In the final analysis, the mere bringing together of objects into a collection does not make that assemblage of importance to anyone but the collector. Therefore, unless the material, collectively, has something new to say, it is better broken up and a safe museum home found for individual items that are of premier importance. It is obviously a great deal easier to get a museum to accept two or three choice pieces than a collection of three hundred of which those three are the only items really worth having. As for the remaining 297, their return to the marketplace provides another generation with the opportunity to acquire and enjoy them. To the specialist who has used his collection as the basis for research, I would urge worrying more about publication than preservation. All too often a collector has devoted the best years of a lifetime to assembling and studying a definitive collection of something, only to die without ever making the results of the work lastingly available to others. Fear of “rushing into print” (the favorite charge of critics who planned to write on the same subject but didn’t) after only forty years of research, lest some new specimen or fact should turn up tomorrow, has resulted in losses far more deplorable than the dispersal of fine collections. In sum, therefore, and before the last trump sounds, if your collection has something to say, let it say it—if not, sell it.
THIRTEEN
And Then What?
WE TAKE A DEEP BREATH, try to control the choke in our voices, and consign our treasures to the salesroom. If we have done our homework properly and the pieces are thoroughly documented (and always supposing that we have struck when the market is hot), the parting may be turned to a sorrow sweetened by lots of lovely money. Is that then to be the end of it?
As Eliza Dolittle might piquantly have put it: Not bloody likely!
Collecting is an incurable habit, and both the empty cabinets at home and the siren songs of grieving dealers will ensure that even after taking the cure we remain forever hooked. Only our new direction remains in doubt—if, indeed, we do elect to begin again at some other beginning. Many specialist collectors have no intention of breaking new ground. Having extracted all the information that their best pieces have to offer, and having drawn and photographed them from every angle, they send them back to the marketplace to obtain funds to buy other, better examples. These dogs are too old to learn new tricks, and they prefer to continue to the end learning more and more about less and less. For the average collector, however, who does not aspire to being an acknowledged pundit or the breaker of new ground, starting again at the gate to a field that is new only to him may offer all the stimulation he can stand.
It would be presumptuous to advise a recently abdicated English porcelain collector to try glass paperweights or player pianos. It is also unsporting to suggest that he should have nurtured the saplings of potential new interests before putting his ax to the old, yet I know from my own experience that the diversity of my collecting has developed out of itself. So, being in no position to pontificate, I can only try to answer the “Where do we go from here?” question by reviewing my most recent digressions, even though (like Mr. Toad’s springtime enthusiasms) there is no guarantee that they will be my last.
As I noted earlier, my need to learn to date the tapestry of soils beneath London’s bombed buildings generated an interest in the evolution of glass wine bottles. From there it was an easy step to learning about the stoneware wine bottles that preceded the use of glass and were ousted by it. These were the so-called bellarmine bottles from the Rhineland, which, when I began, could be picked up in English antique shops for four or five dollars. Collecting Rhenish bottles in turn led to an interest in the British brown stonewares that became an important part of her ceramic industry after John Dwight of Fulham had discovered in 1671 “the misterie of the stone ware vulgarly called Cologne ware.”1 My pursuit of English stonewares through the eighteenth century inevitably ran on into the nineteenth century, but there enthusiasm drained away. The shapes, decorative techniques, and designs settled into a dreary sameness—except in one area, a new class of ornamental gin flask molded to catch the mercurial enthusiasms, causes, and hatreds of public-house tipplers.
