Edward Cecil Guinness, First Earl of Iveagh: A Collector In His

Edward Cecil Guinness, First Earl of Iveagh: A Collector In His Context
Paula S. Fogarty
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of Master of Fine Arts in Art History
at
The Savannah College of Art and Design
© March, 2013, Paula S. Fogarty
The author hereby grants SCAD permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and
electronic thesis copies of document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter
created.
Signature of Author and Date _______________________________________________
Jeffrey Hamilton___________________________________________________/___/___
Committee Chair
Arthur DiFuria____________________________________________________/___/___
Committee Member
Geoffrey Taylor___________________________________________________/___/___
Committee Member
Edward Cecil Guinness, First Earl of Iveagh: A Collector in His Context
A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Art History Department
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Degree of Master of Arts in Art History
Savannah College of Art and Design
By
Paula S. Fogarty
Savannah, GA
March, 2013
For My Parents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Without the mentorship and inspiration of many people who have fostered my deep
appreciation for the history of art and research this thesis would not have been possible. My
father, Robert S. Fogarty, instilled in me great intellectual curiosity about art through his passion
for furniture design, political history and the economics of taste. My family encourages my
intellectual pursuits, even when they do not understand what I am talking about; my mother,
Harriette, and sister Lea have endured my endless ramblings on imagining what the evidence of
the past might mean; brother Dean encourages me to keep going on my new path.
I am most grateful to have personally known and worked with many great scholars.
Professor Constance Antonsen not only instructed me in Art History at Wofford College, but she
also mentored me what it means to be an educated lady; her shadow is long, and I am privileged
to dwell in it. Professor Walter Hudgins introduced me to the world of Aesthetics at Wofford
and his open–ended pursuit of the truth fuels my research. I was most privileged to have been a
student of Professor Robert Brumbaugh in Ancient Greek Philosophy at Yale where he
awakened my historical imagination as did Professor Daniel Hank at Wofford. Dr. Thomas
Hoving was the man whose passion for the arts struck the core of my being like a lightning bolt,
strengthening my predilection for bringing new life to obscure topics. My recently departed
friend, Mr. Wendell Garrett, shared his joys of research, of talking to people about art in America,
and the great observations of men like John Dewey and Alexis de Tocqueville; he remains the
definition of a gentleman, a scholar, and a survivor. The work of the great scholar on Irish art
and furniture, Desmond FitzGerald, 29th Knight of Glin, along with that of my friend and living
colleague the Hon. Desmond Guinness, inspired me to select the topic for this thesis. Like the
Knight’s books on Irish furniture and paintings or Desmond Guinness’s books on Irish Houses
and Castles, my topic is much overlooked, yet nonetheless significant. Ms. Emyl Jenkins was a
dear friend and scholar with whom I travelled across the country championing American
decorative arts; our last visit was to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on her incomplete
mission to write a historic novel about house museums. Emyl encouraged me to “talk to
everyone!” Ms. Nancy Richards is the one who allowed me to conduct primary research for her
seminal book on New England Queen Anne and Chippendale Furniture when she was Curator at
the Henry Francis DuPont Winterthur Museum and Gardens. Nancy gave me the confidence to
reach out to living authors, research institutions and other parties to collect information and to
this day encourages me to mine historic treasure from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The research process for this thesis has introduced me to new heroes and colleagues. Mr.
Julius Bryant, Keeper of Word and Image, Victoria and Albert Museum, has been a great help in
clarifying some of the myths around Edward Cecil Guinness’s identity as a collector and has
kindly shared articles and openly communicated with me through this process. Mr. William
Laffan , a respected authority on English and Irish eighteenth and nineteenth–century arts, has
been a tremendous cheerleader, kindly reading drafts. Laura Houliston, English Heritage Curator
for Kenwood, has been forthcoming and allowed me to visit the property when it was closed for
renovations. Thanks are also due to Ms. Mary Appied and Mr. Robin Adams of Trinity College,
Dublin, who allowed me access to Sir Charles Holmes’s 1928 catalogue on Kenwood in the rare
books library at Trinity. Ms. Nirvana Flanagan, librarian at Farmleigh was kind enough to share
an inventory of its holdings.
Special thanks are also due to members of the Guinness family and other Irish colleagues:
the Hon. Patrick Guinness procured copies of relevant pages from George Martelli’s biography
on Iveagh from the Linen Hall Library in Belfast; and Sebastian Guinness made introductions to
the 4th Earl of Iveagh for future archival research; Mr. Donough Cahill and Ms. Emmeline
Henderson of the Irish Georgian Society assisted in attempting to locate more biographical
information on the First Earl of Iveagh.
Additionally, Ms. Christine Nelson of the Morgan Library and Ms. Julie Ludwig of the
Frick Art Collection Archive were helpful in examining their records for any correspondence
between the First Earl of Iveagh and Mr. Morgan and Mr. Frick. Mr. Julian Hobson of Country
Life Magazine was kind enough to send articles on Elveden, and Mr. Julian Agnew was most
generous in allowing me access to the Agnew’s archives in the future. Friends from my past
corporate life, particularly Mr. Clive Lubner, have contributed greatly in the form of
encouragement and funding for primary research in Dublin and London. Mr. Bill Fine has been
a true supporter through this process and throughout my involvement in the arts for decades.
Each and every librarian at SCAD’s JEN library has been invaluable to this thesis, most notably:
Ms. Stephanie Raines, Ms. Janice Schipp and Mr. Steve Majure. Without their assistance and
great attitudes, I would never have crafted this thesis. Thanks also to Jennifer Johnson and Marc
Mueller in the Writer’s Studio and April Martin in Graduate Studies for help with formatting this
document.
It is with the most gratitude that I thank my professors and fellow classmates at Savannah
College of Art and Design. Professor Jeffrey Hamilton has demonstrated extraordinary patience,
instruction and good humor with my writing over such a brief period of time; his knowledge of
nineteenth–century art history and his attention to detail is something for which I will always be
grateful. Professor Arthur DiFuria suffered my initial foray into the topic of this thesis and I
shall always honor his constructive criticism and the way he encouraged my historical
imagination. Professor Geoffrey Taylor instilled in me a certain practicality in my approach to
this thesis and his encouragement and attention have made me a better scholar. Special thanks
are due to my classmates; Mr. Jared Butler continuously challenges my propositions while
encouraging my chosen path; Evan Allen procured rare books for me at the University of South
Carolina when Interlibrary Loans were just too slow in arriving. My dear friends Steve Gainey
and Marshall Carbee ceaselessly encouraged me through this process and worked out many
arguments over hours of phone calls. My experience in crafting this thesis has been a
collaborative one among the dead, my contemporaries, the next generation, and my supportive
dog Charles, all of whom I thank. The act of creation, after all, does not happen in a void.
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1
ABSTRACT
3
INTRODUCTION
Chapter
ONE
EDWARD CECIL GUINNESS’S COLLECTING ARENA
England’s Rediscovery of Old Masters
England’s Institutions, Exhibitions and Scholarship
The Resurgence of English Eighteenth–Century Portraits
The Rise of England’s Living Artist
Conclusion
16
18
22
23
28
32
TWO
EDWARD CECIL GUINNESS’S COLLECTING TRAITS,
OMISSIONS, AND USE OF HIS PROPERTIES
Iveagh’s Private Demeanor
The Inception of Iveagh’s Collecting
The Judas Attribution
The Inventories and the Omissions
Iveagh’s Use of His Properties and Collections
34
34
36
39
42
43
THREE
FOUR
IVEAGH AND HIS COUNTERPART COLLECTORS
Iveagh and the Americans: Not as Similar as Many Say
Social Advancement and National Identity
The State of American Scholarship:
Opportunity for Englishmen
America’s Money for England’s Past
Contrasts in the Transcontinental Art Markets
Iveagh’s Place Among the British Collectors
WHAT IVEAGH’S COLLECTION AND SELECTIONS FOR
KENWOOD REVEAL ABOUT HIS IDENTITY
Iveagh’s Duality: His Acuity as a Collector and
The Ghost of Judas
“A Fine Example of the Artistic Home of a Gentleman
of the Eighteenth Century”
Display and Dialogue
Women and Children First
The Fancy Pictures
The Men
Of Boats and Birds
56
56
60
63
64
67
70
77
77
79
84
85
86
87
90
The Netherlandish, Flemish and British
Exchange at Kenwood
91
CONCLUSION
97
BIBLIOGRAPHY
100
ANNEX
106
1
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figures
1. After Arthur Stockdale Cope, Edward Cecil Guinness, ca. 1921.
117
2. 80 Stephen’s Green, “Iveagh House.”
118
3. Farmleigh.
118
4. Elveden Hall.
119
5. Rembrandt van Rijn, Judas Retuning the Thirty Pieces of Silver, ca. 1620–35.
120
6. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self Portrait, ca. 1665.
121
7. Jan Vermeer, The Guitar Player, ca. 1672.
121
8. Kenwood House.
122
9. Joseph Mallord William Turner, A Coast Scene With Fishermen Hauling a
Boat Ashore (‘The Iveagh Sea–piece’), ca. 1803–4.
122
10. Sir Edwin Landseer, Hawking in the Olden Time, 1832.
123
11. Sir John Everett Millais, Lilacs, 1885.
124
12. Farmleigh Library.
124
13. Michael Angelo Hayes, Installation of the Prince of Wales as Knight of St.
Patrick in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1868.
124
14. Rose Maynard Barton, Flower Girls in the Strand, 1892.
125
15. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Kitty Fisher as Cleopatra Dissolving the Pearl, 1759.
126
16. Maharaja Duleep Singh’s Indian Hall, Elveden, ca. 1870.
127
17. Earl of Iveagh’s Indian Hall, Elveden, ca. 1902.
127
18. Earl of Iveagh and Elveden Shooting Party with King George V, ca. 1910–15.
128
19. George Elgar Hicks, Portrait of Adelaide Maria, Countess of Iveagh, 1885.
128
20. Frans Snyders, Figures With Fruit and Game, ca. 1635.
129
2
21. Sir Thomas Lawrence, Miss Murray, 1824–26.
130
22. Thomas Gainsborough, Mary, Countess Howe, ca. 1764.
131
23. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mrs. Musters as Hebe, 1782.
132
24. Thomas Gainsborough, Lady Brisco, ca. 1776.
133
25. Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Angerstein Children, 1782–3.
134
26. Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Infant Academy, 1781–2.
135
27. Antony Van Dyck, James Stuart, 1st Duke of Richmond, ca. 1636.
135
28. Frans Hals, Pieter Van Den Broecke, 1633.
136
29. Aelbert Cuyp, View of Dordrecht, ca. 1655.
137
30. Jan Wijnants, Johannes Linglebach, Landscape With a Hawking Party, ca.1666.
137
31. Thomas Gainsborough, Going to Market, ca. 1786–71.
138
32. Thomas Gainsborough, Two Shepherd Boys with Dogs Fighting, 1783.
139
33. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Self Portrait, ca. 1788.
140
34. Herbert Arnould Olivier, Edward Cecil Guinness, 1939.
141
3
Edward Cecil Guinness, First Earl of Iveagh: A Collector in Context
Paula S. Fogarty
March 2013
Little is known about Edward Cecil Guinness, First Earl of Iveagh, but his contribution to
the history of art collecting at the turn of the twentieth century is significant. From 1868 to 1927
Guinness served as the fourth generation at the helm of his family’s brewery and successfully
established the Guinness family name in British high society through his philanthropy and
housing projects in Dublin and London as well as through his acquisitions of property and art.
Guinness rose to the peerage in 1905, was made Lord Iveagh in 1891, and ennobled as Earl of
Iveagh and Viscount Elveden in 1919. Between 1887 and 1904 he collected an astonishing
number of over two hundred works of old masters, English and Continental eighteenth–century
portraits and landscapes, and works by living artists. Between 1925 and 1927, Iveagh personally
selected sixty–three works as part of the Iveagh Bequest housed in his suburban London estate,
Kenwood. His bequest was the largest gift of art to the English nation in the twentieth century.
This thesis is the first comprehensive attempt to contextualize Iveagh as a collector in the
face of little literary and archival evidence. The case of Iveagh as a collector opens discourse on
the broader topic of the collecting of old masters in the nineteenth century, which is largely
overlooked in the shadow of England’s burgeoning modern art scene. By placing Iveagh in the
socio–economic context of his time this thesis sheds critical light on him as an individual as well
as on the topic of old master collecting during the nineteenth century. Reviews of literature on
the socio–economic conditions of the British and American art markets and comparisons with
other collectors of his time, demonstrate that Iveagh’s initial motivation in collecting, swiftness
in amassing one of the world’s greatest collections, his personal selections of works for
Kenwood, and his private demeanor distinguish him from others of his time such as Sir Richard
Wallace, Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, and J. P. Morgan. In examinations of English
collections, the temptation is to contrast Iveagh with bourgeois collectors of living artists and to
treat him as an aristocrat, which he was certainly not. He was, above all, a serious businessman.
This thesis demonstrates the futility of relying heavily on such distinctions in discerning the
character of collectors. In examinations of American collections, the temptation is to compare
Iveagh to such collectors as J. P. Morgan. Whereas the motivations of these collectors differed
greatly, in the end, as a patron, Iveagh’s gift to the nation turns out to be an act of patriotism akin
to American collecting practices.
This thesis provides the first examination of some of Iveagh’s omissions from his bequest.
The omissions and the dialogue among the paintings at Kenwood can reveal more about Iveagh
than the current body of literature devoted to him. What they reveal about his identity is a more
personal message about who he was and what he thought of art in England than the often–cited
identity of a socially ambitious merchant using art solely in service to his ascendancy.
4
Key words: Edward Cecil Guinness, First Earl of Iveagh, Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood, collecting
practices, English nineteenth–century collectors, old master collecting, eighteenth–century
portrait collecting, identity, display.
5
INTRODUCTION
Collecting is a way of being more fully oneself. It allows an individual to express hidden
facets of his personality, thus serving to increase his self–knowledge. Those who are not
capable of creating works of art are often able to decipher their secret meaning. Thus a
true collector can be said to possess the elusive powers of the musician who interprets for
others a great composer’s score.
Alvar Gonzales–Palacios1
Propelled by the Industrial Revolution, nineteenth–century England witnessed numerous
art and design movements, including the Pre–Raphaelite, Arts and Crafts, and Aesthetic
movements. The rapid growth of such modern movements in the nineteenth century has
obscured less popular, but no less important, activities, such as the collecting of old masters and
English eighteenth–century portraits. One quiet leader in the revival of such collecting was
Edward Cecil Guinness, First Earl of Iveagh, an intensely private man who, for all of his accrued
notoriety, was publicly obscure as a collector in his own time.2 Nothing was publicly known of
him as a collector until the Iveagh Bequest at Kenwood was revealed in 1927.3 His case presents
the possibility that there may be other such collectors who, unlike Iveagh, did not leave a
bequest; and it opens the discourse on a neglected topic in nineteenth–century art historical
studies. Through an examination of what is known about Iveagh as a collector, this thesis
expands not only the discourse on his collecting practices and use of art, but also the broader
topic of collecting old masters and English eighteenth–century portraits during the nineteenth
century.
1
Alvar Gonzales–Palacios,“Pulvis, Cinis et Nihil,” in Art, Commerce, Scholarship: A Window Onto the Art World:
A.C.R. Carter, “The Iveagh Bequest,” December 1927, The Burlington Magazine states “the year1891, when he
lent this Hals and five other pictures to Burlington House, was the first when he was shown publicly to be a
collector.” He began collecting in 1887, yet this was publicly unknown until after his death in 1927.
3
Ibid.
2
6
A comprehensive study of nineteenth–century collectors of old masters and eighteenth–
century paintings in England has yet to be compiled. Gerald Reitlinger has addressed some
collectors of old masters and eighteenth–century paintings in the context of changing art prices;
and Joseph Mourdant Crook has examined others relative to the social function of architecture;
however, no recent accounts have examined this group of collectors purely within the context of
art collecting; and Michael Stevenson has focused on the particular group of South African
“randlords, ” some of whom were collectors of old masters in England. The majority of
literature on nineteenth–century collectors concentrates on middle–class collectors of living
artists, exemplified by the work of Dianne Sachko Macleod. Most useful accounts of collectors
of old masters and English eighteenth–century portraits are found in early nineteenth–century
sources and are concerned with generations preceding Iveagh’s.
In keeping with the traditions of many gentlemen of his day, Iveagh destroyed most of his
personal records prior to his death in 1927.4 The existing literature on Iveagh as a collector
consists of five catalogues and a few early articles. Iveagh’s biographical information is
confined to a little–read biography and some biographical references in larger histories on the
Guinness family. Given the lack of literature on Iveagh, understanding him as a collector
requires placing him within the broader socio–economic context of his time and expanding on
the recurring themes in the existing literature. Frank Herrmann claims that most great collectors
were poor authors and did not often record their thoughts and activities; and when they did,
“Those that tried were often cloyingly anecdotal. The extreme circumstance was over
emphasized; the norm went unrecorded.”5 The impulse of a collector to acquire a work is often
fueled by an immediate sense of pleasure and their eye is often better than the art historian or
4
Julius Bryant, interview by author, London, England, July 5, 2012.
Frank Herrmann, ed., The English as Collectors: A Documentary Sourcebook (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press;
London: John Murray, 1999), 3.
5
7
connoisseur who is concerned with technical and other analyses.6 Without first–hand accounts
of Iveagh’s thoughts about the works he acquired, one must contextualize his collecting practices
in order to make more accurate assessments of his taste, motivations, and chosen social milieu.
Comparisons with other collectors of similar genres are necessary to define Iveagh’s place in
time.
Iveagh’s period of collecting (1887–1904) was more fluid than any other in England for
collectors seeking to fashion an identity through the acquisition of art and properties. As a result
of the 1883 Settled Land Act, the market was flooded with works by old masters and English
eighteenth–century portraits from private collections. The period also saw an increase in art
historical scholarship and the rise of connoisseurship, spawning such influential scholars and
experts as John Smith, Anna Jameson, Gustav Waagen, Wilhelm von Bode, Roger Fry, Giovanni
Morelli, Bernard Berenson, Sir Charles Holmes and, Wilhelm Valentiner. The emergence of art
history as a discipline most likely drove Iveagh to be a cautious collector, selecting only works
for his bequest that had been exhibited and had clean provenances, or histories of ownership.
Who Was Iveagh?
From 1868 to 1927 Guinness served as the fourth generation at the helm of his family’s
brewery. He also successfully established the Guinness family name in British high society
through his philanthropic and housing projects for workers and hospitals in Dublin and London,
as well as through his acquisitions of property and art.7 As a result of these accomplishments,
6
Ibid., 21.
For more on Iveagh’s biography as a collector and businessman see Andy Bielenberg, “Late Victorian Elite
Formation and Philanthropy: The Making of Edward Guinness,” Studia Hibernica, 32 (2002/2003): 133–154;
Anthony Blunt, The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood (London: London City Council, 1965); Julius Bryant, Kenwood
(New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2003), Sir Charles J. Holmes, Pictures from the Iveagh Bequest
(London: W.J. Stacey for the Iveagh Trust, 1928); Mary Heffernan, Introduction to Iveagh Pictures: Edward Cecil
Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh (Dublin: Office of Public Works, 2009); Joe Joyce, The Guinnesses: The Untold Story
7
8
Guinness rose to the peerage in 1905, was made Lord Iveagh in 1891, and ennobled as Earl of
Iveagh and Viscount Elveden in 1919 (Fig. 1).8 In 1886, six years after his arrival in London,
Edward Cecil made the bold move to float the Guinness Brewing stock on the open market for
£6m, making him one of the wealthiest individuals in Ireland and England.9 In Ireland, he
retained the family residence in Dublin at No. 80 St. Stephen’s Green (now called Iveagh House),
(Figs. 2 and 3) and he purchased Farmleigh, a woodland estate in Phoenix Park.10 In London, he
quickly established himself at the top of English society and purchased important properties.
Nos. 4 and 5 Grosvenor Place served as his lavish London headquarters in 1887; and in 1889 he
purchased and the prominent eighteenth–century Suffolk estate, Elveden, to serve as the seat for
his title, allowing him to entertain the Prince of Wales, later King George V, and King Edward
VII for shooting parties (Fig. 4).11 He also owned a seaside house at Cowes, where he
participated in yachting regattas on the Cetonia, which he purchased from Lord Gosford in
1882.12 Driven by the need to quickly set up his houses in order to receive royalty and nobility,
Iveagh’s focus was upon collecting only the very best works of their kind and those that would
have resonated within this social milieu.
Much of the art historical literature on English collectors of this period bases analyses on
broad class distinctions—patrician, aristocratic, nouveaux riches, middle–class, bourgeois—into
which Iveagh does not neatly fit. He was not patrician until 1891, nor, as a serious businessman
who worked, was he wholly aristocratic. Newly wealthy industrialists often purchased titles,
of Ireland’s Most Successful Family (Dublin: Poolbeg, 2009); and Frederic Mullally, The Silver Salver: The Story of
the Guinness Family (London: Granada, 1981).
8
Julius Bryant, Kenwood (New Haven, London: Yale University, 2003), 4.
9
Mullally, ix – xi. Joyce, 159–160. Iveagh’s estimated annual income was £250, 000 per year from interest and
£7M in investments and properties in London, Dublin, South Africa, New York, and San Francisco.
10
Bryant, interview. Mary Heffernan, Introduction to Iveagh Pictures: Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh
(Dublin: Office of Public Works, 2009), 54.
11
George Martelli, The Elveden Enterprise (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 47–52.
12
George Martelli, A Man of His Time: The Life and Times of The First Earl of Iveagh. (London: Privately
Published, 1958), 87.
9
however, Edward Cecil was four generations deep in wealth, and his parents had entertained the
Prince of Wales on the occasion of his installation as Knight of St. Patrick in 1868. His level of
comfort among nobility was, therefore, inherent.13 Although a Protestant, opposed to Irish Home
Rule, and favoring a unified England and Ireland, Iveagh was not particularly interested in a
political career. He nevertheless pursued a conservative seat in the Dublin House of Commons,
knowing that it was the fastest way to being ennobled.14 As a fourth generation Guinness, the
richest man in Ireland, and one of the richest in England, he could hardly be considered nouveau
riches, and his early exposure to great art prevented him from having bourgeois taste.15 His
Uncle Arthur Lee Guinness is said to have been a great influence on the Iveagh’s art collecting
as a young man. Iveagh’s first purchase of great art was Rembrandt’s Judas Returning the Thirty
Pieces of Silver’s from the Earl of Charlemont sale in Dublin in 1874 when he was twenty–six
years of age. In Iveagh’s lifetime, the attribution of Judas was questioned by Colnaghi and given
to Bol and then to Jan Leivens. The attribution was confirmed in 1930 as by Rembrandt, and the
painting is now in the collection of the family (Fig. 5). The questionable attribution would make
Iveagh a stickler for verifiable provenance throughout his collecting career. His early exposure
to great art excludes him from being considered as parvenu in the world of art. The broad class
distinctions noted above are used frequently in defining nineteenth–century collectors, but they
are not helpful in Iveagh’s case.
Iveagh collected old masters, English and Continental eighteenth–century portraits and
landscapes, eighteenth–century sporting scenes, as well as works by living artists, almost
exclusively from Agnew’s. The speed and acuity with which he collected are defining
13
Mary Heffernan, Introduction to Iveagh Pictures: Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh (Dublin: Office of
Public Works, 2009), 54.
14
David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990),
305, 312, Joyce, 133.
15
Mullaly, 17. Bryant, 8, 9. Martelli, Man of His Time, 85, 86.
10
characteristics of his collecting practice. An inventory of Iveagh’s purchases from Agnew’s lists
a remarkable number of 220 works acquired between 1887–1891 and eighteen between 1894–
1908. The Agnew’s inventory shows that the core of his collection is made up of English
eighteenth–century portraits, dominated by thirty–six works of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Works by
Romney came in second at twenty–two, followed by fifteen Gainsborough’s.16 The inventory
also includes thirty–two Flemish and Netherlandish works by Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Cuyp,
Wijnants, Bol, Hals, Snyders (thought to be Rubens), and others. These core groups are
accompanied by French works by Boucher, Fragonard, and Watteau, followed by small number
of Italian works by Guardi and Canaletto.17 Anthony Blunt observed in his 1957 catalogue that
although the works are displayed in a mixed manner, they are overshadowed by Rembrandt’s
Self Portrait (ca. 1665) (Fig. 6) and Vermeer’s Guitar Player (ca. 1672) (Fig. 7).18 He also
collected works of living artists such as Millais, Watts, and Orpen; however, none of their works
were selected for Kenwood. Of some 240 works collected by Iveagh between 1887 and 1904, he
selected only sixty–three old masters and eighteenth–century English and Continental portraits
and outdoors scenes for his bequest at Kenwood in 1928; it was the largest gift of old masters to
the British nation in the twentieth century.19 An examination of what is known of the over 200
works that were not included in the Iveagh bequest follows in Chapter Four.
The sixty–three works selected from Iveagh’s vast collection for his bequest hang within
the walls of Kenwood, a Neoclassical Robert Adam suburban home outside London (Fig. 8).
What could be interpreted from the selections, along with the explicit statement in the Act of
Parliament establishing the Iveagh Bequest and stating his intention to leave behind “a fine
16
Bryant, Kenwood, Annex I.
Ibid.
18
Anthony Blunt, The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood (London: London City Council, 1965), 5–6.
