Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves

by Jacqueline Yallop

While Leyland was in Liverpool, launching a shipping line, Whistler moved in, living on site for months so that he could commit himself entirely to the project. He undertook increasingly ambitious alterations, covering the ceiling with Dutch metal, an imitation gold leaf, over which he painted a vibrant series of lush peacock feathers. He gilded every inch of Jeckyll’s walnut shelving and decorated the shutters with four magnificent golden peacocks. He wrote confidently to Leyland, delighted with the changes, explaining that the room was now ‘really alive with beauty – brilliant and gorgeous while at the same time delicate and refined to the last degree. . . there is no room in London like it’.12 He showed off his work to visitors and called in the press to admire what he had done. But when Leyland returned he was horrified, appalled by the liberties the artist was taking with his home and money. He refused to pay the 2,000 guineas which Whistler was demanding and, on Rossetti’s advice, offered half the amount in settlement. But Whistler was a notoriously difficult and passionate man. He took the reduced payment as a personal slight, exacerbated when Leyland wrote out a cheque in pounds instead of guineas. A pound was worth twenty shillings, while a guinea was worth twenty-one, but worse still, while the pound was the currency of trade, the guinea was the currency of gentlemen and artists. Whistler was furious. In revenge, he painted over Leyland’s antique leather with blue paint, creating a mural of two enormous gold peacocks, dominating the dining room, strutting and brash. The telling details were highlighted in silver: scattered at the feet of the squabbling birds were the silver coins Leyland refused to pay; the silver feathers on one of the peacock’s throats recalled Leyland’s taste for ruffled shirts while the silver crest feather on the other resembled Whistler’s distinctive lock of white hair. He called the mural Art and Money; or, The Story of the Room and when it was finished, in March 1877, Whistler quit and never set foot in the dining room again.13

  Behind the bluster and ranting and preening, Marks’ contribution to Leyland’s distinctive interiors has often been overlooked, but he was an integral part of the process of transforming the Peacock Room, and the rest of the house. He worked closely with Leyland’s architect Thomas Jeckyll long before Whistler became involved, putting together the core of Leyland’s distinctive collection and integrating it into a decorative scheme on his client’s behalf. Marks provided a range of quality blue-and-white pieces that was displayed on the dining room’s narrow carved shelves, rising in thin columns up the walls of the room. He was aiming to capture the spirit of the Renaissance, of the Porzellankammer or porcelain rooms which were statements of wealth at the heart of many seventeenth-century collections. But his contribution did not end with the fine china. As well as the blue-and-white, Marks supplied rugs, carvings and tapestries. He provided Botticelli drawings, paintings by his Pre-Raphaelite friends and heavily carved Italian chests. He found the highly coloured stamped leather wall-hangings that Whistler was to paint over in fury, and he set a striking female figure at the foot of Leyland’s stairs, taken from the prow of a Renaissance galley.

  After Whistler’s extravagant intervention, much of Marks’ work still remained. Despite the controversy, Leyland kept the Peacock Room as Whistler had left it, and it still displayed the blue-and-white, even if the impact was muted in the new design scheme. As the room became famous, the subject of gossip and scandal, so visitors came to see what Whistler had done, and in turn were able to admire the beautiful pieces that Marks had assembled. In the other rooms of the house, Marks’ original contribution remained untouched and the rest of the collection he had supplied to Leyland continued to provide a model for a fashionable townhouse. But Leyland’s collecting was a fashion statement: he was interested in making a splash, not in making any kind of scholarly, long-term commitment. Twelve years after Whistler completed the Peacock Room, it was removed from Leyland’s house in its entirety and exhibited in a London art gallery; the collection of blue-and-white was dispersed.14

  Marks was accustomed to such dispersal. As he had suspected, Sir Henry Thompson’s enthusiasm for china also proved shortlived, and in 1880, just two years after the exhibition opening, his pieces of blue-and-white were put into auction at Christie’s (where Marks was well placed to buy back some of the most important lots) and he turned his attention to other fashionable pastimes. Marks was more aware than most that there was no single type of collector. Alongside those who entered into an intense, often obsessive, lifelong relationship with their collections, or collectors who combined fashion with scholarship, were men like Leyland and Thompson whose interest was fleeting and who wanted to buy fine things as status symbols rather than for intellectual pleasure.

