In his early travels, Mayer himself was not above such instant archaeology. There was undoubtedly a thrill to be had from hands-on intervention, and, at a time when European empires were expanding, there were few who would have questioned the right of British collectors to pieces from more ‘primitive’ cultures. What is now regarded as looting was seen by the Victorians as, at best, the rescue of historic objects for posterity and, at worst, little more than enthusiastic opportunism. In Britain, many expeditions were funded by the government, national and regional museums, or by respectable establishment organizations, and the pillaged artefacts were proudly displayed to an admiring public. Private and public collectors alike benefited from the free-for-all. As early as 1799, the Rosetta Stone was looted during Napoleon’s Egypt campaign and eventually given over to the British, shown first at the Society of Antiquaries and then, from 1802, at the British Museum. Mayer’s collection boasted numerous large pieces taken from Egypt, including the great granite sarcophagus of Bakenkhonsu, stolen from his tomb at Thebes, and thirty-three of the stone funerary tablets known as stelae.
But Egypt was not the only source of new objects. Lord Elgin’s expeditions to Greece in the early nineteenth century famously resulted in the Parthenon Marbles finding a home in the British Museum; Austen Henry Layard sent the results of his excavations in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) to private enthusiasts like Charlotte Schreiber and also to the national collections. His looting was regarded as thoroughly respectable and his work was recognized with a trusteeship of the British Museum in 1866. In the 1860s, British troops sent to Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) took sacred wooden tablets, religious manuscripts, ceremonial crosses, a solid gold crown, chalices, textiles and jewellery from the imperial palaces in an operation that is said to have required 15 elephants and 200 mules as transport. Again, the British establishment openly condoned the thievery: the hoard, known as the Magdala Treasure, was largely divided between the Queen, the British Museum, the South Kensington Museum and the British Library. The remaining pieces were auctioned to private owners.
As the century moved on, however, there were signs that the consequences of such widespread looting were beginning to be acknowledged. In June 1871, less than four years after the arrival of the Magdala Treasure in Britain, Prime Minister William Gladstone conceded to the House of Commons that the whole affair had been ‘unsatisfactory. . . from first to last’ and that he ‘deeply regretted that those articles were ever brought from Abyssinia and could not conceive why they were so brought’. Gladstone was, as we have seen, a collector himself, and his observation points towards a growing change of heart in some collecting circles. Clearly, there would remain unscrupulous and profiteering individuals, buying, selling and collecting objects thoughtlessly. The driving political imperatives of Empire still remained, but the increasing influence of scholarly curators such as Franks and Robinson, and of expert private collectors such as Charlotte Schreiber, meant that the emphasis was gradually shifting from acquiring objects at any cost and ripping them from their ancient sites to valuing and understanding them within their original contexts.
This was not, of course, as simple a matter as I might have made it sound. Attitudes were complex and progress was erratic. Some of the scholarship of the most learned of Victorian curators and collectors derived from studying looted objects; many early archaeologists like Layard combined a certain gung-ho acquisitiveness with a genuine spirit of inquiry; public and private collectors are, as we still see today, notoriously slow to agree to the repatriation of other people’s treasures. Nevertheless, the nineteenth century saw a movement towards more structured, scholarly and responsible collecting, and this was reflected in the changing attitudes of collectors like Joseph Mayer. Through discussions with other, often more learned, collectors, Mayer came to appreciate the importance of documentation, research and publication. Though his own methods were not necessarily scholarly, he grew to appreciate – and support – scholarship in those around him. His friendship with Roach Smith in particular taught him to value objects as much for the light they shed on history as for their status as treasure. Roach Smith, Mayer admitted, gave him a ‘valuable education’, in which he learned how ‘all kinds of antiquarian subjects. . . gave an impetus’ to study and acted as ‘corroborative help to written history’.3 Over the fifty years that he was collecting, Mayer’s attitudes changed. The instant gratification of on-site rummaging which had excited him in his youth gave way to a more considered and respectful approach to objects. This may have had something to do with simply growing up, and becoming older, wealthier and more reputable, but personal circumstances do not explain it all. Joseph Mayer was part of a collecting age when new and intriguing objects, like those from Egypt, created different collecting habits. He was part of a generation that was discovering largely uncharted territory and, in turn, developing new ways of doing things, influencing attitudes and forming opinion.