19
Julius Bryant, “Re–presenting the Iveagh Bequest at Kenwood,” Collections Review 3 (2001): 85.
17
11
example of the artistic home of a gentleman of the eighteenth century,” is all Iveagh wanted the
public to know about his identity.20 He collaborated with Sir Charles Holmes to determine how
the sixty–three works he selected for Kenwood should be hung. The speed and acuity with
which Iveagh amassed his collection, his private demeanor, personal selections for his bequest,
his intention to reflect the character of an eighteenth–century gentleman and his donation of the
largest gift of art to the nation are all essential facts in decoding the message he wanted to project
about himself as a collector.
Deciphering Iveagh’s Message
Whereas the evidence presents a fiercely private man who shunned public notoriety, there
is no question that Iveagh was leaving behind an image of himself through his bequest. His
careful selections project associations he had with his works of art. Collecting is at once a highly
personal endeavor and one that is intrinsically connected to a social life. Of the effect of
collections on the collector, Maurice Rheims claims “The collection becomes a living being for
its owner.”21 Collections may also betray a sense of inadequacy on the part of the collector—a
way of trying to elevate one’s status among his chosen social circle.22
No accounts of Iveagh have considered what his selections for Kenwood say about the
man and his views on art. Whereas most of the omissions from his bequest are not fully known,
no accounts of Iveagh have thoughtfully considered what the over two hundred paintings Iveagh
left out of the bequest can reveal about his identity as a collector. Considering some of the
known omissions in a heretofore–unexamined 1984 Christie’s sale catalogue of some of the
20
Bryant,19.
Maurice Rheims quoted in Pierre Cabanne, The Great Collectors (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1963),
ix.
22
Pierre Cabanne, The Great Collectors (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1963), ix.
21
12
paintings Iveagh purchased and had installed at Elveden Hall deepen the understanding of what
Iveagh’s selections from his vast collection project about his self–image. 23 The first list of the
paintings from the 1984 sale, along with their sale prices, is included in the annex of this thesis.
Literature and Methodology
Many works in Iveagh’s bequest are mentioned in the early art historical literature of the
nineteenth century. Several are mentioned in William Buchanan’s Memoirs of Painting (1824),
Gustav Waagen’s Works of Art and Artists in England (1838), Anna Jameson’s Companion to
the Most Celebrated Picture Galleries of Art in London (1844), Hoftstede de Groot’s edition of
John Smith’s A Catalogue Raisonne of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth
Century (1908), and other works by Wilhelm von Bode and Wilhelm Valentiner.24 Most of these
sources, and others, have been consulted extensively during the course of research for this thesis.
The letters of Roger Fry shed critical light on the dissemination and reception of old masters,
English portraits, and modern works of Iveagh’s period.
In spite of his relative obscurity as a collector, Iveagh’s collecting features prominently in
two anecdotes and a biographical accolade. Joseph Duveen cites Iveagh’s 1887 visit to his
father’s gallery as the impetus for his becoming an art dealer; Geoffrey Agnew shows how
Iveagh’s collection stands as the greatest ever amassed by his family’s firm; and George Martelli
said of Iveagh’s concentrated collecting that “It would be difficult to find a precedent for such an
achievement by a private collector, and certainly during the last hundred years there have been
23
Christies, Christie’s On the Premises, Elveden Hall: The Property of the Earl of Iveagh, Vol. 1, Pictures Prints
and Drawings, May 21, 1984 (London: Christies, 1984).
24
For details on the literature of each work in the Iveagh Bequest, see the individual catalogue entries in, Julius
Bryant, Kenwood (New Haven, London: Yale University, 2003).
13
no parallel to it in Britain and few in America.”25 Julius Bryant’s 2003 catalogue Kenwood
provides a comprehensive account of the works collected and an excellent summary of the
hallmarks of Iveagh’s character as a collector. This work, combined with the catalogues of Sir
Charles Holmes (1928), Anthony Blunt (1957), and other early articles, define the characteristics
of Iveagh’s collecting.
Because collecting does not happen in a void, the methodology deployed in this thesis is
rooted in Iveagh’s socio–economic contexts and in the works of art he collected. Most helpful in
establishing this foundation have been Francis Haskell’s Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of
Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France (1976), Gerald Reitlinger’s Economics of
Taste, 1760–1960 (1961), Joseph Mourdant Crook’s The Rise of the Nouveaux Riches (1999),
Frank Herrmann’s The English as Collectors (1999), David Cannadine’s The Decline and Fall of
the British Aristocracy (1990), and Dianne Sachko Macleod’s Art and the Victorian Middle
Class (1996).
Serving as guides for analyses of the message that his bequest projects about Iveagh are
Anna Jameson’s thoughts on selections and arrangements of works of art in galleries, and André
Malraux’s concept of the ‘museum without walls,’ wherein unseen references to works of art
play a defining role.26 Whereas Malraux bases much of his concept in the advent of
reproductions for those seeking to interpret Iveagh’s identity through his bequest the unseen
references are the lack of biographical information, his socio–economic context, comparisons to
other collectors, and the omissions from his bequest. Malraux suggests that an exhibit is a
25
S. N. Behrman, Duveen (Boston and Toronto: Little Brown and Company, 1952), 58–59; Geoffrey Agnew,
“1861–1895,” in Agnew’s 1817–1967 (London: B. Agnew Press, 1967), 23–48; Martelli, Man of His Time, 86,
141.
26
Anna Jameson, Companion to the Most Celebrated Private Galleries of Art in London 1844 (Repr., London:
Ulan Press, 2008), 383–384; Andre Malraux, The Voices of Silence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978),
13–16.
14
representation of something other than the thing itself; Kenwood is a representation of what
Iveagh thought of his selections, of himself as a collector, and how the viewer sees him. Jameson
opined that “To select a cabinet of pictures, which within a small space, shall include what is at
once beautiful, valuable, and rare is a matter of time as well of taste. It cannot be done easily—it
cannot be done in a hurry.”27 Malraux demonstrates that practices in the display of works of art
changed over the course of the nineteenth century and became more intellectual exercises than
pursuits of quiet contemplation. He states, “The practice of pitting works of art against each
other, an intellectual activity, is at the opposite pole from the mood of relaxation.”28 Although
Iveagh amassed his great collection in a remarkably short period, he gave a great deal of care to
his selection of only sixty–three works for Kenwood. The deliberation with which the works in
the Iveagh Bequest were selected and the mixed manner in which they are displayed invite one to
interpret the message Iveagh wanted to project about his views on art and what he thought of “an
artistic home of a gentleman of the eighteenth century” may have been. The paintings and their
manner of display invite a dialogue among the selected artists and their works. Iveagh emerges
from this examination as a representative of what can be described as a most likely obscured
circle of collectors of old masters and eighteenth century portraits in late–nineteenth–century
England that deserves more attention.
In order to draw some conclusions about Iveagh as a collector and his place in the
overlooked topic of the nineteenth–century collectors of old master and English eighteenth–
century paintings in England, this thesis examines the foundations of the art market in which
Iveagh was collecting in Chapter One. Chapter Two examines the existing literature on Iveagh
as a collector and sets the groundwork for evaluating his motivations and tastes. Chapter Three
27
28
Jameson, 383.
Malraux, 14.
15
illuminates his place in time through comparisons to the often–cited American robber baron
collectors and some English collectors. Chapter Four draws upon the preceding examinations to
make reasonable judgments about Iveagh’s identity—not only what he intended to project but
also the identity his bequest continues to project. The conclusion of this thesis calls for further
archival research on Iveagh’s life as a collector and examinations of the collecting of old masters
and English eighteenth–century paintings during England’s rise as a contender in the modern art
movement.
16
CHAPTER ONE
Edward Cecil Guinness’s Art Collecting Arena
The arena in which the 1st Earl of Iveagh was collecting old masters and eighteenth–
century portraits is distinguished by several key factors: England’s leadership in procuring
masterworks; the socio–economic phenomenon of the replacement of the aristocracy by a
plutocracy; the popular stigmatization of old masters and English eighteenth–century portraits as
“patrician” in the rise of England’s golden age of living artists (ca. 1851–1900); and the foreign
“raid” on England’s art treasures, first by German institutions and later by American individuals.
The period during which Iveagh collected, 1887–1904, is characterized by a dramatic increase in
the supply of great works; a blossoming of scholarship and connoisseurship; and the rise of
museums, galleries, auction houses, and other art institutions and publications. One anonymous
contributor, possibly Roger Fry, to a 1904 issue of Burlington Magazine said of this period, “it is
no exaggeration to say that there never was a time in which such interest was taken in
collecting.”29
With such numerous, concomitant areas of growth in the art market, the temptation to
seek an understanding of collectors by applying Marxist class distinctions is great; however, the
binary of the “middle–class business man”—who favored the work of living artists over old
masters—against the “patrician” or “aristocratic” collector of old masters is not helpful in
assessing Iveagh’s identity.30 Whereas Dianne Sachko Macleod convincingly argues that the
social habitus of the middle–class businessman have furthered the success of the living artists,
this is not exclusively the case Reitlinger has shown that, although the rise of living artists was
29
X, “The Consequences of the American Invasion,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 5 (July, 1904):
353–355. Quodbach, 66.
30
Dianne Sachko, Art and The Victorian Middle Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University 1996), 20–3.
17
greatly aided by middle–class patrons, nobility patronized them as well; even Iveagh was
collecting works by living artists. 31 Reitlinger states that there was “no high church or low
church” in collecting at this time and that aristocrats were buying both old masters and works of
living artists.32 Macleod admits that these collectors of living artists do not neatly fit into one
social category and that they “range from the established gentry to the professional class with
ambitions that span an equally wide spectrum.”33 She also shows how businessmen of landed
status exaggerated their own backgrounds to assume a middle–class identity and says “one must
first review the facts of their biographies and their habitus of choice before deciding to what
extent they are the collective product of the broader social conditions of their time.”34 Macleod
cites the example of William Wells Redleaf, who fashioned himself as a middle–class
businessman and patron of living artists, even though he was of a seventeenth–century landed
family and a millionaire. Macleod makes the point that the wealthy gentry, such as the prolific
modern art collector, Robert Vernon, appropriated the middle–class persona. Conversely, it
seems that members of the rising merchant class, such as Iveagh, were trying to appropriate the
aristocratic persona. The nineteenth century effectively offered countless options for creating an
identity through art.
A nineteenth–century Englishman of means was free to craft his identity and
communicate it through art as demonstrated by Redleaf’s assuming a middle–class identity and
Iveagh’s crafting of a more aristocratic one. Although Iveagh was neither self–made nor
nouveau riches, he was indeed aspiring to an aristocratic identity. Class distinctions could be
31
Gerald Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste: The Rise and Fall of Picture Prices, 1760–1960 (London: Barrie and
Rockliff, 1961), 85.
32
Reitlinger, 85.
33
Macleod, 22–3, 33.
34
Macleod, 23, 26. The false binary of class distinctions superimposed on an understanding of art collecting of the
period is made clear through her example of Samuel Whitbread, a landed aristocrat who collected modern works and
“defiantly identified with the middle class.”
18
created by rather than imposed upon such collectors. Iveagh’s choices in creating an identity are
best examined within the context of the art market that was rediscovering old masters, as well as
encouraging the rise of the living artist.
England’s Rediscovery of Old Masters
England had been a leader in taste for art during the reign of Charles I, and this leading
role has continued since the eighteenth–century.35 Having lost many national and private
treasures to Cromwell’s multiple civil wars of 1638-53, England experienced a greatly
diminished pace in collecting. The level of importance of art to the monarchy exhibited by
Charles I was not continued in the subsequent era, until George III sought to recover England’s
treasures and to codify rules of taste.36 The eighteenth century was also a great age of living
artists who were encouraged through the Royal Academy and private patronage. Nowhere is this
better demonstrated than in Dr. Gustav Waagen’s landmark 1838 conspectus, Works of Art and
Artists in England. Following in the footsteps of his friend J. D. Passavant, and William
Buchanan before him, Waagen demonstrated the unrivaled quality of English private collections
that included old masters and works of contemporary artists, many of which were amassed
during the eighteenth–century.37 Unlike most European collection cabinets, English collections
were hung in living spaces, demanding observation by a wider variety of viewers and
encouraging a wider sphere of discourse.38 Although Lady Eastlake and others criticized
35
Herrmann, ed., 7.
Ibid., 9. Inspired by grand tours of Europe, the seventeenth–century saw a rise in English collecting. For more on
Charles I, The Earl of Arundel, and the Duke of Buckingham and their collections that were destroyed by Cromwell,
see Gustav Waagen, “The Great Trio: Charles I, Arundel and Buckingham,” in Herrmann, ed., , 57–65. For more
on George III’s reign and his support of the arts, see John Steegman, Rule of Taste, from George I to George IV,
(New York: Russell & Russell, 1968).
37
For detailed accounts of Waagen’s observations, see Gustav Waagen. Works of Art and Artists in England, I–III
1838 (repr., London: Cornmarket Press, 1970).
38
Herrmann, ed., 3.
36
19
Waagen’s work in its day for not including collections of modern works, his mission was one of
national interest in building collections for Germany; and aristocratic collections with renowned
works better suited this mission.39
Frank Herrmann identifies the three principle factors of what Herbert Read terms
“purposive” collecting in the eighteenth century as taste, fashion, and availability.40 Taste
differs for each collector, but it can be described in more general terms in retrospect as indicative
of prevailing preferences during a specific period. Fashion is similar to taste in the sense that it
can be highly personal, yet there are distinct trends that, as with art, signal one’s social status or
aspirations and financial station. Arguably, availability influences both taste and fashion; and it
was during the late eighteenth century that the availability of old masters surges in Europe,
flooding England’s market.
Herrmann has criticized the English during the nineteenth century for having no real
interest in Renaissance art and for favoring Victorian painting over Impressionism. Yet
England is where most of the scholarship locates the genesis of the rediscovery of old masters
during the eighteenth century.41 The most often cited landmark event signaling the late
eighteenth–century rediscovery of old masters in England is the Orleans sale of 1792.42 The
dispersal of the Orleans collection in England was of such importance that the dealer and
39
Macleod, 23.
Herbert Read, “Introduction,” in Niels von Holst’s Creators, Collectors and Connoisseurs (New York: Putnam,
1967) quoted in Frank Herrmann, editor, The English as Collectors: A Documentary Source Book (New Castle, DE:
Oak Knoll Press, 1999), 8; William Buchanan (1824), J. D. Passavant (1833, translation of Lady Elizabeth Eastlake,
1836), Waagen (1838), Anna Jameson (1844)—and before them, Thomas Martyn (1767)—all surveyed great
English collections of the preceding centuries that contained old masters, and all cite the Orleans Collection.
41
Herrmann, 7. For more on the English contributions to the rediscovery of Old Masters, see, Haskell, Rediscoveries
in Art and Gerald Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste: The Rise and Fall of Picture Prices 1760– 1960 (London:
Barrie and Rockliff, 1961).
42
For more on the impact of the Orleans sale, see Herrmann, ed., 139–45; Haskell, 39–44; and Reitlinger, 27–56.
40
20
connoisseur, William Buchanan, claimed that it started a new era for art.43 The collection of
Philip, Duke of Orleans and cousin to Louis XVI, consisted of nearly 500 works and was rivaled
only by those of the Vatican and Spain’s Escorial collections. Gracing the Orleans collection
were the works of, among others, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Giulio Romano, Titian,
Poussin, Claude, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Van Dyck.44 World–renowned paintings such as
Titian’s Rape of Europa (1562), now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Collection, and
Rembrandt’s The Mill (1646), now in Washington’s National Gallery by way of the P. A. B.
Widener Bequest, were part of this sale.45
The dispersal of the Orleans Collection marks a peculiar change in the English art market.
An unprecedented mix is shown in William Buchanan’s list of participants in the Orleans sale.46
Comprising noblemen, dealers, merchants, amateurs, and artists, this collaboration denotes the
emerging structure of an English art market that Reitlinger declares “was quite unlike anything in
Europe and grotesquely unlike pre–revolutionary France.”47 Three hundred of the French and
Italian works sat in the possession of one M. Mereville, who escaped France for England just
prior to the Revolution.48 The Dutch and Flemish works were in the possession of Thomas
Moore Slade who founded a syndicate with Lord Kinnersley and the dealers, Morland and
Hammersley, to purchase this part of the collection. Slade and his backers put many works on
view in 1793 in Pall Mall where over 2000 spectators a week paid to see them.49
Despite all the enthusiasm for the Slade selections, the English market was not big
enough to consume the entirety of such a collection. Mereville’s share remained uncelebrated
43
William Buchanan, Memoirs of Painting, vol. 1 (1824; reprint, Los Angeles: University of California Libraries,
1994), 11.
44
For an inventory of the Italian and French works, see, Buchanan, Vol. 1, 29–158.
45
Ibid., 134–9.
46
Reitlinger, 30.
47
Ibid., 30.
48
Ibid., 27–30.
49
Ibid., 28. For an inventory of the Dutch and Flemish works, see Buchanan, Vol. 1, 166–208.
21
until 1797, when the little–known dealer Michael Bryan formed a consortium of three noblemen,
The Duke of Bridgewater, Lord Gower, and the Earl of Carlisle.50 1797 was England’s fourth
year at war, during which many, including Thomas Gainsborough, were effectively bankrupt.51
The 1798 public exhibition of these works went on for six months, drawing huge crowds and
igniting keen interest in old master paintings. The Orleans Collection and its dispersal catapulted
a frenzy of collecting and influenced painters. The most vocal critic and artist was William
Hazlitt who effused:
We had heard the names of Titian, Raphael, Guido, Domenichino, the Carracci – but to
see them face–to–face, to be in the same room with their deathless productions, was like
breaking some mighty spell – was almost an effect of necromancy. 52
Francis Haskell designated the participants in the English art market in the early 1800s “The
Orleans Generation.”53
Using the collecting practices of the Baring family into the mid 1800s, Haskell classifies
types of collecting by differentiating levels of taste between ‘elite’ and ‘bourgeois’ collectors.
He claims that by the 1850s the elite in England, were of greater independence of mind and were
therefore more open to the works of old masters than were their “bourgeois” counterparts. Prior
to England’s large–scale selling to Germany and America in the later 1800’s, its private
collectors of old masters showed considerable taste for the genre.54 Iveagh’s case, therefore, is
not as isolated as much recent scholarship would have one conclude. Clearly, the market for old
masters during the 1880s in England was not publicly embraced, as was the market for modern
artists; and Reitlinger claims that the problems with attribution and the domination of living
artists “could have depressed the old–master market indefinitely, if foreigners had not sought
50
Reitlinger, 137.
Ibid., 29.
52
Haskell, 43.
53
Haskell, 124.
54
Ibid., 128–30.
51
22
opportunity in the English salerooms, for with a very few exceptions British art patronage
became incredibly insular.”55
English Institutions, Exhibitions and Scholarship
Iveagh’s motivations and collecting practices can be better understood through a
consideration of the growth of England’s art market economy and the discipline of art history.
Not only were art institutions growing in size and number during the early nineteenth century,
but also the number of exhibitions and the amount of dialogue on art were on the rise.56 After
the publications by Buchanan, Jameson, Waagen, and Ruskin, came the work of Sir Charles
Eastlake, Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Giovanni Morelli, Wilhelm
von Bode, and others. Included in a third wave of followers were Roger Fry, Max Friedlander,
Bernard Berenson, Sir Charles Holmes, and Wilhelm Valentiner. Encouraged by the developing
discourse on art and the growing discipline of connoisseurship was the founding of a number of
publications dedicated to the arts: The Art Union (1839), The Art Journal (1849), The
Connoisseur (1901), and The Burlington Magazine (1903).57
The mid–nineteenth century also saw the growth of a vast network of dealers and auction
houses including Agnew’s, Colnaghi’s, Duveen’s, Knoedler’s, Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Experts
such as Bode, Berenson, and Fry partnered with dealers and assisted with attributions, some of
which were not the most accurate, in order to make a sale. Colin Simpson provides a full
55
Reitlinger, 110.
The founding of the British Institution and the National Gallery, The Earl of Grosvenor’s private gallery’s
opening to the public; a Joshua Reynolds Exhibit; and the Inaugural Old Masters Winter Institution Exhibit all took
place before 1825. The Manchester Exhibition of old masters was in 1857.
57
Hermann, ed., 35. For more on the emerging scholarly debates over attribution involving Dr. Gustav Waagen,
Wilhelm Bode, Giovanni Morelli, Bernard Berenson, Joseph Crowe, G.B. Cavalcaselle, and Roger Fry, see Frank
Herrmann, “Growth of Expertise,” in The English as Collectors: A Documentary Sourcebook (New Castle, DE: Oak
Knoll Press, London: John Murray, 1999), 33–8, and Jenny Graham, “A Note on the Early Reputation of Roger Fry,”
The Burlington Magazine, 143 (Aug., 2001).
56
23
account of the secret association between the dealer Joseph Duveen and the expert Bernard
Berenson that resulted in massive profits for both men.58 The newly developing discipline of
connoisseurship provided solutions as well problems. Issues concerning the attributions of
paintings were on the rise, causing some collectors such as Iveagh, to demand clean provenances
and others to buy paintings of living artists. Disseminated through publications, the dialogue
around Rembrandt attributions reached a high point during the 1890s among Wilhelm von Bode;
Hofstede de Groot; Bredius; and, later, Wilhelm Valentiner.59 The fact that Bode was at once
ascribing attributions and buying works for Berlin’s Kaiser Friedrich Museum is cause for
skepticism of the emergent state of connoisseurship. Bode’s publication of the first catalogue
raisonné of Rembrandt’s works (1897–1905) may have been known by Iveagh; but it, along with
the growing field of Rembrandt scholarship, was late in coming to be of any assistance to his
collecting or to solving the questioned attribution of his Judas. He may have taken some
comfort, however, in Fry’s criticism of what he called Valentiner’s “indulgent attitude towards
pictures which aspire to admission to Rembrandt’s oeuvre” demonstrating the large number of
works questionably attributed to Rembrandt.60
The Resurgence of English Eighteenth–Century Portraits
Despite the problems with attributions during the mid and late nineteenth century, the
collecting of old masters found solid ground for growth in this collaborative environment among
dealers, collectors, connoisseurs and artists, particularly after the 1883 Settled Land Act, which
58
Simpson, Colin, Artful Partners: The Secret Association of Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen (London:
Unwin, 1987). Colin Simpson delivers a detailed account of the secret partnership of Joe Duveen, Jr., and Bernard
Berenson throughout the turn of the twentieth century wherein several of their attributions were knowingly
inaccurate.
59
Catherine B. Scallen, Rembrandt, Reputation, and the Practice of Connoisseurship (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University, 2004), 22–3.
60
Roger Fry, quoted in Scallen, 250.
24
allowed nobility, for the first time, to sell their art collections if the proceeds remained in trust.61
This Act unleashed a flood of English ancestral family portraits from private collections onto the
market; however, interest in this genre had emerged earlier in the century. One impetus for the
rediscovery of eighteenth–century English portraits was the 1813 exhibition of the works of Sir
Joshua Reynolds at the British Institution.62 Founded by private aristocrats in 1805 to allow the
pubic to enjoy the treasures held in private collections, the Institution came to be viewed by
many living artists as patrician and exclusive, championing only “Dead Masters.”63 The
Institution’s exhibitions of old masters attempted to perpetuate the idea of “high culture” and
served to create a “paternalistic” view of the arts, fueling the middle–class movement to
patronize modern art.64 The safety of collecting new art versus old was a significant part of the
public dialogue, with exposés by the Art Union persuading cautious collectors that they were
wiser to invest in paintings “fresh off the easel.”65
By the time the National Gallery grew by extension from the Institution in 1824, there
was a patrician cultural power base leading the public art sector. Emblematic of England’s
general lack of private support of art institutions, the National Gallery had to purchase its
foundational collection of old masters from the estate of J. J. Angerstein.66 Characterized by
Ann Pullan as “reminders of patrician and royal authority” were the ways in which both the
Institution and the National Gallery doled out art to the public with two old masters exhibitions a
61
Bryant, 3.
Herrmann, ed., 226.
63
Ann Pullan, “Public goods or private interests? The British Institution in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Art in
the Bourgeois Society, 1790–1850, ed. Andrew Hemingway and William Vaughan (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), 27–41.
64
Macleod, p. 34–5.
65
Ibid., p. 28, 48.
66
Macleod, 50. Macleod notes that even middle–class tycoons were not inclined to bequeath their collections to the
nation’s art institutions.
62
25
year at a high ticket price.67 The timing of the old masters exhibitions conflicted with other
shows of contemporary works, further fueling the contempt for the Institution and its paintings.68
These institutions came under much criticism by the intelligentsia, including William Blake, who
said, “The Rich Men of England form themselves into a Society to Sell & Not to Buy Pictures.
The Artist who does not throw his Contempt on such Trading Exhibitions, does not know either
his own interest or his Duty.”69 The overriding sentiment was that the presentations of old
masters would cause fewer people to buy works of living artists.