The flask illustrated in Figure 122 is typical, but it is up to its ring neck in history. The design is one that was fairly common (and so relatively inexpensive), though the figure is usually incorrectly described as “The Drunken Sailor.” It is, instead, a portrait of the American vaudeville performer Thomas Dartmouth Rice who, in 1828, while playing at a theater in Louisville, Kentucky, appeared during an intermission between the acts of a play performing a song and shuffling dance that aped an old Negro named Jim Crow. Rice’s routine was an instant success and his song “Jump Jim Crow” with its nonsense lines “Turn about an’ wheel about an’ do jis so / An ebery time I turn about I jump Jim Crow” became a popular hit. Rice sang it at the Royal Surrey Theatre in London on his first visit to England in 1836, and, as ceramic historian Anthony Oliver has discovered, it was the poster for that engagement (Fig. 123) that provided the stance and costume for the dancer on the flask. Rice was the first black-face minstrel, and it was he who was responsible for introducing Jim Crow (the white man’s black man) into the American language. Thus this flask merits a place in any collection devoted to black America or to theatrical history.
122. An English brown stoneware gin flask commemorating the 1836 London debut of Thomas “Jim Crow” Rice, the first American black-face minstrel. Height 6¾ inches.
123. The sheet music and poster design used when Thomas Dartmouth Rice appeared at London’s Royal Surrey Theatre in 1836, and from which the gin flask was modeled.
124. Another brown stoneware flask, this one said to represent Jenny Lind but more probably the figure of Peace holding a dove. Stamped on the back BOURNES’ POTTERIES, DENBY & CUDNOR PARK. DERBYSHIRE, the bottle probably dates from about 1840 and some years before the “Swedish Nightingale” made her British debut. Height 8 inches.
Inspired by acquiring the Jim Crow flask, I went on to obtain (at a much steeper price) the example illustrated in Figure 124, this one allegedly also theatrical in origin. The figure was claimed to be that of Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” who became the toast of London in 1847 and, ten years later, by arrangement with P. T. Barnum, the rage of America. The flask bears no identifying inscription, and the Jenny Lind association stemmed from the fact that the lady holds a bird which, to a myopic non-ornithologist, might pass for a nightingale. It turns out, however, that the back of the figure is almost identical to that of another figure made by the same factory and marked “Queen Alexandrina Victoria.” To make matters worse, the hair style and the support for one arm of the “Jenny Lind” flask match details of the front of the Victoria, which shows the young queen holding a scroll bearing the words “May peace and prosperity prevail.”2 On the eve of her coronation she had said to Lord Melbourne, “I pray God my reign will be one of peace,” and it seems likely therefore that the “Jenny Lind” is actually a companion flask to the Alexandrina Victoria and is intended to portray Peace holding a dove. Anthony Oliver has since advised me that he has seen Jenny Lind in sixteen Staffordshire figure versions, only one of them with its hair in ringlets, and none carrying a bird. So there went Jenny Lind.
There is no denying that my new beginning as a collector of gin flasks got off to a poor start, for even the example showing Victoria beside her coronation regalia was bought as something else (Fig. 70). The figure was claimed to be that of the luckless Caroline until the pose was found to have been taken from Sir George Hayter’s 1833 portrait of the Princess Victoria. I knew my stoneware but I did not have a sufficient knowledge of nineteenth-century art history—and that’s the point of the story.
In spite of the foregoing evidence to the contrary, there are obvious advantages to exploring new collecting byways while still heading in more or less the same direction as before. Brave spirits may counter that this is a cowardly solution that narrows one’s perspective instead of providing new and exhilarating vistas
. But even a totally new direction must have a point of departure, and to string out the metaphor till it chokes, travel is the ideal provider. For me it was a journey down the Nile, although it was not so much a new direction as an old one repointed. It took me back to my childhood and the day when a wealthy uncle (who happened to be paying my school fees) demanded to know what I intended to do with myself when I grew up. I had just spent the last of my pocket money on a secondhand copy of Gaston Maspero’s Dawn of Civilization, and for want of a more intelligent answer, I replied that I intended to become an Egyptologist.
My uncle’s neck reddened. “I’m not asking you to choose a hobby. I want to know how you plan to make a living!”
