Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves

by Jacqueline Yallop

  The library was an instant success, and an extra room had to be provided almost immediately. Three years later, in 1869, Mayer had the opportunity to buy a farmhouse and barn alongside Pennant House and by January 1870 he had created a public garden, with walks of chestnut trees, a grand new reading room brightly lit with gas burners, and a public hall for art exhibitions and lectures. He was clearly joining the philanthropic trend of his age, aligning himself with wealthy industrialists and merchants across the country who were founding public facilities and open spaces. From the ambitious model villages at Saltaire, outside Bradford, and Bournville, near Birmingham, to smaller gifts like the Derby Arboretum, England’s first public park, created for the people of the Derby in 1840 by textile manufacturer Joseph Strutt, philanthropic Victorians were reshaping the urban landscape. Mayer’s projects were respectable and predictable outlets for his energies, positioning him at the heart of Victorian society. But his generosity was not simply a product of conformism. Mayer was a genuinely kind man; he was not interested in gestures. He envisaged sturdy and practical facilities for the young and the old, for learning and for entertainment, not an empty monument to his wealth.

  All of this, he achieved. ‘All classes meet at the library, farmer’s boys in corduroy and heiresses in sable, clergy of the church and little girls of their Sunday School, servants and masters,’ noted The Standard. Many villagers walked four or five miles or more with their families to use the library and ‘each night a crowd assembles around the door as if it were a theatre, waiting with patience’ until the readers could be admitted to browse the shelves.12 Mayer was spoken of fondly and with respect. Far from shutting himself off with his things, he reached out energetically to the community, to the benefit of all in Bebington.

  There was satisfaction in seeing the village thrive around him, and not a little pleasure in being greeted so warmly by local people. As the pains of age grew sharper and his breath came shorter, Mayer delighted in sitting by the counter at the library, helping the staff issue readers’ tickets or watching from the terrace of Pennant House as local boys gathered up the chestnuts in the autumn. With his museum apparently in the safe hands of the Liverpool town council, Mayer made arrangements that, on his death, the objects in Pennant House should be sold to finance the public projects in Bebington. He left clear instructions detailing the sale, and he established a trust to manage the resulting funds and look after the necessary day-to-day administration. With one collection safely stowed for posterity, he could afford to use the other for more practical purposes: the sale of the Pennant House objects would, he knew, reach out into the future, imprinting his name on the village he had adopted as home. Everything was settled. He would leave the best of both worlds, the Liverpool Museum and the Bebington facilities, which, he believed, would last. His memorial would be secure. There would be no need of further portraits.

  Fashion, Fine Dining and Forgeries: Dealing in Society

  MURRAY MARKS

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Rossetti’s Peacock

  The carriage pulled up quietly outside number 16 Cheyne Walk. Everything about this eighteenth-century Chelsea street was hushed and genteel. A light mist drifted up from the Thames and the bells from the medieval Old Church were subdued. Murray Marks paid the driver and stood for a moment on the wide stone pavement looking across the river. It was 1863, and Cheyne Walk was one of London’s most desirable addresses. In 1810, Elizabeth Gaskell had been born at number 93 and in the early decades of the century, Isambard Kingdom Brunel had lived for nearly twenty years at number 98, a divided seventeenth-century townhouse. Admiral William Henry Smith, founder of the Royal Geographic Society and Vice-President of the Royal Society had lived at number 3 in the 1840s and 1850s, while next door to him, at number 4, was the Scottish painter William Dyce. Further along the street, J. M. W. Turner had lived quietly since the mid-1840s, before dying in 1851 at number 119. At 101, James McNeill Whistler had recently arrived. It was a street of celebrity, a place of invention, creativity and achievement, and Murray Marks had come to visit another of its famous inhabitants, the poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He relit his cigar, settled his hat on his head after the ride and made his way through the high gate to the tall, flat-faced white house.

  Marks became aware of a strange squawking, something like the shriek of a banshee. He stopped and looked around. But the citizens of Cheyne Walk, apparently unflustered, remained in their houses, and for a moment all was quiet again. Then the squawking continued; as Marks pulled the doorbell, it was louder and shriller than ever. It was coming from within the house, he could tell that, but he could not place the sound. He had not heard anything like it before; it was harsh and otherworldly; it did not belong. But when the door was opened to him, Marks saw nothing terrifying or supernatural. Nor did he notice, at first, the wide entrance hall with its stuccoed ceiling and sweeping stairway, because the source of the sound was showing off and Marks was confronted with the dazzling blue of a disgruntled peacock, in full display, flashing green and gold in the morning light from the street, and confronting a kangaroo.

