13. Joseph Marryat, A History of Pottery and Porcelain, Medieval and Modern (London: Murray, 1857); see also Clarissa Orr (ed.), Women in the Victorian Art World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
14. Journal, Introduction, 14 March 1870 and 3 November 1874.
15. Journal, Introduction, and see also, for example, 27 May 1876.
Chapter 10
1. Schreiber, Journal, 23 August 1869 and 8 March 1872.
2. Jules Janin, ‘A Summer and A Winter in Paris’, in George Newenham Wright, France Illustrated, vol. 4 (London: Peter Jackson, 1845–7), p. 112.
3. Journal, 2 October 1869 and 22 March 1870.
4. Journal, 10 May 1872 and 8 April 1874.
5. Quoted in Orr (ed.), Women in the Victorian Art World, p. 130.
6. The story of the gourd-shaped bottle is related by Montague Guest in the concluding notes to Charlotte’s journals: ‘The Adventures of a Bottle’, vol. II, pp. 484–8, with additional material taken from Charlotte’s daily entries.
7. For an excellent discussion of female art critics, see Pamela Gerrish Nunn, ‘Critically Speaking’, in Orr (ed.), Women in the Victorian Art World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 107–25. This comment is from Alice Oldcastle, quoted on p. 114.
8. Journal, 22 May 1869.
9. Journal, 8 March 1872.
10. Journal, 19 and 20 March 1880.
11. Journal, 23 September 1880.
12. Journal, 28 September 1880.
13. ‘Economic and Social History: Industry and Trade, 1500– 1880’, A History of the County of Warwick: Volume 7: The City of Birmingham (1964), pp. 81–139.
14. Journal, 29 March 1884.
15. Journal, 9 June 1884.
16. Journal, 3 May 1884.
17. Journal, 18 November 1884.
18. Journal, 17 October 1885
19. Journal, 13 November 1885.
20. The book on English fans was finished in 1888, followed two years later by a publication on European fans. Neither is now in print. The other Freewoman was Baroness Coutts, a banker’s daughter and philanthropist.
Chapter 11
1. The portrait, now in the Liverpool Museum, is dated 1843, but a letter from the Royal Academy concerning the work is dated 9 May 1840, suggesting it was already in existence then. Mayer was born on 23 February 1803.
2. Letter from H. T. Kemball Cook to G. J. Binns, 19 June 1828, archives of Liverpool Museums. For the biographical information on Joseph Mayer and his collecting, I am indebted to the work of the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, and in particular Joseph Mayer of Liverpool 1803–1886, edited by Margaret Gibson and Susan M. Wright (London: Society of Antiquaries/National Museums & Galleries on Merseyside, 1988). The majority of Mayer’s papers are deposited with Liverpool City Archives or at Bebington Library.
3. Ibid.
4. Obituary, Liverpool Daily Post, 20 January 1866.
5. A. W. Franks, quoted Caygill and Cherry (eds), A. W. Franks, p. 169. The brooch has the accession number MLA 1856.7–1, 1461.
6. Joseph Clarke, letter to Joseph Mayer, October 1852.
7. Joseph Clarke, letter to Joseph Mayer, 19 October 1854.
8. Roach Smith, letter to Joseph Mayer, 12 December 1852; letter to Mayer, 11 April 1856.
9. For details of the Faussett collection, see Roger H. White, ‘Mayer and British Archaeology’, Joseph Mayer of Liverpool 1803– 1886, edited by Margaret Gibson and Susan M. Wright.
10. Officers’ Reports, 15 November 1853, British Museum Central Archive.
11. Joseph Mayer, letter to A.W. Franks, 24 November 1853 and 26 February 1854, BM (MLA) papers.
12. Roach Smith, letter to Joseph Mayer, 20 February 1856.
13. ‘Antique Ivory Carving’, Art Journal (1 October 1855), p. 276.
14. Joseph Clarke, letter to Joseph Mayer, 28 March 1868.
15. Joseph Clarke, letter to Roach Smith, 22 November 1856.
16. Joseph Mayer, letter to W. H. Rolfe, 8 September 1857.
17. See Joseph Mayer of Liverpool 1803–1886, pp. 95–6 for further details of the sale. Joseph Clarke, letter to F. W. Fairholt, 14 April 1859.
18. C. T. Gatty, The Mayer Collection in the Liverpool Museum considered as an Educational Possession (Liverpool Art Club, 1878), pp. 20–21.