As with Wedgwood, Mayer was fortunate to be collecting Egyptian objects at the right time, when interest was at its height and when pieces of unique variety, character and quality were first becoming available on the open market. Such good timing, allied with unerring enthusiasm, meant his lack of expertise hardly mattered: he was still able to amass important Egyptian pieces that had both scholarly and aesthetic significance, and that would be valued in years to come. But callers at the Colquitt Street museum who came expecting no more than a display of Egyptian antiquities were both surprised and fascinated by what they found. There was a stuffed crocodile hung high over the ancient sarcophagi; there was Roman pottery; sculpture from Assyria and Babylonia; Anglo-Saxon metalwork; coins and commemorative medals; Burmese manuscripts; a range of fine Persian leather bindings; and examples of Chinese calligraphy. Visitors could browse an extensive reference library or study books in a dozen languages – none of which Mayer could read himself – before moving on to admire his collection of jewellery, or the artefacts of medieval life he had picked up while wandering the Wirral. The ground floor had a room set aside for the history of English pottery, especially local Liverpool ware and Wedgwood, and the first floor boasted a room devoted to Renaissance Italian majolica. On the stairs between the two floors hung a number of illustrations explaining the technical processes of engraving; a cartoon depicting a scene from Dante’s Divine Comedy; and a painting of Noah’s Ark breasting the rising waters of the biblical flood.
Most of all, though, Mayer valued objects that connected to famous lives of the past. Earlier generations would have dubbed him a ‘curio’: the type of collector who chose things not for their intrinsic aesthetic value but for their rarity, novelty or romantic associations. In many ways, he was part of the tradition of collecting for a ‘cabinet of curiosities’; these cabinets of wealthy seventeenth-and early-eighteenth-century gentlemen embraced everything from geological specimens to coins. His museum owed much to eclectic forerunners such as John Tradescant, whose collection was described by a visitor in 1638 as including, among other things, ‘two ribs of a whale, also a very ingenious little boat of bark. . . foreign plants. . . a salamander, a chameleon, a pelican. . . the hand of a mermaid, the hand of a mummy. . . all kinds of precious stones, coins, a picture wrought in feathers, a small piece of wood from the cross of Christ, pictures in perspective of Henry IV and Louis XIII of France. . . a scourge with which Charles V is said to have scourged himself and a hat band of snake bones’. Tradescant’s collection was, according to another admirer, ‘where a Man might in one daye behold and collecte into one place more curiosities than hee should see if hee spent all his life in Travell’. It was a marvel to his contemporaries, and an inspiration to those that followed, eventually becoming the core of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.4
In this tradition, Mayer’s displays of genuinely significant objects at the Egyptian Museum were interspersed with a range of pieces of doubtful aesthetic value, but each of which came with a good story. There was a signet ring and a snuff box which Mayer claimed had belonged to Napol
eon, as well as jewellery and another, gold-lined, snuff box which had apparently once been in the possession of the Empress Josephine. There was a ‘large wheel-lock Gun’ which, the label proudly proclaimed, had been ‘used at the execution of Mary Queen of Scots’, and, in the same room, ‘The Armoury’, there was ‘a cocoa-nut Cup, set in silver, formerly belonging to Oliver Cromwell’, as well as a pair of boots, also said to have been Cromwell’s. Mayer also treated his visitors to the sight of a ‘Pair of Shoes, worn by her present Majesty, on the night of her marriage to Prince Albert’.
Few of Liverpool’s citizens had ever before seen this kind of display; they marvelled at the exotic, the far-away and the historic now all within reach. Mayer’s idiosyncratic and unpredictable approach to collecting was amusing and spectacular, a stimulus to the imaginations of adults and children alike. Locals quickly added the museum to their list of entertainments, and many made return visits. Even in his own museum Mayer lacked the confidence to speak directly to visitors or answer queries about the collection, and the curator was kept busy explaining the displays and acting as tour guide for those unfamiliar with the town.