  Marks was not as surprised as he might have been. He had heard about the menagerie. In this most elegant of streets, Rossetti kept a zoo: among its inhabitants, described by his brother William, were: ‘a Pomeranian puppy named Punch, a grand Irish deerhound named Wolf, a barn-owl named Jessie, another owl named Bobby. . . rabbits, dormice, hedgehogs, two successive wombats, a Canadian marmot or woodchuck, an ordinary marmot, armadillos, kangaroos, wallabies, a deer, a white mouse with her brood, a racoon, squirrels, a mole, peacocks, wood-owls, Virginian owls, Chinese horned owls, a jackdaw, laughing jackasses (Australian kingfishers), undulated grass-parakeets, a talking grey parrot, a raven, chameleons, green lizards, and Japanese salamanders’. It was a haphazard arrangement, and the collection of exotic creatures was not easy to control. The tent constructed in the garden to house the animals was by no means secure; William Rossetti wrote in his memoirs of how ‘one or other bird would get drowned’ or ‘the dormice would fight and kill one another’ or, worse still, the racoon ‘followed his ordinary practice of burrowing, [and] turned up from under the hearthstone of a neighbour’s kitchen, to the serious dismay of the cook, who opined that, if he was not the devil, there was no accounting for what he could possibly be’.1

  Undaunted, Marks tried to take his unusual surroundings in his stride. The obvious eccentricity was unlike his own steady, respectable home, as though he had stepped over the threshold from the ordinary to the avant-garde. But there were also more familiar things to draw his eye; despite the shuffles and smells of strange animals, Marks admired the high ceilings, tall windows and elegant proportions of Rossetti’s panelled rooms, strikingly painted in deep colours. Above all, he could not fail to notice Rossetti’s idiosyncratic collecting. The house was full of bric-abrac picked up at junkshops, an uncoordinated assemblage of brass and pewter, oriental rugs, velvets and chintzes; a jumble of musical instruments valued not for how they played, but for how they looked; Sheraton furniture and Spanish cabinets set alongside worthless junk; and banks upon banks of mirrors, reflecting the city light into the rooms.

  Marks and Rossetti soon became friends. Rossetti had a collector’s instincts. He liked to surround himself with the curious and the rare, and to talk excitably and at length about his finest objects. He could forget himself so absolutely in his curiosity that he was capable of ignoring the dictates of etiquette: upending a porcelain dish at a dinner party to check the maker’s marks on the bottom, he promptly upset a salmon all over the tablecloth. But his fascination with collecting and display needed a reliable and respectable foil, and this is what drew him to Murray Marks. Marks was modest and quiet, reticent with strangers, and distinctly unflamboyant. He had a calming influence on the long-haired, ostentatious Rossetti. He was reliable and sympathetic, happy to help create the rooms the artist wanted with the minimum of fuss. Theirs was a marriage of opposites: Rossetti was excitable
and unconventional; Marks was studious and proper. They were brought together by the desire to discover and acquire lovely objects, to dress Rossetti’s home with the finest furniture and ornaments, to create a Pre-Raphaelite interior that would provide the perfect backdrop for the preening peacock.

  It took a long time for the house at Cheyne Walk to be completed. Rossetti was strong-willed and unpredictable, and could be difficult to do business with. His life was full of distractions and often hectic and fractured. The Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood of painters that he had founded with John Everett Millais and Holman Hunt in the late 1840s was becoming increasingly popular for its aesthetic principles, and increasingly notorious for its extravagant lifestyles. By 1863, when Marks called on the Cheyne Walk house, Rossetti was working on a series of jewel-like watercolours and experimenting with the highly decorated, richly coloured oil paintings of beautiful, faintly exotic women that were to make him famous. His wife and muse Elizabeth had recently died after taking an overdose of laudanum, an opium-based, highly addictive painkiller that was commonly prescribed at the time for ailments ranging from headaches to tuberculosis. He was sharing his home, on and off, with his brother William, his mistress and model Fanny Cornforth, the controversial poet Algernon Swinburne, and the writer George Meredith, whose own wife had recently left him for another of Rossetti’s artist friends. He was suffering from ever-lengthening bouts of depression, drank heavily and was addicted to chloral hydrate, a sedative and hypnotic drug, marketed for insomnia, that would eventually wreck his health.