19. A. H. Church, ‘Josiah Wedgwood, Master Potter’, The Portfolio, 3 (March 1894), p. 100.
Chapter 12
1. Mayer’s contribution to the Great Exhibition was first prompted by a letter from Edward Hawkins, Keeper of Antiquities at the British Museum, 11 February 1850 and the pieces were listed in the official catalogue, pp. 674–5 (Jury Reports, III.520, class xxiii).
2. R. Lepsius, Letters from Egypt, Ethiopia and the Peninsula of Sinai, translated by L. and J. B. Horner (London, 1853), p. 41.
3. Joseph Mayer, letter to Roach Smith, 27 January 1882.
4. For these quotations and further information on John Tradescant, see the Ashmolean Museum’s extensive web pages at www.ashmolean.org.
Chapter 13
1. Exhibition of Art Treasures of the United Kingdom Manchester 1857, Report of the Executive Committee (London: Longman, 1859), p. 3.
2. Ibid., p. 4.
3. Nathaniel Hawthorne, English Notebooks (6 September 1857), p. 332.
4. Exhibition of Art Treasures of the United Kingdom Manchester 1857, Report of the Executive Committee, p. 17.
5. Ibid., p. 31.
6. Quoted in Charles Saumarez Smith, The National Gallery: A Short History (London: Lincoln, 2009), p. 74.
7. Exhibition of Art Treasures of the United Kingdom Manchester 1857, Report of the Executive Committee, p. 20.
8. Nathaniel Hawthorne, English Notebooks (6 September 1857), p. 332.
9. The Duke’s criticism may be apocryphal, but it amused Manchester commentators and so was frequently repeated; see, for example, A Handbook to the Gallery of British Paintings in the Art Treasures Exhibition (London,1857), p. 3, and the Manchester Guardian, 5 May 1857.
10. Gustav Waagen, letter to Joseph Mayer, 18 August 1856.
11. J. B. Waring, ‘Ceramic Art’, Art Treasures of the United Kingdom from the Art Treasures Exhibition, Manchester (London: Day & Son, 1858), p. 31.
12. Gustav Waagen, A Walk through the Art Treasures exhibition at Manchester under the guidance of Dr Waagen, Companion to the Official Catalogue (London: John Murray, 1857), p. 74.
13. Roach Smith, letter to Joseph Mayer, 11 April 1856.
14. Minutes of the Library, Museum and Education Committee, 14 February 1867; quoted in Gibson and Wright (eds), Joseph Mayer of Liverpool, p. 20.
15. Joseph Clarke, letter to Joseph Mayer, 28 March 1868.
Chapter 14
1. The inscription on the bust of Peggy (Margaret) Harrison, now in the Walker Art Gallery (7610, Foreign Catalogue). Very little is known of her, or of her exact relationship with Mayer.
2. Elizabeth Meteyard, The Life of Josiah Wedgwood (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1865), vol. I, p. xiv.
3. Joseph Clarke, letter to Joseph Mayer, 8 August 1863.
4. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, edited by John Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 176.
5. ‘Chronic Chinamania (Incurable)’, Punch, ‘Almanack’ 1875, 68 (17 December 1874), n.p; Les Français Peints par Eux-mêmes, Encyclopédie Morale du Dix-neuvième Siecle (Paris: Curmer), vol. I, p. 277.
6. ‘To our reader’, The Connoisseur: A Collector’s Journal and Monthly Review, 1:1 (January 1895), pp. 5–6.
7. Freud, writing mostly at the beginning of the twentieth century, identified, for example, a biological drive which directly links collecting to sexual drive, while also identifying a resemblance to hunting and the display of trophies from the aggressive drive. More recently, Jean Baudrillard described collecting as ‘a powerful mechanism of compensation during critical phases in a person’s sexual development’. (Jean Baudrillard, ‘The System of Collecting’, in The Cultures of C
ollecting, edited by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion, 1994), pp. 7–24 (p. 9).)
8. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, edited by Nicola Bradbury (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 328, 558, 386; George Meredith, The Egoist, edited by George Woodcock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 138.
9. ‘A Free Village Library’, The Standard (1878), pp. 11–12.
10. H. Cunningham, The Volunteer Force: A Social and Political History, 1859–1908 (London: Croon Helm 1975), p. 2.
11. Mayer’s speech at a celebratory dinner after the opening of the Free Library, reported in the Staffordshire Weekly Times, 5 March 1870.
