While the description of the business was a good place to start, Marks was eager to go further. He tried talking to his father, making suggestions for ways in which they could improve and update the shop, but Emanuel Marks was suspicious of fashion and would not countenance change. So it was after his father set off to Europe for a long trip in 1864 that Marks took his next step, closing a deal on premises in stylish Sloane Street in south-west London, converting them into a showroom and, with a few selected objects carefully displayed, setting himself up alone, as ‘Murray Marks, dealer in works of art’. The showroom at 21 Sloane Street was the epitome of fashionable chic: it was everything Emanuel’s old shop was not. Its broad windows glistened in the evening gas lights; its heavy door was freshly painted and latticed in gold. The chattering window shoppers, parading between Chelsea and Knightsbridge, could not help but notice the new premises, while the artists and poets and collectors of Marks’ crowd were delighted to have somewhere new to be seen. And Marks, sensing what might draw them in, chose for the focus of his display the intense colour and bold forms, the exotic oriental patterns, of blue-and-white china.
Rossetti’s raucous bird, boldly displaying in the Cheyne Walk entrance hall, was a living, squawking testament to the popularity of the deep blues and glittering eye of the peacock feather. From curtains to carpets, from wallpapers to writing papers, the peacock motif became ubiquitous in fashionable homes as a symbol of the avant-garde and the daring, a motif for those wanting to throw off the mustiness of the mid-century and stand at the vanguard of a changing taste. It was an icon for the poets, writers, artists and designers clustering under the banners of the Pre-Raphaelites, the Aesthetes and the Art Nouveau that, by the end of the century, would be making claims for new ways of representing the world. It was beautiful and ephemeral, detached from establishment arguments about the importance of utility, and so the perfect symbol for those wanting to celebrate and collect art for its own sake. ‘Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for example,’ urged John Ruskin in The Stones of Venice.
Alongside the peacock feathers – on Whistler’s mantelpiece and in Rossetti’s parlour, in William Morris’s country house at Kelmscott Manor and in Oscar Wilde’s university rooms – stood the blue-and-white china that Marks’ new shop was showcasing. In his premises on Sloane Street, he was pioneering a trend and promoting one of the biggest collecting crazes of the Victorian age. The fashion for pots and plates with willowy Japanese and Chinese designs would soon create an apparently insatiable market; the homes of the stylish rich and the aspirational middle classes would soon be full of themed rooms, extravagantly decorated in an oriental style with prints, fans, screens and matting and with the distinctive blue-and-white china taking pride of place.
The techniques of making a pure white ceramic with cobalt-blue decoration beneath the glaze had been introduced to China from the Middle East as early as the ninth century. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it was already being exported to Europe: during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) for example, China was part of the Mongol empire that controlled much of Asia, and blue-and-white travelled swiftly to the Mediterranean on its expanding maritime networks. By the end of the seventeenth century, sophisticated pieces from the K’ang-hsi period (1662– 1722) were becoming available to the wealthiest collectors, and the Dutch East India Company was investing heavily in the profitable trading routes that supplied the growing demand in Europe. Blue-and-white became enormously desirable, a way for rich collectors to display their elegance and wealth. The royalty and nobility of Europe created a huge demand and fine examples became so highly prized that they appear in many seventeenth-and eighteenth-century paintings, either as the backdrop to portraits or extravagant allegories, or as subjects in their own right. As early as 1514, Giovanni Bellini’s Feast of the Gods showed a satyr and nymph serving fruit to the gods from blue-and-white Chinese bowls. A century later, blue-and-white was even more widely in evidence. The Dutch painter Jan Treck painted a still life in 1649 with two blue-and-white bowls (probably Ming), while in the 1650s Willam Claesz Heda, another Dutchman, evoked the luxury lifestyle of the seventeenth-century merchant with a still life of lobster, crafted gold goblets and blue-and-white; both works are now in the National Gallery in London.
With a guaranteed market, many pieces were designed and made specifically for export. Thousands of dinner services were ordered in China directly from Europe: drawings of a family’s coat of arms would be sent out to China to be copied on to the porcelain which was then shipped back. Traditional oriental subjects were supplemented by those intended to appeal to European taste: Buddhist gods gave way to Tyrolean dancers and pictures of Adam and Eve; cranes and monkeys were replaced by pheasants and dogs. Taking account of the European fashion for tea-drinking, traditional Chinese patterns were used to decorate Western-style wares – European tea caddies, cups with handles and saucers, and matching milk jugs. European manufacturers, too, were keen to exploit the fashion, and worked hard to perfect techniques similar to those traditionally used in the Far East. By the middle of the eighteenth century, factories in England and the Netherlands were able to produce their own blue-and-white china. Delftware, from Holland, was particularly popular, and most of the major eighteenth-century collections included both imported Chinese ceramics and Delft. But, although the new sources made blue-and-white less exclusive, they did not dent the fashion for oriental-style china, and the demand fuelled some of the earliest mass-production techniques of the Industrial Revolution. By the nineteenth century, blue-and-white was no longer the preserve of the very rich. The more local supply, and the increasing wealth of the middle classes, meant that even relatively modest homes could boast at least a few pieces for display, while the effect of blue-and-white en masse delighted those with a taste for flamboyant decorative schemes.
