The Cook collection, its founder and its inheritors by ELON DANZIGER
by Sir Francis Cook (1817–1901) at Doughty House, Richmond, is known today mainly for a number of extraordinary pictures that it once included, among them Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi’s Adoration of the Magi (Fig.1), Van Eyck’s Three Marys at the sepulchre (Fig.2),1 Velázquez’s Old woman cooking eggs (Fig.3) and Rembrandt’s Portrait of a boy (then identified as a portrait of Titus; Fig.23). However, Cook began as a collector of antiquities and turned to pictures only in mid-life. It was not his ambition to assemble a choice set of masterpieces, but rather an encyclopaedic collection to rival the breadth and depth of the public galleries of England and Europe. In this effort he was aided by Sir John Charles Robinson (1824–1913), who for thirty years served as his adviser. In the twentieth century Cook’s grandson Herbert (1868–1939), whose contributions to England’s cultural life included a major role in the founding of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, enhanced the collection by acquiring many masterpieces and put his personal stamp on it by adding notable works from the Venetian High Renaissance. But financial adversity and the tumult of the Second World War precipitated the dispersal of the collection in the mid-twentieth century, and from the suburbs of London the pictures have been scattered across the world. In this article various sources are explored to assess the role played by successive generations of the Cook family and their entourage in the formation and eventual dispersal of the collection. In addition, a number of photographs recording the display of the collection in the early twentieth century are published here for the first time. Francis Cook (Fig.4) was born in 1817 into prosperous circumstances. His father was a young businessman who had newly arrived in London from his family’s sheep farm in Norfolk. Initial success as a linen retailer enabled him to establish a wholesale firm that became so successful that in 1837 he was able to move his family to Roydon Hall, a country estate in Kent.2 Two years later he sent Francis, his second son, on a tour of Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Italy and the Iberian peninsula. In Lisbon Francis met Emily Lucas, the daughter of an English merchant, whom he brought back to London as his wife. Within a few years they had two children (a third eventually followed), and around 1849 moved to Doughty House, a modest Georgian residence in Richmond.3 THE COLLECTION FORMED
I am grateful to Brenda, Lady Cook, and to John Somerville, whose kindness and cooperation made this article possible. I owe special thanks to Robert H. Smith for funding my research and to Nancy Yeide for interesting me in the topic and taking time for numerous discussions. I also wish to acknowledge the advice and support of Nicholas Penny, Burton Fredericksen, Anne Halpern, Alan Shestack, Elizabeth Pochter, Claire Leighton, Jeremy Warren, Caroline Elam, Caroline Campbell, John Hand, Arthur Wheelock, Philip Conisbee, Douglas Lewis, Theresa Beall, Ted Dalziel, Thomas McGill Jr., Maria Sampang, Jeannette Canty, Jane Baxter, Cris Turfitt, Ines Ferro, Emma Gilbert and Nicholas Barlow. Throughout these notes the abbreviation CCA stands for the Cook collection archive, in the care of John Somerville, England. A database of works in the Cook collection is available at
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1. Adoration of the Magi, by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi. c.1445. Tempera on panel, 137.3 cm. diam. (National Gallery of Art, Washington).
The premature death in 1852 of his elder brother William put Francis in a new position of responsibility and privilege: he became co-principal of Cook, Son & Co., which by then had a very large warehouse across from the southern transept of St Paul’s. In 1855, on one of the regular trips he made to Portugal with his wife, he leased and then bought the quinta of Monserrate near Sintra, where Beckford had lived and Byron had written parts of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.4 Soon thereafter he hired James T. Knowles Sr. to build a magnificent palace in Moorish style that was to become Francis’s summer home. After the death of his father in 1869, Francis became head of the firm, and by some accounts he was then one of the three richest men in England. In the early 1880s he underwrote the construction of Princess Alexandra House, a dor-
www.burlington.org.uk. 1 Although the picture is now generally considered an Eyckian work of c.1450, this article retains the traditional identification. 2 C. Welch: ‘Sir Francis Cook’, in S. Lee, ed.: Dictionary of National Biography: Supplement (January 1901 to December 1911), London 1920, I, pp.404–05. 3 J. Cloake: ‘Doughty House, Richmond Hill’ (unpublished study, 2001). 4 C. Dewey: ‘Monserrate, Sintra, Portugal’, Country Life 184, no.44 (1st November 1990), pp.88–91; F. Costa: História da Quinta e Palácio de Monserrate, Sintra 1985, reprinted in F. Costa: Estudos Sintrenses, Sintra 2000, III. On the architecture, see P. Metcalf: James Knowles: Victorian Editor and Architect, Oxford 1980, pp.143–50. 5 How the benefaction influenced this decision can be gathered from the diary of
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mitory for female musicians and artists in South Kensington. In recognition he was created a baronet in 1886.5 His first wife having died, Francis married in 1885 Tennessee Claflin, an American expatriate and advocate of female suffrage and ‘freelove’. Until his death at the age of eighty-four he remained vigorous as a businessman and collector. Today Francis Cook is best known for forming one of the most important art collections of the nineteenth century. During his youthful tour in 1840, he began humbly with the purchase in Italy of about a dozen Renaissance plaquettes.6 In the later 1850s, when he had established himself at Doughty House and awaited construction of his palace at Monserrate, he started to acquire Greek, Roman and Etruscan marbles, bronzes and ceramics. Large-scale marble statuary was fashionable among the nobility, and one might suspect Cook of aspiring to their status, although his English residence was assertively modest (Fig.5) and he appears to have been socially unaspiring and an independent-minded amateur. One of his earliest purchases was the ‘Venus Mazarin’, a fine six-foottall marble said to have been given by Cardinal Mazarin to the king of France (now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles). For Monserrate he bought a number of Roman portrait busts and an ancient copy of the Vatican Nile group coming from the Worsley collection. In Rome he purchased three third-century B.C. Etruscan sarcophagi, probably from Tarquinia (Fig.6).7 In 1868, just a few years after its construction, Monserrate contained sufficient antiquities to draw the attention of Wilhelm Gurlitt, who published an article on them in the Archäologische Zeitung.8 Five years later, in the same journal, Adolf Michaelis recorded his first visit to Doughty House.9 Among the most significant works he saw were two funerary stelae from Asia Minor (British Museum, London, and Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), a marble Crouching Aphrodite (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), several kraters and kylixes, and a Hellenistic Emaciated youth (now recognised as a good Roman copy; Dumbarton Oaks, Washington). He also noted a collection of gems. In the next few years Francis bought a number of classical male torsos, sarcophagus fragments and statuettes in marble and bronze. However, at this point Francis could not yet be termed a serious collector. His antiquities, of all periods and of divergent quality, were bought mainly to decorate his homes’ interiors. He acquired no more plaquettes, for example, even though they were abundant and inexpensive. And despite claims to the contrary in twentieth-century catalogues of the collection, there is no evidence that Francis owned any paintings before 1868,10 when he was fifty-one years old; if he did, they must have been insignificant.
Gladstone’s secretary; see D.W.R. Bahlman, ed.: The Diary of Sir Edward Walter Hamilton 1880–1885, Oxford 1972, II, p.653. 6 W. Cook: Catalogue of the Art Collection: 8, Cadogan Square, SW, London 1904, I, p.v. He may have bought other portable works. 7 See P. Ducati: ‘Notizia di tre sarcofagi etruschi a Monserrate presso Lisbona’, Studi etruschi 5 (1931), pp.523–30. According to Herbert Cook, as paraphrased in Ducati’s article, it was a shipwreck off the coast of Lisbon that provided Francis with the opportunity to buy the sarcophagi, but the older tradition, reported for example by W. Gurlitt: ‘Sammlung des Hrn. F. Cook zu Montserrat bei Cintra (Lissabon)’, Archäologische Zeitung 26 (1868), p.86, seems more likely. 8 Gurlitt, op. cit. (note 7), pp.84–87.
2. The three Marys at the sepulchre, by Jan Van Eyck. c.1430. Panel, 71.5 by 90 cm. (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam).
3. Old woman cooking eggs, by Diego Velázquez. 1618. 100.5 by 119.5 cm. (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh).