At a time when the distinctions between private and public collections could be hazy, Mayer’s museum straddled the border between the two. Although there was an admission charge of one shilling for adults and sixpence for children (which Mayer regretted having to impose), the museum was genuinely accessible, useful and popular. It was created with the general visitor in mind, as much to entertain as to educate. While many museums – from the South Kensington Museum to Ruskin’s educational experiment in Sheffield – were forthright in their didactic ambition, Mayer seems simply to have enjoyed the idea that people might like to come to see his things. Certainly, it seems clear that he regarded the Egyptian Museum as largely ‘public’, as an enterprise for the town of Liverpool that just happened to be funded by his personal wealth and made possible by his personal obsession.
With his museum open, Mayer felt an increased belief in himself as a collector. He commissioned a third portrait from John Harris, a competent local craftsman without pretensions. It is imposing and substantial. Mayer stands at the heart of his museum and replacing the eccentric clutter of his first portrait are a few choice objects: a colossal statue from the Abu Simbel temples, one of ancient Egypt’s richest and most haunting sites; a rare thirteenth-century German prayerbook in an intricate medieval binding; and a beautiful ancient carved ivory, the Asclepius-Hygieia diptych, which had graced a Roman site of worship and been part of the Fejérváry collection. Behind him, retreating into the arcaded spaced beyond, can be seen the forms of his cases; under his hand the gilt-edged top of a heavily carved scholar’s table and at the front of the picture, bold and large this time, both distinct from his objects and master of them, the figure of Mayer himself, half-smiling at his visitors, welcoming them to the museum he had created with an open, confident sweep of the hand.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Treasures of the North
Five years after opening his museum, Joseph Mayer found himself standing in a crowded field under a hot May sun, choking in the dust of passing horses and staring with slightly dismayed wonder at a vast vaulted iron and glass building whose low wings seemed to stretch far into the distance. He was with a group of his Liverpool friends. They had travelled together by train the few miles to Old Trafford, just outside Manchester, where, in the heart of the industrial grime and pragmatism of England’s north-west, they were about to join the snaking queue to see an unprecedented event. Larger and more impressive even than the famous Great Exhibition, this was Manchester’s Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857. Here, 16,000 works of art were collected under one roof: oils, watercolours, engravings and drawings; the controversial and avant-garde work of the Pre-Raphaelites; Michelangelo’s unfinished ‘Manchester Madonna’; photographs, textiles, sculpture, armour, furniture – and Joseph Mayer’s choicest and most precious pieces.
Like Robinson’s South Kensington exhibition a few years later, the 1857 Manchester display drew on the generosity of, and was an inspiration to, private collectors. ‘Art in England may be said to have derived all its encouragement from private persons,’ explained the organizers. Articulating the tension between private ownership and public display, they went on: ‘The pictures of our leading artists, the work of our best Sculptors, as well as the most select of all other objects coming under the denomination of Fine Arts, are distributed in private houses throughout the kingdom, instead of being found as in Continental Countries in National Collections accessible to the public.’ Like the 1862 show designed by Robinson and the Fine Arts Club, the purpose of the Art Treasures Exhibition was to display the finest of these works, to celebrate the achievements of private collectors, and to go some way towards redressing the balance from ‘periodic gatherings of the production of industry’ to exhibitions of more aesthetic interest: ‘There appears no reason why an effort should not be made to collect together in one central locality, and in a suitable building, the Treasures of Art with which Great Britain abounds.’1
