All the Best Rubbish

by Ivor Noel Hume

  17. The rotunda of the Leverian Museum, once considered the most remarkable “cabinet of curiosities” in Europe. After being won in a two-guinea lottery, the collection ended its life in Southwark where this engraving was drawn in about 1805.

  If I had Virgil’s judgment, Homer’s fire,

  And could with equal rapture strike the lyre,

  Could drink as large of the muse’s spring,

  Then would I of Sir Ashton’s merits sing…

  Here stands a tiger, mighty in his strength,

  There crocodiles extend their scaly length:

  Subtile, voracious to devour their food,

  Savage they look, and seem to pant for blood.

  Here shells and fish, and dolphins seen,

  Display their various colours blue and green.

  View there an urn which Roman ashes bore,

  And habits once that foreign nations wore….6

  And so on through diamonds, monsters, river horses, and the inevitable elephant. The verses, too, aspired to a place in the collection, being the work of a tiresomely precocious boy of ten.

  According to Silliman, Sir Ashton Lever’s collecting zeal brought him to a state of extreme pecuniary embarrassment. In 1790, Thomas Pennant, in his book London, wrote of the Leverian Museum that “To the disgrace of our kingdom, after the first burst of wonder was over, it became neglected.” In 1785, however, when Lever decided to dispose of the collection by lottery, he firmly contended, “The very large sum expended in making [the collection], is the cause of its being thus disposed of, and not from the deficiency of the daily receipts (as is generally imagined) which have annually increased.” He offered 36,000 tickets at a guinea apiece, but sold only 8,000, leaving himself with the 28,000 still in hand, and a more than sporting chance of retaining the collection—and the 8,000 guineas. But he was out of luck. The winning ticket belonged to a Mr. Parkinson (he bought only two) who transferred the museum to a new home across the river in Southwark, a move which apparently gave it another lease on life. It was there that Silliman saw the collection and admired the rotunda; but a year after his visit the doors closed for the last time, and everything in the building was auctioned and dispersed.

  Although exhibitions of waxworks, sculptures, and miscellaneous marvels came and went in nineteenth-century London, the Leverian Museum was the last of the all-encompassing, private collections to be permanently exhibited on a pay-at-the-door basis. Once the British Museum opened its gates to a wider and less discerning public, no other cabinet of curiosities could compete with it. Although the British Museum’s tremendous portico was not finished until 1847, the building had been constantly expanding, and by the 1830s it had become “The Museum,” just as the Ashmolean had been at the end of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, the grandeur of the B.M. did nothing to discourage the nineteenth-century’s private collectors who were to be encountered at every turn, pursuing butterflies, desecrating burial mounds, chipping rocks in the Hebrides, and buying up classical and Egyptian antiquities as fast as they could be found or manufactured. In the seventeenth century the word cabinett had meant “the most retired place in the finest apartment of a building; set apart for writing, studying, or preserving any thing very precious.”7 The 1749 edition of Nathanial Bailey’s English Dictionary was scarcely less grand in its interpretation: “a Closet in a Palace, or Nobleman’s House; a Chest of Drawers or Casket to put Things of Value in.” By the nineteenth century, however, the word cabinet meant pretty much what it does today, and every educated man aspired to some kind of cupboard or glass-topped case in which he exhibited the tangible evidence of his travels and erudition. He hung his hat on the horns of an antelope, kept his umbrella in the brassbound foot of an elephant, and scared the life out of the between-maid with a glass-eyed tiger’s head mounted on the wall of the second-floor landing. There were mini-Tradescants all over England, but with the decline of the benefits of clergy and the dissolution of the gentry, their coins have been sold, their hippo heads given to the Women’s Institute jumble sale, and a myriad mite-eaten butterflies have been consigned to the incinerator. The Harry Lauder walking sticks, and the cavalry sabers, assegais, and Zulu shields that were once the pride of stiff-collared and mustachioed Victorian patriarchs are now the property of limp-wristed and droopy-whiskered dealers in the Portobello Road, hoping to catch the eye of a visiting American “Scotchman” or a Soul Brother in search of a heritage.