It was John Charles Robinson, a luminary and leader in the Victorian art world, who was instrumental in Francis Cook’s transformation into an extraordinary collector. Robinson had trained as an artist in Paris and rose from a teaching post at the School of Design to join the staff of the newly founded South Kensington Museum, where he found a purpose for his
9 A. Michaelis: ‘Die Antikensammlungen in England’, Archäologische Zeitung 32 (1875), pp.57–61. He visited again in 1877; see idem: Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, Cambridge 1882, pp.619–43. For information about the present location of many of the antiquities I am grateful to Carlos A. Picón. 10 Provenance information is available for seventy of the eighty most important pictures, and for about half of the total of 630 paintings known to have been part of the Cook collection. Not only is no painting documented as having entered the collection before 1868, no painting is ever described as acquired ‘in the 1860s’ or ‘in the mid-nineteenth century’, as indeed one might expect if a purchase date was uncertain. Moreover all but one of the pictures that Cook exhibited in 1868 at Leeds demonstrably came from the Robinson collection (see below).
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5. Doughty House, Richmond, Surrey. c.1905. Photograph. (Cook family collection).
4. Sir Francis Cook. c.1900. Photograph. (Cook family collection).
visual acuity and connoisseurial flair as its first superintendent of art collections.11 On trips to Italy and elsewhere he made exceptional acquisitions for the sculpture and decorative arts collection of that institution, now the Victoria and Albert Museum. He also collected works in every medium and from every period for himself and others. A sharp analytical mind, vast memory and boundless energy fuelled his discerning eye and, in addition to acquiring works of art, he helped organise exhibitions, steer the Fine Arts Club and its successor, the Burlington Fine Arts Club, and wrote and lectured prolifically. His catalogues of the sculpture at South Kensington and of the drawings by Raphael and Michelangelo at Oxford demonstrate a precociously systematic and comparative approach to analysing objects. Late in life he was knighted and served as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. Robinson and Cook knew each other by 1868, although they may have met during Robinson’s 1865 visit to Portugal (Robinson had an unusually strong interest in Spanish and Portuguese art). In the winter of 1868, having recently lost his post at the South Kensington Museum (for various rea11 H.E. Davies: ‘Sir John Charles Robinson (1824–1913): His Role as a Connoisseur and Creator of Public and Private Collections’, Ph.D. diss. (University of Oxford, 1992); C. Wainwright: ‘Shopping for South Kensington: Fortnum and Henry Cole in Florence 1858–1859’, Journal of the History of Collections 11 (1999), pp.171–85. 12 Davies, op. cit. (note 11); H. Davies: ‘John Charles Robinson’s Work at the South Kensington Museum, Part II. From 1863 to 1867: Consolidation and Conflict’, Journal of the History of Collections 11 (1999), pp.95–115; E. Bonython and A. Burton: The Great Exhibitor: The Life and Work of Henry Cole, London 2003, pp.211–60. 13 Sale Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 7th and 8th May 1868 (Catalogue de tableaux et de dessins anciens composant la collection de M. J.C. Robinson). 14 The preceding paragraph is based upon my analysis of J.C. Robinson: Memoranda on fifty pictures, selected from a collection of works of the Ancient Masters, London 1868; the Drouot sale catalogue (see note 13); the Leeds exhibition catalogue (see below); and H. Cook, ed.: A Catalogue of the Paintings at Doughty House, Richmond, & elsewhere in the Collection of Sir Frederick Cook, BT., Visconde de Monserrate, London 1913–16. Mem-
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sons, including the impact of his fiery and uncompromising personality)12 and needing to support his wife and young children, Robinson resolved to sell his collection of paintings. He interested Francis Cook in about thirty of the ninety or one hundred pictures he was offering. Francis’s selection strongly favoured Italian painters, but he quickly developed an interest in the full range of continental schools; when in May 1868 Robinson put his remaining paintings and a number of drawings up for auction in Paris,13 Francis bought some twenty Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Netherlandish pictures (some, probably, after being bought in). Robinson was likely to have parted with his collection with some emotion, for that same year he commemorated it in a beautifully produced small book which focused on fifty of his most important paintings. He sent Memoranda on fifty pictures, typically rich in art history and criticism, to interested friends and connoisseurs.14 Barely two weeks after the auction in Paris, Prince Albert opened the National Exhibition of Works of Art in Leeds, a sequel to the great Manchester exhibition of the previous decade. The Art Journal wrote: ‘A first appearance, if we mistake not, in great Art exhibitions, has been made by Mr Cook, of St. Paul’s Church Yard. The merit of many of the works he contributes is “vouchsafed” under authority of Mr J.C. Robinson, whose collection Mr Cook purchased.’15 The Art Journal and The Times found much to praise in the group of eighteen, mostly Italian pictures.16 Among the works oranda has universally and wrongly been described as the first catalogue of the Cook collection, but every surviving copy comes from the collection of a friend of Robinson’s and most have a personal inscription from him; furthermore, a number of paintings in Memoranda that appeared at Robinson’s Paris sale (see note 13) were bought by collectors other than Cook. 15 ‘Leeds Exhibition’, Art Journal n.s. VII (July 1868), p.137. 16 The Times (28th May 1868), p.10. The group did not impress A.H. Layard, a trustee of the National Gallery, who termed the pictures ‘utter rubbish’ in a bilious letter published in J. Anderson, ed.: Collecting Connoisseurship and the Art Market in Risorgimento Italy: Giovanni Morelli’s letters to Giovanni Melli and Pietro Zavaritt (1866– 1872), Venice 1999, pp.39–40. 17 I. Kingsbury: ‘Sir Francis Cook and Monserrate’, Annual Report and Review, British Historical Society of Portugal 3 (1976), p.15; idem: Castles, Caliphs and Christians: A Landscape with Figures, Monserrate, Lisbon 1994.
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6. Sarcophagus with combat scene, Etruscan, third century B.C. Nenfro, 155 by 207 by 70 cm. (Museu Arqueológico de Saõ Miguel de Odrinhas, Sintra).
exhibited were Antonello da Messina’s Christ at the column (Fig.27), Francisque Millet’s Mountain landscape with lightning (National Gallery, London) and Sodoma’s St George and the dragon (National Gallery of Art, Washington). Other important works acquired by Francis from Robinson and not shown in Leeds included El Greco’s Expulsion of the moneychangers from the temple (National Gallery of Art, Washington), Rubens’s Hunting the wild boar (Cook family collection) and Parmigianino’s Holy Family (Fig.8). Robinson’s pictures were those of an art historian, not a patrician collector. Most were small religious pictures, but there were also some portraits and genre scenes. ‘Primitives’ by artists such as Lorenzo Monaco and Lucas Cranach
7. Grand Junction Canal at Southall Mill (‘The Windmill and the Lock’), by J.M.W. Turner. 1810. 92 by 122 cm. (Private collection, London).
enlarged the collection beyond the canonical range of old masters, but there were no modern pictures. The characteristics of this nucleus largely determined the form the Cook collection assumed in later years. The decade after the death of Francis’s father in 1869 was the busiest and most productive in Francis’s life. Now head of the company, he oversaw its continued growth and prosperity. His restoration of Monserrate, the attendant employment of hundreds of Portuguese, and numerous acts of charity earned him the title of Visconde de Monserrate (1870), and in the following years he bought large parcels of land around the core quinta where he and his gardeners created ‘a masterpiece of Victorian naturalistic landscaping’.17 A similar effort went
8. Holy Family, by Parmigianino. c.1523. Panel, 35.5 by 41.5 cm. (Princes Gate Collection, Courtauld Institute of Art, London). the burl ington m agazin e
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9. Holy Family, by Fra Bartolomeo. 1516. Panel, 145.7 by 119.2 cm. (Cook family collection).