Collections of blue-and-white varied enormously, from refined and extremely valuable collections of ancient Chinese pieces to mass-market versions produced to cash in on the trend. Some collectors, like Rossetti and Marks, were knowledgeable and scholarly but there were many others who cared less about the provenance of individual objects than about the lavishness of the display they could create at home. For these collectors, fashion was the driving force. The hierarchy of objects and collections tended, of course, to follow class lines: the wealthier, more aristocratic collectors set their sights on fine-quality Chinese and delftware; the enthusiastic collectors of the middle classes often settled for more ordinary, mass-produced examples.
Marks had fallen for the sinewy decoration and pure glazes of blue-and-white during his childhood studies of Chinese art. And with clients like Rossetti he could share his pleasure in ancient pieces, comparing the subtle developments between periods and dynasties, the evolution of forms and the effects of pigments and oxides. Serious collectors came to rely on his expertise and his skilful handling of the import market. But importing blue-and-white from the Far East remained hazardous, slow and expensive, and with his Dutch connections Marks was also well placed to exploit sources closer to hand. Many of his relatives, under the full family name of Marks van Galen, were based in Amsterdam, running shops and showrooms that drew enthusiastic collectors: Charlotte Schreiber was a regular visitor to what she called ‘van Galen’s’. As a young man, Marks had spent several useful weeks in his grandfather’s Amsterdam shop, and as he grew older he used his contacts in Holland to create an unrivalled supply network. Holland was not only the source for delftware, but it also had large quantities of high-quality, original blue-and-white. This had been imported from China to furnish houses in the seventeenth century but had since become unfashionable. No one wanted it. This Chinese blue-and-white was cheap and plentiful and could be easily shipped back to London. Marks knew where to go, and who to talk to. His contacts kept an eye out at Dutch sales and clearances, buying up blue-and-white on his behalf. He had cousins who could stalk the dealers and search the dusty back
room shelves. And he could speak Dutch, so he could hire coaches to take him out into the countryside and knock on the doors of substantial, likely-looking homes himself.
Eventually, the Dutch caught on to the English mania and, inevitably, prices rose. In fact, they rose so quickly and so steeply that it actually became cheaper to import directly from the Far East. But for a few years in the 1860s, beautiful and ancient pieces were still to be found on farmhouse dressers in the flat lands along the Rhine or north into Friesland, or in everyday use on kitchen tables. That he was so well placed to manipulate the craze for blue-and-white, that he could respond so quickly and effectively to the booming English market, proved the making of Murray Marks. His artistic and bohemian friends applauded his success; collectors from across the country demanded his services and he expanded from Sloane Street to the bustle of High Holborn. In 1874, when Pickford’s moved out of Oxford Street in search of larger premises, Marks seized the opportunity to expand yet again, and to create a showroom to match his crystallizing ambitions.
Marks asked the architect Richard Norman Shaw, one of the most influential of Victorian architects, to extend the Oxford Street premises and make it magnificent. Shaw had been a friend of Marks’ for some years, and was a collector himself. In 1866, both men had been involved in creating Glen Aldred, the Surrey country house of the painter E. W. Cooke. Shaw had designed and built the house and helped choose the furnishings – by ransacking Marks’ showroom for its finest pieces. In later years, Shaw would go on to design grand houses with a classical influence – Bryanston House in Dorset and Chesters in Northumberland in the 1890s, and London’s huge Piccadilly Hotel in the early 1900s – but in the 1870s he was experimenting with a leaner domestic architecture that became known as the Queen Anne style. At 8 Melbury Road, 118 Campden Hill Road and 31 Melbury Road, all in North Kensington, he created three celebrated ‘Artists’ Houses’, each including a light-filled studio space, for the artists Marcus Stone, George Henry Boughton and Luke Fildes. As estate architect at Bedford Park in London, he designed key elements in a pioneering model of suburban living which soon acquired a reputation for attracting ‘a particular person, most likely artistic and bohemian’: a survey of 168 early residents found that 40 were artists, 16 architects and 9 actors or musicians.5
All these projects were undertaken between 1875 and the early 1880s. Shaw worked with Marks on designs for the new showroom during November 1875. Once again, Marks was in at the beginning, creating rather than simply following fashion. Having seen what could be done at Cooke’s house in Glen Aldred, he was convinced that a new kind of artistic architecture could prove popular. Even while Shaw was still experimenting with styles, Marks saw something in his work that fitted perfectly with his own aspirations for a striking aesthetic display space, and he was brave enough to back a new trend, while at the same time raising the profile of his friend’s architecture within an influential artistic circle. A visitor to the shop in the 1870s noted admiringly that Marks had achieved ‘the first artistic business elevation, in creamy coloured woodwork, which was erected in London in the style of Queen Anne’.6
Within months, nothing remained of Emanuel Marks’ old shop. In its place was a ground-floor showroom thirty feet wide, fifty feet long and over twelve feet tall, a splendid airy space, with two more intimate showrooms upstairs. In defiance of the current fashion for blank plate-glass windows, there was a neo-Georgian bow window, with carved wooden frames, to lure customers off the street with a promise of old-fashioned courtesy and hand-picked treasures, and the huge doors were moulded with Renaissance ornament, the name Marks inscribed in large letters above them. And everything was painted in a single colour, a clean cream – the window frame, the walls, the showcases and doors, the display furniture. This might seem an obvious trick designed to show off the objects, especially the blue-and-white, to best effect, but this kind of attention to the interior of an art dealer’s shop was completely new. Some manufacturers had had an eye on the marketing potential of glamorous display rooms since the end of the eighteenth century: the Wedgwood showrooms in London and Bath were carefully designed to appeal to the fashionable, and often female, shopper, and to show off a range of wares at their best. But the art dealers’ premises that most collectors knew were cramped and chaotic in the spirit of the bazaar, the goods heaped up, the pictures double-hung, objects, styles and periods all jumbled, and nothing to be had without diligent rummaging. Marks was setting high new standards. He was trying something daring and innovative. And it caused an overnight sensation, attracting would-be buyers and winning Marks widespread publicity and instant celebrity.