Nonetheless, the resurgence of interest in, and availability of, old masters and English
eighteenth–century portraits was nearing its tipping point with the 1853 Samuel Rogers sale and
the 1859 Lord Northwick sale. These two gentlemen were considered to be the last living
contemporaries of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, adding romantic value to
their sales.70 Reynold’s Strawberry Girl sold to Sir Richard Wallace for a record £2,205 at the
Rogers sale.71 Composed primarily of the works of Reynolds and Gainsborough, these events
provided the foundations of what Reitlinger calls the ‘craze’ or ‘cult’ of the eighteenth century
from the late 1870s to the 1920s.72 H. C. Marillier noted that although a man does not usually
sell his mother’s or grandmother’s portrait, it was now acceptable to sell his great–
grandmother’s.73 Of Marillier’s point, Rietlinger states, “Now this makes a good enough
explanation for a sudden spate of Reynolds or Gainsborough great–grandmothers on the market
67
Ibid., 30.
Pullan, 39.
69
Ibid.
70
Rietlinger, 182.
71
Ibid., 430.
72
Ibid.
73
Ibid., 183.
68
26
in the 1860s, but it does not explain why strangers were prepared to buy them at tremendous
prices.”74
The possible attraction to English eighteenth–century portraits during the second half of
the nineteenth century by “Anglophiles without ancestors” is that they could appropriate the
images of prominent families and the concept of their noble lineages to establish new identities.75
Rightly or wrongly, Reitlinger ascribes a type of ‘snobbishness’ to eighteenth–century portraits,
yet he rightly points out that the matter of selecting a portrait is ultimately subjective.76 Given
Iveagh’s stated intention to leave behind an estate of “an artistic eighteenth–century gentleman,”
it is likely that nostalgia also drove Iveagh’s selections from the period. Roger Fry supposed in
1912 that nostalgia for the eighteenth century was a reaction to the modern conditions of the
Industrial Revolution:
Despairing of the conditions due to modern commercialism it is not
unnatural that lovers of beauty should look back with nostalgia to the
age when society was controlled by a landed aristocracy … The aristocrat
usually had taste, the plutocrat frequently has not … Hence the art of
the eighteenth century, an art that is prone before the distinguished patron
subtly and deliciously flattering and yet always fine. In contrast to that
the art of the nineteenth century is coarse, turbulent, clumsy.77
Against the background of Fry’s opinion, Iveagh’s identity as a collector of both eighteenth–
century and modern works of art shows him to be of an independent mind; yet the fact that he
chose to project his identity by omitting modern works and to align it with the landed aristocracy
of the eighteenth–century indicates that he was indeed nostalgic about the past yet also socially
ambitious in his own time.
74
Ibid.
Bryant, 9.
76
Reitlinger, 183–4.
77
Roger Fry, quoted in Edward Morris, “Paintings and Sculpture,” in Art Gallery, The Lady Lever Collection, Port
Sunlight, (Cheshire: Lady Lever Art Gallery, 1968), 17.
75
27
The English were not the alone in their nostalgia for eighteenth–century portraits. Even
with its heavy excise tax of twenty percent, the primary export market for English eighteenth–
century portraits during the mid to late 1800s, particularly those by Reynolds, Romney,
Gainsborough, and Lawrence, was the United States.78 In 1876, J. P. Morgan’s father, Junius,
purchased the questionably attributed Gainsborough, Duchess of Devonshire, from Agnew’s for
£15,000. It was stolen the evening of the sale, leading to one of the great art heist stories of the
early twentieth century. It was eventually re–purchased by J. P. Morgan in 1901 for a whopping
£35,000.79 The London papers buzzed with this story, but none published the sale amount, about
which Morgan said, “Nobody will ever know. If the truth came out, I might be considered a
candidate for the lunatic asylum.”80 This American desire for English portraits is the outward
expression of the romantic attraction to them that was shared by the English, although it was not
as publicly expressed there. Serving this attraction best was the dealer Joseph Duveen, who
would go on to inflate the market for English eighteenth–century portraits with competition
among such clients as Frick, Huntington, and Andrew Mellon from the early 1900s through the
1930s.81 Eventually, Duveen sold Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy to Huntington for a record–
breaking £148,000 in 1916.82
Iveagh embraced the use of English eighteenth–century portraits to project an association
with the aristocracy ahead of many English and all American collectors.83 Like many collectors
of living artists, Iveagh was a businessman, yet he preferred aristocratic tastes. He was living in
a time when he could deploy these tastes in crafting his identity. The fluidity of the period is lost
78
For an overview of the major American collectors, see Cynthia Saltzman, Old Masters, New World: America’s
Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures (New York: Penguin, 2008).
79
Reitlinger, 188, 189.
80
Strouse, 412.
81
Reitlinger, 190–1.
82
Ibid., 192. For the list of Gainsborough prices between 1748 and 1960, see Reitlinger, 320–325.
83
Julius Bryant, “The Iveagh Bequest From Guinness to Gainsborough,” in Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough
(New York: American Federation of Arts, 2013), 14.
28
in some scholarly writing, obscuring the topic of the collecting of this genre. For instance,
Macleod claims that those above the business class held aristocratic nostalgia for the past, and
she confuses English businessman collectors of modern works with American businessman
collectors of old masters:
Yet not content to imitate the aristocracy, these [English] energetic
businessmen recast the cultural system in their own image in an attempt
to create a stable social category for their class. Yet virtually nothing is
known about these Victorian counterparts to America’s Mellons and
Fricks, despite the fact that they were instrumental in shaping the
cultural life of their era.84
Macleod’s conflation of English businessmen who collected modern works with Americans who
collected old masters is confounding and inaccurate. The Fricks and Mellons were not primarily
patronizing modern artists but collecting ‘aristocratic’ old masters and English portraits, in a
similar attempt to “create a stable social category for their class.” The important thing to keep in
mind is that the late–nineteenth–century marketplace provided abundant choices, allowing
collectors to craft their identities according to their aspirations and tastes, whether they tended to
the aristocratic or the bourgeoisie. The American predilection for English eighteenth–century
portraits and its pervading of the English art market is addressed in detail in Chapter Three.
The Rise of the England’s Living Artist
Whereas Iveagh quietly supported living artists, he neither collected them with the vigor
attributed to a large number of merchant–class patrons, nor identified with England’s popular
modern art scene. Fueled by the patronage of a rising newly rich merchant class in England, the
concomitant “golden age of the living painter” is a distinguishing force in collecting in late
84
Macleod, 2.
29
nineteenth–century England.85 Arbiters of taste and aesthetics including John Ruskin, William
Morris, Walter Pater, Charles Swineburne, and Oscar Wilde, heralded a new age for the arts in
England: one that was seen as “democratizing” the arts and offering all a chance to patronize–or
at least appreciate–the arts.86 Questioning the quality of life provided by the unstoppable
Industrial Revolution and the classically biased formulas for good art put forth by the Royal
Academy, the rebellion of the Pre–Raphaelite Brotherhood served as a hub for many spokes of
discourse around England’s modern art movement.87 Hastened by the Pre–Raphaelite
movement was the dawn of London’s Bohemian subculture, defined by a refusal to conform to
industrialized society. Macleod and Elizabeth Prettejohn have both called for a reassessment of
Modernism in England. Macleod locates the international inception of the avant–garde with the
Pre– Raphaelites; and Prettejohn begs that they be evaluated alongside other modern art
movements, such as the Impressionists and Surrealists.88 Richard Brettell begins his book on
modern art with the Great Exhibition of 1851, which expanded the world of fine art to include
furniture and other decorative arts and was housed in a frank structure that did not purport to be
anything other than what is was.89 Placing the dawn of modernism in England as early as 1851
also places the Pre–Raphaelites at its inception. The larger background of discussions against
which collecting in England was set at this time, centered on the availability of art to a wider
audience, as well as on changes in the traditional hierarchy of subject matter in the production of
art. A hallmark of this period is the collaboration among the artists within this group, and with
outside poets, artists, architects, patrons and aesthetes. The Aesthetic movement under Charles
85
Macleod, 33–6; Reitlinger, 84–100.
Joseph Mourdant Crook, The Rise of the Nouveau Riches: Style and Status in Victorian and Edwardian
Architecture (London: John Murray, 2000), 2–12; Reitlinger, 109–11.
87
For more on the Pre–Raphaelites see Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre–Raphaelites (London: Tate, 2000).
88
Dianne Sachko Macleod, “The Dialectics of Modernism and English Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 35 (Jan.
1995):1–14. Prettejohn, Art of Pre–Raphaelites, 11–12.
89
Richard Brettell, Modern Art, 1851–1929: Capitalism and Representation (Oxford: Oxford University, 1999), 1–2.
86
30
Swineburne’s dictum of ‘art for art’s sake’ found its representative in Oscar Wilde, whose image
and lectures on the arts were heavily parodied in the press, indicating the richness of dialogue
around the arts in the mid and late nineteenth century.90
As much as this period inspired rebellion against the growing industrial landscape, the
success of modern artists was greatly aided by the advent of mass–produced steel engraved
reproductions.91 Millais’ Bubbles (1886) was used as an advertisement for Pear’s Soap, and
William Powell Frith’s New Frock (1889) was used similarly for Sunlight Soap.92 Millais sold
600,000 copies of Cherry Ripe (1879) in the 1880 Christmas supplement of Graphic.93 The
modern art movement in England was the first one in which non–aristocratic collectors
dominated the acquisitions of its works.94 Businessmen such as Robert Vernon became new
patrons, often meddling with the production of works by artists. Of Vernon, Macleod writes,
“Landseer grumbled about the stream of supercilious letters he received from him … while
another painter compared the struggles and squabbles of the ducks in Vernon’s pond … with the
way artists felt about trying to get through the day as his houseguest.”95 Samuel Carter Hall,
founder of Art Union (1839) found a hero in Vernon, calling him “a true Patriot, and a powerful
Instructor by the instrumentality of Art.”96 The advent of these amateur merchant collectors of
not only works by the Pre–Raphaelites, but also modern academic paintings, such as works by
Landseer and Frith, distinguishes this period in the history of England’s art market.
90
For more on the Aesthetic movement, see Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art For Art’s Sake (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2007).
91
Reitlinger, 149.
92
Edward Morris, “Paintings and Sculpture,” in The Lady Lever Art Gallery, The Lady Lever Collection, Port
Sunlight, (Cheshire: Lady Lever Art Gallery, 1968), 14 – 16.
93
Reitlinger, 148.
94
Macleod, 31.
95
Macleod, 38–9.
96
Ibid., 48–9.
31
For the first time in England, living artists were commanding more than the “dead
masters.” In 1876 Titian’s Man With a Red Cap (1516) commanded a measly £95, and
Botticelli’s Mars and Venus (1483) cost Great Britain no more than 1,000 guineas.97 In 1860,
however, William Holman Hunt was paid 5,000 guineas simply for the rights to copy his Infant
Saviour in the Temple (ca. 1855); and in 1874 Agnew’s paid £11,000 for his The Shadow of the
Cross (ca. 1874).98 Millais probably made more money than any living artist of the time, with an
estimated annual income of £25,000 in the years 1868–1874. By the 1880s he claimed that his
income was £40,000.99 Not only were living artists making more money than in any other period
in England’s history, but also prices for works by its recently deceased artists skyrocketed.
Reitlinger shows how between 1850 and 1863, the works of J. M. W. Turner were multiplied
fifteen times in price.100 The notion that England was undervaluing its living artists is at the root
of this change in attitude toward artists in the marketplace. During the same period, works of old
masters were often selling below those of living artists. Reynolds’s Miss Stanhope sold in 1876
to Lord Rothschild for £3,150, and his Little Fortune Teller sold for £5,250 in 1885. With the
exception of Gainborough’s aforementioned Duchess of Devonshire, his works commanded
between £1,100 and £7,000 during the same period. Rembrandt’s first four–figure work since
1848 was Man in a Black Cap, which sold for £1,890 in 1884.101
97
Reitlinger, 99.
Ibid., 98, 147.
99
Reitlinger, 147–8.
100
Ibid., 100.
101
For detailed lists of prices, see Reitlinger’s “Sales Analysis of the Most Popular Painters,” in Economics, 243–
501.
98
32
Conclusion
Modern art galleries, most notably the Grosvenor Gallery (1887) and the Manchester City
Gallery (1824), were on the rise in the mid and late 1800s, popularizing a modern art scene.102
The popular appeal of England’s modern art stands in contradistinction to Anna Jameson’s
observation in 1844 about Lord Grosvenor’s public openings of his gallery at Bridgewater
House:
We can all remember the public days of the Grosvenor Gallery and
Bridgewater House. We can all remember the loiterers and loungers,
the vulgar starters, the gaping idlers, we used to meet there—people
who, instead of moving amid these wonders and beauties, all silent
and divine, with reverence and gratitude, strutted about as if they had
the right to be there; talking, flirting, peeping, and prying.103
Such differences in attitude demonstrate the abundant choices offered by the nineteenth–century
English art market leading up to and during Iveagh’s time. Collectors were presented with a
greater variety of choices, allowing them to create individual personas according to their tastes
and chosen social milieus. The rediscoveries of old masters and English eighteenth–century
portraits presented issues of questionable provenances of works of art in the period. The rise of
the middle–class, and what Crook describes as the overtaking of the aristocracy with a
plutocracy, shone a bright light on the contemporary art scene, enticing hunters of old masters
and eighteenth–century portraits away from their often questionable pursuits to those with
unassailable certainty.104 Only one year after Iveagh’s death in 1928, Sir Charles Holmes
102
For more on the Grosvenor Gallery see, Susan P. Casteras and Colleen Denney, editors, The Grosvenor Gallery:
A Palace of Art in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University, 1996); for more on the importance of the
Manchester Gallery in Victorian England see Julian Trueherz, “The Manchester Royal Jubilee Exhibition of 1887,”
Victorian Poetry 25, No. 3/4 (1987): 192–222.
103
Jameson, xxxiv.
104
Crook, 1–15.
33
observed that the modern mindset was becoming fearful of embracing works of the past too
closely in the event that it may hamper the freedom to create new works.105
105
Holmes, xvi.
34
CHAPTER TWO
Edward Cecil Guinness’s Collecting Traits, Omissions,
and the Use of His Properties
Examination of biographical evidence, Iveagh’s knowledge of art, and the way in which
he used his properties reveals a collector whose understanding of art went beyond its decorative
function. This chapter examines Iveagh’s identity as revealed through his bequest, as well as
through omissions from the bequest. It also lays the foundation for comparisons with other
collectors and for discerning how, through his bequest, Iveagh wanted to portray himself as a
collector.
Iveagh’s Private Demeanor
Compounding the challenges posed by the lack of records and literature on Iveagh’s
collecting is his private demeanor. In his introduction to the 1928 catalogue of the Iveagh
Bequest, Sir Charles Holmes wrote:
The bare facts of the life of Edward Cecil Guinness, first Earl of Iveagh (1847 – 1927),
can be found in any work of reference. But the man himself is not so easily appreciated.
For years past he had lived in isolation among the many beautiful things he had gathered
together, and being accessible only to his intimate friends was something of a mystery to
the world at large. Only the few who were closely associated with him could form any
idea of his attitude to life and the arts, and it is to one of these that I am indebted for the
following personal note upon Lord Iveagh as a collector.106
Whereas Iveagh quietly supported the arts through loans of works to special exhibitions during
his lifetime, his collection’s scope and importance was virtually unknown until his bequest was
unveiled to the public in a loan exhibition at the Royal Academy in January 1928. In his
December 1927 article in The Burlington Magazine announcing plans for Iveagh’s bequest, A. C.
106
Charles J. Holmes, Pictures from the Iveagh Bequest (London: W.J. Stacey for the Iveagh Trust, 1928), xii.
35
R. Carter stated, “the grandeur of the Iveagh bequest has literally stunned the art world.”107
Iveagh shunned publicity, never published and circulated catalogues of his collections, and only
those who were invited to his few large parties and regular weekends with royalty at Elveden or
Cowes would have known Iveagh’s collections.108
Rumors of Iveagh’s spending at Agnew’s were well established at the time and Carter
goes on to say of his quiet loans to exhibitions, “As far back as 1877 Lord Lansdowne had lent
this self–portrait by Rembrandt, for example, but it was not openly revealed that Lord Iveagh had
bought it from him until the Rembrandt Tercentenary Exhibition at Burlington House in
1899.”109 Further illuminating Iveagh’s private demeanor, his only biographer, George Martelli,
notes “he refused to give permission for any inspection of his pictures. Occasionally however he
would lend them to current exhibitions.”110 The public acknowledgement of Iveagh’s bequest by
the Sunday Times after his death opens the speculation about the state of collecting of old
masters by the English:
We hear a great deal of the art treasures which are dispersed and exported to America,
but we hear nothing of the art collections which are quietly being formed in our midst. If
all were known the public would realize that the story of Old Masters in England is not
an unbroken series of losses and defeats … But a point that has hitherto escaped
comment is the proof these collections afford that great art collections are still being
made in England.111
It appears Iveagh was just one of several such private collectors and was not isolated against the
cacophonous background of the modern art movement in England.
107
A.C.R. Carter, “The Iveagh Bequest,” The Burlington Magazine 297 (Dec., 1927): 310.
Bryant, interview.
109
Ibid.
110
George Martelli, A Man of His Time: The Life and Times of The First Earl of Iveagh. (London: Privately
Published, 1958), 144.
111
Ibid., 145.
108
36
The Inception of Iveagh’s Collecting
Through the acquisition of properties and his dutiful philanthropic housing developments
for the poor, later established as the Iveagh Trust, Guinness was granted peerage in 1891 and
ennobled in 1919 as the Earl of Iveagh and Viscount Elveden.112 Because Iveagh was only fourth
generation of wealth, not titled and indeed had useful employment, he did not conform to the
traditional definition of an aristocratic gentleman, which was rapidly changing in the nineteenth
century. Concerning Iveagh, Martelli observes that “From 1886 onwards the disposal of his
wealth, rather than the creation of it, became more and more his chief preoccupation.”113
Although Iveagh was neither wholly nouveau riches nor aristocratic, he was now a relatively
leisured man and set out to create a family legacy through the swift acquisition of great
properties and art so he could get on with the business of entertaining royalty and nobility of the
highest rank, particularly the Duke of York, the future King George V, and the Prince of Wales,
the future King Edward VII.
Despite Iveagh’s relative obscurity as a collector, twentieth–century literature
unanimously credits him with inspiring Joseph Duveen to become an art dealer who went on to
create the American demand for European old masters and English eighteenth–century
portraits.114 The anecdote of his ca.1887 visit to The Duveen Gallery in Oxford Street, recounted
by the young Joseph Duveen, famously illustrates this credit. Guinness anonymously walked
into Duveen’s with his wife, Adelaide, to look at screens for his new home at Grosvenor Place.
Duveen noted Guinness’s thick Irish brogue and that the couple looked like a couple from the
112
For more in the Iveagh Trust and Iveagh’s philanthropic accomplishments, see Anthony Bielenberg, “Late
Victorian Elite Formation and Philanthropy: The Making of Edward Guinness,” Studia Hibernica, 32 (2002/2003):
133–54.
113
Mary Heffernan, Introduction to Iveagh Pictures: Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh (Dublin: Office of
Public Works, 2009), 10.
114
S. N. Behrmann, Duveen (Boston and Toronto: Little Brown and Company, 1952), 58.
37
country dressed up for the city, further emphasizing the dichotomy of his Irishness and English
aspirations.115 Not knowing who they were, Duveen’s father dispatched a clerk to get
information on their identity from the coachman. Mrs. Guinness proceeded to say, “You might
find it strange, Mr. Duveen, that I am buying so many screens,” to which he replied, “Not at all
Lady Guinness. You have many fine homes and are right to supply them with screens.”116 Mrs.
Guinness was apparently thrilled by the recognition and said, “You see Edward, Mr. Duveen
knows who we are!”117 In the presence of his father, the young Joseph Duveen observed the
Guinnesses purchase a host of screens and tapestries. He was none too pleased and he later
observed:
It made me sick at my stomach to see people like Lord Iveagh buying mere art objects
from us and paintings elsewhere … My father was satisfied, my Uncle Henry was
satisfied, my brothers were satisfied, but I was not.118
This event caused the younger Duveen to question why his father was only selling furnishings to
men like Iveagh, who were spending much larger sums for paintings at the neighboring dealers
of Agnew and Colnaghi. The young Joseph Duveen embarked immediately thereafter on a
course of being the biggest dealer of European art to American collectors.
The transforming influence and swiftness of Iveagh’s purchasing power is also given in
an account of Iveagh’s first random visit to Agnew’s gallery in June of 1887. Prompted by his
cold reception at a neighboring gallery in Bond Street where the partners were out and the clerk
would not assist him after asking to see their “finest pictures,” he walked into Agnew’s.
Geoffrey Agnew writes:
Somewhat put out Guinness left and went down the street to Agnew’s. Here he made the
same request. Here too the partners were at lunch. The salesman, however, showed
115
Ibid.
Ibid.
117
Ibid.
118
Ibid., 58–9.
116
38
more discernment and produced some pictures which, strictly speaking, he was not
allowed to show without a partner’s permission. Guinness looked and approved and
stayed on. In their own good time the partners returned. There and then Guinness bought
a Boucher and a Cuyp. Two weeks later he returned and bought three Reynolds and a
Romney. During the next year, 1888, he bought 78 pictures, 27 in July alone.119
All evidence suggests that Iveagh purchased almost exclusively from Agnew’s, acquiring some
233 paintings between June 1887 and April 1891 and another eighteen before 1904.120 Such
anecdotes may portray Guinness as being a somewhat random shopper on a quest to decorate
his new homes, yet he was hardly uninitiated when it came to discerning great works of art.
Biographical references portray Iveagh as a reserved gentleman who was groomed from
adolescence to take the reins of the family business.121 Unlike his older brother Arthur, Lord
Ardilaun, Edward Cecil was educated in Dublin, not abroad, and did not go on the customary
grand tour of Europe.122 Martelli shows him as financially more reserved than his brother Arthur,
taking only half as much income out of the family business while running it.123 Edward Cecil
and Arthur were instrumental in the formation of the 1872 Dublin Exhibition of Arts, Industries,
Manufactures and Loan Museum and orchestrated the loan of several works from the family
collection. This was an event to promote the arts and manufacturing in Ireland that sadly never
found a permanent home. The brothers were following the lead of their Uncle Arthur Lee, who
was a distinguished collector and lent many masterpieces to the 1855 Irish Institution
Exhibition.124 Joe Joyce confirms family rumors about Uncle Arthur Lee, one of the more
colorful Guinnesses at the time, who was removed from the family business for having an affair
with an employee, Dion Boucicault, who went on to be a famous playwright. Arthur Lee was
119
Geoffrey Agnew, “1861–1895,” in Agnew’s 1817–1967 (London: B. Agnew Press, 1967), 36–7.
Ibid., 37. For more on Iveagh’s inventories, see Martelli Man of His Time, 350–356, and Bryant,
121
For more on Iveagh’s biography, see Martelli, Man of His Time; Joe Joyce, The Guinnesses: The Untold Story of
Ireland’s Most Successful Family (Dublin: Poolbeg, 2009); Frederic Mullally, The Silver Salver: The Story of the
Guinness Family (London: Granada, 1981).
122
Bryant, interview.
123
Martelli, 55.
124
Bryant, 8.
120
39
known to have impeccable taste in art, and he influenced the formation of Edward Cecil’s early
taste.125 It was not until 1874, however, that Edward purchased his first important painting from
the Earl of Charlemont’s collection, Rembrandt’s Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver
(1629) for £500.126 Colnaghi questioned this attribution, claiming it was by Jan Lievens; and it
was not until after Edward Cecil’s death that the Rembrandt attribution was confirmed.127 Julius
Bryant suggests that this event made him a cautious collector and states, “It seems highly likely
that the uncertainty that haunted Iveagh’s first major purchase all his life may explain his
preference for buying published and exhibited paintings with provenance after he turned to
Agnew’s for assistance in 1887.128 Iveagh’s was the greatest collection ever formed in
partnership with Agnew’s, and Geoffrey Agnew claims “Lord Iveagh bought what he liked for
the pleasure his pictures gave him. The business was conducted in great secrecy, with all
communications carrying a code name.”129 Perhaps his experience with Judas inspired his
secrecy as a collector.
The Judas Attribution
The importance of the attribution of Judas to Rembrandt for understanding Iveagh’s
development as a collector is that Judas came into his possession prior to the rise in
connoisseurship on Rembrandt initiated in 1897 by Wilhelm von Bode’s catalogue. The earliest
mention of Judas is by Constantijn Huygens in his biographical sketch of Rembrandt (1629–30),
125
Joyce, 59–64.
Bryant, 8.
127
Ibid.
128
Julius Bryant, “Kenwood’s Lost Chapter: Julius Bryant Reveals the Forgotten Story of the National Gallery’s
Management of the Iveagh Bequest, 1928–49” Apollo Magazine (March 1, 2004): 8.
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Kenwood's+lost+chapter%3A+Julius+Bryant+reveals+the+forgotten+story+of...–
a0114477248.
129
Agnew, 37.
126
40
in which he vividly describes the work in the year of its creation during a visit to the artist’s
studio:
Rembrandt … devotes all his loving concentration to a small painting, achieving on that
modest scale a result which one would seek in vain in the largest pieces of others. I cite as an
example his painting of the repentant Judas returning to the high priest the silver coins which
were the price of our innocent Lord. Compare this with all Italy, indeed, with all the
wondrous beauties that have survived from the most ancient of days. The gesture of that one
despairing Judas (not to mention all the other impressive figures in the painting), that one
maddened Judas, screaming, begging for forgiveness, but devoid of hope erased from his
face; his gaze wild, his hair torn out by the roots . . . All this I compare to the beauty that
has been reproduced throughout the ages.130
In Ernst van Wetering’s translation, Huygens goes on to write, “I maintain that no Protogenes,
Apelles or Parhasius has ever produced, nor ever could produce even if they were able to return
to this world, what has been achieved by a young man, a Dutchman, a miller, in a single human
figure [Judas].”131
Judas is now considered to be not only the best documented of Rembrandt’s early works
but also the masterpiece of his early career.132 Why, then, did Colnaghi question its attribution?
