HIDDEN CORNERS
catalogues of
Private Art Collections The volumes documenting the private collections of wealthy art buyers were designed to impress, with magnificent plates and leather bindings. Michael Savage examines a few of the fine examples to be found in the Library, some of them donated by the collectors themselves. Before BP and Chatham House, and even before The London Library, the buildings in St James’s Square housed some of Britain’s finest private art collections. The politician and patron of the arts Sir Watkin Williams Wynn lived at number 20 from 1771, and commissioned Robert and James Adam to rebuild the house. Norfolk House at number 31 was built in 1722 and contained the picture collection of the dukes of Norfolk. Both houses have been demolished, but there are paintings by Joshua Reynolds and examples of Adam furniture from number 20 in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, and the music room from Norfolk House is at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
24 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
Few people saw the treasures inside such great houses, but some of the grandest art collectors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries advertised their connoisseurship by publishing catalogues of their art collections. In practice these books were as little seen as the houses. They were huge and expensive, with magnificent plates and extravagant leather bindings. The collectors who published them were more often arrivistes than aristocrats – financiers and businessmen such as Robert Benson, Joseph Widener and David David-Weill – although The London Library also has a catalogue of the highlights of the Duke of Devonshire’s collection. The best early catalogues included chromolithographic plates, which are stunning and can produce highly accurate images. Each object was first drawn, and then separate printing stones were created for each colour (some plates could have a dozen or more colours). Catalogues were typically printed privately in small numbers, generally just a few hundred. Some were not even sold, but given away to libraries and friends of the collectors. Luckily for us, many were given to or purchased by The London Library, which consequently has a rich collection of these catalogues. The lavish catalogue of the Spitzer Collection of sculpture and decorative art, La Collection Spitzer, by M. Emile Moliner (6 vols., 1890–3), includes some fine chromolithographs, as well as etchings of less important objects. Frédéric Spitzer, a leading dealer as well as a collector, is an intriguing figure. He fraudulently restored many objects and faked others, which were sold for high prices to leading collectors.
His own collection included many dubious objects, but also lots of incontestable masterpieces such as the outstanding bronze, Shouting Horseman c.1510–15, by Andrea Riccio, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The chromolithographs in his catalogue are so realistic they could at first glance be mistaken for colour photographs. The volumes on the Alfred de Rothschild collection (2 vols., 1884) feature early examples of photographic reproduction, with illustrations of his mainly Dutch and French pictures. There are photographs of the interiors of his property in Seamore Place in Mayfair on the first few pages, the goût Rothschild on display. The photographs of paintings show them with their frames; this catalogue was published in an era before the unfortunate convention of reproducing pictures shorn of context, baldly set against the white page. The banker David David-Weill’s catalogues (3 vols., 1926–8) demonstrate a similar aesthetic, and the illustrations include works that are now famous highlights of major museums, such as François Boucher’s A Lady on Her Day Bed (1743), now in the Frick Collection in New York. Many of the early gifts to the Library were solicited by Sir Charles Hagberg Wright, Secretary and Librarian from 1893 until his death in 1940, and some are bound with letters addressed to him from the collectors or authors. The catalogue of John Pierpont Morgan’s collection of miniatures (4 vols., 1906–8) has a note from the author, G.C. Williamson, replying to Wright’s letter requesting the other volumes, explaining that one of the volumes is already in the Library, and that the other one had