Everyone, it seemed, was eager to be involved. As for the later London show, the Queen and Prince Albert agreed to lend a number of pieces and, keen to be included in such exalted company, collectors from across the country hurried forward to make their possessions available. Members of the Fine Arts Club were asked to lend, and Charlotte Schreiber offered three paintings by the Welsh watercolourist Penry Williams to the section of ‘Modern Masters’. But this was to be a regional showcase as much as a national event. It was a chance to polish provincial pride and highlight what could be done by the townsmen of the North; an opportunity for men like Mayer to prove that, even in the regions, there were collectors with taste and refinement whose objects rivalled the best in the world. Local collectors, in particular, readily committed their support and the organizers emphasized the choice of Manchester as a venue. ‘Situated as it is, in the centre of the kingdom, in the midst of a dense surrounding population with railway facilities admirably adapted for bringing and returning visitors within one day’, the city boasted both practical advantages ‘calculated to ensure the financial success of the scheme’ and, just as significantly, a tradition of active collecting and art appreciation: it was, pointed out proud local dignitaries, ‘a district where individuals have done so much to encourage art’.2
In just fourteen months, the committee succeeded in building an enormous palace on land at Old Trafford leased from the Manchester Cricket Club and later converted into the city’s botanical gardens. They filled the cavernous spaces, hanging paintings three or four high on the walls, installing cases with ceramics and glassware and creating corridors of sculpture in the airy nave. Over the entrance was a quotation from Keats – ‘a thing of Beauty is a joy for ever’ – and over the exit a line of Pope’s, ‘to wake the soul by tender strokes of art’. These set the tone for the exhibition. There were over 6,000 paintings, both by respected English artists such as Hogarth, Gainsborough and Constable and by the European Old Masters – Rubens, Raphael, Titian and Rembrandt. ‘Modern’ works by Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites were included, and the emerging art of photography was represented by evocative images of the Crimean War by James Robertson and an ambitious allegoric montage of The Two Ways of Life by the Swedish photographic pioneer Oscar Gustave Rejlander. The hall was subdivided by partitions, creating separate galleries, each shaded with calico to prevent damage to the artworks on sunny days. When things inside got too hot, firemen sprayed water on to the roof in a rudimentary form of air conditioning. Two public refreshment rooms also helped to reinvigorate visitors: in the convivial surroundings of the second-class restaurant, one reviewer noted that ‘John Bull and his female may be seen in full gulp and guzzle, swallowing vast quantities of cold boiled beef, thoroughly moistened with porter or bitter’.3
Pride of place in the Old Trafford palace was given to the impressive collection of medieval and Renaissance decorative arts brought together in
the 1830s and 1840s by the Toulouse lawyer Jules Soulages. It was a collection J. C. Robinson had already seen and admired. In 1855, when it had come on to the market after Soulages’ death, a photographer had been sent by Henry Cole to France to record the objects, with a view to making a purchase. His photographs showed a Toulouse townhouse bursting with vases and platters, highly decorated chests, carved chairs, tables and mirrors, and elaborate fireplaces. It was clearly a unique and valuable collection, and, with the support of Prince Albert, Cole began arrangements to buy everything, in the meantime bringing the objects to England for temporary display in the Marlborough House galleries. There, Robinson began the meticulous task of cataloguing, producing an illustrated descriptive inventory for publication in December 1856, just as plans for the Art Treasures Exhibition were taking shape.
But the sale was not completed. The Prime Minister at the time, Viscount Palmerston, and the Treasury could not see what Cole and Robinson wanted with Soulages’ rare and historic objects, nor how they could be used to educate designers and artisans. Once again, there was a debate about the purpose of the South Kensington Museum and the types of objects it should be collecting. Finally, emphasizing the principle of utility, the expenditure was vetoed. Instead, it was the organizers of the Manchester spectacle who audaciously agreed to pay the £13,500 needed to secure the collection for Britain. Robinson was forced to repack all the objects and the Soulages pieces left Marlborough House for Old Trafford, where they formed the core of the Art Treasures show. ‘After repeated communications with the London managers which failed to secure its loan, the members of the Executive Committee, in their individual capacity and on their personal responsibility, agreed to purchase the Collection. . . and thus secured it,’ explained the committee.4 Manchester had scored a victory over the capital, and let it be fully known in the press. Numerous announcements and illustrations drew the northern crowds to see what it was that had been snatched from London’s hands.
Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves Page 22