Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (16 page)

But even as the pieces were being prepared for display, as a permanent recognition of Robinson's achievements as a collector, it was becoming clear that times were changing. The works were being assessed and arranged by the museum's Assistant Director, Arthur Banks Skinner, who had climbed through the ranks during his twenty years at South Kensington. Robinson had written the display labels to accompany the pieces, presumably because he believed that he was best placed to explain them to the public. Skinner, however, whose ‘knowledge of works of art was singularly wide and accurate' and who ‘enjoyed the confidence and esteem of many foreign collectors and heads of museums', had his reservations.
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‘These descriptions were prepared by him, and in my opinion are open to considerable doubt,' he explained to Purdon Clarke, before asking incredulously, ‘Do you wish them to go out as they are?'
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Purdon Clarke, ever the diplomat, proposed a compromise. He suggested that the labels remained unedited, but that it was made abundantly clear that they were Robinson's own idiosyncratic work, and not a reflection of the museum's scholarship.

It was a small but significant exchange between the new generation of professionals at South Kensington. By the end of
the nineteenth century, men like Arthur Banks Skinner were taking the haphazard knowledge of the hosts of Victorian collectors and connoisseurs and beginning to formalize it into the discipline that we now know as art history. This movement had begun in earnest in the 1850s with what was later referred to as the Vienna School of Art History. In 1852, Rudolph Eitelberger was appointed to the world's first chair of the history of art at the University of Vienna, and a succession of scholars there followed in his footsteps, trying to find ways to make the appreciation of art more objective. This meant taking into account historical sources and adopting a more factually based approach to the examination of artistic achievement. To some extent, this academic work was consolidating the more practical efforts of curators like Gustav Waagen. Alongside his publications, Waagen's displays at the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in the 1830s and 1840s presented objects within their chronological and social contexts, supported by explanatory labels and catalogues. This allowed visitors to get a sense of how one artist's work related to another's, and how practice had evolved across time and in different places. Waagen also advocated re-creating a sense of the original spaces in which the works of art would have been displayed, ‘to lessen as much as possible the contrast which must necessarily exist between works of Art in their original site, and in their position in a museum. . . to realise in some degree the impression produced by a temple, a church, a palace or a cabinet'.
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By the mid-nineteenth century, as had been seen at the Louvre, other European curators were also beginning to experiment with presenting art in ‘schools', grouping works together to explore similarities in technique, style or subject matter, and to demonstrate ways in which artists influenced each other. During the 1880s and 1890s, the principles of this art historical approach were further developed by Heinrich Wölfflin, a Swiss scholar and critic. While teaching in Basel, Berlin and Munich, he formulated
pairs of opposing ideas – such as whether a work demonstrated a ‘linear' or a ‘painterly' approach – to underpin the study of art.

It was not until well into the twentieth century that the academic discipline of art history became fully established, but British curators in the nineteenth century were certainly aware of what was being accomplished by their European counterparts. From the 1850s, articles and pamphlets discussed the arrangement of picture galleries in particular, trying to define the ideal display system. The debate was focused around the National Gallery: the shortcomings of the existing gallery had prompted numerous calls for something completely new, on a different site, and this in turn acted as the catalyst for a wider discussion about different ways of displaying and interpreting the works inside the proposed new building. Waagen himself contributed to the debate, outlining his ideas in a lengthy article in the
Art Journal
in 1853 and including a model classification for presenting paintings within a public museum. Robinson, Ruskin and Eastlake were just some of the others to enter the fray in a process that seemed to typify the Victorian enthusiasm for inquiries, reports, articles and counter-articles, protests, statements and official proceedings.

In the end, the plans for a new National Gallery fizzled out into a modest extension of seven rooms on the existing site and the display principles remained inconsistent. But the idea that art history was a serious area for study continued to flourish and the new breed of scholars, as Skinner demonstrated, became increasingly confident in its challenge to the accepted wisdom of the past. As Skinner's incredulous note suggested, Robinson was no longer, in other people's eyes, at the vanguard of scholarship; he was simply a respectable veteran collector, part of a generation that was being left behind as knowledge about art continued to evolve. He was a Victorian in the dawning years of a new century and a different age.

* * *

Robinson's collections fared little better in creating a lasting impression for posterity. In the early 1890s, at the same time as he was agreeing terms with the Whitworth, he was putting works into four different sales at Christie's with a view to improving his finances. Three hundred and seventy-five oil paintings, thirty-five prints, forty-one Old Master drawings and a hundred and sixty-eight pieces of decorative art went under the auctioneer's hammer at these sales alone, allowing him to meet the not inconsiderable expenses of his lifestyle. With the death of Queen Victoria in January 1901, however, Robinson lost the position of Surveyor in a sudden change of royal politics that came as ‘a most painful surprise'.
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Suddenly, the pressures on his purse grew even more acute and in April 1902 Robinson parted with a significant portion of his collection of sculpture and ceramics at Christie's, quickly followed in two more sales by the majority of his Old Master drawings. In contrast to his reputation for slapdash administration at the museum, these personal pieces were carefully recorded; Robinson noted the source of each of the works, how and when he had bought them, and what he knew about their earlier provenance. In May, over 450 drawings, attributed to the principal artists of the Italian, Dutch, French, German and Spanish schools, were announced in the auctioneer's catalogue as the ‘valuable collection. . . formed by a well-known amateur over the last 40 years', and Robinson watched with mingled pride and regret as other collectors clamoured to acquire what he had taken so long to amass.
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His collection was being irretrievably scattered. After a lifetime's accumulation came months of determined dispersal. There was plenty left – Newton Manor was still a treasure trove – but the sales set a tone of closure, the sad parting of a collector with the objects he prized.