Perhaps he had not read the early Rembrandt biographies written in Latin, or perhaps they
wanted to gain a new wealthy customer in Guinness by making him doubt his independent
decision–making. Although Rembrandt is not known to have made copies of this subject, many
of his contemporaries such as Salomon Konick, Jacob de Wet the Elder, and Abraham van der
Hecken did.133 In a September 6, 1875 note about the painting, Guinness wrote:
Mr. Graves, Printseller and Picture Dealer, about my picture Judas. I took “Judas” to
him to ask his opinion as to who painted it. He at first thought the picture either by De
Comyng of Lebeus . . . He looked at [John] Smith’s Rembrandt Van Rhyn, page 38, and
130
Constantjin Huygens, quoted in Rembrandt und Lievens, ed., Christian Vogelaar, et al, (Amsterdam: Waanders,
Zwolle, 1991), 132–33.
131
Cited in Ernst van de Wetering, “Rembrandt as a Searching Artist,” in Rembrandt: Quest of Genius (Amsterdam:
Waanders, Zwolle, 2006).
132
David Bomford, Ashok Roy and Axel Ruger, ed., Art In the Making: Rembrandt (London: National Gallery,
2006), 54–61.
133
Ibid., 61.
41
found there the picture exactly described. He said Smith’s not knowing where the picture
was, was very much in favour of authenticity of “Judas.” 134
Records of his visit with Mr. Graves the next day state:
Graves also said he had shown it to Martin Cornachi (of Cornacai) [probably Colnaghi]
the picture dealer, who declared it to be a Lebeus. Mr. Graves says he is the best judge of
Rembrandt in London.135
Sadly such detailed records are scarce; but this one clearly indicates that, whereas he collected
much in a short period to fill his new properties, Iveagh’s interest in art went well beyond its
decorative function. Martelli says of his collecting:
Although he was never a collector of the kind for whom collecting was a passion, and his
object in the first place was simply to acquire a large number of fine pictures as quickly
as possible . . . in the course of time he undoubtedly came to love his pictures and would
often spend an hour with them alone after lunch in the picture gallery at Grosvenor
Place.136
Martelli overlooks the bearing of Iveagh’s early quest to discover the truth about Judas on his
“passion” and “love” for his paintings. Because a collector is swift in making keen decisions
about his acquisitions does not necessarily mean he is not passionate. It can indicate that the
collector is operating with a high level of knowledge.
During Iveagh’s lifetime, Bode, Valentiner, and De Groot mentioned Judas in literature
and catalogues between 1897 and 1915.137 Perhaps Iveagh chose not to leave Judas as part of his
bequest because its attribution was still questionable at the time of this death. It may also have
been that its biblical subject matter did not suit the mix of works he selected for Kenwood. It is
possible that he simply kept the painting to benefit the family, with whom it remains today, still
attributed to Rembrandt.
134
Edward Cecil Guinness quoted in Martelli, Man of His Time, 85.
Ibid.
136
Martelli, Man of His Time, 144.
137
Universiteit van Amsterdam, “Web Catalogue of Rembrandt Paintings, 1624–1631”
http://staff.science.uva.nl/~fjseins/rembrandtcatalogue/r.1624_1631.html [accessed January 9, 2013]. This site
provides a detailed list of all mentions of Judas in literature from 1897 to 1992.
135
42
The Inventories and The Omissions
A brief examination of the inventories of Iveagh’s purchases from Agnew’s, the library at
Farmleigh and the works of art in his collection that were omitted from his bequest can reveal
more about Iveagh’s identity. Because he relied almost solely on Agnew’s for his acquisitions,
the inventory of Iveagh’s purchases remains intact and has been transcribed by Bryant in his
2003 catalogue Annex I.138 It may be tempting to imagine Iveagh’s pursuit of great works of art
as one spent in isolation with Agnew’s; however, as stated earlier, collecting does not happen in
a void; and collaboration was a hallmark of the nineteenth–century art world. Iveagh’s social
and commercial networks and the expanded discourse around the arts in publications and at the
various exhibitions to which he lent works must have had an impact upon his taste and his
acquisitions. Additionally, the scholarly literature on art must have informed his decision–
making, even in consultation with Agnew’s. One wonders what he was reading in addition to
Smith’s Rembrandt. Attempts have been made to procure inventories of his libraries; however,
the only documentation available is the complete list of books in the Benjamin Iveagh Library at
Farmleigh, donated by Benjamin Guinness, Third Earl of Iveagh (1937–1992). The list contains
books that belonged to Edward Cecil, however it is not yet known which ones they are. More
importantly, the list does not contain any catalogues or reference books to collections.139
English eighteenth–century portraits dominate the Agnew’s inventory of Iveagh’s
acquisitions, however, there are several modern works and sporting pictures that were omitted
from his bequest. Iveagh purchased eight modern works from Agnew’s, and only a few of them
were included in the Kenwood bequest including J. M. W. Turner’s Fishermen Hauling a Boat
138
Bryant, 416–20.
This inventory was provided in Excel spreadsheets in an E–mail on 2 February 2013 from Farmleigh’s Marsh
Librarian, Miss Nirvana Flanagan.
139
43
Ashore (Iveagh Seascape) (1803–04) (Fig. 9), Sir E. Landseer’s The Hon. E. S. Russell and His
Brother (1834), and Hawking in Olden Time (1832) (Fig. 10) were selected for the bequest.
Others, including Sir John Everett Millais’ Lilacs (1885) (Fig. 11) and Orphans (1885) and
Thetis (1869) by G. F. Watts did not survive Iveagh’s selection process for his bequest.
Additional modern works by William Orpen, Rose Barton, Landseer, George Elgar Hicks, and
John Rogers Herbert, including his influential Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop (60), are listed in
the 1984 Christie’s sale catalogue from Elveden Hall and the 2009 Farmleigh exhibition
catalogue.140 More detailed accounts of these objects and the bearing of their omission from
Iveagh’s bequest will be given in Chapter Four, but what is important to bear in mind is that this
mix of modern works demonstrates Iveagh’s independence of mind in knowing what he liked.
His acquisitions were not solely confined to old masters and English portraits but included
modern and commissioned works that appealed to him personally.
Iveagh’s Use of His Properties and Collections
Most accounts of Iveagh show him to be a ruthless and singularly focused businessman
who, through the use of his properties and the collections they housed, presented himself as a
leisured man of immense wealth.141 Iveagh’s self–consciousness fueled his feverish efforts to set
up housekeeping and to amass his great collection with sharply focused swiftness. Martelli
observes “The photographs of him taken with groups of friends in the garden of the house at
Stephen’s Green or at country house parties give no hit of the successful business man; rather
Christie’s, Christie’s on The Premises, Elveden Hall. Office of Public Works, Iveagh Pictures: Edward Cecil
Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh .
141
For more on Iveagh’s business demeanor, see, Joyce, 130–169; Mullaly, ix–70.
140
44
they suggest the monied man of leisure.”142 He goes on to observe the artistic care with which
the groups within the photographs were arranged, suggesting “the self–conscious look of people
in tableaux–vivants.”143
Number 80 St. Stephen’s Green, now known as Iveagh House, was used as Iveagh’s
primary Dublin residence and for entertaining on a grand scale. Iveagh’s father, Benjamin Lee,
bought the house as his family seat in Dublin to serve his growing public persona as a
Conservative MP for Dublin.144 Benjamin Lee spawned the family spirit of philanthropy and
support of the arts through his £100,000 contribution to the restoration of St. Patrick’s Cathedral
and contributions to the Dublin Exhibition Palace and Winter Garden, dedicated to exhibitions of
Irish arts and manufacturers.145 These efforts earned him a baronetcy in 1867, and the house at
St. Stephens Green has ever since been associated with the Guinness family’s philanthropic spirit
and patronage of the arts.
Originally commissioned by the Protestant Bishop Robert Clayton in 1736, the architect
Richard Castle (1690–1761) applied his renowned attention to scale and detail to 80 St.
Stephen’s Green.146 Best known for his classical designs of eighteenth–century country
houses—notably Hazelwood, Co. Sligo and Ballyhaise, Co. Cavan—Castle created a
domineering, yet well proportioned, house for Bishop Clayton, with commanding views over
Dublin’s main green.147 Edward Cecil inherited the house in 1868, and of his lavish parties there
it was said that they came close to outshining the Lord Lieutenant himself.148 It was while in
residence in Dublin that Edward Cecil commenced his patronage of the arts by continuing the
142
Martelli, Man of His Time, 56.
Ibid.
144
Nicholas Sheaff, Iveagh House: An Historical Description (Dublin: Department of Foreign Affairs, 1978), 19.
145
Sheaff, 19.
146
Sheaff, 15.
147
Ibid., 16.
148
Sheaff, 20.
143
45
support of the 1872 Exhibition Palace Company; however, the attempt failed to promote the
permanent display of Irish arts and manufactured goods.149 Rounding out the family patronage
of the arts through this property is the gift of the St. Stephen’s Green house to the Irish nation in
1939 by the Second Earl of Iveagh when it became known as Iveagh House. It now serves as the
Department of Foreign Affairs and continues to receive and entertain distinguished guests.150
When Edward Cecil was not entertaining in Stephen’s Green, he retreated to Farmleigh,
the woodland estate in nearby Phoenix Park, purchased in 1873, the year of his marriage to his
cousin Adelaide.151 Farmleigh is a good walk from the Guinness brewery at St. James’s Gate
and provided regular exercise for Edward Cecil, who was running the operations on a daily
basis.152 The surrounding grounds and gardens provided a splendid setting for lavish
entertaining of a more relaxed manner.153 The architect of the original eighteenth–century house
is not known, but the renovations undertaken by Edward Cecil between 1881 and 84 are well
documented.154 The Georgian underpinnings of the house were augmented by the addition of a
great iron staircase, which is similar to the one added to the main hall at 80 St. Stephen’s Green.
This hall is open, and as Jill Franklin notes about the plan, “it was unsegregated, unspecialized,
open plan; it was freely available at all times of day both to guests and family and to members of
both sexes.”155
Farmleigh’s richly carved oak dining room, immense ballroom, quiet conservatory,
drawing room, and comfortable library convey a lavish, yet welcoming spirit. In 2003 Julius
149
Ibid.
Sheaff, 25.
151
Patricia McCarthy and Catherine Kelly, “An Architectural History of Farmleigh,” in Iveagh Pictures: Edward
Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh (Dublin: Office of Public Works, 2009), 17.
152
Martelli, 85.
153
Ibid., 16.
154
For more, see Patricia McCarthy and Catherine Kelly, “An Architectural History of Farmleigh,” in Iveagh
Pictures, (Dublin: The Office of Public Works, 2009), 15–30.
155
Jill Franklin quoted in McCarthy and Kelly, “An Architectural History of Farmleigh,” in Iveagh Pictures, 21.
150
46
Bryant recalled his visit with the Third Earl of Iveagh at Farmleigh, “Farmleigh felt like a magic
place when I visited Lord Iveagh there in 1999, the year the family sold the estate to the Irish
Government. That special quality now seems even richer, as the house and grounds are in such
good hands and being enjoyed by so many more people.”156 Bryant also contends that it is
Farmleigh that best displays Edward Cecil’s taste.157 Of particular interest to this study is the
library at Farmleigh (Fig. 12). The authors of a 2009 exhibition catalogue liken the library to
others of its day that were used not only for reading but also for sitting, conversing, and playing
cards or billiards, stating:
When the Guinness family lived in the house, the library was also a sitting room with
Chesterfield suites and Victorian armchairs. Family and guests could play cards in the
evening … They could also have admired … the books that filled the one hundred and
eight bookshelves. Many a leisurely hour could be spent in front of a fire … perusing the
earl’s impressive collection of books and manuscripts.158
It is not clear to which Earl this refers. The Third Earl donated his own collection to the Marsh
Library in 1999; however, the comment suggests that the First Earl honored the value of books
and placed them in a comfortable environment that fostered conversation.
Although it is not known which objects of art were on display at Farmleigh during
Iveagh’s lifetime, it is likely that similar works to those on display now would have been
featured. Bryant suggests that Iveagh would have displayed hunting themes at Elveden,
seascapes at Cowes, and portraits in London.159 Farmleigh’s proximity to Dublin and its
relatively rustic setting make it plausible that Iveagh would have selected Irish works and
perhaps a few landscapes. The inventory prominently features commissioned works by Barton,
Orpen, and Elgar Hicks, along with Michael Angelo Hayes’s Installation of the Prince of Wales
156
Bryant quoted in Heffernan, 12.
Ibid.
158
Office of Public Works, Iveagh Pictures: Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh (Dublin: OPW, 2009), 25.
159
Bryant interview.
157
47
as Knight of St. Patrick in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1868 (ca. 1868) (Fig. 13). The latter
features a key to the participants that includes Iveagh’s parents and other family members, as
well as the parents of Oscar Wilde. Iveagh’s patronage of Mary Barton, the only female member
of the Royal Watercolour Society, helped her works become published in her book Familiar
London (1904) (Fig. 14).160 The family sold sixteen of her works in 1984 at Christies; however,
several examples remain on display at Farmleigh.161
His patronage of the arts in Dublin demonstrates Iveagh’s sense of noblesse oblige and
suggests that, whereas his first order of collecting was to decorate his houses, he had a love for
art that went beyond this. Of Iveagh’s support of the arts, it is interesting to note that whereas he
gave works of art to the National Gallery in Dublin and to the Hugh Lane Gallery, he only gave
money to London’s National Gallery.162 Perhaps he was more comfortable publicly displaying
his support of the arts in Dublin, as it was an established family tradition. In England, however,
the family was only just being established.
The most concerted efforts for his art collecting were focused on his London residence at
No. 5 Grosvenor Place, which he had purchased in 1877. Immense in scale and of the French
Renaissance style, the house contained 150 rooms and had parking spaces for sixty cars.163
Joseph Duveen claimed that the decoration and furnishing of the Grosvenor Place house was “the
finest advertisement I could have had.”164 Indeed, the house was used for entertaining on an
unprecedented scale for the Guinnesses. Claiming that £6,000 had been “wasted” on a ball he
attended at the house in 1879, Augustus Hare wrote, “It was a perfect fairy land, ice pillars up to
160
Christies, 113.
Ibid.
162
Heffernan, 10. Iveagh presented portraits of Lord Chancellor of Ireland, Adam Loftus by an unknown artist and
Charles Tottenham MP by James Latham to the National Gallery of Ireland in 1891. He also gave a portrait of
John Philpot Curran by Sir Thomas Lawrence in 1901.
163
Bryant, 12.
164
Duveen quoted in Crook, 175.
161
48
the ceiling, an avenue of palms, a veil of stephanotis from the staircase, and you pushed your
way through a brake of papyrus to the cloak room.”165 While the Guinness’s parties were
extravagant in their presentation, they were also perceived as dull and highly exclusive in
attitude as The Tatler told Lady Iveagh and other readers, “your parties, if dull, are reckoned
among the most exclusive in London. . . . You have gone in for a severe smartness and proud
reserve which can only be equaled by that of our typical grande dame, the Duchess of
Buccleuch.”166 Known as the “Marlborough House Set” surrounding the wayward Edward,
Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), Iveagh’s chosen social milieu included the Dukes and
Duchesses of Connaught, Marlborough, and Wellington and the Earls and Countesses of
Albemarle, Onslow, and Shaftesbury.167 Given the Prince of Wales’s tendency to keep multiple
mistresses, Iveagh’s parade of portraits of beautiful women—some noble, others harlots such as
Reynolds’s Kitty Fisher as Cleopatra Dissolving a Pearl (1759)—seems appropriate to
enlivening conversation with the future King (Fig. 15).168 It was necessary before such an
exalted, yet exclusive and private, audience to display great works of art that encouraged
conversation.
William Agnew’s manuscript catalogue of the 233 works at Grosvenor Place (1891) does
not list them alphabetically, and Bryant suggests that the inventory may follow the order of their
display.169 Most remarkably, the inventory is grouped by provenance; and if the works were
displayed by provenance so that clusters of prominent family portraits were shown together, it
would have stirred many conversations among Iveagh’s guests. Bryant says of the provenances:
165
Augustus Hare quoted in Crook, 175.
Martelli, 258.
167
Bryant, Kenwood, 14; Bryant, Guinness to Gainsborough, 15.
168
Bryant, Guinness to Gainsborough, 15.
169
Ibid.
166
49
There is only one monarch, Charles I, but this [these] pictures are joined by those of a
duchess, two marquesses, seven earls, two viscounts and three barons … If this follows
the hang one can almost imagine the scene at a Grosvenor Place party when a surprised
aristocratic couple came upon their former heirlooms.170
Iveagh’s preference for acquiring works with well–known provenances resulted in fourteen
works coming from Lord Palmerston’s collection, five from that of the Marquess of Lansdowne,
and four from the Earl of Lonsdale’s.171 With such pedigrees on display in his exclusive circle,
his choices could hardly have been criticized.
The way in which Iveagh used the full–length portraits from his collection when he
entertained was akin to the manner in which the Marquess of Lansdowne changed the locales of
his works depending on the season. Of Lansdowne’s travelling works of art, Anna Jameson
wrote, “they frequently change their locality; Lord Lansdowne sometimes brings favorite
pictures to town, or removes others for a season to the country.”172 Iveagh was an avid
yachtsman and when he entertained the Prince of Wales on the Cetonia during Cowes Week, he
hung the dining room with full–length portraits from his other properties.173 Because a yacht is a
temporary space, the works of art would have changed, but his choice of portraits stimulated
conversation among his elite crowd. Owing to their effect on the viewer rather than to their
subject matter, as in eighteenth–century conversation pieces, Jameson refers to such portraits as
conversation pieces, writing that “Upon the sight of a portrait, the character and master–strokes
of the history of the person it represents are apt to flow in upon the mind, and be the subject of
conversation: so that to sit for one’s picture is to have an abstract of one’s life written and
published.”174
170
Ibid.
Ibid.
172
Jameson, 288.
173
Bryant, 8.
174
Jameson, 293.
171
50
The acquisition of Georgian seats by aspiring collectors of the late nineteenth century
was a solid stepping–stone to ascending in social rank. Crook says, “One instant way to acquire
the status that only classicism could bring was to buy a major Georgian seat.”175 Iveagh
certainly increased his status with the purchase of Elveden, which was bathed in the auras of
Lord Albemarle and British Colonial power left by its former owner, the Maharajah Duleep
Singh; it was also established as the greatest shooting estate in England (Fig. 4).176 The grandeur
that was Elveden in Iveagh’s day was unmatched in England—its dazzling interiors, supreme
stock of game, and spectacle of royal fanfare and exclusive entertainment deserve more attention
than is paid here. Iveagh’s expansion of Elveden and its exotic homage to British Imperial India
lends great insight to his use of imagery in projecting his identity. The setting he created became
ideal for pompous weekend shooting parties to entertain King George V and the Prince of Wales.
What is known about the paintings Iveagh acquired and hung at Elveden is confined to the list of
works in the 1984 Christie’s Elveden Hall catalogue, which neither confirms nor denies that
these paintings hung there during Iveagh’s life.
Iveagh’s purchase of Elveden rescued the estate from its incipient state of decay as it was
left behind from the fallen and disgruntled Duleep Singh. Once a favorite exotic guest at Queen
Victoria’s court, Duleep Singh was stripped of his status as Maharajah in the Punjab at the age of
five after a Sikh uprising and given a pension from the East India Company.177 He came to court
in England at the age of fifteen where he grew up with the Prince of Wales who would later stay
with him at Elveden.178 Singh immediately set out to modify Elveden’s original Georgian
175
Crook, 45.
Martelli, 47–50.
177
Clive Aslet, “Elveden Hall, Volume VII,” in Christie’s On the Premises, Elveden Hall (London: Christies, 1984),
5. For more on Duleep and Queen Victoria, see Michael Alexander and Sushila Anand, Queen Victoria’s
Maharajah (Weidenfeld, 1980).
178
Aslet, 6.
176
51
exterior, changing it to a brick structure resembling more a townhouse than a country house.179
The interior still contained Georgian rooms, some of which reflected the style of Robert Adam;
however, Singh created an Indian confection of a drawing room that can only be viewed as one
of the most remarkable rooms in England at the time (Fig. 16). Although this room can be
considered as nostalgic pastiche, its decoration came to be associated with a royal Indian imprint
on English aristocratic soil. 180 Embattled against British Colonial rule as he matured, Duleep
Singh fought for his due recognition and remuneration from the British India Company and
lost.181 Of Elveden in Singh’s time, Clive Aslet writes, “Although by building a house the
Maharajah might have seemed to have reinforced his bond with Britain, in reality it had the
reverse effect. It was paid for by a mortgage from the East India Company, the interest on which
ate into his never–generous allowance.”182 Singh’s final chapter closes with vitriolic resentment
against the British throne exemplified in a letter to the Prince of Wales wherein he reclaimed his
royal status and signed it, “Sovereign of the Sikh Nation and proud implacable foe of
England.”183 Although the house carries some anti–British associations from this period, Iveagh
reclaimed the British authority over Indian culture by creating his own version of the Indian Hall,
making Elveden the house that most signifies the idea of British Empire in England (Fig. 17).184
Perhaps Iveagh expanded the Indian theme as a way of expressing the English Imperial
appropriation of Indian culture.
Iveagh set about a vast expansion of Elveden, effectively constructing a mirror image of
the structure as it was when he acquired it joined by a vast central Indian styled hall that was
179
Ibid, 8.
For more on Elveden, see Clive Aslet, “Elveden Hall, Suffolk II: A Seat of the Earl of Iveagh,” Country Life
(March 15, 1984): 672–6.
181
Ibid, 9.
182
Ibid.
183
Ibid.
184
Aslet, “Elveden Hall, Suffolk II,” 672.
180
52
topped by a copper dome. The creation of Iveagh’s marble Indian Hall, echoing Singh’s
drawing room, gives rise to speculation about Iveagh’s political views on the British Empire. He
was against Home Rule, indicating that he advocated England’s sovereignty over its territories;
and Iveagh’s Elveden expansion expresses his favor of this sovereignty. The examination of
some omissions of portraits of male figures along with some inclusions in the bequest in Chapter
Four reflects Iveagh’s position as a Royalist. Great care was taken in the expansion of the estate
with the assistance of William Young as architect and Caspar Purdon Clarke of the Victoria &
Albert Museum for the interior decoration.185
Presided over by both Lord and Lady Iveagh, the social scene at Elveden was indeed
grand. The Loyal Suffolk Hussars met party guests of Elveden with royal fanfare, leading their
procession from Thetford Station to the estate.186 Mayfair magazine called Elveden “appallingly
luxurious,” and Augustus Hare once again weighed in on his Guinness social experience at
Elveden by complaining about the “electric piano which goes on pounding away with a
pertinacity which is perfectly distracting.”187 Guests were entertained lavishly on shoots and
George V’s record in the book of November 15, 1899 show that he shot 368 pheasants, 127
partridges, twenty–eight hares, fifty–one rabbits, and a pig (Fig. 18).188 The evenings were spent
in the extravagant marble–lined Indian Hall, accompanied by musicians; and Lady Fingall
remembered the room as the coldest in England owing to its immense scale and the presence of
only two Italianate fireplaces.189 Surrounded by nobility, abundant game, magical interiors, and
the largest stables in England, it seems likely that the works of art chosen for Elveden would
have inspired conversation about outdoor life and politics.
185
Ibid., 12–14.
George Martelli, The Elveden Enterprise (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 52.
187
Ibid., 21.
188
Ibid.
189
Ibid., 15.
186
53
The 1984 Christie’s Elveden Hall Sale catalogue shows some surprising modern works,
as well as a large number of works depicting horses; sporting and outdoor scenes; exotic Spanish
characters; and portraits of gentlemen including, Duleep Singh. Whereas it is not known if all of
these works hung at Elveden during Iveagh’s lifetime, none of these works are included in his
bequest. The catalogue shows ten horse portraits by John Frederick Herring, yachting scenes by
George Webster, the aforementioned works of Mary Barton, eighteenth–century English genre
engravings; exotic Spanish portraits of Spanish; John Rogers Herbert’s Christ in the Carpenter’s
Shop (1860), and an 1885 portrait of Lady Iveagh by Elgar Hicks (Fig. 19).190 Of the portraits of
gentlemen in the sale, the majority are of those who defended England’s territory in some way
and include Roger Edge Pine’s Lord Amherst (c. 1790), Gainsborough Dupont’s George III
(1790), and William Hoare of Bath’s William Pitt (c. 1754).
Photographs of the shooting parties show that women were always a presence at Elveden,
requiring great effort in the transport of their ‘baskets’ of clothing for a long weekend, as it was
taboo to be seen in the same dress twice. The Iveagh’s marriage was characterized in gossip
columns of the day as “romantic,” and they were seen to be truly in love.191 It has been said that
after Lady Iveagh’s death in 1916, parties at Elveden were never as grandiose and were only
attended by male guests.192 Of the period following Lady Iveagh’s death Martelli says that “for
the rest of his life Lord Iveagh lived in semi–retirement. After the end of the war most of the
rooms in the vast house remained closed, the furniture covered with dust–sheets, and the only
guests were a few men friends. …the glory had departed … never to return.”193 Nothing is
190
See Christies Elveden Hall Catalogue. The works include: yachting scenes by Thomas Luny, and William Stuart;
English 1790s genre engravings by and after Francis Wheatly, Henry Singleton and George Morland (1790s); and
exotic Spanish portraits by figures by Sala y Frances and Melida y Alinari.
