Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (60 page)

In 1794 some students at the Royal Academy had paid for a newspaper advertisement to thank Boydell and his rival print-seller Thomas Macklin ‘for the privilege granted them to go into the picture Galleries without expence’.
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The lack of access to original artworks was becoming a national embarrassment. Apart from the print shops, there was nowhere in Britain for everyone to be able to look at art without charge. Instead, many art-lovers ended up going to shows like the one attended by Mrs Lybbe Powys in 1798, when she went to see ‘Miss Linwood’s worsted work’ at the Hanover Square Concert Rooms, where famous paintings were re-created in embroidery panels: ‘It is beyond description. They are chiefly taken from the most celebrated artists, such as Raphael, Guido, Rubens, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Stubbs, Opie, &c., thirty-four pieces, beside the cave with a lion and tigress…In the inner apartment is a fine whole-length [copy in worsted of ] Salvator Mundi, by Carlo Dolci.’
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This situation was compared by many to that in Vienna, which had set up a publicly funded national gallery in 1781. And in 1793, soon after the revolution began, the Louvre had been thrown open so that France’s new citizens could enjoy its now national, rather than royal, art treasures. This latter might have been brushed aside as an ugly symptom of revolutionary fervour - the general opinion of the British ruling class was that the opening of the Louvre was an indecent display of war plunder
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but then monarchical Sweden also opened a national gallery the following year. It was impossible to avoid the comparisons. A French journalist sneered at those across the Channel, ‘That country has no centralized, dominant collection, despite all the acquisitions made by its private citizens who have
naturally
retained them for their private collection.’
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Even if only in terms of public opinion, discomfort was clearly felt, and some thought that access to art ought to be improved - or, if not access, the
appearance
of access ought to be improved. The embarrassment of the art-owning upper classes increased when John Julius Angerstein, the chairman of Lloyd’s in the City, set up a fund for the families of those who had died fighting the French, publishing a list of donors and the precise amount of each donation. The predominance of City financiers and the mercantile middle class made the upper classes, notable by their absence, feel that they had been put at a disadvantage. Angerstein was also known for opening his collection of paintings to artists and writers, and several of the aristocracy decided that they could, and should, compete on these grounds.

Great country houses had been open to the public for some time; now some of their owners felt that it would be a face-saving exercise to open their London houses as well, which was where for the most part their art collections were held. In 1797 the Duke of Bridgewater built a gallery next door to his London house to display his old masters. It was open every Wednesday to the holders of tickets which had been obtained in advance by writing to the Duke; the visitor was then attended in the gallery by twelve liveried footmen as well as an additional two dozen servants.
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Much of Bridgewater’s collection was newly purchased, a recent acquisition from the collection of Philippe d’Orléans, which had been broken up after the Revolution had put an end to the luxurious lifestyle of Philippe Égalité. The pictures were exhibited before they were auctioned off, and this viewing constituted the first old-master exhibition to be held in Britain. At the sale, the Duke of Bridgewater, the Earl of Carlisle and Earl Gower formed a syndicate to buy the bulk of the lots, choosing what they wanted and selling off the remainder. It does not appear that the government contemplated making a bid for the Orléans collection on behalf of the nation.

Instead of the government, it was the upper classes, perhaps in an attempt to hold on to their deteriorating positions as arbiters of artistic merit, who made the next move. By 1800 there were twenty-one private
collections open to the public intermittently, with entry to them for the most part dependent on class.
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More importantly in the long run, in 1805 a group of gentry and aristocrats produced a prospectus for the formation of the British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts in the United Kingdom. Its sole aim, the pamphlet humbly suggested, was ‘to encourage and reward the talents of the Artists of the United Kingdom, so as to improve and extend our manufactures, by that degree of taste and excellence which are to be exclusively derived from the cultivation of the Fine Arts; and thereby to increase the general prosperity and resources of the Empire’.
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This was to be achieved by establishing a public gallery for the display of a permanent collection of contemporary British paintings, to be bought by funds raised by the Institution, as well as mounting a series of temporary exhibitions showing contemporary art that would then be sold. This was to be an entirely ruling-class operation. George III, in a pointed snub to the Royal Academy, which was run by artists for artists, supported the new Institution on the condition that artists ‘should not have any concern with the management’. This was scarcely a worry, as only two artists were given membership: one was to be the keeper; the other was the president of the Royal Academy - and he was invited, one feels, with only a disdainful sense of
noblesse oblige.
The majority of the founders were peers, or had substantial old-master collections, or, of course, both.