  Not surprisingly in the circumstances, Rossetti’s collecting could be erratic. Marks might send notice of a striking table, or a pretty writing desk, only to have his note returned if his client were lost in a misanthropic haze of drugs and depression. For long weeks, Rossetti would refuse any guests, before a sudden obsession with a particular piece had him hounding Marks for information. His demands were exacting, and he expected his dealer to be thoroughly diligent on his behalf. He would think nothing of giving Marks apparently impossible commissions: ‘get me two thimble-shaped lids for two little round pots I have’, he demanded on one occasion, sending Murray to scour the length and breadth of Holland for just the right lids, of the exact shape and size he required.2

  But Marks was patient and amenable, and prepared to ride the peaks and troughs of his client’s moods. He found Rossetti ‘the most amusing and at the same time the most intellectual man I ever met’, and he was conscientious in his quests on Rossetti’s behalf.3 His friendship with the artist flourished. Marks commissioned portraits of his wife, her face blooming in Rossetti’s characteristic red chalk, her long neck and full lips, her flowing hair, typical of Pre-Raphaelite models. Rossetti borrowed objects from Marks to use in his paintings: a mirror from the drawing-room fireplace, a blue jar. And as he mixed his paints, blending and reblending to capture a particular shade, he sent Marks on errands to the markets of Covent Garden to find iris or tulips of a particular colour or a lemon tree in a china pot. When Rossetti’s funds dried up, as they were apt to do, Marks would pay some of his bills or negotiate discounts until the crisis passed. He could be found at auctions, bidding up the price of Rossetti’s works so that his friend could be sure of a profit. In particularly hard times, he bought parts of Rossetti’s collection, at a good price, and kept them safe. Years later, in 1882, Marks was one of the few mourners who made the journey to Rossetti’s bleak funeral on the Kent coast, where he had gone to escape both his paralysing addiction and his creditors.

  * * *

  Despite the evident closeness between the two men, Marks never forgot that the relationship was primarily founded upon the business of collecting and dealing. It was this attention to commercial opportunity, partnered with a sensitivity to the nuances of fashion and the market – and hard-nosed ambition – which made Marks in time, perhaps inevitably, a successful man. He was part of a new generation of art dealers that was changing the collectors’ world. Born in 1840, he was a near contemporary of both Joseph Joel Duveen, Charlotte Schreiber’s rival, who was born just three years later, and of the prominent and respected art dealer Asher Wertheimer, born in 1844. Like many other London dealers, all three came from Jewish émigré families: Marks and Duveen had roots in Holland, Wertheimer’s father was German. They fell outside the social circles that filled museum posts and gentlemen’s clubs. They were born into an established community that stretched across all the major cities of Europe, one that viewed art as a business enterprise, that combined connoisseurship with commercialism, and was open about the fact that collecting was a market activity.

  Marks, Duveen and Wertheimer were all socially accomplished, knowledgeable and astute. While they had been raised in business families, their love of art was both genuine and inquisitive. All three combined a life dealing in historic works with befriending and supporting emerging young artists. Duveen happily loaned pieces from his showroom to furnish the backdrops to paintings, providing Millais in particular with a number of valuable tapestries; John Singer Sargent dined weekly with the Wertheimers at their house in Connaught Place and painted twelve portraits of the family which were left to the National Gallery after Wertheimer’s death in 1918. As social outsiders, they mixed not with the gentry and royalty of Robinson’s acquaintance but more commonly with an avant-garde artistic circle that challenged the establishment. But they were also careful to maintain a precious air of respectability that attracted the wealthiest and most influential clients. By the 1860s and 1870s, when all three dealers were at their peak, they had become some of the most powerful men in the collecting world.

