery chair and imagines himself in colonial Philadelphia, which, if he happens to live in New York, is thoroughly sensible thinking. We might, however, be more quizzical if we knew that he habitually rushes home from the office and changes into a Ben Franklin suit; yet we would be flattered and amused to be invited to his Washington’s Birthday colonial costume party. It is all a question of degree. How far dare we let our innate Walter Mittyism go before we draw the attention of neighbors, employers, or the police?

  I once knew an elderly lady dealer in Egyptian antiquities; she was fat, dowdy, and not terribly clean, yet her stark white bedroom was furnished with superb reproductions of the bed, chairs, and tables from Tutankhamen’s tomb. The floor was strewn with tiger-skin rugs, as was the magnificent bed whose frame was fashioned in the shape of a pair of golden cows, representing the goddess Hathor, each head supporting a gilded sun-disc between its horns. I would have wagered an asp to an obelisk that no sooner was that old lady alone than she would exchange her drab clothes for a lapis lazuli necklace and, lying back on the bed, be transformed into the Temptress of the Nile. And why not? There could have been little joy in spending her days amid flaking mummy cases and corroding bronzes, trying to sell ushabtis and canopic jars to a world that had shed its last bout of Egyptomania before the Second World War.

  Escapism and nostalgia lie at the very roots of collecting, and the tree grows best in periods of national uncertainty, when the “good old days” seem safer and more desirable than either the present or the future. Those of us whose flights of fancy have difficulty getting off the ground look back no farther than our own youth; hence the recent enthusiasm for Mickey Mouse watches, old Sears catalogues, and ancient movie magazines. Psychiatrists consider this sort of thing unhealthy and intimate that it can turn us into a generation of emotional cripples. Perhaps; though such gentle aberrations seem infinitely preferable to those that promote the collecting of Nazi insignia, animal traps, and whips of the world.

  It is true that people collect some very weird things, but as a rule such collections are but the tip of the iceberg; much greater depths of oddity lie beneath the surface of the collector himself. I became aware of this early in my career on a visit to the museum at Rochester in England. The town is best known as the setting for numerous episodes in the writings of Charles Dickens, and its museum is appropriately housed in one of the low-ceilinged and labyrinthine buildings which Dickens described so well. It is a typical county museum, rich in old farm tools, costumes, leather fire buckets, memorabilia, Dickensiana, and an extremely fine collection of Roman pottery. Many of the pots are large, immaculately preserved, and possessing a beauty of form and decoration that is quite breathtaking. Among them, in an unlit case, just inside a low doorway where few people stopped to notice it, had stood a small pitcher coated with a dirty yellowish-green glaze, dating from the first century A.D., and made in France at what is now the small town of St. Rémy-en-Rollat (Fig. 11). By comparison with many other pots in the collection, it was a singularly unattractive little pitcher, but in terms of Roman ceramic history it was both rare and important, more so than any other vessel in the collection. The curator showed me where it had stood on the shelf, the place marked by a small circle in the dust. The case had been pried open and the jug stolen. Nothing else had been touched, though there must have been a dozen other small pieces to gladden the heart of any thief looking for a “starter” collection of Roman pottery.

  11. A burglar’s loot. This lead-glazed pitcher from Roman Gaul was stolen from the Rochester Museum in England more than twenty years ago and has not been seen since. Excavated at Bapchild, Kent, the jug dates from the first century A.D. Height 5⅞ inches.

  As far as I can recall, the St. Rémy jug bore no label proclaiming its rarity, though it had been mentioned and occasionally illustrated in scholarly journals. There could be little doubt, therefore, that the thief knew precisely what he was taking and that he would never be able to dispose of it. The museum subsequently published a photograph of the missing pitcher in journals read by museum curators, dealers, and auctioneers but, although the theft occurred some twenty years ago, the jug has not been seen from that day to this. One wonders what pleasure anyone could derive from possessing an object he could never show to his friends, never sell, never even talk about. What will happen when he dies? Will some respected antiquarian be revealed as a common thief—he surely must think about that—or will the jug be thrown away by relatives or executors who know nothing of its importance? He must think about that too, for if he risked his reputation to steal the pitcher because of its rarity, it is unlikely that he would be willing for it to be robbed of its significance at his death.

  Equally hard to understand are collectors who will pay professionals to steal paintings and other well-known works of art, for in doing so they not only become prisoners of their own collections, they also lay themselves open to blackmail. Diamonds can be recut, silver melted down, and relatively common antiques sold to unsuspecting dealers. But what do you do with a hundred delftware plates from a famous collection, all photographed and ready to appear in a book soon to be in the hands of every dealer and collector? Thieves who knew the answer raided a London apartment, equipped with boxes and Styrofoam packing, cleaned out all the pieces of importance, and disappeared without trace—save for a few shreds of their packing material left behind on the floor. Police, dealers, and customs officers on both sides of the Atlantic have waited in vain for the loot to reappear, and presumably they will continue to do so until the statutes of limitation on the sale of stolen goods run out.

