Issue 24 - Summer 2014

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.

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 been prepared in manuscript but never published, so he was ‘not in a position to do the library the good turn to which you refer’ . There is a signed letter from John G. Johnson – a famous American lawyer who also created a superb art collection, which is now housed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art – bound in the catalogue of his collection (3 vols., 1913–14).

Most interesting of all are Robert Benson’s own copies of both the illustrated and unillustrated editions of his catalogue (1913–14). The former, which had a print run of just 125 copies, includes his pencil annotations, with his identification of Martin Colnaghi as the unnamed rogue dealer he refers to in the text, who overcleaned pictures. Benson was a British investment banker and a knowledgeable and discriminating collector of Italian Renaissance art, and sold his entire collection to the dealer Joseph Duveen in 1927. Many of his pictures are now the star attractions at American museums, particularly the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Another reason The London Library has a strong collection of these books is that they have not ‘deaccessioned’ them, a horrid word for a horrid practice. It is a great shame that many other libraries have done so, because the catalogues remain useful as well as beautiful. The text is sometimes superficial, and the illustrations may seem outmoded as technology moves on, but they are often attractive and superbly produced books, with beautiful bindings and high-quality printing on thick handmade paper with gilt edges. These early catalogues are vital records of the history of art collecting, and often show pictures at a particular moment in their history, looking quite different from their state today, after a century or more of cleaning and restoration.

These catalogues are important documentary sources, but the accompanying text is rarely edifying. The volume on the Spitzer Collection was written by famous specialist connoisseurs like Wilhelm von Bode, and included only short catalogue entries. Other works were written by non-specialists whose job was collation rather than scholarship, hagiography rather than art criticism, with earlier attributions repeated unquestioningly. Several were written by librarians rather than art historians. For example, the Devonshire Collection catalogue (1901) was written by the House of Lords librarian S. Arthur Strong, and the Pierpont Morgan catalogue by the banker’s librarian. In the introduction to the Devonshire catalogue, Strong defends himself against any potential offence caused by his personal opinions on attributions, writing that ‘if old attributions have been questioned, and in certain cases abolished, this has not been in forgetfulness of the respect that is still due to an old tradition with a pedigree, as against a new critic without a document’.

The contrast with more recent catalogues is stark. It is still enormously expensive to publish good-quality art books, and even costly museum catalogues need hefty subsidies. But good colour printing has become ubiquitous, and catalogues of private collections now aim to stand out by virtue of the excellence of scholarship as much as their luxurious printing and fine binding. It has become a source of pride for collectors to commission serious critical texts from prominent scholars.

The catalogues of the Kann Collection (2 vols., 1907) and the Widener Collection (1931) are revealing of early twentiethcentury taste. Rodolphe Kann, another banker–collector, must have been an impressive connoisseur. At a time when there were few reliable catalogues raisonnés and many optimistic attributions, he bought pictures of consistently high quality whose attributions have generally stood the test of time. The highlights of his collection were held to be the paintings by Rembrandt, mostly late works that were especially esteemed. But he also had some dreadful daubs that cannot be by Rembrandt. It is tempting to respond smugly, and condescend to a less knowledgeable age, but humility is perhaps a better response. Such mistaken attributions show us that there is an element of contingency to taste, and should serve as a reminder that today’s confident opinions may seem similarly daft to the next generation of critics.

An interior at Seamore Place, one of Alfred de Rothschild’s properties, from volume 1 of Works of Art, Collection of Alfred de Rothschild (2 vols., 1884).

Old catalogues record the history of taste, and the history of illustrated books. They also show pictures that have otherwise been forgotten. Museums are accessible to all but private collections are often unknown even to specialists. There is a fine picture of The Last Communion of St Jerome reproduced in the Benson catalogue that is given to Sandro Botticelli. The prime version is now considered to be a different picture, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, but the Benson picture also seems of high quality. I do wonder where it is now; it may well turn out to be at least partially by Botticelli himself, but it is not reproduced in any of the recent books on the artist.

The last great catalogue of a private collection was the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, which has not been completed and seems regrettably to have been abandoned (13 vols., 1986–95). The published volumes are superb, and admirably candid where there are questions about quality or authenticity. The volume on seventeenth-century Dutch pictures, written by Ivan Gaskell, is uncompromisingly harsh in its judgements; a recent catalogue raisonné of Jacob van Ruisdael even defends the quality of one of the Thyssen pictures in response to Gaskell’s opinions on the work. The Lehman Collection catalogues published by the Metropolitan Museum, which now owns Lehman’s art, are of a similarly high standard (15 vols., 1987–2012).

Some private collections are still being catalogued today: volumes on the Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, and on the Norton Simon collection, now a museum in southern California, for example, are still being published and added to the Library’s collection. These books continue to inspire to all, but private collections are often art lovers and inform connoisseurs.

Chromolithograph of vase by Antonio Patanazzi, from volume 1 of La Collection Spitzer (6 vols., 1890–3).