  Marks was unusual among the crowds of London dealers in advising on how to use collections to make a show, to define and create ‘lifestyles’ in the way we now expect from interior designers. His willingness to embrace this most ephemeral of collecting habits again set him apart. It was a shrewd way of doing business. Joseph Joel Duveen followed Marks’ example and persuaded Arthur Wilson, a Hull shipowner, to let him redesign his house in the early 1880s, noting that ‘the decoration and furnishing of Mr Wilson’s house was the finest advertisement I could have had, and his rich friends almost fell over each other to get beautiful objects, too’.15 In the early years of the next century, Duveen’s son Joseph went a step further, immersing his collectors in Old World luxury and frequently advising his wealthiest clients, especially Americans, on ways to make their homes impressive: ‘This decoration always included enormous sales of precious things,’ noted Duveen’s nephew James.16 In the late 1890s, in an echo of the Peacock Room, Joseph Duveen oversaw the decoration of the London house of J. P. Morgan, son of Pierpont Morgan, a few doors down from Leyland at 14 Princes Gate, creating a special room for a series of eighteenth-century painted panels by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. In 1915, after Morgan’s death, he arranged for the sale of the ‘Fragonard Room’ to the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, reinstalling it at Frick’s mansion in New York. At Whitemarsh Hall in Pennsylvania, he helped the banker Edward Stotesbury decorate his huge mansion with oriental rugs and French sculpture, while the American socialite Eleanor Elkins Widener Rice commissioned Duveen to decorate four houses, paying $2 million for her New York dining room in 1925.

  For many years to come, the public face of such ostentatious international collecting owed much to the quiet industry of Marks’ research and his early experiments with fashionable collaborations. In an age of conspicuous wealth, when the richest people in the world wanted to create glittering, gilded mansions to flaunt their success, collections were no longer confined to studies and parlour cabinets. They became an essential element of display; rooms, galleries and even entire houses were built to show them off. The luxurious interiors of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century European royalty and nobility were reinvented for a new generation of high-society aristocrats. And as Marks demonstrated, these new collecting showcases owed as much to the dealers who made them possible as to the owners who financed them.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Fake Flora

  The wax bust of Flora, Roman goddess of flowers and of Spring, was delicate and elegant. The close-coiled tresses of Flora’s hair were intertwined with roses, her smiling face was smooth and noble, the slip of material draped over her shoulders and breasts hardly imagined by the sculptor. It was a classic piece, a masterpiece, and it seemed to bear all the hallmarks of Leonardo da Vinci’s distinctive style: the same alluring half-smile as the famous Mona Lisa, the expressive sculptural lines, the modest female form. Given that only a handful of Leonardo’s works survived his experimentation with different materials and techniques, and the procrastination of a perfectionist, Flora was not just beautiful – she was also both important and rare.1

  As a new century dawned, Murray Marks was seduced by Flora. It was 1909, and he was sixty-nine years old. In many ways, he had become a figure of the art establishment. He had worked closely with the giants of late-Victorian collecting from Pierpont Morgan to W
ilhelm von Bode. Since the late 1870s, he had been in partnership with Durlacher Brothers, an old and established London dealer’s, and in 1885 the new business moved into Bond Street, at the heart of the antique trade. His townhouse was replete with his collections: the dining room alone featured a helmeted head and a fine display of blue-and-white, glass showcases exhibiting jewellery, enamels and ceramics, and a French Renaissance cabinet and table. Another house, a seaside retreat at 75 Marine Parade, Brighton, was furnished with a Regency collection. He worked closely with several museums, especially South Kensington, attending auctions on the museum’s behalf, and supplying eye-catching objects such as a marble and alabaster rood screen from the Cathedral of St John at Bois-le-Duc (or ’s-Hertogenbosch), south of Amsterdam. This seventeenth-century masterpiece with statues of the saints, pillars and angels, delicate carvings, arches, balustrades and massive ornamental candlesticks, was a huge architectural gem 36 feet high and 32 feet long, and became a mainstay of the new Cast Courts (or Architectural Courts) when they were built at the museum in the early 1870s. To acquire Flora would be a crowning glory, an impressive finale to a great career.