10. The Last Judgment, from the Ciudad Rodrigo altarpiece, by Fernando Gallego and assistants. c.1488. Canvas applied to panel, 153.7 by 110.5 cm. (University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson).
into his activities as a collector; overnight he became one of the most voracious collectors in England, and in 1876, just eight years after starting a picture collection, he owned 510 paintings.18 Almost all were displayed at his Richmond home. Many of his most inspired purchases date to this period of intense activity: Metsu’s Woman at her toilet (acquired 1870; Norton Simon Collection, Pasadena); Velázquez’s Old woman cooking eggs (probably acquired c.1870; Fig.3);19 Van Eyck’s Three Marys at the sepulchre (acquired c.1872; Fig.2), Rembrandt’s Portrait of a lady wearing a beret (acquired 1873; Wiederkehr collection, Zürich); Clouet’s Portrait of a lady (acquired 1874; National Gallery of Art, Washington); Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi’s Adoration of the Magi (acquired
1874; Fig.1), Turner’s Grand Junction Canal at Southall Mill (acquired c.1874; Fig.7); Fra Bartolomeo’s Holy Family (acquired by 1875; Fig.9); and Turner’s ‘Fifth’ plague of Egypt (acquired 1876; Indianapolis Museum of Art). Francis was also buying entire collections in other media: around 1870 he purchased Alexander Barker’s maiolica, an extraordinary assemblage including a late fifteenth-century Faenza plaque of the Annunciation (Victoria and Albert Museum, London); a Cafaggiolo plate with a subject adapted from Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge); a Cafaggiolo dish with the arms of Pope Leo X surrounded by music-making putti (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam); and a beautiful Faenza plate with Dido and Aeneas
18 According to his grandson Herbert in the introduction to Cook, op. cit. (note 14), I, p.vi. The high number suggests that many Cook paintings of unknown provenance were purchased early on, and probably also that from 1876 onwards Cook sold as many paintings as he bought each year, since 510 is roughly the number of paintings he owned at the time of his death. 19 What is certain is that the picture, bought in 1813 by Samuel Peach, was sold in London with the rest of his collection on 23rd April 1863 (as noted by Julia Armstrong-Totten, who informs me that it was ascribed to Murillo and comprised lot 268, not lot 239 as mistakenly reported in H. Brigstocke: Italian and Spanish Paintings in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh 1993, p.191). It is also certain that by 1873 it belonged to Cook, who exhibited it at that year’s old masters exhibition at the Royal Academy (no.92). For the intervening history we have only the confused testimony of Robinson in ‘The Early Works of Velázquez’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 10 (1906), pp.177–78, where he wrote that the painting had been well known while in the possession of the picture dealer Smith of Bond Street, and was auctioned some years later in 1863 by a collector in the north of England, when it was acquired for Cook. In a letter written to Cook’s grandson six years later to clarify the account (quoted in Brigstocke, op. cit., p.193, note 15), Robinson repeated the story, although now he and Cook went to the sale together and bought the picture. He cautioned
(original emphasis): ‘This as far as I recollect is the history of the Velázquez.’ Although the account must be garbled (the 1863 sale was not at Bradford, as stated by Robinson, and the picture had not previously been sold by Smith), Brigstocke relied on Robinson’s mention of 1863 as the approximate date of the picture entering the Cook collection. Yet neither Robinson nor Cook was a buyer at the 1863 sale and the purchaser of lot 268 was someone named Smith, who could well have been the picture dealer John Mountjoy Smith of 137 New Bond Street. In that case Robinson’s memory may have been mostly correct: the picture was sold in 1863, was in the possession of the dealer Smith, and could easily have been bought some years later from a northern collection for Francis Cook. Further research will be necessary to resolve the question. In any case, it seems unlikely that Robinson bought the picture before 1868 since it does not appear in Robinson, op. cit. (note 14), and even more unlikely that Francis did, since no single picture is definitely stated in any catalogue to have been bought before that year (see note 10), nor was the Velázquez shown by him at Leeds in 1868. 20 I am grateful to Timothy Wilson for information on the present whereabouts of these objects. 21 Cook, op. cit. (note 6), p.v; J.C. Robinson, ed.: exh. cat. Spanish and Portuguese ornamental art, London (South Kensington Museum) 1881.
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11. Virgin and Child with the apple, by Luca della Robbia. c.1455–60. Enamelled terracotta, 58 by 44 cm. (Skulpturensammlung, Berlin).
12. Plate with Dido and Aeneas. Faenza ware. 1530s. 26.7 cm. diam. (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne).
(Fig.12).20 In 1875 Cook bought the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury’s small but choice collection of miniatures, which included portraits of Thomas Wriothesley by Hans Holbein the Younger (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Henry Wriothesley by Peter Oliver (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) and a vivacious unknown lady by Nicholas Hilliard (Victoria and Albert Museum, London). By 1881 he had a large collection of Spanish and Portuguese jewels, works in silver, and ivory carvings, which he lent to the South Kensington Museum’s Spanish and Portuguese exhibition.21 It may have been at this time too that he bought his Renaissance bronzes and marbles, although few of these were of great significance. J.C. Robinson’s role in Francis Cook’s collecting is usually defined as that of an adviser. As Cook’s grandson put it, ‘to Sir Charles’s extraordinary knowledge and flair at a time when experts were few and opportunities many is due the successful acquisition by Sir Francis of numberless treasures worth today ten times what he paid for them’.22 It was a point of pride that the collection owed its strength to a good eye, not deep pockets: ‘Sir Francis Cook never cared to buy “tenthousand-pounders”’,23 his grandson commented, and in the catalogues he edited he took care to include the low prices
paid for many masterpieces. Beyond that, Cook’s and Robinson’s taste was catholic: Francis’s grandson could only characterise their guiding criteria as ‘sobriety and balance’.24 As Robert Witt observed: ‘The personal element . . . inevitably tends to disappear where every taste must be impartially considered.’25 But Robinson did more than simply advise Francis. More than half the pictures of known provenance that were at one time in the Cook collection can be shown to have been purchased from or through Robinson,26 who acted as a dealer or agent for Francis, and usually, as his account book shows, at a significant profit.27 Robinson also sold Cook many sculptures and decorative works of art.28 He championed Cook the collector, and his position on the committee of the Leeds exhibition, for example, must have aided the eleventh-hour entry of works latterly acquired by Cook. Two years later he successfully proposed Francis and his son for membership of the Fine Arts Club.29 In May 1885, while Cook’s baronetcy was under consideration, Robinson published the painting collection for the first time in an openly admiring, illustrated article in the Art Journal,30 and the next year effused about Monserrate, ‘the most noble and beautiful landscape garden in the world’, in The Times.31
22
27 The account book is kept at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; see Davies, op. cit. (note 11), pp.399–404. 28 Cook, op. cit. (note 6), pp.v–vi and passim. 29 Fine Arts Club Candidates Proposal Book (London, Victoria and Albert Museum, National Art Library, MSL/1952/1329). I am grateful to Jonathan Hopson for this information. 30 J.C. Robinson: ‘The Gallery of Pictures by the Old Masters, Formed by Francis Cook, Esq., of Richmond’, Art Journal (May 1885), pp.133–37. The article praises Cook’s patriotism in saving many pictures that would otherwise have left England. 31 [J.C. Robinson]: ‘An English Landscape Garden in Portugal’, The Times (28th December 1886), p.11. The article is unsigned but was reprinted in the form of a de luxe booklet under his name; copies are in the Art Library of the Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon.
Cook, op. cit. (note 14), p.vi. H. Cook: ‘The Gallery at Richmond Belonging to Sir Frederick Cook’, Les Arts 44 (August 1905), p.iv. 24 Ibid., p.i. 25 R.C. Witt: ‘Two Well-Known Private Picture Collections’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 26 (1915), p.242. 26 This statement is based on a concordance made from the catalogues of the Cook collection, museum records, Robinson’s account book (see note 27 below), and other sources. Herbert seems to have been ambivalent about Robinson’s deep involvement: in Cook, op. cit. (note 23), p.i, he makes the false statement that ‘few of these original acquisitions [from Robinson] remain’; and family records, such as a 1904 Abridged Catalogue (see note 61 below) annotated in 1911, belonging to Brenda, Lady Cook, show that the published catalogues do not record some known Robinson provenances. 23
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13. Plague in an ancient city, by Michael Sweerts. c.1652–54. 121 by 175 cm. (Los Angeles County Museum of Art).