  Sidestepping the lepidopterists whose delight it is to poison and impale, and the amateur botanists who have ruined many a rare book by staining its pages with the life juices of crushed flowers, it is a fair generalization to say that the history of English and American collecting stems both from a curiosity about distant places, people, and things and from the pursuit of beauty. In the eighteenth century the division between the two was often drawn along class lines; the scholars on one side and the possessors on the other, men of wonder and men of taste, the antiquaries and the dilettanti.

  The Society of Antiquaries of London (which included Benjamin Franklin among its eighteenth-century fellows) was founded in 1707 and held its early meetings at taverns in Fleet Street and the Strand. The Dilettanti Society was born some years later, in 1732, and in spite of grandiose plans to build itself premises designed as an exact copy of a classical temple, it, too, settled for a tavern—the Star and Garter in Pall Mall. The Dilettanti were principally interested in works of art, preferably foreign works of art. Thus, in 1751, they sent two members to Greece to compile an account of the antiquities of Athens, a project whose publication in 1762 had a dramatic influence on English and American artistic and architectural taste in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Although the Dilettanti Society was ready enough to sponsor antiquarian travels to Greece and Asia Minor, it showed little interest in the Roman and later antiquities of its own coun
try.

  In this the Society can be compared to modern American state art museums which vie with each other to acquire costly French Impressionists, Tibetan scrolls, or Fabergé Easter eggs, while ignoring the material remains of their own nation’s past. Thus the Dilettanti looked down on the Antiquaries (though a few were members of both societies), many of them subscribing to the view of one contemporary lexicographer who defined an antiquary as “a curious critick in old coins, stones, and inscriptions, in worm-eaten records and antient manuscripts; also one that affects and blindly doats on relicks, ruins, old customs, phrases, and fashions.”1 Nevertheless, the Society of Antiquaries went on to receive a Royal Charter in 1751, and to a permanent and handsome home in Burlington House, Piccadilly, which it has occupied for almost a century. It remains, as it has for more than two hundred years, Europe’s most prestigious antiquarian society and, now as in the past, it counts a number of Americans among its fellows (Fig. 12).

  In the eighteenth century, most antiquaries were collectors, in part for the pleasure of owning things that interested them, but more because there were then few public museums wherein the relics of the past could be preserved and made available for scholarly study. The British Museum did not open its doors until 1759, and then only by appointment. Previously, anyone describing a visit to “The Museum” was likely to have been referring to the Ashmolean Museum which had been established at Oxford in 1679, through the efforts of Elias Ashmole—in whom resided all the demons of the manic collector.

  12. The president of the Society of Antiquarians receiving a new member. A watercolor cartoon by Thomas Rowlandson in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries of London. 1782.

  The nucleus of the Ashmolean Museum’s treasures, though donated by Ashmole as his, was actually the fruits of another man’s labors, or, to be more exact, two other men’s: the Johns Tradescant, father and son. Together they had been the parents of scholarly collecting and the museum in England and are deserving of vastly more recognition than posterity and Elias Ashmole have allowed them. The Tradescants lived in south Lambeth at Caron House, which had been acquired by John the Elder in 1626 and which would later earn renown as “Tradescant’s Ark” wherein were housed all the wonders of the earth that diligence and friendly sea captains could secure. Both father and son were gardeners to kings, John the Elder also enjoying the patronage of Charles the First’s favorite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and it was he who sponsored the Tradescants’ assembling of a collection of exotic botanical and animal rarities.

  The word went out to British captains trading around the world that they should try to obtain all manner of unusual, large, or otherwise interesting “Beasts & fowells and Birdes Alyve or If not Withe Heads Horns Beaks Clawes skins fethers” as well as “seeds Plants trees or shrubs” from Guinea, Benin, Senegal, and Turkey. In a postscript Tradescant was more specific, asking that the merchants of the Guinea Company should bring back an “Ellophants head with the teethe In,” or a “River horsses head of the Bigest that can be Gotten.” He also asked for the heads of “Seacowes” and “seabulles…with homes,” as well as any “strange sorts of fowells & Birds Skines and Beakes Leggs & phetheres that be Rare or not knowne to us,” along with “All sorts of shining stones…of Any strang shapes”; in short “Any thing that is strang.”2

  The elder Tradescant died in 1638, shortly after being appointed keeper of the botanical garden at Oxford, and in his will he left most of his estate to his son, adding “That if hee shall desire to pte with or sell my Cabinett that hee shall first offer ye same to ye Prince.”3 But John the Younger (Fig. 13) had no intention of selling the “Cabinett”; on the contrary he intended to keep on enlarging it, and when the civil war broke out between King and Parliament in 1642, he was in Virginia doing just that. It was his second trip; he had been there when his father died, he would go again in 1654, and all the time the collection would continue to grow. John had taken as his second wife a girl with the improbable name of Hester Pooks, who fortunately shared his enthusiasm for exotic plants and all things weird and wonderful. So, too, did the public, and even during the sober years between the kings, Tradescant’s Ark received a constant stream of visitors: dignitaries, men of science and curiosity, old men with tales to tell, youngsters with wide eyes and awe in their silence, travelers and seamen bearing packages and plants, all of them pilgrims.