Robinson's collection did not survive him. After his death at the age of eighty-eight in April 1913, the rest of the works were gradually sold on. By September, many of the drawings were
being put up for sale, and by February 1914 the Robinson name was appearing regularly at Sotheby's. With an eye perhaps on this kind of insecurity, Robinson had left a number of financial gifts in his will, primarily to organizations that encouraged collectors and artists and preserved their work for the future. The Burlington Fine Arts Club, not surprisingly, was top of the list, but there were also legacies to Dorset County Museum, the National Art Collections Fund, the Royal Society of Painters and Etchers, the Society of Antiquaries and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.
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Through the work of these kinds of institutions, Robinson knew, arts scholarship would continue to progress and flourish, collectors would meet like-minded colleagues, and the best objects would be admired, studied and displayed.

The South Kensington Museum had changed greatly since Robinson's years as a curator, becoming known as the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1899 and unveiling a massive new building and a grand stone façade ten years later. Nonetheless, Robinson left to the collections there a parcel of his own etchings, which he selected just weeks before his death. He wished to be remembered, it seems, not just as a collector and dealer, a learned middleman, but as a peer of the painters, sculptors and craftsmen whom he so much respected. The etchings, however, were not enough to accord Robinson a lasting presence in the museum. The opening of the new building in June 1909 – almost fifty years after Robinson had scurried across from Marlborough House to see the first work begin on the site – was seen by staff as an opportunity for rearranging the collections and asserting their modern relevance. There was even a backlash against what was seen as the excesses of Victorian taste: the art critic of the
Daily Telegraph
noted that the practical new building was so plain that it gave ‘the general impression. . . of some immense, finely-appointed modern hospital' and until the outbreak of the First
World War there was a controversial campaign to remove the most highly decorative elements of the original building because they ‘belonged to a bygone age'.
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Robinson was increasingly out of fashion and his etchings out of place in a collection which was once again reinventing itself for new generations.

Robinson's long life straddled the Victorian age and his biography as a collector reflects the changes of his time. In the complicated twists and turns of his career – as private connoisseur, professional curator and successful dealer – we begin to see the complexities of the Victorian relationship to the collection, the achievements and disappointments, the shifts and disputes and contradictions. In the fate of Robinson's beloved things, we also glimpse a motif which will be repeated at the heart of these collecting stories – a collection does not last. Tastes change, financial and family concerns intervene; what seems to one collector like a logical arrangement of lovely pieces often looks to the next generation like a hotchpotch of odd personal trinkets. Individual objects survive through history, often gathering meaning and value; the collection is ephemeral. It acquires life and meaning from the collector who makes it. It is a very personal treasure.

C
HARLOTTE
S
CHREIBER

I
t was a long and tedious journey to Paris. Charlotte Schreiber and her husband Charles were woken in time to join the noisy huddle of travellers at the inn in the centre of Bordeaux, all clamouring in the cold dawn for a place on the omnibus to the capital. They had arrived from Spain the previous day by train, reaching Bordeaux in the middle of the night, but there was no chance of taking a break. Paris was emerging from the Franco-Prussian War and was in the middle of an armed uprising which was to become known as the Paris Commune. Transport to and from the city was unpredictable: railway bridges had been destroyed or cut off, trains halted, roads blocked by barricades, and horses, carriages and carts caught up in the confusion. Places on the omnibuses that were still making the journey to the city were at a premium. In the courtyard of the inn, the mood was hectic and slightly aggressive; the driver was surly and blatantly profiteering. But as a seasoned and levelheaded traveller, Charlotte conducted her negotiations amicably and in impeccable French. She was a wealthy woman, and offered
to pay handsomely for places in the coach for herself, her maid and her husband. She was polite and unruffled. She agreed a price for three seats on the fourteen-seat omnibus, and, with her appetite sharpened by the brisk May air, she set her mind to breakfast.

The problem came with the bag – not with the usual cases and hat boxes that could be piled on to the roof and tied on to the railings for safety, but with the floppy, soft red velvet bag that the Schreibers insisted on carrying between them. The driver would not take it inside, and they would not relinquish it to the roof. It was a stalemate. And since it was a stalemate of a particularly French kind, quiet and smoky and stubborn, there was little the middle-aged English couple could do to press their point. Just over an hour later, the omnibus pulled slowly out of Bordeaux, the horses steaming in the early-morning air, and Charlotte and Charles Schreiber were left behind – with their bag – in the chilly shadows of the city's medieval streets.

Since there were no more omnibuses and no trains, the Schreibers ended up riding to Paris in a farm cart with a horse Charlotte described in her journal as ‘sturdy' and a ‘loquacious' driver.
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They rattled slowly through the French countryside, bumping along rutted roads, with no shelter from the wind and occasional spitting rain, and the incessant chatter of the driver drumming in their ears. It was a long and uncomfortable journey, but they had their red bag safe in the cart between them, and that was the main thing.