And yet it would be wrong to think that Francis Cook played a secondary or even passive role in the formation of his collection. Although no correspondence between the two men survives,32 Robinson’s account book documents regular exchanges and the sale of pictures from Cook to him, bearing out Cook’s grandson’s assertion that Francis was ‘constantly improving the quality of the whole by getting rid of inferior examples’.33 Robinson extracted the Parable of the rich man (The moneychanger) by Rembrandt and Luca della Robbia’s Virgin and Child with the apple (Fig.11) from the collection for Wilhelm von Bode and in two letters to the latter reveals the personal interest Cook took in his works of art: ‘I am afraid Mr Cook, although an excellent good man, and an intimate friend of mine, could not be induced to do as you wish about the picture . . . [the] only prospect I can at present see, would be if I could induce Mr Cook to let me have the picture in exchange for some other work: if I could do this, I would myself present it to the Crown Princess [Victoria, consort of the future Emperor Frederick and eldest child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert]’, and ‘[as] to the payment for the Della Robbia please let it be to me not to Mr Francis Cook. I had no end of trouble to get him to part with it and I don’t want him to know that it has gone to Berlin . . ..’34 Finally 14. Presentation model for the seal of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, by Lautizio da Perugia. c.1513. Gilt bronze, 11.7 cm. high. (Private collection).
there is the testimony of Cook’s obituarists: he was ‘known to every picture dealer, to every art sale room in Europe’,35 and ‘his great pride was his wonderful collection of pictures and “objets d’art” . . .. To many art lovers the recollection of their tour through the galleries, piloted by the venerable owner, attired in old smoking-coat and cap, will long be pleasant.’36 With the rapid expansion of the painting collection came the need for a place to display it. While a few pictures were kept at Monserrate, and some even decorated the warehouse near St Paul’s, the majority was shown at Doughty House, Richmond. This compact late Georgian home, which overlooks the Thames from a quiet residential street, takes its name from Elizabeth Doughty, a longtime resident. The relatively modest house comprised two main storeys, a mezzanine and a semi-basement for services.37 The living space needed by a wealthy family with three children left little room for the display of works of art and it must have been in the early 1870s that Francis had a fifteen-foot-high skylit gallery built along the back of the house. The picture collection continued to grow in the late 1870s and 1880s, if less rapidly. In 1878 Francis bought Metsu’s Lady at the spinet (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam); in 1881 the gem-like Virgin and Child with angels by Benozzo Gozzoli (National Gallery, London); in 1882 Fernando Gallego’s enormous altarpiece from the cathedral in Ciudad Rodrigo (Fig.10); in 1883 Poussin’s Rape of the Sabine women (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); about 1884 Sweerts’s Plague in an ancient city (then attributed to Poussin; Fig.13); and in 1886 Reynolds’s St John the Baptist in the wilderness (Minneapolis Institute of Art). Of the roughly five hundred pictures that were in the collection at Cook’s death, about 190 were Italian, 190 seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish, twenty English, thirty French, twenty early Netherlandish, ten German and forty Spanish or Portuguese. A number of outstanding artists, particularly of the Dutch school, could be studied in five to twenty examples each; including copies and discredited attributions, this list contains Rubens, Rembrandt, Murillo, Van Dyck, Ruisdael, Ostade, Poussin, Andrea del Sarto, Claude, Wouwermans, Dou, Veronese, Tintoretto, Titian and Raphael. Works by major Italian artists could rarely be bought cheaply, so authentic minor examples were sometimes supplemented with old or new copies, for instance a minor predella by Raphael with copies of the ‘Colonna Madonna’, the ‘Virgin of Orléans’ and the Portrait of Julius II. The pursuit of comprehensiveness required that artists who were then considered secondary be collected; at Doughty House there were works by Beccafumi, Cesare da Sesto, Rondani, Schiavone, Backhuysen, Hackaert, Van Mieris, Schalcken, Mabuse and Valdés Leal. 32 Most of the nineteenth-century records of the collection are lost. Herbert Cook noted in the preface to Cook, op. cit. (note 14), I, p.vi: ‘The history of the formation of the collection can be traced with some degree of accuracy owing to the existence of numerous letters, receipts, and notes of transactions, all of which Sir Francis seems to have kept as though aware of their interest to subsequent generations.’ Yet in his own copy of the catalogue, now at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Herbert’s son marked the passage and asked: ‘Where are they–? Are they at Beecrofts or Wasbrough? They are not with Brockwell or Kaines Smith. [Initialled] 1939–53 Jersey.’ Beecrofts and Wasbrough, two of his trustees, apparently did not have them; in 2001 I inspected the documents in the possession of the law firm that succeeded theirs; all date to the twentieth century and are now on deposit with John Somerville.
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Francis continued to collect in other media, albeit less doggedly and systematically. In the 1880s or 1890s he bought some important ancient works, including fragments of a Graeco-Syrian sarcophagus of the Sidamara type (now in the British Museum, London); a Roman bronze head of a boy (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); a large marble statue of Apollo (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford); and in 1898 an extraordinary Byzantine vase in agate and gold that had belonged to Charles V of France and later to Rubens (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore). A small collection of Egyptian works, formed at an unknown date, included a fine mummy case, Ushabti spirit figures, bas-reliefs, faience pottery and various trinkets.38 Probably in the 1870s, but at any rate by 1885,39 an impressive new skylit gallery measuring one hundred by twenty-five feet was added to Doughty House. This was building on a more than domestic scale and emulated the great national collections of Europe. By 1896 a skylit octagonal room, probably inspired by the Uffizi’s Tribuna, had been added beyond the Long Gallery.40 By this time Francis had bought several more masterpieces, including Moretto’s Pietà (purchased 1892; National Gallery of Art, Washington) and Van Dyck’s Betrayal of Christ (Minneapolis Institute of Art). Virtually no nineteenth-century descriptions of Doughty House are known but, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, its gallery ‘was always freely open to genuine students’,41 and in 1897 Cook himself mentioned in a letter to The Times that ‘the daily visitors to the collections in this house are numerous’.42 Francis was a generous lender to exhibitions, particularly in the first and last decades of his collecting life. One journalist remembered Cook as ‘tall, long bearded, strikingly handsome, massive’, and wrote that he ‘presented himself to you with something of old worldliness and yet with a curious and contrasted briskness of manner and absence of ceremony’.43 Another recalled that ‘Sir Francis was very reticent . . .. He was not one who would brook argument, although he would listen, and then say, very quietly and politely, “That subject will not bear further discussion”.’44 He was devoted to his work and continued to make the trip to St Paul’s Churchyard up until a few days before his death at the age of eighty-four. ‘Possessing a good memory for faces and names, it was one of his greatest pleasures to watch the careers of the hundreds of people who served him . . .. He cured his young men of “side” by carrying brown paper parcels through the streets, and of extravagance by walking to and from the railroad station.’45 His benevolent works benefited mainly his
employees in London and Portugal, and the absence of any charitable bequests in his will drew criticism. One has only to visit Richmond Hill or Sintra, so isolated from the ‘bruised, crushed, struggling humanity’ that Cook was accused of neglecting,46 to see that he preferred to devote himself to the world over which he had control. An account of Sir Francis’s life would be incomplete without its final, unexpected chapter: his marriage to a flamboyant American feminist avant la lettre. One obituary even mused: ‘He will probably be best known to the outer world as the husband of the immortal Tennessee Celeste Claflin, and the brother-in-law of that Victoria Claflin Woodhull, now Mrs Martin, who once ran for the Presidency of the United States.’47 By the age of thirty-five, when she began seeing Francis, Tennessee had been a child clairvoyant, run a Wall Street brokerage firm with her sister (backed by Cornelius Vanderbilt), pamphleteered and lectured on women’s rights and sexual liberation, and supported her sister’s presidential campaign of 1872.48 Francis and Tennessee were married in 1885, a year after the death of Francis’s first wife. Tennessee brought new life to Doughty House, organising concerts and grand garden parties. The contrast between husband and wife was striking: ‘To hear the unfamiliar and strong accent of the United States – and to hear the problems which America discusses eagerly and familiarly, and England passes over in shuddering silence – and to see the slight, alert, restless, and intellectual face of this fiery-souled American woman by the
33 On the exchanges and sales, see Davies, op. cit. (note 11), pp.324–65. The quotation is from Cook, op. cit. (note 23), p.i. 34 Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kunstbesitz, Zentralarchiv, Bode Nachlass 4023, letters (original emphasis) of 30th April 1892 and 22nd February 1881. These letters were first published in J. Warren: ‘Bode and the British’, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen, Beiheft (1996), p.132. While it is possible that in the case of the Madonna Cook’s supposed reticence to sell was really a sales tactic, Robinson did freely give Rembrandt’s Parable to Victoria, who passed it on to the Berlin picture gallery; see T. von Stockhausen: Gemäldegalerie Berlin: die Geschichte ihrer Erwerbungspolitik 1830– 1904, Berlin 2000. 35 ‘The Late Sir Francis Cook’, Mostly About People 6, no.142 (2nd March 1901), p.195. 36 Sun (19th February 1901). 37 Cloake, op. cit. (note 3), p.5. 38 H.W. Mengedoht: Catalogue of the Egyptian Antiquities in the Collection of Sir Her-
bert Cook, Bt., London 1924. 39 When it is mentioned by Robinson, op. cit. (note 30), p.133. 40 Cloake, op. cit. (note 3), p.5. 41 Welch, op. cit. (note 2), p.404. 42 Letter to the editor, The Times (16th March 1897), p.3. 43 ‘The Late Sir Francis Cook’, op. cit. (note 35), p.194. 44 Drapers’ Record (23rd February 1901). 45 London Argus (22nd February 1901). 46 E. Willomatt, letter to the editor, Daily Chronicle (15th March 1901). A subsequent letter to the editor (18th March 1901) defended Cook by citing his accessibility and generous pay to his employees. 47 Daily Chronicle (19th February 1901). 48 The best of the many sources on the two sisters is L. Beachy Underhill: The Woman Who Ran for President, New York 1995.