I never did study Egyptology beyond reading a book or two, and instead my archaeological career drifted onward through the centuries until it came to rest at the gates of the Industrial Revolution. Along the way I slowly became aware that although technology has carried us onward and upward, man himself has changed little. On the contrary, his aspirations, ethics, and passions have remained almost defiantly earth-bound, enabling him to boast that he is what he is, untainted by the experience of history. Thus it was in search of perspective and, above all, a sense of scale, that I went to Egypt. I returned convinced that we have been as we are for thousands of years.
The unlearned lessons of ancient Egypt are legion, paralleling to a remarkable degree, for example, the failures of modern Middle Eastern alliances. That a single nation could have endured, waxing and waning in so relatively orderly a fashion, through three millennia, is amazing enough in itself, but that this people could design, build, and decorate structures of such prodigious size with little more than levers and copper tools to aid them, is almost beyond belief. To learn that those achievements were less the work of slaves than of willing hands dedicated to the greater glory of the gods came as no small shock—as did the discovery that the building blocks of those religious beliefs were borrowed to construct the Christian Trinity. The experience left me awed, uneasy, and yet exhilarated—as one should be in the presence of the gods, the sensations magnified by the knowledge that they had been shared by great literary names of the past from Herodotus to Flaubert. Unfortunately, one was constantly mindful of innumerable less-illustrious names carved, scratched, and painted on every wall and pillar within reach (including R. K. HUME 1836 on the roof at Dendera), the vandalism of Greeks, Romans, Coptic Christians, British, French, and Americans, proving that no matter how civilized we may appear, we are still barbarians at heart (Fig. 125). Although nothing could have induced me to follow in my predecessors’ monstrous footsteps, I found myself sharing their compulsion to leave a mark at the fountainhead of history and, picking up a piece of flint, I scratched my initials on a modern Arab potsherd and left it in the desert somewhere south of Tell el-Amarna. Why? I asked myself. Perhaps because no matter how firm or shattered are our religious beliefs, we all seek some measure of immortality, even if it is no more than a personalized potsherd to remind posterity that we once were here.
125. The scourge of the tourist. A wall painting in the tomb chapel of the ancient Egyptian provincial governor Pahari at El Kab, embellished with a graffito proclaiming that D. BUSHNELLS OF OHIO was there on November 14, 1839. He was not the first, for there are many other names on these walls, the earliest dated 1804. His is simply the largest. The painting dates from the Eighteenth Dynasty and is of great cultural importance.
I doubt whether my efforts to learn to read hieroglyphs will go beyond interpreting a few royal cartouches and a handful of useless words (vastly more is needed to become proficient in identifying Egyptian antiquities), but I can already look with new perception at the shawabti figures and other odds and ends—even the mummified hands—that I acquired in youthful bouts of Egyptomania. Now, however, enthusiasm is tempered with caution, as I remember, for example, the warning of Lady Lucie Duff-Gordon who, while in Luxor in 1864, met a Coptic priest who “fabricates false antiquities very cleverly.”3 Ten years later, her literary successor Amelia B. Edwards would make the point even more sharply, declaring that “every man, woman, and child about the place is bent on selling a bargain; and the bargain, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, is valuable in so far as it represents the industry of Luxor—but no farther” (Fig. 126).4 It should surprise no one that a peasant culture which has changed so little in five millennia should continue to operate today as it did a mere century ago. The descendants of Egypt’s Billies and Charlies are still at work, disarmingly tempting tourists with the same travesties and the same lies that they were dispensing when Victoria was queen (Fig. 127).