191
Aslet, “Elveden Hall, Suffolk II,” 672–3.
192
Martelli, Elveden Enterprise, 59.
193
Ibid.
54
known about the contributions of Lady Iveagh to her husband’s collections, beyond the trip with
her husband to Duveen’s.
Throughout this examination, the remarkable absence of advisors is a testimony to
Iveagh’s knowledge and confidence in making his selections. Whereas he wisely relied on
Agnew’s for the purchase of his core collection, only two other names appear as assisting him
with purchases: Caspar Purdon Clarke who advised on the colossal expansion and furnishing of
Elveden, and one Mr. Spence who guided the Guinnesses on a shopping trip to Florence in
1877.194 It is reasonable to think that Iveagh would have made numerous acquisitions on his
own during his travels and at home, such as the Spanish pictures from the Elveden sale and his
commissioned works of living artists.
Iveagh emerges as an educated collector, who not only understood the value of fitting his
properties with great art for social purposes, but also truly enjoyed his collections. The intense
purposefulness with which he collected identifies him as a man who understood the service that a
great collection provides toward social advancement. It also shows him to have had a
sophisticated knowledge of art. Iveagh’s own display consultant and renowned connoisseur Sir
Charles Holmes praised the collector, stating that, “His knowledge of the art and of anecdotes
and characteristics of old masters was considerable. He seldom offered to show his collection,
and yet no curator could have better explained it, or in a more interesting way than he did.”195
That he acted with very few advisors further demonstrates the high level of his knowledge about
art. His private demeanor and the fact that he never displayed his collection in public exhibitions
or catalogues distinguish him from many collectors of his time. On the rare occasions when he
did loan individual works for public display, he did so anonymously. By shunning the modern
194
195
Aslet, 12, 19–20. Martelli, 86.
Holmes, xiii–iv.
55
art scene while quietly patronizing modern artists and by collecting old masters and eighteenth–
century portraits, Iveagh’s collecting habits demonstrate the futility of defining him by any broad
class distinctions. His choices in crafting an identity as a collector were abundant. Most telling
about the differences in the regard with which family portraits were held between the English
and the Americans is the fact that, in keeping with the nineteenth–century tradition, the Guinness
family saw fit to sell the portrait of their great–great grandmother by Elgar Hicks in 1984.196
196
Christie’s, 76.
56
CHAPTER THREE
Iveagh and His Counterpart Collectors
The impulse to classify works of art based upon their styles is a hallmark of art history
and is useful in defining what George Kubler called “the shape of time.”197 When individual
collectors are classified into social groups according to the styles of paintings they collect,
judgments about them can be misleading because one is dealing with not only differences
between individuals but also social motivations in collecting similar works of art. Classification
is necessary for understanding historical developments, but caution must be exercised in
classifying individuals, lest they vanish into the recesses of their crowds. With this precaution as
a guide, this chapter will examine other collectors of old master and eighteenth–century paintings
in America and England in order to gain a clearer understanding of Iveagh’s motivations and the
place he holds among them
Iveagh and the Americans: Not As Similar As Many Say
When the Iveagh Bequest was opened to the public at Kenwood in 1928, Apollo
magazine exclaimed, “Eight Gainsboroughs secured for the English nation while America is still
gaping for ancestors. Gainsboroughs for Kenwood while Chicago and Des Moines are still
unsatisfied.”198 Whereas the popular impulse to group him with American robber baron
collectors and English nouveaux riche collectors has included Iveagh in the dialogue, it has also
been misleading. The conflation of the American and English collectors of old masters denies
197
George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University, 1962), 8–
15.
198
Julius Bryant, “The Iveagh Bequest From Guinness to Gainsborough,” in Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough
(New York: American Federation of Arts, 2013), 21.
57
the nuanced, but critical, differences in social and cultural motivations of these two groups of
collectors. It wrongly assumes that art served similar social purposes for the elite English class
as it did for the elite American class. Through a comparison of England’s elite collectors’ arena
with that of the Americans, it becomes clear that these two groups were culturally and literally an
ocean apart; yet in the end, Iveagh becomes similar to the Americans not as a collector but as a
patron.
Julius Bryant warns against the temptation to group Iveagh with American collectors and
states that, unlike his American counterparts, he was not a “patriotic pioneer–collector of English
eighteenth–century portraits, determined to keep one step ahead of his generation of American
collectors, pursuing masterpieces for his museum–in–waiting.” 199 Iveagh purchased Kenwood
late in his life in 1924, after his collecting days were finished, with the intention of living there
for ten years and then giving it to the nation.200 He unfortunately only slept at Kenwood for five
nights between 1924 and 1927, the three years in which he began earnestly considering which
paintings from his collection he would leave for the nation.201 During 2012 and 2013, paintings
from the Iveagh Bequest toured United States for the first time. Press coverage unanimously
grouped Iveagh with the American robber–baron collectors, Henry Clay Frick, J. P. Morgan, and
Henry Huntington, all of whom collected with the intention of making museums.202 Indeed
American collectors and Iveagh shared some tastes in paintings, but as collectors, this is where
the similarity ends. As Bryant contends, their motivations were for different purposes in
199
Bryant, 3. For the sentiment of American patriotic art collecting, and the outwardly conscious effort to use art in
America to build our image, see, Esmee Quodbach, “The Last of the American Versailles: The Collection at
Lynnewood Hall,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, 29 (2002): 42–50.
200
Bryant, “Re–presenting the Iveagh Bequest,” 86.
201
Ibid.
202
Willard Spiegelman, “Status Symbol,” Wall Street Journal, (June 12, 2012),
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303830204577446693055866210.html
American Federation of Arts, “Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough: The Treasures of Kenwood House, London,”
American Federation of Arts,
http://www.afaweb.org/exhibitions/treasuresofKenwood.php.
58
collecting; yet, through this examination the image of Iveagh ultimately emerges as that of a
patriotic patron with his bequest of the largest gift of art to the British nation in the twentieth
century. It is likely that, until now, Iveagh’s patriotic patronage has not been clearly
distinguished from his motivations as a collector and his cultural differences as an Anglo–
Irishman. By isolating Iveagh’s motivations and cultural differences as a collector from the act
of his bequest, the often–cited comparisons to the Americans are called into question.
Even if similar works were being collected, they served different purposes for collectors.
English elite collectors of the nineteenth century were more personally motivated and were
inheritors of an aristocratic tradition that viewed works of art as commodities to fund the
maintenance of their properties rather than as potential gifts to institutions. The National Gallery,
for example, purchased its foundational collection from the estate of J. J. Angerstein. The need
for private funding of England’s institutions was not promoted until 1903, when Christiana
Herringham recruited Roger Fry and others in founding the National Art Collection Fund to
acquire works, such as Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus (1647–51), for the National Gallery.203
American collectors used art in an outward, intensified effort to build art institutions and a
national identity, while portraying themselves as nation–builders on a level with the founding
fathers. Andrew Mellon has been considered a ‘patriot’ for founding America’s National Gallery
of Art.204
It is likely that when J. P. Morgan financed the American Academy in Rome at the Villa
Mirafiore—opened in 1906—he saw himself as a successor to Thomas Jefferson’s vision that all
203
For more on the National Art–Collection fund, see Mary Lago, “Christina Herringham and the National Art
Collections Fund,” The Burlington Magazine, 135 (Mar., 1993).
204
Esmeee Quodbach, “The Last of the American Versailles: The Widener Collection at Lynnewood Hall,”
Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, 29 (2002): 46, note 6.
59
American artists should benefit from going to Rome to learn about art and architecture.205
Nowhere in England does one see the act of private collecting so closely tied to the advancement
of national institutions. John Walker, former director of the National Gallery, Washington said
of P. A. B. Widener’s gift to the institution, “Whereas the nobility of Europe enjoyed their
collections for centuries, the Widener family is remarkable in America for having possessed their
works of art for two generations.” 206
The American democratic system was such that, without the existence of an aristocracy,
the newly wealthy industrial class assumed the top social rank with no further to climb.207 Elihu
Root, a former U.S. cabinet member, put it plainly when he proclaimed that Americans and their
political representatives wanted “the art of our fathers, the art of our private citizens to be the art
of our whole people.”208 The relevance of this seemingly obvious difference from the argument
that the elite English and American collectors had different motivations is that the Americans
were in the process of creating the country’s first elite class based on wealth, rather than co–
opting a pre–existing aristocratic class that was not inclined to benefit its nation’s art institutions
through private gifts and funding. Joseph Mordaunt Crook has claimed that England was
experiencing a “democratization” of the arts at the turn of the twentieth century.209 The misuse
of such terms potentially fosters a bald acceptance that the elite English and American collectors
of this period were similarly motivated. The term “democracy” as a social, rather than political,
term was used differently in each country. In England, the rise of the living artist and his
205
Strouse, 500.
Quodbach, 42–3.
207
Crook, 224.
208
Strouse, 500.
209
Crook, 2.
206
60
merchant–class patrons is equated with a notion of democracy that is defined by the middle–
class’s participation in aristocratic endeavors such as art collecting. 210
Social Advancement and National Identity
America’s newly wealthy collectors acted with a great deal of national and civic pride in
quickly sharing their acquisitions with the public. The nineteenth century was a time of
tremendous cultural growth for the young nation, which, according to Lillian Miller, suffered
from an inferiority complex as European visitors found its cultural institutions lacking.211 For
America’s first art historian, Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908) this undeveloped state of its
cultural landscape also applied to its scholars. He bemoaned that America lacked a “supply of
men who . . . do the higher and more lasting constructive work of civilization” and wondered
how long the nation would rely on “the thinkers and scholars of other lands?”212 Whereas Miller
offers no direct proof that Americans generally felt inferior, it is right to characterize the arts in
America as being incipient. John Dewey observed in 1927, “Be the evils what they may, the
experiment is not yet played out. The United States are not yet made; they are not a finished fact
to be categorically assessed.”213 The attacks on America’s state of the arts were coming from its
European visitors and not so much from her own people. Indeed, Roger Fry noted how openly
the Europeans detested the Americans, saying:
210
David Cannadine, 35–41. The English middle–class entered the House of Commons by 1832; and the Third
Reform Act of 1884–85 in England doubled the voting population of England and Ireland, bringing about Disraeli’s
anticipated class warfare between the landed patrician and the lower classes. Cannadine aptly quotes Robert Lacey’s
assessment of the dawn of democratic thinking: “The dawning of mass democracy [in 1884–85] brought into being a
new sort of popular power which could, if it wished, make the possession of title, money and even land quite
irrelevant.” Robert Lacey, Aristocrats (London: McClelland & Stewart, 1984), 133, quoted in Cannadine, 35.
211
Lillian B. Miller, Patrons and Patriotism: The Encouragement of the Fine Arts in the United States 1790 – 1860
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966),10.
212
Charles Eliot Norton quoted in Miller, 31.
213
John Dewey, “Pragmatic America,” in Larry Hickman, Thomas M. Alexander, editors, The Essential Dewey:
Pragmatism, Education, Democracy, Vol. 1 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, 1998), 31.
61
Like all other Europeanized people here we make signals of distress to one another in this
weltering waste of the American people. It is strange what an invariable bond of
sympathy this instinctive hatred of America as it exists to–day is—tho’ many believe in
the future. I suppose I do, as I’m investing so much in it.214
In 1902 Wilhelm Von Bode maintained that American collections contained nothing of real
importance. By 1911, during his final trip to America, his New York Times article recognized the
achievements of American collectors and claimed that Europe now had more “spurious and bad
pictures.” Bode, however, could not escape his inherent European snobbishness and also stated
that American collectors had “become by degrees enthusiasts for art and have attained an almost
childlike joy in their treasures such as we blasé Europeans can hardly know.”215
Illustrating the American confidence in the face of such attacks is the toast delivered by
Charles McKim at the celebration of the opening of the American Academy in Rome: “Drink
with me the health and longevity of these Medician benefactors.”216 This anecdote is
emblematic of the confident self–image of American patrons of this period. America’s national
debate on the role of art in society during this period was budding.217 Whereas some Americans
advocated the study of old masters and others argued for developing new artists, there was
consensus that the arts were central to cultivating the nation.218 This notion would impact civic
pride and the development of great private collections that were open to the public such, as
Isabella Stewart Gardner’s museum at Fenway Court in Boston.219 English enlightenment
philosophy, such as that of John Locke, informed America’s founding principles and its views on
214
Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography (1940; repr., : Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 135.
Scallen, 190, 191.
216
Ibid, 501
217
Miller, 8–23.
218
Ibid.
219
For more on Isabella Stewart Gardner, see Louise Hall Tharp, Mrs. Jack: A Biography of Isabella Stewart
Gardner, 1898 (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1965).
215
62
the moralizing nature of art.220 Additionally, the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds and the
British Academy of Art were significant to the development of America’s taste and the work of
its artists. 221 The teachings of John Ruskin also factored into the nineteenth–century dialogue on
art in America. Although Ruskin’s views differed from Reynolds’s on the importance of the
works of old masters, both men espoused the moralizing nature of the arts and their ability to
shape human conduct, which appealed to America’s puritanical sensibility.222
Early in the nineteenth century, Americans were not exposed to the works of old masters
due to the lack of supply; and they necessarily developed a taste for new works.223 Later in the
nineteenth century, however, American robber–baron collectors dominated the purchase of old
masters and English eighteenth–century portraits, with Morgan leading the pack in sheer volume;
Frick selectively mixing old masters, history paintings, and English portraits; and Huntington
purchasing more English portraits than anyone else in the world. In appropriating England’s
Enlightenment philosophy for its foundations, as well as England’s aristocratic and plutocratic
tastes to establish its elite class and national identity, America sought to appropriate the social
prestige and identity of its forbears. Concerning the selling of English works art in America,
Bernard Berenson wrote, “It is much easier to sell a second–rate picture that has belonged to any
English nobleman than a first–rate one that has belonged to a great name in the Italian
nobility.”224 David Hughes writes of America’s domination of European art collecting that:
the great obsession of the Gilded Age was acquiring the trophies of other earlier
cultures—especially those of a grander and more aristocratic Europe. . . . To buy the art
object, whether it was a suit of armor, a Giorgione, or a whole library, was also to
220
For an account of Locke’s influence on American philosophy see, Laura J. Scalia, “The Many Faces of Locke in
America’s Early Nineteenth Century Philosophy,” Political Research Quarterly 49, No. 4 (1996): 807–835.
221
For more on Reynolds’s principles and foundations in Enlightenment philosophy, see Amal Asfour and Paul
Williamson, “On Reynolds’s use of de Piles, Locke and Hume in His Essays on Rubens and Gainsborough,”
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 60 (1997).
222
Miller, 24–30.
223
Ibid., 28, 29.
224
Behrman, 68.
63
appropriate its history, its magic and its aura. Thus, with a huge sucking noise, old
Europe began to vanish into America.225
The English general public had much anxiety about the departure of their art treasures during the
late nineteenth century, and this inspired as much criticism by the public as it provided
opportunity for scholars and dealers.
The State of American Scholarship: Opportunity for Englishmen
Charles Elliot Norton was pessimistic about the nation’s cultural life and believed,
as Thomas Jefferson did, that America needed its own scholars.226 In the absence of such
a community, Fry, one of England’s well–connected art experts, joined forces with
August Jaccaci, editor of McClure’s Magazine and the unpublished chronicle Noteworthy
Paintings in American Private Collections, to create an international dialogue called “Art
in America” within the pages of the venerable Burlington Magazine.227 While this was a
noble attempt at a dialogue, cultural differences and differing views on the importance of
connoisseurship and social perspectives quickly terminated the enterprise.228
The American audience was not inclined to read articles on the technical or
scholarly analyses of works, and the English audience was not inclined to read about the
American social perspective.229 Fry made a most concerted effort to understand the
American art market and was appointed Curator of European Paintings at the
Metropolitan Museum in 1906. His American experience was not a complete success—
although his acquisition efforts were hugely successful—as he was not prepared for the
225
David Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (New York: Knopf, 1997), 228.
Miller, 31–2.
227
Flaminia Gennari Santori, “Holmes, Fry, Jaccaci and the ‘Art in America’ Section of The Burlington Magazine,
1905–10,” The Burlington Magazine 145 (Mar., 2003).
228
Ibid.
229
Ibid., 153.
226
64
roughness of the New York scene.230 Fry encountered philosophical and cultural
differences with J. P. Morgan who served as the Metropolitan’s president, further
illuminating some fundamental differences between the English and Americans in this
period.231 Fry was at once enamored of Morgan and his own reception in America;
however, he characterized Morgan’s taste as one borne of “a crude historical
imagination.”232 Morgan intimidated Sir Charles Holmes who wrote, “Mr. Morgan so
overwhelmed me at our first interview by his terrifying look and monumental silence,
that I could hardly speak.”233 Fry’s was a love–hate relationship with America that is
well documented and illustrates the seduction of America’s collective mission to
establish a national identity through the private accumulation of great art for public
service. Fry illustrated America’s lure for scholars in a January 1905 letter to his wife
Helen:
There is a big work to be done here and we should, in a sense, take a very leading
position. Money, I think, would come plenty, but more than that, real power to
shape things and real consideration. It’s a quite different spirit to that in
England. . . . It is extraordinary to find oneself looked up to and one’s opinion
regarded as it is here. I think that is really the thing that inclines me most.234
This statement echoes the call of America’s fertile ground for experts, scholars, dealers,
and enthusiasts seeking respect, fame, and fortune.
230
For more on Fry and his foray into the American art world see, Denys Sutton, ed, Letters of Roger Fry, Vol. 1
and 2 (New York: Random House, 1972), 22 –31, and Santori, op cit..
231
Sutton, 23, 32, 33, Auchincloss, Louis, J. P. Morgan: The Financier as Collector (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1990), 23, 24.
232
Strouse, 571.
233
Sir Charles Holmes, Self and Partners (More Self) (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 224.
234
Sutton, 231.
65
America’s Money for England’s Past
Lamenting the loss of British art to America, The Times in 1907 proclaimed, “American
money has lately been far too successful in conveying many of the finest examples of European
art from Europe, and especially England, across the Atlantic.”235 It is important to keep in mind
that this lamentation is coming from the public sphere and not from the aristocrats who were
selling their great–great grandmothers’ portraits to the highest bidders. Henry James brought the
English anxiety over the loss of its treasures to life in his play, Outcry, which opened in 1911.236
The play is based on the public outcry in London over the announcement of the sale of Hans
Holbein’s portrait, Christiana of Denmark, Duchess of Milan (1538) by the Duke of Norfolk, to a
foreign entity. The public outcry resulted in donations that allowed the painting to find a home
in London’s National Gallery.237 The characters in the play converse about a noble collection, a
blossoming connoisseur (perhaps Berenson), a “check–book” American collector, an art dealer,
and the noble family members. The connoisseur proclaims, “That art–wealth is at the mercy of a
leak there appears to be no means of stopping. It’s going out of our distracted country at a
quicker rate than the very quickest—a century and more ago—as its ever coming in!”238
Reitlinger ties the advent of this anxiety to the 1821 sale of the Edward Solly collection
to the Royal Gallery in Berlin, under the direction of Waagen, which “had passed unnoticed.” 239
The sale also marked the launch of the German raid on old masters in England. According to
Crook turn–of–the–century London was becoming Americanized in the sense that “wealth was
235
Nicholas J. Hall, ed., Colnaghi in America, (New York: Colnaghi, 1992), 11. Hall further states that an uproar
was caused by Hugh Lane’s sale of Titian’s portrait of Philip II to Mary Emory in the same year. Cannadine, 358.
Cannadine cites a 1903 Estates Gazette that warns: “The American invasion of England has begun with a
vengeance.”
236
Ibid., 12.
237
Henry James, “The Outcry,” henryjames.org, http://www.henryjames.org.uk/outcry/home.htm. [accessed January
19, 2013].
238
Ibid.
239
Reitlinger,125.
66
replacing breeding as the index of social prestige.” 240 Conversely, America’s wealth defined its
social index from its inception; and this lured prestige–seeking English experts, such as Charles
Eastlake, Oscar Wilde, and Fry, as well as the German scholars Bode and Valentiner, both of
whom had deep tentacles in England. Enterprising dealers such as Otto Guttekunst at Colnaghi
forged partnerships in America to broker great European works to Morgan, Frick, and others.241
Henry James’s comment on the state of the New York art market and the Marquand Bequest
resonates:
“. . . But the gifts and bequests in general, even when speciously pleasing or
interesting, constitute an object–lesson in the large presence of which the New
York mind will perform its evolution. . . . Acquisition . . . may, during the years to
come, bask here as in a climate it has never before enjoyed. There was money in
the air, ever so much money.”242
England’s insular slumber and its predilection for collecting the works of living artists invited
first the German institutions and then the more ominous Americans, with the power of individual
“ready money.”243
No contemporary scene, such as the one in England, existed in America at the time,
giving a wide berth to fame–and–fortune–seeking Englishmen in the arts.244 Extolling the
virtues of the English Arts & Crafts and Aesthetic movements were Charles Eastlake and Oscar
Wilde, who were met with cult–like reception on their American lecture tours.245 Perhaps
because the term “nouveaux riches” was not as sullied in America as it was in England,
240
Crook,155, 181.
For more on Guttekunst and his relationship with Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner in America, see
Saltzman, 45–89.
242
Henry James quoted in, Sutton, Denys, ed, Letters of Roger Fry, Vol. 1 and 2 (New York: Random House, 1972),
28.
243
Strouse, 488.
244
For more on the Americans and the New York Art scene see, Saltzman, Old Masters, New World; and John Ott,
“How New York Stole the Luxury Art Market: Blockbuster Auctions and Bourgeois Identity in Gilded Age
America,” Winterthur Portfolio 42 (2008): 133–58.
245
For an overview of the Aesthetic movement and its influence, see Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art For Art’s Sake, (New
Haven: Yale University, 2007).
241
67
enterprising Englishmen found more freedom of expression and a welcoming reception in
America.
Contrasts in the Transcontinental Art Markets
Not withstanding political and class distinctions, the art markets developed
differently in each nation. Until the 1880s the English were ahead of America in
scholarship, connoisseurship, institutional development, dealership networks, and
publications.246 Anna Jameson claimed that England was the birthplace of the private
collector in Europe, citing the Earl of Arundel in the early sixteenth century, and stating
that only princes and sovereigns collected until the middle of the sixteenth century.247
American collectors eclipsed the English collectors of old masters and English
eighteenth–century portraits during this period. With J. P. Morgan at the helm of the
Metropolitan Museum, America’s leading art acquiring institution sought only the best
scholars and rallied unprecedented private funds to build the nation’s public identity
through art. The American collector’s biggest rival for collecting in England was Bode,
who, in a series of articles in the early 1900s, singled out Morgan as the “most feared and
sought after” of the new American collectors. Bode also assured his audience in this
series that, with its knowledge of old masters and its history of scholarship, Europe
possessed big advantages over the American market.248 Despite the fact that England
was ahead of America in its inventory of world–class art in private collections, American
collectors still managed to rapidly accumulate an alarming number of European old
246
Herrmann, 17–20.
Jameson, xxi.
248
Scallen, 188.
247
68
masters, which explains England’s public shock over the rate at which it was losing
masterpieces.249
Widening the divide between the two nations’ art markets were the differences in
how works of art were distributed and displayed. In America auction house
environments, protocols, and displays were equally as important as any scholarly
analyses of the works on view.250 By contrast, the English auction rooms were musty,
dull, and emphasized scholarship.251 The state of British museums did not aid the
nation’s cultural image. America’s demand for showmanship and willingness to pay an
outrageous tariff for imported works indicates the value Americans placed on art as a
vehicle for gaining social and political status.252 Whereas some of the values placed on
works by Americans, most notably Gainsborough’s Duchess of Devonshire and The Blue
Boy and Rembrandt’s The Mill, have proved over time to be aberrations, they
demonstrate the intangible value of art as a means of building a national identity.253
Collectors such as Morgan circumvented the considerable tax on works of art by buying
rare books and manuscripts that could be justified as educational tools and were,
therefore, tax exempt.254 America’s robber–baron collectors had a love of the art–game
that distinguishes them from many English collectors, especially Iveagh. According to
249
Saltzman, 3–47.
Ott, John, “How New York Stole the Luxury Art Market: Blockbuster Auctions and Bourgeois Identity in
Gilded Age America,” Winterthur Portfolio 42 (2008): 135.
251
Ott, 137.
252
For more on the American Art Tariff and its impact on collecting European works of art, see Kimberly Orcutt,
“Buy American? The Debate over the Art Tarriff,” American Art 16 (Autumn 2001), and John Ott, 145. Ott argues
that when the tariff on foreign artworks was raised from 10 to 30 percent in 1883, it released a bottleneck in the
dealer network by those who had been reluctant to sell the best works and he quotes a letter to the editor of Studio
1”…the harder they made it for rich men to buy the better sort of foreign pictures, the more pride the rich men took
in snapping their fingers at the money barrier put up to fence in the market.”