15. Sir Herbert Cook, by William Orpen. 1923. 98 by 84 cm. (Cook family collection).
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16. Doughty House: the drawing room. c.1905. Photograph. (Cook family collection).
17. Doughty House: the Old Gallery. c.1905. Photograph. (Cook family collection).
side of this stately old Englishman, and in the framework of old-world art and English landscape, was one of those surprises and contrasts that show how varied and startling life can be.’49 In Francis’s last years the marriage became strained, partly because of family disapproval.50 On 17th February 1901 Francis died, less than a month after Queen Victoria, with whose life his was nearly conterminous. In his will, Francis had divided the collection between his two sons: ‘the pictures and drawings, the antique sculptures and marbles, the tapestries, glass and terra cotta passing to . . . Sir Frederick Cook . . . whilst the bronzes, silver, ivories, china, miniatures, missals, antique gems and mediaeval jewellery were left to his second son, Mr Wyndham Cook.’51 Wyndham (1860–1905), a partner in Cook, Son & Co. and a devotee of yachting, appears to have had a high regard for his inheritance: he built a gallery for it at the back of his Chelsea home, was active in the Burlington Fine Arts Club, made purchases of his own in England (including J.C. Robinson’s gem collection) as well as around the world, and commissioned a scholarly catalogue, the first volume of which appeared in 1904. He died the next year, at the age of fortyfour, of pneumonia contracted on a yachting expedition, but his widow kept firm control of the collection and even sponsored two further volumes of the catalogue in 1908 and 1910.52 Six months after Wyndham’s widow died in 1925, their only son, Humphrey (1893–1978), a racing driver, sold the entire collection at Christie’s for £75,000.53 Among the most important works sold on this occasion were a gilt bronze presentation model for the seal of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici by Lautizio da Perugia (which may have been bought by either Francis or Wyndham; Fig.14)54 and a sardonyx cameo with a Bacchic group from the Marlborough and Robinson collections (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Many international collectors, including Joseph Brummer of New York and H.C. Gallois of Rotterdam, acquired works from the sale. Meanwhile, the larger share of the collection remained intact in the hands of Frederick Cook (1844–1920), who took custody of Doughty House and Monserrate a year after Francis’s death. Although well-intentioned, Frederick was a less talented man than his father. He fulfilled his responsibilities at the family firm and for eleven years served as Member of Parliament for Kennington, although, as one writer noted, ‘he did not startle the assembly by eloquence; he was content to be a silent member’.55 His granddaughter recorded that he added only one (second-rate) picture to the collection, and remembered him thus: ‘He entered into his inheritance with zest and I am sure enjoyed playing the leading part, looking proudly at the vast array of paintings through clouds of tobacco smoke and slapping everyone on the back with loud, cheerful greetings.’56 49
‘The Late Sir Francis Cook’, op. cit. (note 35), p.195. See, for example, ‘Lady Cook Buys a House: Comes Here to Live, and May Found a Home for Women Artists’, New York Times (10th December 1899), p.6. However, she remained in Richmond until a year after Francis’s death, as his will provided, before moving elsewhere in England. 51 Cook, op. cit. (note 14), I, p.v. 52 In a series with Cook, op. cit. (note 6). The 1908 catalogue included antiquities, the slim 1910 catalogue miscellaneous objects (the only copy of which I know is in the British Library, London). 53 Christie’s, London, 7th–10th July 1925; Christie’s, London, 14th–16th July 1925. 50
18. Doughty House: the smoking room. c.1905. Photograph. (Cook family collection).
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Frederick’s son Herbert (1868–1939), the third baronet, had a deeper interest in art than even Francis, although he met with less success in business. He was ‘an amateur of the old school’, as Denys Sutton put it in a sympathetic appreciation of Herbert and his milieu (Fig.15).57 After attending Harrow School and Balliol College, Oxford, he worked in the law while also pursuing a career in the world of art, his wealth and connections supplementing his considerable ability. In 1898 Herbert married Mary Hood, a daughter of Viscount Bridport, and established a home at Copseham, near Esher in Surrey. By his mid-twenties, Herbert Cook was a barrister at the Inner Temple and a contributor to art journals such as the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. His independence from received opinion became clear early on: he sponsored and wrote the preface to the attribution-toppling pamphlet on the 1894–95 New Gallery exhibition in London of Venetian art written by his friend Bernard Berenson. He was active in the Burlington Fine Arts Club and served on the committee for the Lombard exhibition held there in 1899. In 1900 Herbert published a monograph on Giorgione, a lifelong fascination, which included a biography and catalogue raisonné. He was a prescient champion of Giorgione’s authorship of the Allendale Nativity and Benson Holy Family (both National Gallery of Art, Washington), although he accepted many other works that are certainly not autograph. In two unpublished letters (see the Appendix), both Berenson and Roger Fry communicate their disapproval of his ‘pan-Giorgionism’ and, implicitly, their attitude towards him. In 1903 Herbert was instrumental in creating THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, as its own pages recorded at his death: ‘he belonged . . . to the small group of art lovers through whose efforts this journal was founded.’58 He was also a regular contributor to the Magazine. Herbert helped found the National Art-Collections Fund in the same year, and letters from Roger Fry to Mary Berenson show the importance of his energy and his bank balance to both these ventures.59 Upon taking possession of Doughty House, Frederick aggrandised the house, cladding the exterior of the main floor in stone, surrounding the windows with elaborate neo-mannerist enframements and crowning the façade with a triangular pediment. Probably at the same time he added a room beyond the Octagon, in which he placed a fine pipe organ by Hill & Sons.60 Herbert attended to the pictures. In 1903 he published an abridged version of a lost catalogue, perhaps a manuscript, that existed in a single copy and appears to have given extensive information on the pictures.61 Copies of the
19. Doughty House: the Long Gallery. c.1905. Photograph. (Cook family collection).
20. Doughty House: the Octagon Room. c.1905. Photograph. (Cook family collection).
54
Sold at Sotheby’s, New York, 14th June 1996, lot 235. Drapers’ Record (5th June 1915). 56 V. Ryder: The Little Victims Play: An Edwardian Childhood, London 1974, p.57. 57 D. Sutton: ‘Sir Herbert Cook: An Amateur of the Old School’, Gazette des BeauxArts (December 1989), pp.301–04. 58 ‘Sir Herbert Cook’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 74 (1939), p.295. 59 D. Sutton, ed.: The Letters of Roger Fry, London 1972, I, pp.215–17. 60 The room may possibly have been built in the last years of Francis’s life, but, as Alison Smith of the Birmingham City Archives kindly informs me, Frederick commissioned the organ from Hill & Sons only in 1902. 61 Abridged Catalogue of the Pictures at Doughty House, Richmond (Belonging to Sir Frederick Cook, Bart., Visconde de Monserrate), London 1903. On p.22 of the 1907 edition, which gives more detailed descriptions of the paintings, the following note precedes a six-paragraph history of the Gallego altarpiece: ‘The following is extracted verbatim from the full Catalogue.’ Presumably the full catalogue had been written by Robinson or Herbert Cook. 55
21. Doughty House: the Organ Room. c.1905. Photograph. (Cook family collection). the burl ington m agazin e
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22. La Schiavona (‘Caterina Cornaro’), by Titian. c.1511. 118 by 97 cm. (National Gallery, London).