12. ‘A Free Village Library’, The Standard (1878), pp. 18–19.
Chapter 15
1. See the reminiscences of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s brother William, in Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family-Letters Edited with a Memoir by William Michael Rossetti, 2 vols (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1895), vol. I. p. 28.
2. For details of this and other of Rossetti’s demands, see George Charles Williamson, Murray Marks and His Friends (London, 1919).
3. Quoted in Williamson, Murray Marks and His Friends, p. 52.
4. Times Literary Supplement (12 June 1919).
5. T. Affleck Greeves, A Guide to Bedford Park: the first garden suburb (1893) (London: The Bedford Park Society, 2010).
6. Williamson, Murray Marks and His Friends, p. 13.
Chapter 16
1. Walter Sickert, ‘Small Pictures’, The Speaker, 2 January 1897.
2. ‘The French Gallery’, The Times, 8 April 1879, p. 4.
3. Williamson, Murray Marks and His Friends, p. 38.
4. Exhibition Culture in London 1878–1908, database, University of Glasgow, 2006;
5. Bernard Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon Press, 1956), pp. ix, xii.
6. Schreiber, Journal, 26 February 1870.
7. Henry James, Preface to The Portrait of a Lady (1881). The fascination was two-way: Charles Dickens, for example, found an eager audience for his American Notes, published shortly after his first visit to the United States in 1842.
8. J. P. Morgan appears less than sympathetically in Richard Armour’s 1953 satire It All Started with Columbus: ‘Morgan, who was a direct sort of person, made his money in money. . . He became immensely wealthy because of his financial interests, most of which were around eight or ten percent. . . This Morgan is usually spoken of as “J.P.” to distinguish him from Henry Morgan the pirate.’
9. The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York was made a public institution in 1924 by his son, J. P. Morgan; many of the gems were donated to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Pierpont Morgan also left works from his collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and founded the Yale Babylonian collection with over 3,000 cuneiform tablets.
10. William Bode, Die italienische Bronzestatuetten der Renaissance, 3 vols (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1907–12), vol. I, p. 3; quoted in Clive Wainwright, ‘A Gatherer and Disposer of other men’s stuffe: Murray Marks, connoisseur and curiosity dealer’, Journal of the History of Collections (2002), p. 171.
11. Ibid.
12. James McNeill Whistler, letters to F. R. Leyland, 2 and 9 September 1876 (University of Glasgow Transcription 08796; Manuscript division, Pennel-Whistler Collection PWC 6B/22/1).
13. There has been much writing and discussion about Leyland’s Peacock Room and Whistler’s contribution. For a detailed and authoritative account, see Linda Merrill, The Peacock Room: A Cultural Biography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998). The room is now on show, complete, at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington.
14. In 1904, twelve years after Leyland’s death, the room was bought intact by the American collector Charles Land Freer, who later founded the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, and it was taken apart, shipped across the Atlantic and reinstalled at Freer’s house in Detroit, where it was used to display his own collection of ceramics.
15. Quoted in Meryle Secrest, Duveen: A Life in Art (New York: Knopf, 2005), p. 29.
16. James Henry Duveen, The Rise of the House of Duveen (London and New York: Longmans, Green, 1957), p. 84.
Chapter 17
1. There is still much discussion among art historians about the exact number of works that can be accurately ascribed, either in whole or in part, to Leonardo da Vinci, but there are around fifteen paintings on panels, murals and drawings on paper which form the core of the accepted body of his work. The two most famous examples are, of course, the Mona Lisa, displayed in the Louvre, and The Last Supper, in the Convent of Santa Maria della Grazia, Milan.
2. We know few details about exactly where or from whom Marks acquired the bust.
3. The new firm of Marks, Durlacher Brothers gave up the Oxford Street shop in 1885 and moved to 23A Bond Street. By 1887, they had moved again, to 142 New Bond Street, and the Marks name had been dropped, although he was still a partner in the business.
4. ‘The Newly-Discovered Leonardo’, Burlington Magazine, 15, number 74 (1909), pp. 108–13. There was also a follow-up article in the same magazine: ‘The wax bust attributed to Leonardo’, Burlington Magazine, 16, number 81 (1909), p. 123.