253
Reitlinger 322, 423. Junius Morgan paid £10,605 for the Duchess in 1876, and for sentimental reasons, Pierpont
Morgan paid £30–35,000 in 1901 to re–claim it after its theft; Henry Huntington paid the first six figure amount for
Gainsborough of £148,000 for the Blue Boy in 1921; P. A. B. Widener purchased Rembrandt’s The Mill in 1911 for
£103,300.
254
Strouse, 487.
250
69
Bryant, Iveagh would have never been seen in an auction room, nor did he have a
consultant, such as a Langdon, Berenson, Waagen, or Bode.255
Although Iveagh knew J. P. Morgan personally and visited him in New York,
where he purchased real estate, as collectors, the two were indeed an ocean apart.256 It is
likely, although unconfirmed, that Iveagh would have visited Morgan’s collection at his
new library, where he displayed his works in a mixed manner, not unlike the display at
Kenwood. Morgan purchased entire lots in order to gain one or two prized objects and
compulsively collected a wide range of objects from multiple dealers until the time of his
death.257 His biographer, Jean Strouse, writes that “there was what Baudrillard called “a
strong whiff of harem” about this kind of collecting—a sense of intimacy “bounded by
seriality.”258 Morgan’s wife, Francis, famously quipped the he would buy anything from
a pyramid to Mary Magdalene’s tooth.”259 Iveagh, by contrast, collected for a short
period and bought what he liked with the almost exclusive advice of Agnew’s.260
Whereas Iveagh’s financial liquidity could have allowed a collecting habit like
Morgan’s, his goal was to quickly furnish his numerous properties in the manner of an
English gentleman. That he so rapidly achieved this goal is the mark of great self–
awareness and confidence, which is borne of knowledge. Although he did not publicly
participate in the art world, he quietly supported many exhibitions, artists, and institutions.
Iveagh, like the Americans, was indeed appropriating the lifestyle of the British
255
Julius Bryant, interview by author.
Ibid.; Martelli, A Man of His Times, 143. Responses from my inquiries to the Morgan Library indicate that there
is nothing in Morgan’s records referring to Iveagh.
257
Louis Auchincloss, J. P. Morgan: The Financier as Collector (New York: Harry N. Abrams 1990), 14 – 15. It
is not known if Morgan sold items from the lots he did not particularly want.
258
Jean Strouse, “J. Pierpont Morgan: Financier and Collector,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New
Series, 57 (Winter, 2000): 4.
259
Strouse, “J. Pierpont Morgan: Financier and Collector,” 13.
260
Bryant, interview.
256
70
aristocracy as an Irishman seeking to advance his family in high society. His American
counterparts, however, were collecting from the start with a mind to leave their lots
behind for national and civic posterity. Unlike the personal and private English approach,
theirs was an outward, conscious effort to put themselves and their nation in a position of
cultural leadership for their “museums in waiting.” It is not unreasonable to think that
Iveagh’s visits with Morgan in New York late in his life inspired him to consider giving
such a large gift to the British nation; and in this sense his patronage, rather than his
collecting, can be considered patriotic.
Iveagh’s Place Among British Collectors
Iveagh’s place among the his counterpart collectors in England presents a fascinating
study in contrasts, which is too large to give full weight to here; however, a cursory comparison
of Iveagh with a few of his peers reveals him to be less showy and more reserved about his
identity. Iveagh was neither a serial collector, like his Americans and British counterparts, nor a
collector with the intention of leaving his legacy in a house museum. As previously
demonstrated, English nineteenth– and turn–of–the–century collectors tend to be divided into
two groups; those who favored living artists and those who collected the works of “dead masters.”
The former are typically characterized as “merchant class,” or “bourgeoisie” and the latter as
“patrician,” or “aristocratic.” Since Iveagh collected both types of paintings, finding similar
collectors is a challenge.261 Iveagh’s selective, understated, and practical collecting habits are
most similar to those of some collectors from previous generations, specifically the Marquesses
of Hertford in the Wallace Collection.
261
Reitlinger, 85.
71
The Wallace Collection is often cited as an international influence on turn–of–the–
century art collectors.262 Amassed over four generations of Marquises of Hertford and opened
by Sir Richard Wallace in 1900, the Wallace Collection at Hertford House in London, set an
example for collectors such as Iveagh and Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild. First exhibited in
1875, this collection was likely viewed by Iveagh and may have set a direction for his selections
of art, as it did for so many others, including Rothschild.263 Bryant speculates that Iveagh and
Wallace would have known one another as Wallace owned a shooting estate in Suffolk and was a
trustee of the National Gallery of Ireland.264 Replete with masterpiece examples of French
eighteenth–century works by Fragonard, Boucher, and Watteau; English portraits by
Gainsborough, Reynolds, and Romney; and Netherlandish old masters by Rembrandt, Hals,
Cuyp, and Steen, this mix certainly echoes the tone for not only Iveagh’s selections but also
Frick’s and Morgan’s. The Wallace Collection would have rightfully been deemed “elite,”
“aristocratic,” or “patrician,” as the four generations of titled Marquesses justifies.265 The
concentration of eighteenth–century French works in the Wallace collection is said to have
influenced Iveagh to make his first purchase from Agnew’s in 1887 of what was then thought to
be Boucher’s The Flower Gatherers (ca. 1770).266
Whereas the mix of paintings bears a striking similarity to Iveagh’s, the Wallace
Collection is enshrined in the Seymour family’s ancestral Hertford House and focuses equally on
262
Quodbach, 45. “For the great collector’s of America’s Gilded Age, the Wallace Collection was the standard
against which their own ambitions were to be measured.”
263
Bryant, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough, 14.
264
Bryant, Kenwood,18, note 15.
265
Bryant, Kenwood, 12. For more on the Wallace Collection, see Pierre Cabanne, “Lord Hertford and Sir Richard
Wallace,” in The Great Collectors (Farrar, Straus: New York, 1963), 21–45 and The Wallace Collection (London:
Scala, 2005).
266
Bryant 118. Iveagh purchased numerous works by Boucher and Watteau that were dispersed among the family
and only chose two for Kenwood to represent this genre. In the interview, Bryant speculated that the French works
may have appealed more to Lady Iveagh. The two works he selected relate to the Wallace Collection, and place
Iveagh in a similar league.
72
the impeccable French Empire furnishings and other decorative arts. It clearly projects a
family’s lifestyle, as well as its obsession with collecting.267 Unlike Hertford House, Kenwood
does not as clearly identify Iveagh’s family history or lifestyle, having never served as his home.
The publication of catalogues for aspirational, merchant–class collectors was a hallmark
of this crowd; however, this activity would not have accorded with Iveagh’s demeanor.268
Notably the soap king, William Hesketh Lever, Lord Leverhulme, was guilty of showing off his
collections in the form of glitzy catalogues.269 Although Leverhulme’s collecting period (ca.
1900 – 1912) was slightly later than Iveagh’s, he also took a great interest in collecting English
eighteenth–century paintings and paid the spectacular price of £12,000 for Romney’s Sarah
Rodbard in 1903.270 Leverhulme’s public persona around his collections, and art in general, was
widely projected, particularly in the copyright scandals of John Everet Millas’ Bubbles for his
Pear’s Soap, and W. P. Frith’s New Frock for his Sunlight Soap. Leverhulme argued that these
scandals created new interest in ‘high’ art, which is not altogether incorrect.271 The plans for his
public museum were in the works from 1913, and Leverhulme used American examples of
glossy private collection catalogues for his own three–volume edition for the Lady Lever Art
Gallery.272 Lord Lever exemplifies the crowd of newly wealthy, flambouyant collectors of
Iveagh’s period. The South African diamond mining “randlords,” such as Sir Alfred Beit and
267
Cabanne, 21–45.
Herrmann, 21.
269
Lady Lever Art Gallery, The Lady Lever Collection, Port Sunlight (Cheshire: Lady Lever Art Gallery, 1968).
270
Edward Morris, “Paintings and Sculpture,” in Lady Lever Art Gallery, The Lady Lever Collection, Port Sunlight
(Cheshire: Lady Lever Art Gallery, 1968), 13–35.
271
Ibid., 14.
272
Ibid., 32.
268
73
Julius Wernher were also among the more showy collectors.273 By comparison, Iveagh is a
collector more closely associated with the reserved aristocrats of the eighteenth–century.274
Crook and Haskell indicate that another family of collectors, the Barings, may offer more
similarities to Iveagh’s conservative approach to projecting his collections with the key
differences being the time period over which each collection was amassed and the lack of Italian
history paintings in the Iveagh Bequest.275 Gustav Waagen catalogued the collections of Sir
Thomas Baring and Alexander Baring, Lord Ashburton, in 1838.276 In 1844 Anna Jameson
noted the dispersal of Sir Francis Barings’ considerable collection to the Queen of England.277
Given the Barings’ noble and merchant class status as bankers, as well as the number of Flemish
and Netherlandish works in Lord Ashburton’s collection, it is not unreasonable to think that this
family of collectors may have been a model for Iveagh. It may be of no small consequence that,
when Iveagh decided to float the Guinness stock in 1886, he declined an offer from the
Rothschild bank and gave it to the Baring brothers, indicating a close relationship with the
Baring family.278 Although it is not known, it is possible that Iveagh may have been familiar
with this collection and with the family’s disdain for publicity around it.
Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, likely also used the Wallace collection as an example for
amassing his own at Waddesdon. The fundamental difference with Iveagh, however, is that
Rothschild’s French lineage precluded him from collecting French Eighteenth–century paintings;
273
For more on the randlords see, Michael Stevenson, Art and Aspirations, The Randlords of South Africa and their
Collections (Cape Town: Vlaeberg, 2002).
274
For more on the characteristics of flamboyant nouveaux riches collectors see Crook, 57 – 72.
275
Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France
(Oxford: Phaidon Press Limited, 1976), 124 – 131; Crook, 46.
276
Waagen, 27–46, 265–86.
277
Jameson, 4–6.
278
Joyce, 148.
74
and he instead turned to Georgian portraits for Waddesdon.279 Whereas the French found it
acceptable to construct French–styled chateaux and to be surrounded by eighteenth–century
French furniture, French paintings from this period were shunned in favor of English portraits
and old masters.280 French demand for its eighteenth–century paintings, such as those of
Boucher, Fragonard and Watteau, diminished in the nineteenth century due to the association
with their Imperial past in the superfluous subject matter; yet French taste for furniture and
architectural styles of the period survived in exile.281
Rothschild, a successful Jewish immigrant, via Paris, and head of the Viennese banking
family, of which he was the head, set out to make a place for his family in English society with
the design and construction of his French chateau, Waddesdon, outside London.282 His
decorative arts are primarily continental; but Rothschild’s strategy in collecting paintings by
Gainsborough, Reynolds, Romney, and old masters of the Dutch and Flemish schools is
strikingly similar to Iveagh’s. Indeed, there were a few purchases by Iveagh that came to
Agnew’s through the Rothschild’s.283 Both Iveagh and Rothschild used Georgian English
portraits to communicate with members of their newly adopted English high society.284 Such
portraits may have been seen as part of the trappings of “anglophiles without ancestors.”285
Similarly, Rothschild also collected modern works, by such artists as Millais; however, like
Iveagh, he was not outwardly involved with the modern movement.286 To illustrate the regard
279
For a detailed account on Rothschild’s collection at Waddesdon see Michael Hall, Waddesdon Manor (New
York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002).
280
Reitlinger, 184–4.
281
Ibid.
282
Hall, 19–43.
283
Jan Wijnants’ and Johannes Lingelbach’s A Landscape With A Hawking Party was acquired from Alfred de
Rothschild, as were Gainsborough’s Two Shepherd Boys With Dogs Fighting, and An Associate of the Prince of
Wales. For more on these provenances, see the individual catalogue entries in Bryant, Kenwood.
284
Hall, 80.
285
Bryant, Kenwood, 12.
286
Ibid., p. 81.
75
with which Rothschild’s type of collecting was held, the Spectator of 1888 denounced one of his
purchases of a Cellini vase for the Duke of Devonshire as being unsupportive of living artists:
If the Baron had given the mighty sum he must have dispersed for his gold vase, to secure
the best work in gold that the present age can produce, he would have done more for art
than in transferring Cellini’s work from one storehouse of treasures to another. . . .
Raffaelles are not produced by giving £70,000 for a Raffaelle.287
Whereas Rothschild and Iveagh had much in common: foreign status, several generations
into merchant class wealth, and a lack of interest in the popular modern movement, there is much
they did not share. As does the Wallace Collection, Waddesdon trumpets a lavish lifestyle that is
not capable of harmonizing with Kenwood’s understated message about Iveagh’s persona.
Rothschild aggressively built a new estate in order to imprint his Frenchness upon English soil,
as opposed to acquiring a proper English house of the late eighteenth century to appropriate what
Iveagh likely deemed representative of the height of English civilization. By contrast, Crook
demonstrates that the quickest way to acquire status was to buy a major Georgian seat—which
Iveagh did with the purchase of Elveden—or at the least a classical house with impeccable
provenance, such as Kenwood.288
Both Iveagh and Rothschild favored English portraits of women and other likenesses of
“instant ancestors.” Iveagh shared tastes for pictures with both the English and American
collectors, but his motivations and representations of himself through his collecting are
distinctive. His purposeful collecting, borne of a studied taste and disciplined selectivity in art
and architecture, combined with his extreme reserve in sharing his collections with the public,
distinguish Iveagh as an individual collector among his aspiring peers as well as those who
287
Hall, 84.
Crook 45–7. Crook shows examples of other merchant and industrialist class members who claimed their
identities through classical architecture and states, “The lure of classicism never had much to do with comfort or
convenience. Ever since Alexander Pope, the Palladian mansion had been a byword for haughty comfort.”
288
76
preceded him. It is likely that there are more such reserved collectors yet to be identified, due to
their private demeanors and the tendency in recent literature to focus on England’s modern artists.
77
CHAPTER FOUR
What Iveagh’s Collections and Selections for Kenwood Reveal
About His Identity
Iveagh’s Duality: His Acuity as a Collector and The Ghost of Judas
The speed and acuity with which Iveagh acquired his collection and the thoughtfulness
with which he selected the works for his bequest are primary points of entry to the discovery of
his identity as a collector. That he was ahead of many other collectors in the rising marketplace
for English eighteenth–century portraits is not to say that he had more abundant choices than
others. Throughout the late nineteenth century, portraits flooded the marketplace as aristocratic
families decided to sell them as they saw the new taste for British portraits becoming fashionable.
Bryant suggests that even though Iveagh used Agnew’s as his dealer, he chose every picture
himself and did not let Agnew’s buy in bulk on his behalf.289 Anthony Blunt, in his early
catalogue on Kenwood, states that Iveagh “gave proof of remarkable discrimination and personal
taste in the choice of paintings for his collection.”290 Iveagh’s power of discrimination coexisted
with the proclaimed ‘haunting’ induced by the attribution of Rembrandt’s Judas.291 The conflict
between these two driving forces defines Iveagh as a keen collector who was aware of the
challenges posed by the state of connoisseurship and of his personal tastes for old masters and
English portraits.
289
Bryant, e–mail, February 5, 2013.
Blunt, Kenwood, 4.
291
Julius Bryant, “Kenwood’s Lost Chapter: Julius Bryant Reveals the Forgotten Story of the National Gallery’s
Management of the Iveagh Bequest, 1928–49” Apollo Magazine (March 1, 2004)
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Kenwood's+lost+chapter%3A+Julius+Bryant+reveals+the+forgotten+story+of...–
a0114477248.
290
78
Certainly, the canon of art history is in a constant state of becoming, a situation reflected
in the changed attributions of several works in the Iveagh Bequest. In 1888, when Iveagh
purchased Portrait of an Unknown Woman (ca., 1644) as a Rembrandt, it met all of his
requirements for irrefutable attribution and clean provenance––it came down through two
generations of the Marquesses of Lansdowne and both Smith and Waagen listed it as a
Rembrandt.292 It was subsequently published by others, including Bode, as a Rembrandt; and it
was not until 1982 that Albert Blankert confirmed the painting as being by Ferdinand Bol.293
When Bryant arrived at Kenwood as Curator in 1983, the authorship of four works by Romney
and three by Gainsborough were questioned; and Bryant made cases for reinstatement in some
cases and reattribution in others.294 Frans Snyder’s Figures With Fruit and Game (ca. 1635) was
purchased by Iveagh in 1888 as a Rubens’ portrait of the artist and his wife but was subsequently
determined to be a peasant scene by Snyders (Fig. 20).295 At the time of his death, the works
selected for Iveagh’s bequest were those with unquestioned attributions and provenances,
indicating that he wanted to leave a gift to the nation that he was certain about. It seems
reasonable to say that Iveagh would have also understood the changing nature of attributions of
great works of art. After all, it is only the great ones to which the public and many collectors pay
any attention.
Iveagh’s personal involvement with the selections for his collections demonstrates a kind
of understanding that is only borne of knowledge. His understanding of the changing canon of
art through scholarship is reflected in his aforementioned correspondence on Judas. Most telling
is a note of 1927, the year of his death, in which he states, “when Agnew was cleaning it in
292
Bryant, Kenwood, 28-9.
Ibid.
294
Ibid., 23.
295
Ibid., 78.
293
79
February, 1927, he said he thought it was a Rembrandt, Dr. Degener of Amsterdam also saw it
and pronounced it to be a picture of the Rembrandt School but not a Rembrandt.”296 That he was
still searching for the truth about the authorship of this picture at the end of his life reveals a man
deeply engaged with the works in his collection. It is conceivable that Iveagh did not view Judas
as a lesser work than the others, yet given his highly private demeanor he probably did not wish
to have a dialogue about attributions prompted by his legacy. Furthermore, Iveagh’s choices of
works to leave to his family surely influenced the Kenwood bequest.
“A Fine Example of the Artistic Home of a Gentleman of the Eighteenth Century”
Deeper meanings in Iveagh’s selections for Kenwood come into focus by considering the
estate that houses Iveagh’s collection and announces his public identity. Frank Hermann has
incorrectly stated that Iveagh bought Kenwood in 1925 specifically to restore it and give it and
his collection back to the state. Herrmann also asserted that Iveagh collected for this project
vigorously until the time of his death.297 Bryant vehemently contests this and insists Iveagh
bought Kenwood to restore and live in for ten years as his place of respite from his immediate
social world, away from the bustle of the city. He then intended to bequeath Kenwood and some
of his collection, but certainly he did not collect for this purpose up until his death.298 In 1838 J.
C. Loudon hailed Kenwood as “the finest country residence;” and Robert Adam had promoted it,
like none other of his works, through a set of engravings during the 1770s.299 Built originally in
1616, the residence was extended and greatly improved inside and out by Adam for his patron
296
Bryant, “Kenwood’s Lost Chapter,” 7.
Herrmann, 393.
298
Bryant, Interview; E–mail, February 5, 2013. Crook notes that Hampstead Heath was the favoured retreat of
many millionaires. “All these men left a million pounds in the decade 1915–25; some of them several million. All
were English, all were self–made, and all ended their careers in Edwardian London. But they lived in the suburbs, a
place—to echo Carlyle—where retired wholesalers look down on retired retailers, and retired manufacturers look
down on both.”
299
Bryant, Kenwood, 1.
297
80
William Murray, First Earl of Mansfield, in the 1760s. Mansfield, known as the greatest lawyer
of the eighteenth century, defended the British government against William Pitt’s efforts to
continually expand the British Empire by declaring war on Spain in 1761.300 In 1774 Adam
himself wrote of Kenwood in an attempt at self–promotion, “The whole scene is amazingly gay,
magnificent, beautiful, and picturesque … nor is it easy to imagine a situation more striking
without, or more agreeably retired and peaceful within.”301 Once again, Iveagh is appropriated a
property—as with Elveden—with the aura of the aristocracy and British Empire; but this one
comes with the added aura of the most prominent British architect of the eighteenth century.
Kenwood perfectly fulfills Iveagh’s intention in the 1929 Act of Parliament establishing his
bequest to leave “a fine example of the artistic home of a gentleman of the eighteenth
century.”302
Whereas a distancing of land from money during the Victorian era overtook the
eighteenth–century association of property with wealth in Iveagh’s Edwardian Britain period it
was acceptable for wealth to be associated both with the urban and the rural.303 Iveagh’s return
to the eighteenth–century landed lifestyle took place at Elveden, yet Kenwood bridges the urban
mercantile life and that of the country in its suburban setting. It would have been far less
accessible to as great a number or people had his bequest been situated at Elveden. Conversely,
an eighteenth–century building in London’s city center would not have been associated with land
and, therefore, would not have as appropriately accorded with the idea of an “artistic home of a
gentleman of the eighteenth century.”
300
Brittanica.com. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/462131/William–Pitt–the–Elder/5737/Leadership–
during–Seven–Years–War
301
Robert Adam quoted in Bryant, 1.
302
Bryant, Kenwood, 19.
303
Crook, II; For more on the changing associations of property and wealth in eighteenth–century England, see
Lawrence E. Klein, “Property and Politeness in the Early Eighteenth–Century Whig Moralists: The Case of the
Spectator,” in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves, Consumption and Culture
in the 17th and 18th Centuries (London: Routledge, 1995), 223–33.
81
Whereas Iveagh’s selection of the sixty–three paintings for Kenwood was part of an
attempt to emulate the collection of an artistic eighteenth–century gentleman’s estate, it is still
very much that of a late Victorian, early Edwardian man.304 The selections lack what Bryant
calls the “grand mythological, historical or religious subjects . . . or ideal landscape,” that would
have been part of an eighteenth–century aristocratic collection.305 It is not precisely known why
Iveagh did not collect religious subject; however, the supply was abundant at this point with
Berenson, Morgan and others acquiring them. It is reasonable to think that because most of such
works were handed down through the Catholic tradition of Raphael, Iveagh’s reserved Protestant
background precluded this activity. Iveagh’s Kenwood selection is divided into the following
groups: seventeenth–century Dutch and Flemish works, eighteenth and nineteenth century
continental works, eighteenth and nineteenth century British works, and a small group of French
eighteenth–century paintings. It is not likely that Iveagh sought to slavishly imitate eighteenth–
century collections, as Kenwood is not only lacking in mythological and religious subjects, but
also in sporting scenes by Stubbs and genre pictures by Hogarth.306 The Christie’s Elveden Hall
sale catalogue of 1984 shows sporting scenes and horse portraits by John Doyle, James Ward,
James Pollard, and John Frederick Herring.307 The Farmleigh exhibition catalogue of 2009
shows Hogarth’s The Four Times of Day and The Rake’s Progress series of engravings.308
Clearly, Iveagh had the option to include such scenes in order to better reflect the mix in an
eighteenth collection. Waagen characterized great collections of the Dukes of Marlborough and
Devonshire, the Marquesses of Lansdowne, Earl Pembroke and Sir Robert Walpole, as
304
Bryant, Kenwood, 19.
Ibid.
306
Ibid.
307
Christies, Elveden Hall.
308
Farmleigh catalogue, 58–61.
305
82
containing great numbers of Venetian school works.309 Whereas Waagen is writing about those
who represent the top of their class in wealth and collections, they are the collectors whom
Iveagh most likely sought to emulate; this is evident in the provenances of many works in the
Iveagh Bequest, most notably those from the Lansdownes.310 The lack of Italian history and
religious painting in the Iveagh Bequest, and throughout his known collection, indicates Iveagh’s
personal taste drove his collecting, rather than the literal imitation of past collectors. The
presence of works by many artists who were just being rediscovered in Iveagh’s day—Hals,
Guardi, and Vermeer—distinguishes his selections from an eighteenth–century ancestral
collection and demonstrates that he was an educated collector on the cutting edge of his time.311
English collectors of the eighteenth–century were also known to patronize living artists,
such as Reynolds and Gainsborough, therefore Iveagh’s omissions from the bequest of his
contemporary the contemporary paintings he collected indicates that he wanted to display works
of familiar artists in the eighteenth–century rather than the emulate eighteenth–century collecting
principles. The inclusion of contemporary works likely did not accord with his vision of his
vision of an ‘artistic gentleman of the eighteenth–century,’ or more precisely, himself as a
collector in his time.
In his quest for self–Anglicization, Iveagh makes a grand bow to English artists and
aristocrats through his selections. It is easy, on the one hand, to rationalize the omission of the
Irish artists Orpen and Barton. On the other hand, it is curious that Herbert and Millais would be
left out of the Kenwood selections, as their contributions to English art are part of the canon; and
309
Waagen 38–40. Lansdowne once owned four works in the Iveagh Bequest including Rembrandt’s Self Portrait;
for more on the Lansdowne provenances at Kenwood see, Bryant, Kenwood.
310
Ferdinand Bol’s Portrait of and Unknown Woman (bought as by Rembrandt), Cupy’s View of Dordrecht, van
Ostade’s A Canal in Winter, and Rembrandt’s Self Portrait all came down through the Marquises of Lansdowne. For
more details on provenances, see individual entries in Bryant’s Kenwood.
311
Bryant, Kenwood, 18. On the rediscovery of Hals, see Haskell, 32–5, 146–50 and Reitlinger, 141–2.