  The connoisseurship that was so much a part of the Victorian English gentleman’s life-style was not widely paralleled in America. The old, colonial plantation aristocracy had fallen on hard times, and, with a few notable exceptions, the new, landed and monied men were too busy making it and developing it to spare time for butterflies or Roman coins. Relatively few American men traveled in Europe or the Near East simply for the pleasure of it, and they had no empire to patronize.8 Furthermore, American army officers were more at home on the prairie than with the polka and expected to end their days at a log fort at Laramie rather than in a bath chair at Leamington Spa. Britain’s outposts of empire were imagined with a romantic yearning by those who stayed at home; the enemy was a noble adversary, medieval in his armored gallantry, his face fierce but fine as engraved in the Illustrated London News. Consequently, his helmet, plated gauntlets, jeweled daggers, and brass trays were welcome in English homes. White Americans, on the other hand, looked upon their Indians as child-murdering savages whose war bonnets, beads, pots, and scalps would not be appreciated in polite Eastern homes. Nevertheless, just as there had been kings and princes in Europe to assemble great private art collections, so in the late nineteenth century there were potentates of industry to do the same in America. At their forefront stood John Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) who would become president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1905 and whose generosity, along with that of his son, did much to improve the buildings and enhance the collections of Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum—which opened its doors in 1844 and can thus claim to be the nation’s oldest surviving art museum. It is not, however, the Morgans, Carnegies, Rockefellers, Hearsts, Du Ponts, or Mellons, and their ability to buy masterpieces as other less fortunate men relish the acquisition of an arrowhead or a mustache cup, who truly represent American collectors.

  The rise of patriotic interest after the 1876 centennial celebrations saw the creation of numerous historical and preservationist societies to which gravitated all sorts of local curiosities. Lacking professional curators or proper display facilities, the gifts were often stored away in boxes and drawers where they languished until they fell apart or were thrown out. Now and then in the course of house cleaning, a long-neglected treasure would be found amid the trash, and with luck somebody would be around to tell one from the other. Thus, for example, the turning out of an old desk drawer by a newly appointed director of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities led to the discovery of a mutilated bronze figure and a faded label stating that it had been found on an Indian site in the 1930s. Although, when the figure was first shown to me, I did not recognize it for what it proved to be, I was certain of its importance and incorrectly deduced that it was Spanish and dated from the late fifteenth century (Fig. 18). On a subsequent trip to England I found a close parallel in the Ashmolean Museum and another in the Victoria and Albert Museum and learned that the figure was part of a German-made candelabrum dating from the first half of the sixteenth century (Fig. 19). It can lay claim to being one of the earliest, if not the earliest, European art object yet found in the eastern United States, and it is certainly the oldest surviving colonial lighting appliance. One shudders to think what might have become of it, had the desk cleaning at the A.P.V.A. headquarters been in the hands of a clerk rather than a professional with museum training.

  In addition to the major American historical societies with their sometimes opulently clublike quarters in big cities, there are many small societies and local branches of larger organizations that maintain museums of their
own. Rarely have they inherited collections of importance; instead they have become useful repositories for memorabilia. Throughout the nineteenth century, the family was America’s most valuable possession, and kinship the greatest honor. Consequently, these local museums became artifactual mausoleums for the satisfaction of the donors, with exhibits having no need to appeal to a public much broader than was to be found in the neighboring counties. Now, of course, even the smallest American museum can expect to receive tourists from every state in the Union, and if they happen to own Jefferson’s gimlet, Jim Bowie’s knife, or General Grant’s whisky flask, they can still get by. But if all they have to offer is Mrs. Satterfield T. Wrightgard’s glove “worn by her when she danced with President Buchanan at the Athenia Hotel on the occasion of his visit in 1858, and presented by her daughter Miss Amelia B. Loveless of Barren Hill, Fauquier County,” then the curators are faced with a yawning communications gap.