Within two years, Marks’ bright, clean, sophisticated method of display was being adopted by any dealer with ambition. In 1877, he was called in to advise on the decoration of the new Grosvenor Gallery, being set up in Bond Street, and the same year the art dealers Agnew’s built a new and refined showroom at 43 Old Bond Street, very much with Marks’ model in mind. These new shops saw themselves as private galleries. The attention to display was an indication that they were challenging established institutions like the Royal Academy and, perhaps more importantly, it signalled the respect being given to artists and their work. Where the Royal Academy tended to treat its artists as mere producers contributing to a crowded warehouse of paintings, the owners of these new gallery showrooms were developing courteous and creative friendships with their artists and collectors. The harmonious rooms where each piece was allowed generous space were designed to complement the objects, suggesting that works were valued and that those who spent their lives with these works should be valued too. It was a strategy that proved successful. The Grosvenor Gallery had 1,100 customer-visitors a day when it opened in its purpose-built temple to art, and Marks’ equally popular showroom became a place to see and be seen.
Marks’ new achievements took him back to the quiet pavements of Cheyne Walk, to Rossetti’s drawing room and the magnificent peacock. Because he needed one more thing, and for this he called on his friends. And so, on a late spring afternoon, bright with sunshine, three of Europe’s leading artists met together with Marks. They drank wine and smoked. There was the flamboyant and controversial James McNeill Whistler, a neighbour of Rossetti’s, who was painting moody landscapes and severe and complex portraits. There was Rossetti, of course, in one of his better moods, and there was the rebellious William Morris, craftsman, designer and Socialist agitator. They were men who, between them, were to change the way people thought about art. But first, they had to design a business card for Marks. And what they came up with was gold and blue and maroon, with a heavily decorated border of the type for which Morris is still remembered, Chinese characters emphasizing Marks’ connections across the world, and the inscribed names of all the fields in which he was now an expert: carvings, armour, leather, tapestry, furniture, bronzes, oriental and European ceramics and enamels. It was a card that swaggered with commercial confidence and poise, a statement of personal achievement and a flourishing display of Marks’ influential friendships. At the centre, framed by the elaborate border and sitting on a highly polished surface, was a gorgeous blue-and-white ginger jar. Tucked inside the jar, and lying nonchalantly alongside, were the twinkling eyes of two large peacock feathers. Perhaps they were picked up from Rossetti’s hallway, or out of his garden. Perhaps they came directly from the bird that had greeted Marks so boisterously on his first visit. With their luxuriance, their bold colours and their delicate fine forms, they were a perfect icon of everything Marks had so far accomplished.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A Notorious Squabble
Collectors, artists, connoisseurs, other dealers – and simply the followers of fashion – flocked to see what Murray Marks was offering. Charlotte Schreiber called by at the showroom to see if there was anything to tempt her. Robinson was forced to take note of this energetic competitor. The shop buzzed with activity, commissions poured in and sales flourished. But it was a difficult time for most dealers.
During the 1870s and 1880s, rural decline, a dip in world trade and a stuttering British economy led to a corresponding depression in the art market. The greatest success was to be had by those who, like Marks, were prepared to innovate, finding new ways to market their wares and services. As well as updating and improving their premises, many dealers began to specialize. Etching, oil painting and watercolour all began to find distinct homes in particular outlets, while smaller paintings and more portable works of decorative art continued to gain in popularity: ‘The exhibition painting has had its day,’ suggested Walter Sickert in a magazine article, adding that artists ‘will have to learn to work on a small scale’.1 Like Marks, many dealers were also forging links abroad, scouring Europe for works, bringing together an international client list of collectors and trying to offset a downturn in one nation’s market with a potential boom in another. ‘Art in England . . . is fast becoming cosmopolitan,’ noted The Times in 1879. ‘Our picture dealers and buyers lay under contribution the ateliers, not only of Paris, but of Vienna, Munich, and Dusseldorf, Brussels and Antwerp, the Hague and Amsterdam, modern Florence, Milan and Rome.’2
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