The Institution’s first exhibition was held in February 1806, and more than 10,000 members of the public attended. It was also financially successful: £11,000-worth of paintings were sold. (Unlike the Royal Academy, from 1809 the Institution was to take a 20 per cent commission on sales.) In 1813 the Institution held a summer exhibition, which previously only the Royal Academy had done; in the same year it mounted an exhibition of Reynolds’s work - the first one-man exhibition of a British painter. (Not quite ‘contemporary’ art, but awfully close: Reynolds had died in 1792.) Exhibitions the following year, showing works by Richard Wilson, Gainsborough, Hogarth and Zoffany, were promoted as exhibitions that would ‘teach the Collector what to value, and the Artist what to follow’. Thomas Lawrence understood the subtext, and warned that the members of the British Institution ‘had departed from the original objects…and were becoming
Preceptors of Artists
’,
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or, in today’s terms, they were attempting to keep alive the idea of the aristocratic patron.

After 1813 contemporary British paintings took a back seat, and the members of the Institution instead began to lend their own old masters, which became the essential portions of the shows. Because of the stated aims of the Institution, because of the social position of its members, and because this was, still, the only way possible to study old-master paintings in depth in Britain, the private wealth of private individuals somehow became transformed into a public good. ‘The British Institution’, remarks one present-day historian,

allowed patricians to influence the development of British art without conceding a national gallery, which might seem to challenge the principles of private ownership…In virtually every Continental state at this time, aristocracies had to live with the risk that their property might be pillaged or confiscated. Only in Great Britain did it prove possible to float the idea that aristocratic property was in some magical and strictly intangible way
the people’s property also.
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The single national museum in Britain was the British Museum, which had been in existence for half a century, but it was not a museum of art. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, in fact, its critics - who were almost everyone - were wondering exactly what its purpose was. It had been founded in 1753, in a rather half-hearted manner, set up on an ad-hoc basis to enable the government to purchase two large private collections that had suddenly appeared on the market. (The plan for a national museum was so much in its infancy that when the Cotton Collection of manuscripts had been bought by the government in 1722 it was simply stored for the next three decades at Westminster School. No one had any idea what to do with it.) When the Harleian Collection of manuscripts and Sir Hans Sloane’s collections were both put up for sale in 1753, a public lottery was established to raise the money to enable the government to acquire them without having to allocate government funds. Horace Walpole, an old-fashioned virtuoso and a keeper of curiosities,
was by a quirk of circumstance destined to usher in the modern world of museum-keeping. ‘Sir Hans Sloane is dead, and has made me one of the trustees to his museum, which is to be offered for twenty thousand pounds to the King, the Parliament, the royal academies of Petersburg, Berlin, Paris and Madrid. He valued it at four-score thousand, and so would anybody who loves hippopotamuses, sharks with one ear, and spiders as big as geese! It is a rent charge to keep the foetuses in spirits!’
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The lottery fund had also raised sufficient cash to purchase Montagu House, a seventeenth-century nobleman’s mansion in Bloomsbury, which was in the wrong area of town, in a terribly run-down condition and in any case completely unsuitable for public displays. (The purchase price was £10,250; it then cost another £12,000 to turn it into something that could begin to house the collections adequately.)
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The trustees were named, among them the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor and the Speaker of the House of Commons. In this first public museum in Europe, it was as yet unclear that an administrative structure would have to be put in place. Instead, jobs were allocated as sinecures to dependants of the trustees. The Museum would not manage to open to the public for another six years. (Compare that to the Royal Academy, nine years later, which was up and running within months of receiving its charter.)