  18. Part of the standing figure supporting a German bronze candelabrum dating from the first half of the sixteenth century. Found on an Indian site in King William County, Virginia, it is believed to be the oldest example of European art metalwork yet found in America. Height 4½ inches.

  It would be grossly misleading if I were to imply that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America was without educated men for whom collecting was part of that education. On the contrary, there were colonial collectors of natural curiosities as early as the second half of the seventeenth century, and the archaeological discovery of ancient Indian pottery and implements on colonial home sites of the 1640s suggests a degree of interest in aboriginal artifacts. Thomas Jefferson’s excavation of an Indian burial mound in Virginia in the 1760s attests to the “curiosity” of the colonial gentleman and reminds us also that Jefferson is acknowledged as having been one of the world’s pioneers in the field of scientific archaeology. The Charleston Library Society had been founded in 1743, its members voting to add a museum in 1773; the American Philosophical Society was also created in 1743, and expressed interest in just about everything grown, born, or manufactured. In 1774 the Philadelphia-based society ordered its collections to be brought together to be housed in a “Cabinet” instead of being scattered through the homes of its members, and in 1789, with the building of Philosophical Hall, its treasures found a safe haven. But the catalogue of those treasures still smacked of Tradescantiana; thus, for example, a list of acquisitions received in 1797 included a lump of petrified buffalo dung, a stuffed swan’s foot, and a pair of Indian garters. Other curiosities included a chair once sat in by Benjamin Franklin, a chip off Plymouth Rock, and a cannonball reputedly fired at Mary Queen of Scots.

  19. A German bronze candelabrum in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, closely paralleling the Virginia fragment, 1500–1550. Height 9¼ inches.

  When the American Philosophical Society opened its new building it had no professional curator and so a mutually convenient arrangement was made with the artist and naturalist Charles Willson Peale, who agreed to rent part of the hall to house his own natural history museum and to serve as caretaker for the Society’s collection. In 1802, however, Peale moved next door, to Independence Hall, where he installed his museum on the second floor and ran it as a commercial enterprise (Fig. 20). In spite of a somewhat indigestible juxtaposition of stuffed birds and painted patriots, Peale’s museum was long considered the best in the country—though supercilious European visitors claimed to find little to choose between the best and the worst. British author Frederick Marryat on a tour of the United States in 1837 observed that the nation’s museum collections were of the caliber “as would be made by schoolboys” rather than by men of science. “Side by side with the most interesting and valuable specimens, such as the fossil mammoth [in the Peale Museum], etc.,” Marryat told his hosts, “you have the greatest puerilities and absurdities in the world…. Then you invariably have a large collection of daubs, called portraits of eminent personages, one-half of whom a stranger never heard of.”9 A later British traveler was even less charitable. “A ‘museum’ in the American sense of the word,” he declared, “means a place of amusement, wherein there shall be a theatre, some wax figures, a giant and a dwarf or two, a jumble of pictures, and a few live snakes. In order that there may be some excuse for the use of the word, there is in most instances a collection of stuffed birds, a few preserved animals, and a stock of oddly assorted and very dubitable curiosities.”10 It was a description that could well have applied, for example, to the once distinguished Western Museum of Cincinnati, which had begun life in 1820 as a genuinely scholarly institution but which, by the time it expired in 1867, had slipped to exhibiting a pig with eight feet and two tails, the pickled head of a local murderer, and a waxwork chamber of horrors.

  20. “The Artist in His Museum.” Charles Willson Peale’s self-portrait standing in his gallery at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, in 1822. Behind and to his right can be seen part of the mammoth skeleton which Peale himself had excavated.

  No such charges of cheap sensationalism have ever been laid at the door of America’s version of the British Museum. From the outset, and throughout its long life, the collections and staff of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington have played key roles in many of the most significant ethnological, anthropological, geological, and astronomical studies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Somewhat ironically, the funds to establish it were provided by an Englishman, James Smithson, a chemist and mineralogist, who died in 1829 leaving a sizable estate to a nephew with the stipulation that should he die without issue, the legacy would pass to the United States. It was there to be used “to found in Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” The nephew did so die, and the rest is history—which needs no repeating, other than to note that the Institution was formally created in 1846 with the first meeting of its regents.