126. An alleged funerary figure of the Ptolemaic period. Made of painted wood and covered with the remains of fabric which a textile specialist has stated to be “at least several hundred years old,” the figure is nevertheless a fake. The paint colors are too glossy, and the textile seems to have been attached in small pieces with a mixture of glue and animal dung, effacingly and convincingly obscuring the bogus hieroglyphs that begin to be revealed for what they are as the dirt is removed. Height 12¼ inches. When Egyptian fakes are good, they are very, very good…
Expert collectors who find that they have made embarrassing and costly mistakes naturally condemn the forgers and would like to see them hung up by their ears. Egyptologists, on the other hand, regard them as a useful evil, discouraging the elicit digging for genuine antiquities in favor of selling equally profitable fakes. As for the naïve, novice collector, as long as he can happily believe that his plaster head of Nefertiti was created in the ancient workshops of Akhetaten, his cerebral excursions into history remain real and exciting. For my part, I find the bogus antiquities manufactured in the days of Lady Duff-Gordon and Amelia Edwards of interest in their own right, as relics of that Victorian world which (as I have tried to show in these chapters) remains as intriguing and different from our own time as were the centuries of the pharaohs.
127. …but when they are bad, they are horrid. An ancient fellah tries to sell scarabs and alabaster figures of Horus to apathetic tourists at Thebes. His talent for mewing like a cat when offering statuettes of the cat-headed deity Bastet was much more impressive than his treasures.
It is partly for this reason that my renewed interest in Egypt is fueled, not by a desire to possess, but by the pleasures of vicarious travel and adventure to be derived from the often marvelously literate journals of nineteenth-century antiquaries and tourists. I intend to journey with Belzoni, the one-time circus strong-man, as he digs into the tombs and temples of Thebes for treasures that would enrich the British Museum; I shall stop my ears as that dubitable Briton Colonel Howard Vyse blasts his way through the pyramids and drills holes in the Sphinx; and I shall share the fears and excitement of the Frenchmen Mariette and Maspero as they creep through rock-hewn tunnels, their flickering lamps revealing the awesome painted figures of Re, and Seth, and Sobek, and of servants and handmaidens, all enjoining us to trespass no farther.
128. An Egyptian woman searching for portable valuables in what, in 1841, was described as a “mummy pit.” From Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson’s Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, 2nd Series, vol. II, p. xxxi.
129. The dry black hands of Egyptian mummies were popular tourist trophies in the nineteenth century, particularly among those who lacked the fortitude or the room in their bags to carry off the whole thing. In the preceding centuries, however, there had been a brisk trade in mummy parts for the use of European apothecaries who ground them up as components for medications to cure almost anything from bruises to epilepsy. It was a business that did the future of the Egyptian past no good at all. The hand on the right still wears part of a blue faïence ring, and the nails of both are henna stained, an embalmer’s technique for enlivening the “loved one.”
In short, a new world and a lifetime of adventure have opened for me, and although I have no intention of becoming an avid collector of canopic jars or mummy cases, I am willing to bet beans to a belly dancer’s but
ton that space will have to be found for the occasional Egyptian bargain.
Notes
ONE: “What’s Past Is Prologue…”
1. Maurice Rheims, The Strange Life of Objects (New York, 1961), p. 211. Originally published in France in 1959, and subsequently in England as Art on the Market.
2. Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, Mass., 1963), n.p.
TWO: To Have and to Hold
1. John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1812–1815), vol. VIII, p. 68.
2. Quoted by Mea Allen, The Tradescants, Their Plants, Gardens and Museum, 1570–1662 (London, 1964), pp. 114–15.
3. Ibid., p. 175.
4. Elias Ashmole 1672–1692, C. J. Josten, ed. (Oxford, 1966), vol. IV, p. 1607.
5. Allen, op. cit., p. 215.
6. The Diary of John Evelyn, William Bray, ed. (London, 1952), vol. II, p. 124, entry for July 23, 1678.
7. Anon., Old England: A Pictorial Museum (London, 1845), vol. II, p. 287.
THREE: Cabinets, Closets, and Dubitable Curiosities
1. Richard Steele, The Tatler (London, 1709), No. 34.
2. Quoted by William Kent, An Encyclopaedia of London (London, 1937), p. 484.
3. Benjamin Silliman, A Journal of Travels in England, Holland and Scotland, and of Two Passages over the Atlantic, in 1805 and 1806, 3 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1820), vol. II, p. 73.
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