When it finally did open, in 1759, the ‘Statutes and Rules relating to the inspection and use of the British Museum’ confirmed suspicions that its aim was to do everything within its power to bar public access. These statutes limited entry to ‘such studious and curious persons’ as were willing to submit a written application, giving name, address, occupation and character references. The tickets were then allocated after the references had been fully checked (a lengthy business: in August 1776 there were complaints that the April applicants were still waiting), and even then entry was for the day
after
the ticket was collected, necessitating three trips for every one visit. The museum was open on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and 120 people were given entry on each of these days, in groups of 15. Once inside, the visitor was escorted around by a warder, who moved his group on when he was ready by ringing a bell.
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In 1784 William Hutton, an earnest visitor from Birmingham, had jumped through all the hoops necessary to get a ticket and described his visit:

[My group] began to move pretty fast, when I asked with some surprize, whether there were none to inform us what the curiosities were as we went on? A tall genteel young man…who seemed to be our conductor, replied with some warmth, ‘What! Would you have me tell you everything in the Museum? How is it possible? Besides, are not the names written upon many of them?’ I was too much humbled by this reply to utter another word. The company seemed influenced; they made haste, and were silent. No voice was heard but in whispers.

If a man pass two minutes in a room, in which are a thousand things to demand his attention, he cannot find time to bestow on them a glance each…

In about thirty minutes we finished our silent journey through this princely mansion, which would well have taken thirty days. I went out much about as wise as I went in…

I had laid more stress on the British Museum, than any thing I should see in London. It was the only sight that disgusted me…

In my visit to Don Saltero’s curiosities, at Chelsea, they furnished me with a book, explaining every article in the collection. Here I could take my own time, and entertain myself.
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Don Saltero had been Sir Hans Sloane’s servant (as well as a barber), and in 1695 had gone into business running a coffee house in Chelsea, which he filled with cast-offs from Sloane’s collection, creating an oldfashioned ‘cabinet of curiosities’. He had died in 1728, decades before Hutton’s visit, but the coffee house continued to be run by his children. Some of the exhibits (listed from the catalogue Hutton was so impressed by) included a ‘lignifed hog’ (a piece of petrified wood in the shape of a pig), ‘A piece of Solomon’s temple. Job’s tears that grew on a tree. A curious piece of metal found in the ruins of Troy…A curious fleatrap. A piece of Queen Catherine’s skin. Pontius Pilate’s wife’s greatgrandmother’s hat.’
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Another private museum that competed happily on more than equal terms with the British Museum at this time was the East India Company’s rooms in the City, where an Oriental Repository displayed a jumble of objects collected by the Company’s many employees, including by 1808 Tippoo Sahib’s Tiger (1793), a clockwork painted wooden tiger, nearly two metres long, that, when wound up, mauled a prostrate Redcoat. (It is now in the Victoria & Albert, but sadly it is too fragile for the machinery to be operated any more.) The Oriental Repository was only a few rooms, badly lit, poorly arranged, but in
default of anything better at the British Museum it welcomed tens of thousands of visitors every year. By contrast, in 1805 the British Museum managed to admit 2,500 people.
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The British Museum, by the start of the nineteenth century, was labouring under two serious problems: one was money, the second was its understanding of its purpose, and it was hard to say which of the two was the more pressing. The building itself was costing thousands: seven years after it opened, dry rot had appeared; in 1767 a weight fell off the clock and through the roof; in 1780 a vase fell off the colonnade and damaged a passing carriage, mercifully failing to kill or maim anyone inside. During its first fifty years, £50,000 of good money was thrown after bad in trying to keep Montagu House from falling apart. And yet the Museum was supposed to be self-sufficient financially. After the purchase of the collections and the building, there was still £30,000 left from the funds raised by the lottery, and the interest on this had been allocated to the costs of running of the institution. But by 1760, the year after the Museum opened, the interest, some £900 a year, already covered only half of the outgoings. In 1762 a one-off grant was made by Parliament, for £2,000, which carried the Museum through for another year or so. Yet it was not until 1816 that an annual grant was established.
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In the interim, any money that the Museum received was all set aside for the purchase of further collections, and none for its running or maintenance. Between its opening in 1759 and 1816, £120,000 was spent on books for the library, the Townley Collection of classical sculptures, Sir William Hamilton’s collection of vases, a vast collection of antiquities from Egypt (including the Rosetta Stone) and the Elgin marbles.
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There was nothing to spend on cataloguing; nothing to spend on what today would be called curating; nothing for conservation; nothing for administration.