23. Portrait of a boy, by Rembrandt. c.1645–50. 65 by 56 cm. (Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena).
abridged catalogue were lent to visitors and given to friends. The preface records that in 1902 and 1903 the collection was ‘entirely rearranged’, and a careful study of the 1904 and 1907 editions shows a gradually stricter adoption of the museological principle of segregating schools and periods by gallery or wall. Even additions to the house served this purpose: in the middle of the right wall of the Long Gallery, devoted to Dutch and Flemish Baroque pictures, a new annexe was built for paintings by Rembrandt and his school, which were formerly mixed with Italian masters ‘of the best period’ in the Octagon Room and elsewhere in the house.62 Herbert also weeded the collection in these years, sending thirty-three paintings to auction or charity. Probably in 1905, just before the addition of the annexe, a large photographic album with sumptuous views of the public rooms of Doughty House was produced, providing a unique record of the display of the collection, albeit after its division between Francis’s sons.63 With its eclectic mix of Baroque and modern furniture, Chinese porcelain, marble sculpture and old-master paintings of subdued tone, the drawing room (Fig.16) is representative of the house proper. Through the low gates one reached the Old Gallery (Fig.17), a fine space so densely hung that one had to squat to be able to see half of the pictures it contained. After experiencing the domesticity of the drawing room, the visitor received a jolt from the link to the conservatory, an intimate and informal space which, one realises with alarm, was, from at least 1903, the smoking room (Fig.18). Its other function, perhaps played down by Frederick, was that of a chapel; hung with religious works, it culminated with a cas-
sone put to use as an altar, with candles on top of it framing Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi’s Adoration of the Magi.64 Returning back through the Old Gallery, the visitor then reached the magnificent Long Gallery (Fig.19) with large Italian pictures on the left, small and medium-size Dutch and Flemish pictures to the right, and a row of ancient statuary and pottery down the centre. The mix of works in different media in the same room must have been even more pronounced when Doughty House contained Wyndham’s share of the collection. Herbert seems to have disliked this outmoded arrangement and the work on the house carried out in 1902– 03 included the addition of a basement ‘Museum’ to which some of the antiquities were relegated. Beyond the Long Gallery was the Octagon Room (Fig.20), adorned with many of the most highly prized pictures of the collection; those on the lower registers were arranged on shallow shelves, perhaps so that trusted visitors could hold them up for close examination.65 The last room in the sequence was the Organ Room (Fig.21) where on the side walls the Spanish and Portuguese pictures hung. In spite of all his work at Doughty House, Herbert managed to find time to start his own collection for his home in Esher. In his twenties he seems to have purchased and received a handful of paintings as gifts, but it was in the years around 1910 that he began to collect seriously. He travelled widely to study and acquire art – in his book on Giorgione he noted that he had seen every painting he discussed except those in St Petersburg. He acquired at least sixty-four paintings, including some highly significant ones: Titian’s (or, as he preferred, Giorgione and Titian’s) ‘Caterina Cornaro’ (now
62
um (2), lower Octagon Room (1) and billiard room (3). It also includes several photographs of individual paintings. 64 This is my interpretation of the photograph and a sentence in the diary of Lord Ronald Gower (Old Diaries 1881–1901, London 1902, p.267): ‘The end room beyond the gallery is fitted up with an altar and all its appliances.’ 65 Although partially determined by the site, the sequence of alternating long and short rooms probably reflects the Victorian prescription that galleries should have a varied plan to enrich the visitors’ experience; see C. Leighton: ‘The Cook Collec-
A notebook kept by Mary Berenson includes notes from the late 1890s on the Doughty House collection (Florence, Villa I Tatti, Berenson Archive; kindly transcribed for me by Fiorella Superbi). If the pictures are described in the sequence in which they were seen, as seems plausible, Herbert must have entirely rearranged the galleries and left only the smoking room relatively untouched. 63 The album contains photographs of the exterior (2), entrance hall (2), drawing room (2), an upstairs bedroom (1), dining room (2), conservatory (3), Old Gallery (4), smoking room (5), Long Gallery (6), Octagon Room (1), Organ Room (1), Muse-
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known simply as a female portrait or as ‘La Schiavona’; acquired 1914; Fig.22); Rembrandt’s Portrait of a boy (Fig.23); Velázquez’s Jester Calabazas (acquired 1915; Cleveland Museum of Art); Ercole de’ Roberti’s Portia and Brutus (acquired 1920; Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth); and Giorgione’s Giovanni Borgherini and his tutor (acquired 1925; National Gallery of Art, Washington). In the early and mid-1910s yet more care was lavished on the Doughty House collection. Frederick and Herbert commissioned the architects Brewer, Smith & Brewer to build a further extension to the galleries.66 This time a double colonnade, glazed only on the main storey, was added beside the Long Gallery with a garden gallery above and a loggia for ancient statuary below. The columns and capitals were in Whitbed Portland stone, the interior furnishing in English oak. Herbert immediately moved his ‘Caterina Cornaro’ to a place of honour in this airy new picture gallery (Fig.24). In this same period – 1913–16 – Herbert oversaw an even greater achievement: the publication of the collection (incorporating his own acquisitions) in three luxurious volumes, limited to five hundred copies each. Herbert commissioned three art historians – Tancred Borenius, J.O. Kronig and Maurice Brockwell – to write on the Italian, Dutch and Flemish, and other schools, respectively, and he himself served as editor, adding short notes of his own opinions whenever he disagreed with attributions. The catalogue was well received and the care (and expense) of producing it was not lost on reviewers, one of whom declared: ‘The fine art of catalogue making has reached what is at present its highest point in the record of Sir Frederick Cook’s pictures at Richmond.’67 Even by modern standards, it is indeed a model catalogue; the entries provide brief descriptions of the pictures and, often, critical discussion of questions of attribution, provenance, bibliography and exhibition history. All but the least significant works are illustrated and entries are arranged by school and, within school, by artist, each of whom receives a brief biography. It is yet another measure of the Cooks’ emulation of public institutions that these principles were derived from an article proposing improvements to the catalogues of the National Gallery.68 It was in this period that Herbert’s ascension to the highest ranks of the art world took place. Upon his father’s death in 1920, Herbert succeeded to the baronetcy and moved to Doughty House with his wife and children, while hiring a dedicated curator for the collection. This was his friend Maurice Brockwell who, besides writing a volume of the catalogue, had published a series of articles on Cook’s pictures in The Connoisseur.69 In 1916 Herbert became a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, and in 1923 he was invited to serve as a trustee of the National Gallery. He remained on both boards until 1930, when ill health forced him to resign.
However, all was not well with Cook & Son. Still extremely successful in the early 1910s, the firm suffered during the war years,70 and in 1920 it became a public company owing to its precarious finances. Upon Frederick’s death in the same year, Herbert became chairman, but he could not stave off the losses, and in 1921 the company lost over £400,000 and continued to flounder throughout the decade as co-operatives and department stores bought directly from manufacturers, eliminating the role of the wholesaler. In 1931 Herbert resigned and a cousin (a descendant of Francis’s younger brother) took control. All this could not but affect Herbert’s personal finances and in 1929 and 1931 he even tried to sell Monserrate.71 Although unsuccessful, he raised some money by parting with much of the land that lay beyond the original quinta. By then he was sixty and badly afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, which he endured for a decade. Herbert had one son upon whom the baronetcy was to devolve. Francis Ferdinand Maurice Cook (1907–78) was in his twenties during his father’s illness. He had a creative bent and, after an abortive study of mathematics, he became a
tion’, MA diss. (Southampton Institute, 2002). 66 ‘New Picture-Gallery and Loggia, Doughty House, Richmond Hill’, The Builder (8th October 1915), p.261. 67 ‘A Catalogue De Luxe’, Times Literary Supplement (11th December 1913), p.602. 68 D.S. McColl: ‘The National Gallery: Its Problems, Resources and Administration’, The Nineteenth Century and After 71 (January 1912), pp.36–37. Herbert names the author and source of the article, but discreetly omits the title; see Cook, op. cit. (note 14), I, p.ix. 69 M.W. Brockwell: ‘The Cook Collection’, Connoisseur 47, no.187 (March 1917),
pp.123–30; ibid. 47, no.188 (April 1917), pp.20–29; ibid. 50, no.197 (January 1918), pp.3–10. A few years earlier Gustavo Frizzoni had published the collection for an Italian audience: ‘Rivelazioni della galleria Cook a Richmond’, Rassegna d’Arte 1, no.6 (1914), pp.121–34. 70 The information in this paragraph comes from Cook’s of St. Paul’s, a 1957 commemorative pamphlet (Guildhall Library, London), and a mid-1920s biography of Herbert’s son in British Sports and Sportsmen, reproduced in the British Biographical Archive, II 1400, 313–15. 71 The Times (18th October 1929), p.25; The Times (1st January 1931), p.24.