5. New York Times, 5 December 1909.
6. There are 351 letters from Marks to Bode, just covering the period from 1890 to 1910, all of which are in the Zentralarchiv der Staatlichen Museen in Berlin. The first publication was the two-volume catalogue for the Pierpont Morgan bronzes, already mentioned in Chapter 11; the second was a three-volume book on bronzes in general which Bode published between 1907 and 1912.
7. Quoted in ‘Did da Vinci or R. C. Lucas create Flora’, The Times, 5 December 1909.
8. Ibid.
9. New York Times, 5 December 1909.
10. See Francis H. Hinsley, British Foreign Policy under Sir Edward Grey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 556.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. See Kenneth Clark, Leonardo da Vinci: An Account of his Development as an Artist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939). The Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin reopened in 2007 as the Bode Museum, with Flora prominently displayed in the lecture hall (room 220). Museum guides still refer to the origins of the work as a mystery, and the label hedges its bets, describing the sculpture as ‘both attributed to Leonardo da Vinci or one of his apprentices and viewed as a forgery of the 19th century’.
14. Art Referees Report, 6 April 1864, Robinson Papers, NAL.
15. Daily Telegraph, 2 January 1885; quoted in Burton, Vision and Accident, p. 132.
16. Speech at the Birmingham School of Art, 1888, Robinson Papers, NAL.
17. Museum minutes, 29 March 1887, Robinson archives.
18. Wallis Budge, Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum from 1892 to1924, in By Nile and Tigris: a Narrative of Journeys in Egypt and Mesopotamia, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1920), p. 73.
19. A. W. Franks, letter to the British Museum, 7 October 1879.
20. Right Revd G. F. Browne, The Recollections of a Bishop (London, 1915), p. 209; quoted in Caygill and Cherry (eds), A. W. Franks, p. 78.
21. A. W. Franks, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries, IV (1859), pp. 246–50.
22. E. Renard, ‘Die Kunsthistorische Ausstellung, Dusseldorf, 1902’, in Rheinlande: Monatschrift für deutsche Kunst (1902), pp. 41–2.
23. Christie’s London, ‘19th Century “Renaissance” Works of Art: A Question of Supply and Demand’, The Collection of the Late Baroness Batscheva de Rothschild (14 December 2000), pp. 102–106.
24. Giovanni Morelli, Italian Painters: Critical Studies of their Works (London: John Murray, 1892–3).
25. The Reliquary came to the British Museum as part of the Waddesdon Bequest, left to the museum in 1898 by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild. It was only in 1959, when the fake reliquary was brought to London and compared with the original, that the truth was finally
established.
26. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of London, 42 (1891), p. 254.
27. Times Literary Supplement, 12 June 1919.
28. Official statement concerning the Salting Bequest; see Williamson, Murray Marks and His Friends, p. 198.
29. Murray Marks, letter to Cecil Harcourt-Smith, 12 June 1916, Murray Marks archives, Victoria and Albert Museum. Marks assured the museum that his insurance would cover any losses.
Chapter 18
1. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, edited by Stephen Wall and Helen Small (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), pp. 236–7.
2. Jane MacLaren Walsh, ‘Legend of the Crystal Skulls’, Archaeology, 61.3 (June 2008).
3. Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, edited by Tom Dolin and Alan Manford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 186.
4. For the biographical information on Stephen Wootton Bushell, I am indebted to the work of Professor Nick Pearce, in particular his lecture ‘Collecting, Connoisseurship and Commerce: An Examination of the Life and Career of Stephen Wootton Bushell (1844–1908)’, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society, vol. 70 (2005–2006), pp. 17–25. For details of Bushell’s appointment, see p. 18. Bushell’s archives of correspondence are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum where they were consulted, unless otherwise stated.
5. Details of Bushell’s discoveries, his study of cultural meanings and his evaluation of technique and craftsmanship are taken from his masterly two-volume work Chinese Art, first published in 1904 and 1906 as a handbook to the Chinese collections at the Victoria and Albert. Despite being written in Bushell’s old age, it retains the excitement of his early explorations and demonstrates the breadth and thoroughness of his understanding: S. W. Bushell, Chinese Art, 2 vols (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1904 & 1906), p. 10; pp. 240–1.
6. Mary Crawford Fraser, A Diplomat’s Wife in Many Lands (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1910). See also Pearce, ‘Collecting, Connoisseurship and Commerce’, pp. 18–19.
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