  Marks was offered the Flora bust by another dealer, and quickly agreed terms.2 She promised to be one of his greatest finds, and as usual he made the most of her. He may not have been able to arrange a splendid dinner to show her off as he had his displays of china, but he ensured she was presented in the New Bond Street showroom he now shared with the Durlachers.3 Raised on a high plinth, smiling provocatively at the customers, Flora charmed all who visited and news of her spread rapidly across Europe and the world, as the discovery of this new and lovely Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece became known. The art journal Burlington Magazine ran a feature extolling the virtues of the bust, and Marks’ friends and customers travelled long distances to see the Flora he spoke of so enthusiastically.4

  By the end of the year, the attention had attracted a number of high-profile buyers, and Marks agreed to sell Flora to Wilhelm von Bode for the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin for around £8,000. Bode was opinionated, politically astute and ambitious, in many ways a German counterpart of J. C. Robinson. Many of his contemporaries found him arrogant and egotistical with ‘a tendency to lay down the law with more or less pontifical assurance’ but he was devoted to his collecting and was one of the first museum directors to openly court private collectors in the hope of acquiring their objects.5 He rejoiced in making prestigious purchases. He was also Marks’ friend and had acquired a variety of pieces from him over the years; in addition, the two men had corresponded energetically as well as collaborating on scholarly publications.6 They knew each other’s tastes and respected each other’s judgement. It was Bode who had authoritatively declared the bust to be fifteenth century, and unquestionably the work of da Vinci, when he had first seen it in Marks’ showroom. So it seemed fitting that Flora should go to Berlin to begin a prominent new life. Only the British press objected, bemoaning the loss of such a treasure: ‘Our own museum authorities might have bought it,’ complained The Times, ‘but nothing was done’, adding that the inability of museums such as South Kensington to recognize the importance of Flora ‘is humiliating to our national connoisseurship’.7

  The bust had only been in Berlin a few weeks, however, when the press picked up on a more titillating element of the story: a letter to The Times from Charles Cooksey, a Southampton antiquary and auctioneer, claimed that the bust had nothing to do with da Vinci, and had never seen Italy at all, let alone the Renaissance. It was the work, Cooksey asserted, of Richard Cockle Lucas, a Victorian sculptor, who had been copying from a picture of a scantily clad woman draped in flowers. The picture had been shown to Lucas by an art dealer called Buchanan, and might well have had links to da Vinci, but the bust, Cooksey maintained, was nothing more than a second-rate copy that had spent almost forty years rotting in Lucas’ garden. When it had turned up in a Southampton junkshop a few years after Lucas’ death in 1883, Cooksey had been given the chance to buy it for less than a sovereign, but did not think it worth the investment: he knew its mundane history and, as he pointed out, ‘it was in bad condition owing to the long exposure’.8

  Soon the story, which seemed to be confirmed by Lucas’ son, was in all the newspapers. Popular English dailies like the Daily Mail carried opinions on what was dubbed ‘the Flora affair’, as did the more serious Times. In Germany, too, the press published pictures, claims and counter-claims, and the American papers kept an amused eye on proceedings, noting that ‘the man in the street in both countries has become interested. . . if he is a German he is very sure that the bust is a genuine Da Vinci, and if he is English he is quite certain that Lucas made it’.9 In an increasingly tense Europe, such allegiances mattered. For several years, there had been talk of the possibility of war between Britain and Germany, while German naval expansion during 1908 and 1909 had sounded alarm bells in Britain and prompted a nervy arms race: ‘we should not complain of Germany’s right to build as many vessels as she pleased, she must not take it amiss if we built the number of ships which we thought necessary for our own protection,’ explained Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary, anxiously.10 With national pride at stake, Kaiser Wilhelm II, son of Princess Vicky, visited the Berlin Museum, examined the bust for over half an hour, and proclaimed definitively that Flora was indeed by da Vinci. He assumed that the weight of his opinion would put any controversy to rest, and that he had saved German blushes. But, as the New York Times pointed out, there was considerable ‘British joy over the discovery that the Germans have been fooled’ and, despite the Kaiser’s intervention, impassioned spats continued between London and Berlin, capturing the popular imagination more thoroughly than any learned art history discussion.11