24. View of the Garden Gallery, Doughty House. Photograph. (Cook collection archive, care of John Somerville, England).
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25. Huis Elswout, Overveen, by Gerrit Berckheyde. c.1680. 50.8 by 78.8 cm. (Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem, on loan from Instituut Collectie Nederland).
painter working in a traditional representational style.72 The young Francis’s choice of profession and expensive tastes, together with the family’s diminishing fortune, brought the fate of the art collection into question. In 1933 Herbert entered an agreement with Francis (formalised in 1934) by which thirty first- and second-rank paintings, presumably of Francis’s choosing, along with cash, shares and a property, would become his, subject to certain conditions of sale. Other works would go to national collections, with the remainder to be held for successive generations in the ‘Baronetcy Fund’, a trust that had been established by the first Francis.73 News of the Cooks’ financial straits was already spreading. In 1935 Christie’s enquired whether they could be of service; the following year it was Duveen.74 Herbert remained adamant that the collection should not be dispersed. But in 1939, a month before he died, he drafted a new will that appointed four lawyers and accountants as trustees for the large amount of the art collection not given to Francis, as well as Doughty House itself, and empowered them to sell with Francis’s consent. After Herbert’s death in May, the dealers descended. Only one, Nathan Katz from Dieren in Holland, met with any success. He offered a six-figure sum for forty Dutch pictures and before long the deal was concluded.75 Almost as quickly the paintings ended up in Nazi hands. Some were sold directly to Hans Posse for the Führermuseum in Linz, while others went there either through intermediaries or to Göring or to the Reichskanzlerei in Berlin. The most significant of the paintings thus sold was Berckheyde’s Huis Elswout, Overveen (Fig.25); this, like many others to reach the Nazis, is now part of Holland’s collection of recuperated art. Other paintings 72
See the biography cited at note 70 above. Monro Pennefather & Co./Fisher Fairchild Wasbrough kindly allowed me to read Herbert’s 1939 will along with some documents pertaining to the 1934 settlement. Also informative is the legal article, ‘Rembrandt Given to Wife’, The Times (12th February 1964), p.3. 74 Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Research Institute, Duveen archive, box 232, folder 49: letter from White and Wasbrough, Cook trustees, to Christie Manson & Woods, 28th February 1935; letter from James Durham to Duveen, 1st December 1936. 75 ‘Famous Pictures Lost’, Richmond and Twickenham Times (1st June 1940). 76 J.R. ter Molen, ed.: 150 jaar Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam 1999, p.294. 77 London, National Gallery, Cook archive (1939–47), correspondence of 21st July 73
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sold to Katz, notably Ter Borch’s Lady spinning, Rembrandt’s Portrait of Aletta Adriaensdr. and Metsu’s Lady at a spinet, were bought in early 1940 by Willem van der Vorm and since 1972 have been on long-term loan to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.76 In July 1939, one of the Cook trustees wrote to the directors of the Frick Collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, asking if they ‘would like an early opportunity of considering whether they wanted anything’ for their museums. When word of the offer – and Boston’s interest in Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi’s Adoration of the Magi – reached Kenneth Clark,77 then director of the National Gallery in London, he began frantic discussions with the trustees and the young Francis Cook. He convinced them that in time of war four highly important paintings should be safeguarded together with the National Gallery’s own collection in the Manod Quarry, Penrhyn Castle, and in the Pritchard Jones Hall in Wales.78 In the 1920s Herbert Cook and other trustees of the National Gallery had established a ‘Paramount Pictures List’, which included those ‘supreme masterpieces’ that ‘must be acquired for the nation at any cost’. Among these was Van Eyck’s Three Marys. The government had committed to spend up to £100,000 to save it and was prepared to do so even in wartime. Robert Witt of the National Art-Collections Fund, knowing the high sums that could be attained for old masters, appealed to the trustees: letting the Van Eyck or any other masterpiece from the Cook collection leave the country was the ‘last thing [Francis’s] father would have approved or allowed’.79 Yet he and Clark were unable to convince the trustees or Francis to accept any sum under £150,000 for the Van Eyck. When in April 1940 D.G. Van Beuningen offered an astronomical £250,000, the painting was swiftly sold.80 After this, sales ceased for a few years, but this painful loss to the nation proved a harbinger of further depletions. By 1941 the three paintings in Wales, together with twenty-two other important works, were shipped to New York, ostensibly for safekeeping in a bank vault.81 The remaining pictures were stacked in the basement of Doughty House or kept at Cothay Manor in Somerset, another of Francis’s properties. Maurice Brockwell retired as keeper upon Herbert’s death and in 1941 the trustees hired S.C. Kaines Smith of the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery,82 on the understanding that his main charge would be the sale of a great many pictures, for which he received a commission, often as high as ten per cent.83 For his first few years, however, he simply managed the collection and ‘primed’ it for sale: he initiated a campaign of restorations carried out by William Drown and William Suhr, the intent of which was to 1939. For this and much of the material in this paragraph I am indebted to Claire Leighton’s dissertation, cited at note 65 above. 78 London, National Gallery, archives, informational sheet headed ‘Sir Herbert Cook’; London, National Gallery, Paramount Pictures archive, letter from Kenneth Clark to David Jackling, one of the Cook trustees, of 17th January 1940. The paintings were Van Eyck’s Three Marys, the Adoration tondo, Rembrandt’s ‘Titus’ (Portrait of a boy) and Gozzoli’s Madonna and Child with angels. 79 London, National Gallery, Paramount Pictures archive, letter from Witt to D. Jackling, October 1939. 80 Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Archives, letter from Nathan Katz to D.G. Van Beuningen, 6th April 1940, kindly communicated to me by Friso
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increase the value of the works.84 In 1942 Francis gave his father’s favourite painting, ‘La Schiavona’, to the National Gallery in memory of Herbert. In 1943, as the war intensified, more pictures were transferred to Cothay – advisedly, as it turned out, for the next summer Doughty House was badly damaged by bombardments.85 Renewed financial pressures (including heavy taxes), together with the difficulty of managing a vast art collection without a proper home, led to new discussions about the fate of the collection. In the summer of 1944 some £400,000 had to be raised for the trust (a sixth of it urgently, a third by mid1945, and the remainder eventually)86 and the only way to do so, as Kaines Smith and the trustees convinced Francis with some difficulty, was to reduce a museum-like collection to ‘a group of the hundred best pictures . . . suitable for hanging in a moderately sized private house not provided with a picture gallery’.87 Kaines Smith was shrewd and patient in sales, believing that ‘a sweeping dispersal of the collection’ would have ‘a disastrous effect upon prices’.88 He began inviting enquiries from the swarm of dealers who had for so long knocked on Doughty House’s door, including Contini-Bonacossi, Seligmann, Drey, Agnew, Duveen and Rosenberg & Stiebel. In response to their initial offers he usually conveyed sympathy on his own part but intransigence on Francis’s (which was sometimes real) and the trustees’ (which never was). Once he felt the price offered was high enough, he sold, and 242 paintings had left the collection by 1952.89 The most important buyer was the foundation formed by Samuel H. Kress, himself a collector of encyclopaedic ambitions. Its greatest acquisition was Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi’s Adoration of the Magi (Fig.1), which in late 1946, after two years of fruitless negotiations as the painting was shuttled between small exhibitions in Toledo OH and Canada and the New York bank vault, was poised to return to England. An exceptional last-minute recommendation from Berenson led the Kress foundation trustees to agree to buy the painting for a very substantial sum.90 Shortly afterwards they gave it to the newly founded National Gallery of Art in Washington, where it remains one of the most important works in the collection. The Kress foundation bought dozens of other Cook paintings, mostly through Contini-Bonacossi, and gave twentyone of the most important works to the National Gallery of Art. Among the purchases were Moretto’s Pietà and Titian’s Ranuccio Farnese (both National Gallery of Art, Washington); Paris Bordone’s Perseus armed by Mercury and Minerva (Fig.26); François Perrier’s Polyphemus and the sea nymphs (Bucknell University, Lewisburg PA); and the Gallego altarpiece.