  The Smithsonian differed from the British Museum not only in its commitment to research but in its inaccessibility. The B.M. was in the heart of London, and London was the road and rail hub of England, and in relatively easy reach of any Briton with a pound and a potsherd in his pocket. Conversely, however, all roads did not lead to Washington, and few nineteenth-century Americans had the time, the money, or a driving desire to go there. Those who did would have found the Smithsonian’s collections weak in popular appeal and less extensive than might be expected of a national museum—due in some measure to a major fire in 1865. Though well able to open the visitors’ eyes to the natural and aboriginal wonders of his own continent, the collections did little to encourage the kinds of eclectic collectors who abounded in the Old World—which was probably just as well.

  Today the shoe is on the other foot; the Englishman has sold his rarities, and it is the American who collects everything in sight. This is, of course, a sweeping generalization; legions of Americans collect nothing more esoteric than trading stamps, while in England one can find connoisseurs of anything from constables’ truncheons to manhole covers and lavatory pulls. Nevertheless, the fact remains that collecting calls for stability, leisure, money, mobility, and education (not necessarily in that order), and while the average American did not enjoy these advantages during the pioneer generations, he has them now to a greater extent than ever before. Speaking of the “average” present-day American is to risk another charge of irresponsible generalizing. It is, however, far less dangerous than referring to the “average” Englishman of the nineteenth century, for the cultural and social differences ’twixt top and bottom in the United States today bears no resemblance to the gulf that divided them in Georgian and Victorian England. In the heyday of British collecting, it was essentially the hobby of the gentry, the upper middle class, the clergy, and scholars of various stripes who might or might not stem from one or another of these groups, but who, in any case, through their scholarship aspired to social acceptability.

  The United States is probably as close to bei
ng an open, classless society as is possible (or desirable) in an aging nation, and it is curious, therefore, that so much of American collecting is entwined with status. This was brought home to me in the early 1960s when one of the lectures scheduled for delivery at the prestigious Williamsburg Antiques Forum was to be devoted to what was described as “Pedigreed English Pottery.” Assuming that the speaker would have something useful to say about pieces made by identified potters for recorded customers at known dates, I urged my archaeological colleagues to attend. To my dismay, and their amusement, the lecture was concerned not with makers and original owners but with the collectors through whose hands the pottery had passed and the prices it had commanded along the way. I have since learned that, regardless of its artistic or historical importance, the value of an object can be dramatically enhanced by its having lingered long enough in a well-known collection to be so labeled. Frequently, of course, the famed figure was insufficiently orderly in his collecting to aspire to a printed label, and so one’s knowledge of his ownership comes from a sale catalogue or a dealer’s whisper. Then, alas, the only way that the new owner can get any mileage out of this information is to pass it on orally, converting his treasure into that most devastating of antisocial weapons, the “conversation piece.”

  There probably are as many definitions of what is meant by a serious collector as there are people who collect. I am well aware that some of the most single-minded and unsmiling are those who see each acquisition as an investment, but to me the serious collector is one who learns from whatever it is he collects,* and that applies as well to the collector of barbed wire as to the connoisseur of Battersea enamels. Make no mistake; there is tremendous snobbishness among both collectors and those who serve them, not only as to the quality of our specimens, but also as to what we collect. The operative word here, of course, is money. The Bond Street art dealer specializing in Italian old masters would not be caught dead holding the door for a little old lady who loves Landseer’s dogs—unless Sir Edwin should enjoy a sudden, profitable renaissance. Similarly, the collector of fine Philadelphia furniture will not feel comfortable seated on the knotty pine brand of Americana, any more than the numismatist specializing in Spanish gold pieces from the Lima mint will be at ease in the company of a man whose collection of American pennies is ingeniously mounted to form a life-size portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Collectors of fine arts can just tolerate superior numismatists, armor specialists, and collectors of classical antiquities, but they warm not at all to folk art or to bygones. And so it goes—in more ways than one.