  As we have seen, Marks enjoyed publicity and even a little controversy, but the thought that he had publicly passed on a forgery to one of the world’s leading museums horrified him. Collectors trusted him – and this trust was the foundation of profitable trading. As soon as the questions over provenance arose, he sent a banker’s draft for the complete purchase price to Bode, begging him to send Flora back to London, hoping to clear his conscience and forget the entire matter. But the banker’s draft remained uncashed. Unfortunately for Marks, Bode was not ready to accept defeat so easily. He had identified the bust as being by da Vinci, and he meant to stick by his opinion. He was not in the least worried by rumours in the press, and he suggested that Flora should be inspected scientifically, to prove to the world that he was right in his assessment.

  Marks could do little but wait. But the reports, when they came, were not good. The chemists who examined the composition of the wax were far from convinced that it was fifteenth century. Worse still, it became clear that tucked inside Flora was a grey canvas of English origin (some newspaper reports claimed it was part of a Victorian bed quilt), while scraps of a modern newspaper were jammed into the pedestal. The evidence looked damning. Marks wanted nothing more than to be out of the limelight. He pleaded with Bode again to accept a refund and let the matter rest, and he dreamed of letting Flora slip quietly out of the international news.

  But Bode himself was part of the problem. He had set himself up as an omniscient expert, ‘a sort of Jove in art matters’, and it was the appeal of deflating him that encouraged many of the attacks: ‘He had exercised his authority in the world of art opinion in the most ruthless manner, bowling the little fellows over with a mere wave of the hand when they got in his way,’ explained the New York Times, pointing out that it was therefore inevitable that people would welcome the chance to exact revenge, enjoying ‘a keen delight over the fact that Dr Wilhelm Bode, curator of the museum, is the particular individual who has been victimized’.12 What’s more, Bode resolutely refused to change his opinion, or even to consider changing it: ignoring the apparent evidence from the investigation, he published a statement in Die Woche, maintaining his position that ‘only Leonardo’ could have been responsible for Flora and asserting that the
modern material was the result of restoration work undertaken by Lucas.

  The outcome was the worst possible for Marks. It was a deadlock, with the dealer stuck helplessly in the middle of the storm. Evidence and counter-evidence, rumour and counter-rumour, swirled around the art world and the whole ‘Flora affair’ quickly became muddy and unsure. The debate was to drag on for years. Some art historians claimed that the bust was a product of Leonardo’s workshop, though not made by the artist himself; others were of the view that the sculptor was one of Leonardo’s contemporaries based elsewhere in Europe, perhaps in France. Well into the twentieth century, the belief that Flora was the work of Richard Cockle Lucas remained widespread. But Bode, too, had his supporters, who maintained that he was correct in his original assessment. As late as 1939, the art historian Kenneth Clark again raised the possibility that Flora might indeed have been a genuine work by Leonardo da Vinci: ‘Nothing in Lucas’s work suggests that he was capable of the noble movement of the Flora, and the evidence advanced of his authorship only proved that he had subjected the bust to a severe restoration,’ Clark contended. ‘Bode was right in seeing this piece as a clever indication of Leonardo’s later sculpture. . . [she is] another of those mutilated documents through which, alas, so much of Leonardo’s art must be reconstructed.’13 In the mid-1980s, however, further chemical tests on the bust seemed conclusive. They revealed the presence of synthetic stearin, added to wax to help it harden, a substance that was not produced before the nineteenth century. It was finally concluded that Flora was a fake.

  For Marks’ contemporaries, without the benefit of any modern dating methods, the matter remained one of bitter dispute. Although Bode was the target of most of the criticism, Marks could not help but feel that his reputation had been damaged. With the limited techniques available, it was impossible to be certain what the truth behind the bust might be, but it was disappointing that the prospect of discovering a lost da Vinci masterpiece had embroiled him in such negative debate, perhaps undoing years of careful professional work.