  13. John Tradescant, Jr., in his garden at Lambeth. A contemporary painting by Emanuel de Critz in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.

  By 1650 John and Hester were growing concerned about the future of the collection. What would become of it after they were gone? It was a question and a fear that have haunted every aging collector, and the Tradescants discussed it with their friend Elias Ashmole. He was a kindred spirit, a student of astronomy, natural philosophy, alchemy, and heraldry; he was also a bibliophile and a modest collector of coins, medals, and antiquities but, more importantly, he was an enthusiastic admirer of the Ark and everything in it. It was Ashmole’s opinion that the Tradescant Collection should be preserved for the nation, and John and Hester agreed wholeheartedly. But first, Ashmole told them, a catalogue should be published, and he would underwrite the cost of it.

  The catalogue took six years to produce, not because of its vast size or the depth of its research, but because, then as now, there was many a slip ’twixt pen and printer. There was John’s absence in 1654 on his last trip to Virginia, then more delay caused by the tardiness of the celebrated engraver Wenceslaus Hollar, who had undertaken to provide portraits of the two Johns as the catalogue’s only illustrations. At last, in 1656, the Musaeum Tradescantianum was published, and although it was not destined to become everybody’s pocket companion, it did what it set out to do. It preserved for all time a record not only of the stuffed birds, animal heads, minerals, antiquities, and miscellaneous marvels, but also of the trees, shrubs, and plants that the Tradescants had introduced into their unique Lambeth garden. The garden was destined to disappear along with the house in 1881, and in 1894 the Ashmolean Museum dispersed the Ashmole–Tradescant Collection in a way that caused much of it to lose its identity. Consequently, most of the content of Tradescant’s Ark is known to us only as a listing in the catalogue—a sobering thought for any modern collector who keeps his catalogue in his head.

  By sophisticated, twentieth-century museum standards Tradescant’s Ark was a mess, something akin to Noah’s at the end of the Flood, disorganized, naïve in concept, and piloted more by love than scholarship. Yet, surely, it was a magic craft wherein seventeenth-century Englishmen could truly blow their minds; and if anyone thinks it would have no popular appeal today, he has only to recall the patient lines that waited at the Smithsonian to see a drab, gray rock from the moon!

  There was nothing drab about Tradescant’s treasures. Who could fail to thrill at the sight of his first “Dragon’s egge,” at “Two feathers of the Phoenix tayle,” or at “The claw of the bird Rock; who, as Authors report, is able to trusse an Elephant”? There was a dodo from Mauritius, “a natural dragon, above two inches long,” a “wilde Catt” from Virginia, birds’ nests from China, a circumcision knife of stone, and “A Brazen-ball to warme the Nunnes hands.” If these failed to excite, there was a trunnion from Sir Francis Drake’s globe-girdling Golden Hind, a couple of Roman urns, and some “Blood that rained in the Isle of Wight, attested to by Sir Jo: Oglander.” Other wonders ran a mind-boggling gamut from a “lacrymaticall Urne for Teares, of glasse” and “Nunnes penitentiall Girdles of Haire,” to women’s breeches from Abyssinia and “A Bracelet made of thighes of Indian flyes.” There were turtles and tortoises, teeth from a sea horse, a sea wolf, and the “unicornu marinum,” the closest the Tradescants could get to the true unicorn. Though failure to find it was one of their greater disappointments, other marvels did much to soften the blow. It was not everyone who could claim ownership of “A copper Letter-case an inch long…with a Letter in it, which was swallowed by a Woman, and found.” They own
ed porcelain from China decorated in purple and green, and thirty sorts of tobacco pipes from Brazil, Virginia, China, India, and Amazonia, as well as “Shooes to walk in Snow without sinking,” and “Pohatan, King of Virginia’s habit all embroidered with shells, or Roanoke.” Luckily, this most evocative of all American Indian treasures still survives in the modern Ashmolean Museum (Fig. 14).

  Upon publication of the catalogue and the even greater interest in the Ark that it aroused, the future of the collection was again under discussion, and Elias Ashmole once more expressed his deep concern for its ultimate safety. He mentioned in passing that if he could enlarge his own modest collection to comparable proportions he planned to build a museum for it. John and Hester were suitably impressed, and in 1659, under circumstances that remain unclear, they signed a deed of gift assigning the contents of the Ark to Ashmole upon their deaths. Hester, however, was suspicious of the document and asked Ashmole to allow her to show it to lawyer friends, and he made the mistake of letting her have it. On reading the fine print, John Tradescant decided that he had been duped; he cut his signature and the seals from the vellum, and when, in 1661, he made his will, he made no reference to any previous disposition of the collection. Instead, he left everything to his wife and asked that on her death the contents of the Ark should be given either to Oxford or Cambridge University.

  14. The deerskin mantle presented to Captain Christopher Newport by the Virginia Indian chief Powhatan in 1608. The cloak is decorated with shell beadwork in designs comparable to others found on Virginia Indian tobacco pipes in the seventeenth century. The garment was subsequently part of the Tradescant Collection and is now in the Ashmolean Museum.