83
Millais’ contemporary fame and acceptance as a member of the Royal Academy would have
justified inclusion.312 After years of resistance and rejection, John Everett Millais was the only
member of the Pre–Raphaelite Brotherhood to join the Academy.313 The influence of Herbert’s
Christ in The Carpenter’s Shop (ca. 1847) on Millais’ Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–
50) is well known and, if shown with Iveagh’s Lilacs (1885) by Millais, the Herbert could
prompt discourse about England’s ‘golden age’ of the living painter.314 The lack of religious
subject matter among Iveagh’s Kenwood selections may explain the omission of Herbert. Millais’
Lilacs (1885) presents a more complex omission based upon its content. Purchased by Iveagh in
1888, Reitlinger calls Lilacs, one of the artist’s “blatant vulgarities,” along with Bubbles and
Cherry Ripe.315 Donated to the Dublin City Gallery in 1908, Lilacs bears a striking resemblance
to Sir Thomas Lawrence’s Miss Murray (1824–26) in the Iveagh Bequest (Fig. 21). Both
paintings depict the innocence of young girls, presenting fresh flowers cradled in their skirts, and
are in keeping with Iveagh’s predilection for portraits of children. The other striking modern
work listed in Agnew’s inventory is G. F. Watts’s Thetis (1869), a highly sensuous nude, clearly
underdressed for the occasion at Kenwood. The family gifted Thetis to the Watts Gallery, Surrey
in 1951.316 Perhaps Millais and Watts were too closely aligned with Iveagh’s own time, and the
artists’ reputations too closely associated with the middle and nouveaux riches classes to serve
the construction of Iveagh’s lofty identity.
312
Hugh Lane Gallery hosts Iveagh’s gift of John Everett Millais’s Lilac’s 1908. This painting bears a striking
resemblance to Iveagh’s selection of Thomas Lawrence’s Miss Murray (1824–25), Bryant, 277.
313
For more on the PRB and the reaction against the Academy, see Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre–
Raphaelites (London: Tate, 2000), 35–40+101–103.
314
For more on Herbert and Millais, see Prettejohn, 46–50, and Christie’s Elveden Hall, 58.
315
Reitlinger, 145.
316
See Annex.
84
Display and Dialogue
Essential to an examination of Iveagh’s identity through the works he selected to display
his identity are the notions that works of art and their meanings do not exist in isolation from one
another and their meanings change over time. Iveagh’s omissions inform one about the identity
he wanted to reveal. The construction of André Malraux’s “Museum Without Walls” is founded
on the dialogue among works of art throughout the ages. Malraux writes:
“We have learned that, if death cannot still the voice of genius, the reason is that genius
triumphs over death not by reiterating its original language, but by constraining us to
listen to a language constantly modified, sometimes forgotten—as it were an echo
answering each passing century with its own voice—and what the masterpiece keeps up
is not a monologue, however authoritative, but a dialogue indefeasible by Time.”317
For Malraux, the condition of metamorphosis of works of art is not a matter of chance. It is their
governing law.318 Upon this foundation of continuously changing dialogue, rests this
examination of what Iveagh’s selections echo about his identity.
The display of works of art in a gallery setting determines the course of dialogue among
the works. Sir Joshua Reynolds once said of a gallery that it was “hung round with thoughts.”
Anna Jameson echoes this, adding, “and not thoughts only, but memories, hopes, aspirations.”319
Kenwood represents what Bryant calls a “mixed hang;” one that could be found in a residence
rather than in a museum, where works are often grouped by period or style, inviting
“comparisons across centuries and seas.”320 Kenwood is unique among house museums,
partially because Iveagh did not live in the house during his short period of ownership from 1925
to 1927. By contrast, the Wallace Collection at Hertford House is enshrined in the ancestral
Seymour home, where the works are grouped by genre, discouraging conversations among
317
Malraux, 69.
Malraux, 68.
319
Jameson, 80.
320
Bryant, 20.
318
85
periods. The works in Iveagh’s selection seem to be conducting a grand discussion about the
picturesque, the ladies of high society, subtle politics, and intellectual wit.
Women and Children First
The women and children of Kenwood are pleasing subjects; however, these images call
forth deeper meanings. Aside from the obvious flattery a procession of desirable women
delivered to the powerful male, these works served as conversation pieces for both the male and
female company kept by Iveagh. One can imagine lively dialogue among the ladies about the
variety of dress and character represented in the portraits of women. Mary, Countess Howe’s
contemporary fashion, remarkably rendered by Gainsborough (ca. 1764), stands in contrast to
the muted tones of Reynolds’s idealized classical drapery in Mrs. Musters as Hebe (1782) (Figs.
22, 23). Generally, Gainsborough depicted contemporary fashion whereas Reynolds preferred
the idealized timeless classical drapery that strives to put portraiture on the level with history
painting. One of the more outrageous fashions may have been Gainsborough’s Lady Brisco (ca.
1776) whose hairdo delivers an eighteenth–century fantasy (Fig. 24).
What is the significance of the presence of numerous less than honorable beautiful
women, such as Romney’s Emma Hart as The Spinstress (ca. 1784–5) who was an illiterate
harlot and mother of an illegitimate child?321 Perhaps the most famous temptress in the crowd is
Reynolds’s Kitty Fisher as Cleopatra Dissolving the Pearl (1759).322 Although Iveagh did not
select this work for his bequest, it was passed down to his third son, 1st Baron Moyne, who
bequeathed it to Kenwood in 1946.323 As the daughter of a prostitute, Miss Fisher became an
infamous courtesan in London and was the subject of many prints and poems, one of which was
321
Bryant, Kenwood, 378.
Ibid., 308.
323
Ibid.
322
86
entitled “Kitty’s Stream of Noblemen Turned Fishermen.” It is recorded that she paid twenty–
two visits to Reynolds in 1759 alone, when he, too, likely succumbed to her temptations.324 One
can imagine the conversations ignited by her presence in Iveagh’s social circle. More intrigue is
to be found surrounding the painting’s purchase by Iveagh, who bought it the very same day that
Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild sold her out of his harem of eighteenth–century beauties. The
omission of this acquisition from the bequest may have been driven by the nature of Fisher’s
character and because Iveagh acquired it after Rothschild enjoyed his time with her likeness.
Nonetheless, Miss Fisher was part of his stable of women and showed him to have a
sophisticated flare for social intrigue.
Of particular interest in the selection of portraits of children is Reynolds’s The Angerstein
Children (1782–3) (Fig. 25). Iveagh may have been paying homage to the love of his own three
boys through his collecting of portraits of children however, some evoke deeper meanings. This
selection could be homage to Angerstein’s contribution of Dutch and Flemish masters that
started the National Gallery. Iveagh was a supporter of the Gallery, along with N. M. Rothschild
and Charles Cotes, and contributed £10,000 to purchase works from Longford Castle, including
Holbein’s The Ambassador, Moroni’s Portrait of an Italian Nobleman, and a work thought to be
by Velasquez but now attributed to Mazo.325
The Fancy Pictures
What do the number of ‘fancy pictures’ say about Iveagh’s sense of humor? Fancy
pictures of the eighteenth century were forms of allegory and humor, often sexually charged.
This genre was popular in France and England during the eighteenth-century, with artists such as
324
325
Ibid., 308
Herrmann, 122.
87
Boucher, Elisabeth Vigee–Lebrun, and Jean Baptiste van Loo popularizing it in France.326
Certainly Reynolds’s Infant Academy (1781–2) can be read as a satirical commentary on his
view of the state of art in England at the time, with naked children assuming the status of master
and patrons (Fig. 26). Of Reynolds’s ‘fancy pictures,’ Jameson writes, “his fancy pictures are
enchanting; they are so many bits of lyrical poetry, full of novel and graceful ideas, full of
amenity and sweetness; his parodies and adaptations of certain old pictures are exquisitely
felicitous.”327 In keeping with Iveagh’s penchant for acquiring well documented and exhibited
works is the purchase of the Infant Academy, one of Reynolds’s best–known works. It was
exhibited in the 1813 tribute, at which time the Observer wrote, “Of his talents in compositions
of a less dignified but more generally pleasing nature, the Infant Academy … and the Gipsy
Fortune Teller afford most exquisite specimens.”328 The Fortune Teller (ca. 1781) joins the
fancy dialogue at Kenwood, along with Venus Chiding Cupid for Learning to Cast Accounts
(1771), and expands it from the intellectual state of English art to the playful forecasting of one’s
future and the follies of love.
The Men
There were omissions of certain portraits of men, who somehow defended England’s
territories, somehow did not serve Iveagh’s self–image. The eight male portraits at Kenwood
include two self portraits by Rembrandt and Reynolds; a presumed self–portrait of Rubens, now
attributed to Snyders; and five portraits conveying political and mercantile messages, the most
subtle of which may be Van Dyck’s portrait of James Stuart, 1st Duke of Richmond (ca. 1636)
326
Bryant, Kenwood, 318, 334; for more on the French and the genre of Infant Academies see Angela Rosenthal,
“Infant Academies and the Childhood of Art: Elisabeth Vigee–Lebrun’s “Julie With a Mirror,” Eighteenth Century
Studies 37, No 4 (2004): 605–28.
327
Jameson, 296.
328
Joseph Farington, The Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds (London: Pallas Athene, 2005), 192.
88
(Fig. 27). James Stuart was cousin to Charles I and a strict confidant leading up to his execution
by Cromwell’s puritanical forces. Had this portrait traveled to Elveden, it may have inspired
conversation with the royal guests after a day of shooting about rising Irish Nationalism, to
which they were all opposed. No matter where this portrait hung, it would have spoken about
the reign of Charles I and his great art collection, which was tragically ruined by Cromwell’s
forces. Bryant suggests that the collection of Charles I informed Iveagh’s collecting pattern to
some degree. This is, perhaps, revealed through the purchase of the Snyders painting. Charles I
had two such self–portraits by Rubens in his collection, notably his self–portrait as a courtier of
1623.329
Also omitted from the bequest is a portrait purchased as having been by Holbein (ca.
1540s) of a gentleman identified as Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, and Gainsborough
Dupont’s portrait of George III (ca. 1790).330 The Holbein attribution would have accorded with
the Charles I influence; however, the subject matter may have been inappropriate at the time of
his bequest. Thomas Cromwell was Henry VIII’s chief minister during England’s break with the
Roman Catholic Church. Although Iveagh’s father funded the restoration of St. Patrick’s
Cathedral, the family was aligned with the Protestant Church of England; and making any kind
of statement about the initial break from the Catholicism would have been politically insensitive
during Ireland’s struggle for Home Rule. Although Iveagh was against Home Rule, his
company’s dependence on the Irish workers would have made it a flaunting of support for the
Protestant break counterproductive to the company’s success. The omission of Dupont’s George
III may have had something to do with respect to Iveagh’s American friends such as J. P.
Morgan; but it may more likely be due to the fact that this work is copied from the original,
329
330
Bryant, Kenwood, 78.
Christies, 69, 65.
89
which hangs in Windsor Castle, and may have been viewed by Iveagh as too aspiring or
inauthentic.
Gainsborough’s Associate of the Prince of Wales (ca. 1781), purchased by Iveagh as a
portrait of George IV when he was Prince of Wales, was selected for Kenwood. After 1953, the
subject’s identification as an anonymous member of the Prince of Wales’s court has diminished
the importance of this work.331 The relevance of its inclusion is that Iveagh was paying homage
to the predecessor of his friends, George V and Edward VII, and in so doing, associating himself
with royalty. The portrait Iveagh commissioned by Arthur Stockdale Cope—a copy of which
hangs at Kenwood—shows him in uniform with the order of St. Patrick and clad as a figure
approaching royalty. A later inclusion, by Iveagh’s descendants, is John Jackson’s William
Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield (1805). This is a copy of a portrait of the former owner of
Kenwood by Joshua Reynolds. It is a fine copy and would have been a splendid contribution to
the dialogue about Kenwood itself. It is curious that it did not make the selection process, given
that Iveagh bought this work in 1925, the year he purchased Kenwood. Iveagh most likely did
not select this painting because it is not the original.
The most vociferous male contributor to the dialogue about Iveagh’s identity is that of
Frans Hals’s Pieter van den Broecke (1633) (Fig. 28). This is a typically lively portrait by Hals
of a highly successful Dutch merchant who, as admiral of a fleet for the Dutch East India
Company, was decorated upon his return from India in 1630.332 This sparkling image of a
successful, adventurous businessman on the high seas was in accord with Iveagh’s identity as a
hugely successful merchant and avid yachtsman. The inclusion of the painting in the bequest is
331
332
Bryant, Kenwood, 224.
Ibid., 56.
90
understandable in light of the recent rediscovery of Hals and the presence of his Laughing
Cavalier (1624) in the Wallace Collection, legitimizing its inclusion in the bequest.
Of Boats and Birds
Iveagh’s love of yachting, shooting, and the outdoors affected his selections for Kenwood.
The Elveden Hall sale catalogue lists twenty–seven seascape paintings, including several by
George Webster, Thomas Luny, and William Stuart.333 Of the six seascape selections for his
bequest, Iveagh chose four well–known works of Netherlandish painters Jan van de Cappelle,
Aelbert Cuyp, and Willem Van de Velde, as well as two modern English works by J. W. M.
Turner and the father and son team of John and John Berney Crome. The sea played a big role in
Iveagh’s social life, and his selections of Cuyp’s well–known View of Dordrecht (ca. 1655) and
the Cromes’ Yarmouth Water Frolic (1821) present two views of what the ocean may have
meant to Iveagh. Cuyp’s view is dominated first by the big expanse of sky and second by a large
ocean–going merchant ship surrounded by much smaller local riverboats (Fig. 29). Dordrecht
was a city whose economy was being eclipsed by Amsterdam and Rotterdam during the
seventeenth century, yet it continued to thrive with a healthy trade in timber along the river.334
The depiction of trade and changing commercial forces would have likely appealed to Iveagh,
whose own commercial enterprise was rapidly growing. The Cromes’ English view is one of
pure pleasure, as boaters ready themselves for a festive rowing match in which the entire village
participated.335 Through the sharing of this painting as a part of the bequest, Iveagh shares the
part of himself that so loved the pleasure of the regattas at Cowes.
333
Christies, 28–49.
Bryant, Kenwood, 36.
335
Ibid., 180.
334
91
Iveagh’s new status as a member of the landed elite is reflected in the hanging of Jan
Wijnants’ and Johannes Lingelbach’s Landscape With a Hawking Party (ca.1666) (Fig. 30) and
Sir Edwin Landseer’s Hawking in Olden Times (1832). At the time, he was also hosting some of
the best shooting parties of the period at Elveden. There is a harmonious echo produced by these
works across two centuries, at once recalling all of the grand times had at Elveden hunting birds
and uniting the Netherlands and England. Such traditional subjects would have also been present
in many country houses in England at the time.
The Netherlandish, Flemish and British Exchange at Kenwood
Kenwood’s mingling of Dutch and Flemish masters with Reynolds and Gainsborough is
reminiscent of the cultural debt England owned the Netherland by the eighteenth–century,
especially in panting. Gainsborough’s debt to Rubens and van Dyck, particularly during his
‘Bath period’ (1755–74), is well documented and resonates in Going to Market (ca. 1786–71),
which features the first appearance of a cottage in his oeuvre (Fig. 31).336 Gainsborough’s debt
to Van Dyck’s treatment of drapery has already been demonstrated. Reynolds’s Discourses
included references to both Van Dyck and Gainsborough, and was widely read by collectors of
Iveagh’s generation.337 The absence of Italian old master history paintings, such as those handed
down through the school of Raphael and the Venetian decorative painters, such as Veronese and
Titian, places the historical focus of the Iveagh Bequest on the Flemish and Netherlandish works
of Van Dyck, Snyders, Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer, Cuyp, and Wijnants. Iveagh’s independence
of mind guided by his personal taste is clear when one considers the rising scholarship on Italian
336
Bryant, Kenwood, 194–98. For more on Gainsborough’s Bath period, see Michael Rosenthal, The Art of Thomas
Gainsborough (New Haven: Yale University, 1999), 23–53, and Susan Sloman, Gainsborough in Bath (New Haven:
Yale University, 2002).
337
Bryant, Kenwood, 336–38; Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed., Robert B. Wark (New Haven: Yale,
1975).
92
art in his period from those such as Berenson, Bode, and Morelli, and the fact that others such as
J. P. Morgan, included Italian history paintings among their acquisitions.
The lack of old master history paintings and his favoring of Dutch and Flemish masters
indicates that Iveagh was more taken with the painterly, pleasant aesthetic delivered by art rather
than an overtly moralizing message delivered through subject matter. That his bequest contains
no mythological Italian history paintings, which Gainsborough claimed, “had better be in a
church,” signals a personal message about Iveagh on a human, rather than spiritual, level.338
Iveagh may have been responding to the English eighteenth–century sentiment about the
painterly in art when he made his selections. The preference for the painterly over the historical
and moralizing content in art was at the heart of the discourse within the Royal Academy when
Reynolds was appointed President in 1768.339 In his early Discourses, Reynolds put forth his
concept of the ‘Great Style’ made up of an idealized expression of nature—from looking at
nature—and declared art a liberal artistic “sister” to poetry.340 This declaration goes to the center
of the late eighteenth–century debate in England about the copying of nature’s being a merely
mechanical trade or an intellectual pursuit.341 Prior to 1781, Reynolds shared the English view
of Dutch art as defined by Giovanni Bellori and handed down through Dreyden’s edition of De
Arte Graphica (1695), in which he declared that artists should “draw men as they ought to be,
and not like Bamboccio, and most of the Dutch painters who have drawn the worst likeness.”342
338
Rosenthal, 72.
Amal Asfour and Paul Williamson, “On Reynolds’s use of de Piles, Locke and Hume in His Essays on Rubens
and Gainsborough,” Journal of the Warburg and Courauld Institutes 60 (1997).
340
Reynolds, 50.
341
Harry Mount, “Introduction,” in Sir Joshua Reynolds, A Journey Through Flanders and Holland, ed. Harry
Mount (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1996), xxx.
342
Ibid., xxix.
339
93
In 1781 and 1785, Reynolds toured Flanders and Holland; and his A Journey of Flanders
and Holland was published as an addendum to his posthumous Works.343 A Journey espouses
the virtues of Dutch and Flemish paintings of nature based on Reynolds’s readings of Roger de
Piles, who praised the use of color in Rubens as a means of elevating ordinary, or low, subject
matter.344 Reynolds deploys de Piles’ praise of Netherlandish art in order to champion
Gainsborough in his Discourse XIV and adds a healthy dose of Lock and Hume’s British
Empirical thinking to announce Gainsborough as a genius in delivering sense–data.345 Reynolds
was indeed conflicted by his simultaneous appreciation for the poetic rendering of nature as it
is.346 Reynolds uses Gainsborough and the Netherlandish Masters to prove that the English way
of rendering lowly nature as it is requires artistic genius. Iveagh’s selection of Gainsborough’s
Two Shepherd Boys with Dogs Fighting (1783) clearly resonates in the dialogue among
Reynolds and the Netherlandish masters (Fig. 32). Reynolds said of it during the Exhibition of
1783, “Damn him, how various he is.” 347 John Hayes, the Gainsborough scholar, claims this
work is “one of the strangest and most untypically cruel of his paintings … a work in which he
tried to excel, in sheer observation of animal ferocity, the hunting scenes of Rubens and
Sniders.”348
It is of no small moment that the self–portraits in Iveagh’s selection are of Rembrandt
and Reynolds, in addition to one thought to have been of Rubens. Reynolds’s Journey was the
first English examination of Dutch Painting, although Daniel Daulby’s 1797 catalogue of
Rembrandt’s prints was the first published English work to address the topic.349 Reynolds
343
Ibid., xx.
Asfour, 220–26.
345
Ibid.
346
Rosenthal, 72.
347
Hayes, letter 90, 150.
348
Ibid.
349
Mount, xxiv.
344
94
demonstrates a greater appreciation for the work of Rembrandt in particular than the commonly
accepted English view of Netherlandish art that regarded its literal rendering of ordinary detail as
vulgar. His praise of Rubens is consistent throughout the work; and although it is not the same
kind of praise we expect for these artists today, at the time, it was the most balanced attempt to
appreciate these two artists in England.
When Kenwood opened in 1928, the portraits of Rubens, now attributed to Snyders, and
Rembrandt were hung together in the anteroom of the library, aligning these two great
Netherlandish masters in the dialogue. Out of the more than sixty known self–portraits by
Rembrandt, Iveagh’s is considered to be the artist’s most definitive.350 Whether Iveagh
examined this status with Agnew’s is a matter of speculation. John Smith is on record as saying
about it in 1836, “Rembrandt’s animated expression indicates him to be engaged in his studies in
his atelier, on the walls of which are described some geometrical figures.”351 The unusual circles
in the background may allude to the story in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Painters (1550), which
was repeated by Karel Van Mander in his Schilder–Boeck (1604). Van Mander relates how
Giotto (1266–1337) provided proof of his artistic genius for the Pope simply by drawing a
perfect circle with a single stroke.352 Whether he was comparing himself to Giotto, or even
Apelles, who drew prefect bisecting circles in competition with Protogenes, the nature of the
portrait’s unfinished brushwork and the humble attire of the artist draw attention to the dignity of
the artist’s expression in his later years as a master.353
Iveagh’s selection of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Self Portrait (ca. 1788) bears some striking
similarities to that of Rembrandt’s, which Reynolds viewed at the Danoot collection in Brussels
350
Bryant, Kenwood, 70.
John Smith , VII, p. 85, no. 207, quoted in Bryant, Kenwood, 70.
352
Bryant, Kenwood, 72.
353
Ibid.
351
95
in 1781 and noted that it was “in a very unfinished manner, but admirable in its colour and effect
(Fig. 33).”354 Bryant speculates that Agnew’s likely shared this information with Iveagh when
he purchased the portrait in 1891 and that it could not have escaped his mind when he selected it
for Kenwood.355 Of all of Reynolds’s portraits, this is the most copied and is itself a copy of one
in the Royal collection, which did not deter Iveagh from selecting it for invitation to the dialogue
at Kenwood.356 Whereas Iveagh did not include some works, most likely because they were
copies, it reasonable to conclude that this particular image of Reynolds redeemed the fact that it
is a copy. Also, that another hangs in the Royal collection may also tie Iveagh more closely to
his royal friends. Iveagh himself, through his discerning eye and depth of knowledge, deepens
the acceptance of the Flemish and Netherlandish artists alongside the British, by mixing the
portraits of Rembrandt and Reynolds.
A convincing general observation about what Iveagh’s selections of works by Rubens
and Van Dyck mixed with Reynolds and Gainsborough cones to us from Waagen; these
selections pay homage to Charles I, the greatest art-loving monarch in English history before
Queen Victoria.357 Both artists were employed as court painters to Charles I and thereby claimed
the status of honorary Englishmen.358 Cromwell’s puritanical regime allowed no room for the
arts; but, fortunately, it had the good sense to purchase the seven Raphael cartoons in Charles I’s
collection for the state.359 It is not unreasonable to conclude that Iveagh is adopting the
Netherlandish artists as fellow countrymen, based on an established tradition. Iveagh’s
selections of most pleasant French works by Boucher and J. B. Pater serve to recall the great
354
Mount, 19–20.
Bryant, Kenwood, 362.
356
Ibid.
357
Gustav Waagen, “The Great Trio: Charles I, Arundel and Buckingham,” in, The English as Collectors, ed.
Herrmann, 57-65
358
Ibid.
359
Ibid.
355
96
Wallace Collection and its proclaimed influence his collecting. In effect, the French works
reveal Iveagh’s awareness of his place as a collector among the most renowned in English
history. They are also homages to the frivolity so characteristic of the eighteenth century.
The Iveagh Bequest at Kenwood serves as an example of Malraux’s characterization of
collecting from the eighteenth–century on as an intellectual activity.360 Eighteenth–century
England is characterized by rationality, the rise of empiricism, order, civility and intellectual
pursuits. It is also characterized by sensibility, romanticism, and frivolity. Iveagh’s selections of
the artists and subjects in his bequest are indeed the mark of a pithy intellectual. Perhaps this
intellectual pursuit is the closest to what he imagined an English eighteenth–century artistic
gentleman was.
360
Malraux, 14.
97
CONCLUSION
Every passion borders on chaos, that of the collector on the chaos of memory.
Walter Benjamin361
The case of the First Earl of Iveagh as a collector opens up an enquiry into the broader
topic of collecting old masters and English eighteenth–century portraits during the nineteenth
century. Comparisons with other collectors in England and America, set against the background
of the burgeoning nineteenth–century art world, demonstrate the value of examining individuals
within their respective socio–economic contexts. The lack of comprehensive literature on Iveagh
and his broader context demands such examinations, which reveal Iveagh to be distinct from
both American and English collectors in many ways, yet similar to the Americans, in the end, as
a patriotic patron. The initial enquiry into the omissions of works of art from the Iveagh Bequest
demonstrates that future research may help reveal more characteristics of Iveagh’s views on art.
Additional archival research on his relationship with J. P. Morgan and correspondence with Sir
William Agnew may also shed further light on Iveagh’s particular character as a collector. The
image of Iveagh projected through Herbert Arnould Olivier’s portrait (1935), likely
commissioned by Rupert Guinness, 2nd Earl of Iveagh, shows him as a man of letters, writing at a
desk with books behind him (Fig. 34). This is how his family remembered Iveagh. If an
inventory of his libraries exists, it, too, will offer deeper insight into his thoughts on art. All such
future evidence could expand this initial enquiry into what Iveagh may have meant by his
intention to leave behind “a fine example of the artistic home of a gentleman of the eighteenth
century.”
361
Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 1968), 60.