A few years after the war ended, Francis moved to the Channel Islands, taking with him only a small number of pictures. Some of the remaining works were kept in a rented studio in London while many more began a tour of England in a series of temporary exhibitions in small towns and cities, and others went on long-term loan to regional museums;91 this continued throughout the 1950s, although the stock diminished after a large auction of 136 lots at Sotheby’s on 25th June 1958. In 1955 Francis sold the first of the major paintings from the group that had been reserved for him in 1934: he and the trustees concluded deals with the National Gallery of Scotland for Velázquez’s Old woman cooking eggs and the Minneapolis Institute of Art for Van Dyck’s Betrayal of Christ. Such sales continued into the 1960s with Filippo Lippi’s Saints (sold 1963; Cleveland Museum of Art) and Ercole de’ Roberti’s Wife of Hasdrubal (sold 1964; National Gallery of Art, Washington), while Rembrandt’s Portrait of a boy went to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena and Velázquez’s Calabazas to the Cleveland Museum of Art at an eventful sale in 1965.92 Since then further Cook paintings have been sold at auction 93 as well as privately – the Louvre’s purchase in 1992 of Antonello da Messina’s Christ at the column (Fig.27) stands out among these sales – and now only a very few pictures still belong to the family. The geographic distribution of the 244 Cook pictures whose present whereabouts are known is representative of the collecting patterns of the last half-century: five are in Asia, Australia and South America; forty-one have returned to the continent; eighty-nine remain in the United Kingdom and Ireland; and 109 are in North America. Just over fifty pictures, or nearly ten per cent of the collection,
Lammertse; Ter Molen, op. cit. (note 76), p.324. 81 A telegram of 16th September 1941 from the New York to the London office of Duveen indicates that the pictures had already arrived by that time; Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Research Institute, Duveen archive, box 232, folder 49. 82 ‘Art in Birmingham: The Late Mr S.C. Kaines Smith’, Illustrated London News (12th July 1958), p.77. 83 According to letters and records in the CCA, his successor E.L. Conran received five per cent (letter from Wasbrough to Conran of 8th June 1953). 84 CCA, Keeper’s Reports. 85 CCA, Keeper’s Reports, July–December 1943, January–June 1944 (and addendum), July–December 1944. 86 CCA, Monro Pennefather & Co./Fisher Fairchild Wasbrough files, letter from S.C. Kaines Smith to Francis Ferdinand Maurice Cook, 11th May 1944; report by
Kaines Smith to the trustees, 2nd May 1944. 87 Ibid., letter from S.C. Kaines Smith to W.P. Holford, 8th October 1949. 88 Kaines Smith report cited at note 86 above. 89 CCA, tally sheet of 22nd September 1952. 90 Florence, Villa I Tatti, Berenson archives, letter from Bernard Berenson to Samuel H. Kress, 1st July 1947. 91 A great many small catalogues for these exhibitions are in the CCA. The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and the Manchester City Art Galleries both displayed Cook pictures for many years. 92 Sale Christie’s, London, 19th March 1965. See S. Muchnic: Odd Man In: Norton Simon and the Pursuit of Culture, Berkeley 1998, pp.86–95 and 289. 93 All at Christie’s, London: 25th November 1966 (16 lots); 13th April 1984 (11 lots); 6th July 1984 (10 lots).
26. Perseus armed by Mercury and Minerva, by Paris Bordone. c.1545–55. 104.2 by 154.2 cm. (Birmingham Museum of Art, AL).
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Appendix Letters from Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry to Herbert Cook, –. (In the possession of Brenda, Lady Cook, who kindly allowed me to examine and transcribe them.) . Bernard Berenson to Herbert Cook
27. Christ at the column, by Antonello da Messina. c.1476. Panel, 29.5 by 21 cm. (Musée du Louvre, Paris).
hang in national museums, while many more enrich the rooms of regional and local museums. In 1946 Francis unsuccessfully offered Monserrate to the Portuguese state and he subsequently sold it to a wealthy speculator who promptly auctioned the entire contents of the palace. Two years later, after Sintra had denied him permission to divide and develop the land and a high-ranking professor had brought Salazar’s attention to Monserrate, the state bought the land and the empty palace.94 After many years of neglect Monserrate in the last decade has begun to be restored with support from the state and a friends’ association. It was recently named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 1947 Francis sold most of the antiquities; many went at low prices to the British Museum and the Ashmolean Museum while others were sold to Spink & Son.95 Two of the best Egyptian works were purchased in 1945 by the Manchester Museum, and twenty more in 1947.96 That same year five tapestries were auctioned.97 In 1949 Doughty House itself was given up; its purchaser converted the house into flats and sold the smoking room and land occupied by the destroyed conservatory as a separate freehold. The plan of a subsequent owner to transform the galleries into offices never materialised, and since the mid-1980s Doughty House has languished as a poorly maintained home, while the smoking room and its basement are now a pleasant bed and breakfast.98
94 See Costa, op. cit. (note 4), pp.40–42, appendix D, and documents 7 and 8. The speculator realised a large profit. 95 University of Oxford, Ashmolean Museum. Report of the Visitors, Oxford 1947, pp.7, 12 and 15–21 and ibid., Oxford 1948, pp.13 and 20; CCA, letter from Kaines Smith to R.R. Forrer (Department of Antiquities, Spink & Son, London), 22nd November 1947.
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12 Dec. 1900 Poggio Gherardo, Via Settignanese, Firenze My dear Herbert, My good thanks for your ‘Giorgione’. I wish I could say even a word in sincere approval of it. You must however have discounted my opinion before sending your MSS to the press, so you will not be surprised [that] I think even from your own stand-point, your arguments will not hold water & your material is arbitrarily chosen. Once you’ve broken the dykes neither I nor anyone else will understand why you have not included another fifty pictures I could easily mention. But all that is as nothing beside my objection to your point of view. Followed out logically you should re-attribute to Leonardo most pictures of the Milanese School, & count every Botticellian picture for a Botticelli etc. etc. etc. In most cases there is no difference but of quality. Now I have for thirteen years given my undivided attention to Italian art, & my ever increasing conviction is that before quality all other considerations vanish, that the study of an artist is above all things an aesthetic & psychological problem – But I could talk forever, & I fear to no purpose. You can not plead not knowing my principles. You are of course at liberty to disregard them, & certainly I take no kind of personal offence at your attitude. Now you have in writing what it is much better to say out than to keep inside. And having had my say, I beg you to believe that all is well between me and you. Our wedding has been delayed by an infinitude of red tape, but is fixed at last for the 29th. Meanwhile Mrs Costelloe & her family are putting the new home to right. It promises to turn out perfectly charming. You must come soon to see & I shall not mourn over you as a prodigal. We have I hope much beside ‘connoisseurship’ to tie us together, as for instance a conviction of being one for the other what in America is called ‘a white man’ – a rara avis I assure you. My love to your wife, & best wishes for a merry Xmas, & happy New Year. Yours ever B.B. . Roger Fry to Herbert Cook Ivy Holt, Dorking 7 Feb. 1901 My dear Cook, As I don’t wish to fire at you from behind a hedge, I ought to let you know that I penned the savage attack on your Giorgione in the Athenaeum of last week. I hope I have put my views temperately and said how much I admire your attitude. Too sincerely I wish I could agree more with you but alas I can’t. I went to see the Beaumont picture [the Allendale Nativity] which is lovely, but just look at the way it is built up of isolated details never seen as a whole though pulled together at the end, a very different method to that of Giorgione even in his earliest & most naïve work. I have not I admit tackled the Giorgione-Titian problem which I consider almost beyond the wit of man, but am rather concerned to weed out all the second rates who imitated their common manner. I have for my sins and for a small quantity of miserable schekles undertaken to write for a guidebook a history of Italian art, and wish you would take pity on me & lend me your notice of the Lombard school. If possible I should like your unadulterated work & not the bowdlerization of Strong & Co. I will take good care of it & let you have it back in a few days. Have you seen Mrs Ady’s Florentine Painting. The beginning of it is a resumé of my lectures which she borrowed because she was so much interested. She has copied mistakes of mine with delightful inadvertency. I hope I shan’t get [illegible word] in the brain like a certain person [possibly Berenson] but it is a little amazing & now she actually says I got so much from her, how does not appear. I hope you are both well & flourishing: we continue to await the great event which still delays annoyingly. Yrs. Ever Roger E. Fry P.S. The ‘Pilot’ wanted me to review the Giorgione too but I didn’t like to have two shots at you, so have got one A.M. Daniel who is learned & thorough to do it.
96 I am grateful to Nigel Strudwick for helping me trace the fate of the Egyptian works, and to Susan Martin of the Manchester Museum for sharing information from its records. 97 ‘Tapestry from Doughty House: Five Panels Sold for £3,360’, The Times (25th July 1947), p.2. 98 Cloake, op. cit. (note 3), p.6.