  Marks had known connoisseurs and collectors since his earliest childhood, helping out in the shop which his father, Emanuel Marks, had opened around 1850 on London’s Oxford Street, on the edge of the antiques heartland of Victorian Soho. He was a precocious child: by the age of ten, he was said to be fond of chattering happily to his father’s customers, discussing fine points of art history, comparing the masterpieces of the past and arguing the case for forgotten painters. He developed an interest in Chinese art and pestered his father, unsuccessfully, to allow him to undertake a tour of the Far East. A few years later, he attended one of Europe’s leading universities in Frankfurt, studying Spinoza and exploring the art of France, Italy, Austria and Germany as he holidayed with his friend, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. He was unusually well educated for a dealer – erudite, articulate and cultured. As we have seen, Duveen’s training in the docks of Hull was more practical, and Wertheimer learned his trade in his father’s showroom. Marks, on the other hand, was an intellectual and a connoisseur; he could stand his own in society and, according to Rossetti, his ‘taste amounted to genius’.4

  After returning to London from Frankfurt, Marks settled to business, joining his father in the expanding Oxford Street shop that shared a building with Pickford & Co., then just starting out in the removals trade. In the early 1860s, he was conscientious and dutiful, but to a young man with ambition, Emanuel Marks’ approach to trade seemed dull and lifeless. There was no sparkle to it. Marks, meanwhile, enjoyed nights at the theatre, spending hours at stage doors waiting for late-night actresses; talking politics and poetry and music with noisy young men; visiting artist’s studios with the fashionable crowd for private views. He was warm and witty. He impressed with his learning, but wore his knowledge lightly. He was stylish and modern and smart. And so, despite his father’s disapproval, Marks edged his way into the heart of society, to the dinners and dances and parties that mattered. He scoured his father’s client list for the names he needed to know; he pressed for invitations; he was seen at all the right occasions. Before long, he had a bohemian circle of influential friends. As well as becoming part of the Pre-Raphaelite coterie, he was close to other men whose names dotted the fashionable journals and pages of Punch: the satirical artist and dandy George Cruikshank, who had once received a bribe of £100 from George III ‘not to caricature His Majesty in any immoral situation’; the s
on of Charles Dickens, a lively, and often inebriated, socialite; and The Times journalist, and soon-to-be actor and entertainer, George Grossmith.

  With this somewhat outré crowd, Marks kept late hours and attended all the new shows. But he did not forget himself, nor his profession. He was, even as a carousing young man, decorous and slightly reserved. He continued to work diligently, sensing that he was on the verge of making his business one of the most sought after and desirable in London. So, while he might on occasion be fashionable and frivolous, he was also comfortable assuming the character of scholar and intellectual on evenings spent with John Ruskin, or Charles Hercules Read, who worked with Augustus Franks at the British Museum. He took care of his credentials, continuing to read and study widely, and developing links with dealers abroad. And he discovered that even his more ostentatious friends and clients could be useful in sustaining a scholarly network: both Rossetti and James McNeill Whistler belonged to the Fine Arts Club, connecting Marks to the most prominent and active collectors of his day.

  In a campaign to attract the kind of customers he wanted, Marks sought to shed the stereotype of the grimy backstreet dive that Dickens had featured in The Old Curiosity Shop; the ‘receptacles for old and curious things which seem to crouch in odd corners of this town and to hide their musty treasures from the public eye in jealousy and distrust’. He aimed instead for the bright and accessible, the professional but unstuffy, creating a business which would woo the fashionable without alienating serious collectors and the museums. He began by reinventing the Marks name, and with it the character of the art dealer. By 1862, the Marks entry in the London business directory, which for years had simply read ‘curiosity dealer’, was puffed and polished, and had become instead ‘Importer of antique furniture, Sèvres, Dresden, oriental china and curiosities’. It was a statement of Marks’ intent and ambition: the business was no longer just about unidentified ‘curiosities’ nor was he simply a ‘dealer’, tainted with overtones of the noisier, dirtier London trades. He was an ‘Importer’, a man who travelled, discerning and learned and slightly exotic; a man with contacts. The new entry associated him with the best and most desirable of European objects and, by association, the leading European dealers. And it kept him ahead of the competition. About the same time, Joseph Joel Duveen was similarly remarketing his own business, printing new stationery as ‘Importer of Antique China, Silver and Works of Art’ and looking to move to London from Hull, visiting premises on both Oxford Street and Bond Street. In the end, Duveen had to postpone the London move until 1876, but Marks was no doubt aware that other dealers were looking to expand and modernize, and that to succeed he had to find new ways of doing things.