98
This examination reiterates the often–stated observation that Iveagh and others used art as
a tool in aiding their personal social advancement; yet beyond this obvious fact Iveagh emerges
as a man with much deeper regard for art than its service to this ambition. At once fiercely
private and quietly magnanimous, The First Earl of Iveagh is revealed through his collection—
the bequest as well as the omissions—as being highly educated in art and collecting, keenly
aware of his own particular taste, and possessing of a sense of humor and joy of the company of
his friends and family. Some of his conservative political leanings and his staunch support of the
English Empire are projected through such works as those by Van Dyck in support of the reign
of Charles I and Gainsborough’s The Associate of the Prince of Wales and The Rt. Hon. William
Pitt, who led the country in the war against Napoleon and took away the administration of India
from the British East India company.362 His love for the outdoors and the sporting life are
trumpeted in such paintings as the John Frederick Herring omissions; Landseer’s Hawking in
Olden Times; and all the boating paintings, such as the Cromes' Yarmouth Water Frolic. Hals’s
Pieter Van Den Broecke and Cuyp’s View of Dordrecht reflect his love of commerce. Iveagh’s
selections for his bequest under the romantic mantle of his thoughts of the eighteenth–century
demonstrate his awareness of his place in time.
Ultimately, there is little doubt that Iveagh’s deliberate selections for Kenwood later in
his life, as well as the mixed manner in which they are displayed within the Robert Adam
structure, were meant to invite the interpretation of a dialogue among the works of art, as well as
the collector’s vision and his experience with the past. This reflection on the collector’s vision is
akin to what Walter Benjamin called “historical materialism,” about which he wrote,
“Historicism presents the eternal image of the past, whereas historical materialism presents a
362
Bryant, Kenwood, 232.
99
given experience with the past—an experience that is unique.”363 As the single largest gift of art
to the nation during the twentieth century, the Iveagh Bequest at Kenwood is a unique example
of private support for national art in England that reflects the patron’s belief that great art can
serve not only individuals in their social and intellectual ambitions, but also an entire nation.
363
Walter Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproduction (Cambridge: Harvard University, 2008), 118.
100
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106
ANNEX364
Paintings from Christie’s Elveden Hall Sale, May 21, 1984
Lot
Description
Samuel Howitt, Drawing Cover. Purchased from Agnew’s
Dec. 4, 1891.
£ Price
6,500
Estimate
2,000–
3,000
2
Charles Hancock, Ferretting, 1830. Purchased from Agnew’s
Dec. 4, 1891.
11,000
4,000–
6,000
3
A. Wilson, Cockfighting, 1820. Purchased from Agnew’s
July, 1891.
24,000
7,000–
10,000
4
John Doyle, Gentleman Leading a Racehorse. Purchased from
Agnew’s June, 1891.
26,000
7,000–
10,000
5
Sir Edwin Landseer, Marianne, Favourite Hunter of John
Russell, ca. 1825. Purchased from Agnew’s Nov. 1888.
12,000
6,000–
10,000
6
James Ward, Elevation. Purchased from Agnew’s July 1891.
5,000
5,000–
10,000
7
John Frederick Herring, Sen., Emilius, a Racehorse, 1835.
Purchased from Agnew’s July 18, 1891.
30,000
7,000–
10,000
8
John Fredrick Herring, Sen., Priam, a Racehorse, 1830.
Purchased from Agnew’s July 18, 1891.
26,000
6,000–
8,000
9
John Frederick Herring, Sen., Crucifix, a Racehorse, 1840.
Purchased from Agnew’s July 18, 1891.
19,000
6,000–
8,000
10 John Frederick Herring, Sen., Touchstone, a Racehorse, 1834.
Purchased from Agnew’s July 18, 1891.
26,000
6,000–
8,000
11 John Frederick Herring, Sen., Orlando, a Racehorse, 1844.
Purchased from Agnew’s July 18, 1891.
18,000
6,000–
8,000
12 John Frederick Herring, Sen., Dr. Suntax, a Racehorse, 1823.
Purchased from Agnew’s July 18, 1891.
19,000
5,000–
8,000
13 John Frederick Herring, Sen., Beeswing, a Racehorse, 1842.
Purchased from Agnew’s July 18, 1891.
19,000
6,000–
8,000
1
364
The term “Annex” is used here to be consistent with Julius Bryant’s lists of Agnew’s inventories in Kenwood.
107
Annex, cont.,
Lot
Description
£ Price
Estimate
14 John Frederick Herring, Sen., Gladiator, a Racehorse, 1844.
Purchased from Agnew’s July 18, 1891.
19,000
6,000–
8,000
15 John Frederick Herring, Sen., Sweetmeat, a Racehorse, 1846.
Purchased from Agnew’s July 18, 1891.
19,000
6,000–
8,000
16 John Frederick Herring, Sen., Tramp, 1828.
Purchased from Agnew’s July 18, 1891.
26,000
7,000–
10,000
17 Dean Wolstenholme, Full Cry. Purchased from Agnew’s
June 1891.
480
600–800
18 Jacob Adriaenz Bellevois, Dutch Frigates off Amsterdam, 1675.
18,000
8,000–
10,000
19 French School, Action between M. Levesque’s ‘La Soutiere’ and 2,400
Commnder Lambert’s ‘The Breda,’ 1697.
1,500–
2,500
20 Adrian van Diest, English Man–o’–War Firing Salute off Malta.
4,500
3000–
4,000
21 Richard Vale, The Streights Fleet off the Mediterranean, 1719.
11,000
6,000–
8,000
22 Thomas Mellish, British Fleet Going to Lisbon.
5,000
3,000–
5,000
23 Attributed to William Anderson, The ‘Arethusa,’ A Frigate.
Purchased from Agnew’s Dec. 4, 1891.
1,900
800 –1,200
24 Captain William Elliott, Admiral Lord Howe Relieving Gibraltar. 12,000
Purchased from Agnew’s May 5, 1891.
7,000–
10,000
25 John Thomas Serres, Commodore Dance’s Action with the Comte 8,500
De Linois in the Straits of Malacca, 15 February, 1804.
5,000–
7,000
26 Thomas Buttersworth, Nelson in the ‘Theseus,’ off Cadiz, July,
1797.
7,000–
10,000
19,000
27 Thomas Luny, The Battle of Cape St. Vincent, 14 February, 1797; 36,000
and The Battle of Doggerbank, 5 August 1781. Purchased from
Agnew’s June 15, 1891.
10,000–
15,000
108
Annex, cont.,
Lot
Description
£ Price
Estimate
28 Circle of George Chambers, The Retreat of Admiral Cornwallis,
June 1795. Purchased from Agnew’s Dec. 4, 1891.
5,000
2,000–
3,000
29 Thomas Luny, A Man–o’–War off Portsmouth, 1823.
11,000
6,000–
10,000
30 William E. D. Stuart, The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October, 1805.
Purchased from Agnew’s March 22, 1890.
8,000
2,000–
3,000
31 William E. D. Stuart, The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October, 1805.
Purchased from Agnew’s May 9, 1890.
7,500
2,000–
3,000
32 After de Loutherberg, The Battle of Camperdown, 11 October,
1797.
1,700
700–
1,000
33 Charles Martin Powell, A Dutch Gajlot and English shipping off
Penzance.
11,000
7,000–
10,000
34 George Webster, A man–o’–war and other shipping off the Dutch 6,000
coast. Purchased from Christie’s June 23, 1873.
6,000–
10,000
35 George Webster, A Dutch man–o’–war and other shipping in an 6,000
estuary, in a stiff breeze. Purchased from Agnew’s June 23, 1981.
2,000–
3,000
36 George Webster, Shipping off the port of Flushing.
7,500
2,500–
3,000
37 William Clarkson Stanfield, R.A., Shipping on the Zuider Zee,
1845. Purchased from Agnew’s Nov. 22, 1888.
13,000
3,000–
5,000
38 James Webb, A seashore with an old pier, 1876.
1,800
700–
1,000
39 After Turner, The Chair Pier at Brighton, 1828.
220
40– 60
40 James Meadows, Shipping off Dunkirk, 1860.
4,800
2,500–
3,500
41 The Hon. Federick Lawless, View of Santa Maria della Salute
500
300–
500
from the P. & O. buy, Venice.
109
Annex, cont.,
Lot
Description
£ Price
Estimate
42 Joannes F. Schutz, A calm day, 1878.
5,000
2,500–
3,500
43 Circle of Francesco Zuccarelli, An italianate lake landscape
with figures and cattle by a bridge.
1,500
800–
1,200
44 George Vicat Cole, R.A., View of the Thames at Greenwich
9,500
15,000–
20,000
with Figures and Deer in the Foreground, 1890. Purchased from
the artist 1890.
45 John Collet, The Sailor’s Return.
3,200
3,000–
4,000
46 William Lawranson, A Lady at Haymaking.
5,500
2,000–
3,000
47 William Hamilton, R.A., “Virtuous Love” from Thomson’s
Seasons. Purchased from Agnew’s July 24, 1891.
6,200
3,000–
5,000
48 Circle of Sir David Wilkie, R.A, The Only Daughter.
Purchased from Agnew’s July 4, 1889.
120
300–
500
49 William James Muller, The Opium Seller, 1843.
4,500
2,500–
Purchased from Christie’s April 29, 1893
3,500
50 Daniel Maclise, R.A., The Disenchantment of Bottom.
Purchased from Christie’s May 6, 1871.
17,000
15,000–
25,000
51 John Rogers Herbert, R.A., Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop,
1860. Purchased from Agnew’s May 19, 1874.
2,500
4,000–
6,000
52 Philip Hermogenes Calderon, R.A., The Young Lord Hamlet,
1868. Purchased from Christie’s April 29, 1893.
4,200
3,000–
4,000
53 Philip Hermogenes Calderon, R.A., “Lines from Romeo and
Juliet.” Purchased from Agnew’s April 29, 1893.
6,000
2,000–
3,000
110
Annex, cont.,
Lot
Description
£ Price
Estimate
54 Emilio Sala y Frances, A Young Beauty, 1877.
1,300
500–
800
55 Emilio Sala y Frances, The Sweep, 1877.
600
400–
600
56 Enrique Melida y Alinari, A Spanish Beauty, 1877.
1,000
500–
800
57 M. S. Hapaleto, The Flower Girl, 1877.
700
600–
800
58 Jose Benllurie y Gil, The Rascals.
2,300
800–
1,200
59 Camillo Miola, At the Fountain, 1875.
140
400–
600
60 Circle of Barthel Bruyn the Elder, “Portrait of a Gentleman.”
Purchased from Christie’s June 20, 1891.
2,400
4,000–
6,000
61 Attributed to Joseph Highmore, Portrait of a Gentleman (said
to be Handel). Purchased from Christie’s July 23, 1881.
1,400
2,000–
3,000
62 Attributed to William Hoare of Bath, R.A., Portrait of William
Pitt. Purchased from Agnew’s March 22, 1890.
1,100
800–
1,200
63 Janet Hawkins after Hogarth, The Strode Family, 1898.
850
100–
150
64 Circle of Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A., “Portrait of Lord
Heathfield” Purchased from Agnew’s March 22, 1890.
320
300–
500
65 Manner of Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A., “Portrait of Sir Thomas
Troubridge.”
420
300–
500
66 Gainsborough Dupont, “Portrait of George III.”
Purchased from Agnew’s March 22, 1890.
2,400
2,000–
3,000
67 Robert Edge Pine, “Portrait of Lord Amherst”
Purchased from Agnew’s March 22, 1890.
3,400
1,500–
2,000
111
Annex, cont.,
Lot
Description
£ Price
Estimate
68 Manner of the Rev. Matthew William Peters, “Portrait of a girl.”
4,500
800–
1,200
69 Attributed to James Millar, “Portrait of Squire Morland.”
Purchased from Agnew’s July 24, 1891.
14,000
6,000–
8,000
70 Janet Hawkins after Winterhalter, “Portrait of the Maharaja
Duleep Singh of Elveden.”
14,000
3,000–
5,000
71 George Elgar Hicks, R.A., The Orphans, 1884.
12,000
4,000–
6,000
72 George Elgar Hicks, R.A., Portrait of Adelaide, Lady Iveagh 1885. 120,000
30,000–
50,000
73 Circle of William Owen, R.A., Portrait of Olivia Whitmore.
550
250–
500
74 English School, Portrait of Adelaide Maria.
250
150–
300
75 Dorofield Hardy after Collier, Portrait of Rupert Guinness.
Not listed
150–
300
76 H. Harris Brown, Portrait of Lady Gwendolen Guinness, 1910.
1,800
800–
1,200
77 John W. Gilroy, Portrait of Gwendolen.
600
400–
600
78 C. B. L., Portrait of Gwedolen, 1888.
800
250–
500
80 English School, Circa 1794, Scott in St. James’s Street.
150
40–60
81 Attributed to Francesco Bartolozzi, R.A., Mars and Venus,
after Veronese.
380
200–
300
112
Annex, cont.,
Lot
Description
£ Price
Estimate
82 Attributed to Francesco Bartolozzi, R.A., Saint Mary Magdalene.
35
100–
200
83 Attributed to Francesco Bartolozzi, R.A., Saint Mary Magdalene
in Contemplation in a Landscape, after Annibale Carracci.
70
200–
300
84 Attributed to Francesco Bartolozzi, R.A., Venus and Cupid.
55
300–
400
85 Attributed to Francesco Bartolozzi, R.A., Cupid holding a
Bunch of Grapes
150
300–
400
86 Attributed to Francesco Bartolozzi, R.A., The Dance of the
Cupids.
140
300–
400
87 Attributed to Francesco Bartolozzi, R.A., “A study of a female
Saint and Bacchante.”
150
250–
350
88 Attributed to Francesco Bartolozzi, R.A., A Young Woman.
400
300–
400
89 Attributed to Francesco Bartolozzi, R.A., The Three Graces.
220
200–
300
90 Attributed to Francesco Bartolozzi, R.A., Venus with
Attendants uncaging three Cupids
.
60
200–
300
91 Circle of Phillip James de Loutherbourg, R.A., The Battle
of Camperdown, October 11, 1797.
140
100–
200
92 Charles Sharpe, Maiden Riding a Ram before a King, 1801.
550
200–
300
93 George Chambers, The Battle of Trafalgar: The Victory
breaking the Line. Purchased from Christie’s July 5, 1895.
7,500
5,000–
8,000
94 Augustus Hare, From Lindsay House, Cheyne Walk.
550
400–
600
113
Annex, cont.,
Lot
Description
£ Price
Estimate
95 Augustus Hare, Hatfield, July 7, 1882.
170
250–
350
96 Augustus Hare, Scotney Castle, Kent.
100
250–
350
97 Augustus Hare, Caernarvon.
90
300–
400
98 Augustus Hare, The Duke of Albany’s Memorial and Villa
Nevada, Cannes; and From Villa Nevada, Cannes.
480
600–
800
99 Augustus Hare, Subiaco.
100
300–
400
100 Augustus Hare, The Arch of Constantine, Rome.
1,000
300–
400
101 Augustus Hare, The Colosseum, Rome.
110
300–
400
102 The Hon. Frederick Lawless, Study of a Man’s Head.
Not listed
200–
300
103 The Hon. Frederick Lawless, Appian Way, Outside Rome,
104and A Venetian Canal, 1873.
60
100–
150
105 Edward Tennyson Reed, Suggested Procession to the House
after the Holidays (Duleep Singh).
100
100–
200
106 James Drummond, An Old Salt.
160
80–120
107 English School, Lady Gwendoline 1899.
320
200–
300
108 Frank Miles, Portrait Head of a Lady.
28
100–
150
109 John Tenniel, A Little too previous! H–rc–rt. ‘No, No,
my lad! That won’t hurt him! You must leave him to us!’
35
200–
300
114
Annex, cont.,
Lot
Description
£ Price
Estimate
110 V. Sozonoo, King George V lying in State, Westminster
Hall.
50
200–
300
111 P. W. Baldwin, A Castle Tower, 1936.
65
100–
200
112 Osbert Lancaster, Reconstruction: Two Studies.
260
150–
200
113 Wagon, A Country House, 1970.
Not listed
60–100
114 Rose Maynard Barton, Flower Girls in the Strand, 1892.
8,500
5,000–
8,000
115 Rose Maynard Barton, Azaleas in bloom, the Row, 1893.
Purchased at Christie’s December 21, 1982
3,500
2,000–
3,000
116 Rose Maynard Barton, By the Ring, Hyde Park– Evening, 1892.
4,500
2,500–
3,500
117 Rose Maynard Barton, Piccadilly in June, 1894.
4,500
2,000–
3,000
118 Rose Maynard Barton, South Kensington Station, waiting for
a Hansom Cab, 1893.
5,550
2,000–
3,000
119 Rose Maynard Barton, In the Row out of Season.
6,500
2,000–
3,000
120 Rose Maynard Barton, A Rest in the Row, 1892.
4,200
3,000–
4,000
121 Rose Maynard Barton, The Row, Hyde Park Corner, 1893.
5,500
2,000–
3,000
122 Rose Maynard Barton, Waterloo Bridge, 1892.
3,800
1,500–
2,000
123 Rose Maynard Barton, Scene in the Strand, waiting Election
News, 1892.
2,400
800–
1,200
115
Annex, cont.,
Lot
Description
£ Price
Estimate
124 Rose Maynard Barton, Gordon’s Statue, 1893.
1,800
800–
1,200
125 Rose Maynard Barton, The Thames, Charing Cross, 1892.
1,500
800–
1,200
126 Rose Maynard Barton, Evening Street Scene, London.
2,000
600–
1,000
127 Rose Maynard Barton, Hyde Park Corner: Wet Day, 1892.
3,800
1,500–
2,000
128 Rose Maynard Barton, Mounting Guard, St. James’s Palace,
1894.
1,800
1,000–
1,500
129 Rose Maynard Barton, Sailing Boats on the Serpentine, 1892.
4,500
2,000–
3,000
130 Rose Maynard Barton, Parliament Street, 1892.
8,000
4,000–
6,000
131 Rose Maynard Barton, The Crossing, Hyde Park Corner, 1894.
2,800
1,500–
2,000
132 Rose Maynard Barton, St. Martin’s in the Fields, 1892.
4,000
2,000–
3,000
133 Rose Maynard Barton, Kensington Gardens, 1892.
4,000
1,000–
1,500
134 Rose Maynard Barton, Villiers Street, Charing Cross.
3,800
1,500–
2,000
135 Rose Maynard Barton, Emanuel Hospital, Westminster, 1892.
5,500
800–
1,200
136 Rose Maynard Barton, Tottenham Court Road at Night, 1893.
3,500
2,000–
3,000
137 Rose Maynard Barton, Charing Cross Railway Bridge, 1893.
4,800
3,000–
4,000
116
Annex, cont.,
Lot
Description
£ Price
Estimate
138 Rose Maynard Barton, Westminster, House sitting, 1894.
3,200
2,000–
3,000
139Rose Maynard Barton, The Royal Exchange, 1894.
4,200
2,500–
3,500
140 Rose Maynard Barton, Changing Guard, Whitehall, 1894.
3,200
2,000–
3,000
141 Rose Maynard Barton, The Row in the Morning, 1892.
6,500
2,000–
3,000
142 Rose Maynard Barton, The Last Lamp, Thames Embankment,
1896.
Not listed
1,500–
2,000
143 Rose Maynard Barton, Fleet Street, 1892.
9,500
5,000–
8,000
117
ILLUSTRATIONS
Fig. 1. After Arthur Stockdale Cope, Edward Cecil Guinness, ca. 1921, oil on canvas, 127 X 86
cm, English Heritage Collection, Kenwood (www.bbc.co.uk).
118
Fig. 2. 80 Stephen’s Green, “Iveagh House,” Dublin, Department of Foreign Affairs
(www.wikimedia.org).
Fig. 3. Farmleigh, Phoenix Park, Dublin, Office of Public Works
(en.wikipedia.org).
119
Fig. 4. Elveden Hall, Suffolk, England (Norfolk County Council, www.literarynorfolk.co.uk).
Fig. 5. Rembrandt van Rijn, Judas Retuning the Thirty Pieces of Silver, ca. 1620–35,
oil on canvas, 79 X 102.3 cm, Private Collection (www.rembrandtpainting.net).
120
Fig. 6. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self Portrait, ca. 1665, oil on canvas. 45 X 37 in, Iveagh Bequest,
Kenwood (www.ibiblio.org).
121
Fig. 7. Johannes Vermeer, The Guitar Player, ca. 1672, oil on canvas, 21 X 18 in, Iveagh
Bequest, Kenwood (www.ibiblio.org).
Fig. 8. Kenwood House, ca. 1616 – 1774, Hampstead Heath, London
(English Heritage, www.english–heritage.uk.org).
122
Fig. 9. Joseph Mallord William Turner, A Coast Scene With Fishermen Hauling a Boat Ashore
(‘The Iveagh Sea–piece’), ca. 1803–4, oil on canvas, 36 X 48 in,
(www.houston.culturemap.com).
Fig. 10. Sir Edwin Landseer, Hawking in the Olden Time, 1832, oil on canvas, 60 X 72 in,
Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood (www.artlover.me).
123
Fig. 11. Sir John Everett Millais, Lilacs, 1885, oil on canvas, 102.9 X 72.4 cm, Hugh Lane
Municipal Gallery of Modern Art (www.bridgemanart.com).
124
Fig. 12. Farmleigh Library, Phoenix Park, Dublin, Office of Public Works (www.wikipedia.org).
Fig. 13. Michael Angelo Hayes, Installation of the Prince of Wales as Knight of St. Patrick in St.
Patrick’s Cathedral in 1868, oil on canvas, 248X195 cm, Collection of the Guinness Family
(www.stpatrickscathedral.ie).
125
Fig. 14. Rose Maynard Barton, Flower Girls in the Strand, 1892, watercolour, 20 ½ X 14 in,
Private Collection (www.bridgemanart.com).
126
Fig. 15. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Kitty Fisher as Cleopatra Dissolving the Pearl, 1759,
oil on canvas, 30 X 25 in, Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood (www.seattlepi.com).
127
Fig. 16. Maharajah Duleep Singh’s Indian Hall, Elveden, ca. 1870 (www.dipty.com).
Fig. 17. Earl of Iveagh’s Indian Hall, built ca. 1902 (Christies Images, www.bridgemanart.com).
128
Fig. 18. Earl of Iveagh and Shooting Party at Elveden With King George V, ca. 1910–15
(Martelli, Elveden Enterprise).
Fig. 19. George Elgar Hicks, Portrait of Adelaide Maria, Countess of Iveagh, 1885
oil on canvas, 125 X 93 in, Private Collection (Christies Images, www.countrylifeimages.co.uk).
129
Fig. 20. Frans Snyders, Figures With Fruit and Game, ca. 1635, oil on canvas, 49 ½ X 48 in,
Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood (www.amazon.co.uk).
130
Fig. 21. Sir Thomas Lawrence, Miss Murray, 1824–26, oil on canvas, 53 ½ X 42 ½ in, Iveagh
Bequest, Kenwood (www. seattlepi.com).
131
Fig. 22. Thomas Gainsborough, Mary, Countess Howe, ca. 1764, oil on canvas, 95 ¾ X 60 ¾ in,
Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood (www.1000museums.com).
132
Fig. 23. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mrs. Musters as Hebe, 1782, oil on canvas, 94 X 57 in, Iveagh
Bequest, Kenwood (www.seattlepi.com).
133
Fig. 24. Thomas Gainsborough, Lady Brisco. ca. 1776, oil on canvas, 92 5/8 X 60 ¾ in, Iveagh
Bequest, Kenwood (www.ibiblio.org).
134
Fig. 25. Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Angerstein Children, ca. 1782–3, oil on canvas, 55 ¼ X 43 ¾
in, Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood (www.wikipaintings.org).
135
Fig. 26. Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Infant Academy, 1781–2, oil on canvas, 45 X 56 in, Iveagh
Bequest, Kenwood (www.amazon.com).
Fig. 27. Antony Van Dyck, James Stuart, 1st Duke of Richmond and 4th Duke of Lennox, ca.
1636, oil on canvas, 39 ¼ X 63 in, Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood (www.bbc.co.uk).
136
Fig. 28. Frans Hals, Pieter Van Den Broecke. ca. 1636, oil on canvas, 28 X 24 in, Iveagh
Bequest, Kenwood (www.ibiblio.org).
137
Fig. 29. Aelbert Cuyp, View of Dordrecht, ca. 1655, oil on canvas, 38 ½ X 54 ¼ in, Iveagh
Bequest, Kenwood (www.seatlepi.com).
Fig. 30. Jan Wijnants and Johannes Lingelbach, A Landscape With A Hawking Party,
ca. 1666, oil on canvas, 30 ½ X 35 ¼ in, Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood (www.bbc.co.uk).
138
Fig. 31. Thomas Gainsborough, Going to Market, ca. 1768–71, oil on canvas, 47 X 57 ½ in,
Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood (www.bridgemanart.com).
139
Fig. 32. Thomas Gainsborough. Two Shepherd Boys With Dogs Fighting, ca. 1783, oil on canvas,
87 5/8 X 61 in, Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood (www.flickr.com).
140
Fig. 33. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Self Portrait, ca. 1788, oil on canvas, 30 X 25 in, Iveagh Bequest,
Kenwood (www.bridgemanart.com).
141
Fig. 34. Herbert Arnould Olivier, Edward Cecil Guinness, 1935. Oil on canvas, 100.3 X 80 cm,
Private Collection (Office of Public Works, Iveagh Pictures, 80).