Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (34 page)

It took a long time for the house at Cheyne Walk to be completed. Rossetti was strong-willed and unpredictable, and could be difficult to do business with. His life was full of distractions and often hectic and fractured. The Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood of painters that he had founded with John Everett Millais and Holman Hunt in the late 1840s was becoming increasingly popular for its aesthetic principles, and increasingly notorious for its extravagant lifestyles. By 1863, when Marks called on the Cheyne Walk house, Rossetti was working on a series of jewel-like watercolours and experimenting with the highly decorated, richly coloured oil paintings of beautiful, faintly exotic women that were to make him famous. His wife and muse Elizabeth had recently died after taking an overdose of laudanum, an opium-based, highly addictive painkiller that was commonly prescribed at the time for ailments ranging from headaches to tuberculosis. He was sharing his home, on and off, with his brother William, his mistress and model Fanny Cornforth, the controversial poet Algernon Swinburne, and the writer George Meredith, whose own wife had recently left him for another of Rossetti's artist friends. He was suffering from ever-lengthening bouts of depression, drank heavily and was addicted to chloral hydrate, a sedative and hypnotic drug, marketed for insomnia, that would eventually wreck his health.

Not surprisingly in the circumstances, Rossetti's collecting could be erratic. Marks might send notice of a striking table, or a pretty writing desk, only to have his note returned if his client
were lost in a misanthropic haze of drugs and depression. For long weeks, Rossetti would refuse any guests, before a sudden obsession with a particular piece had him hounding Marks for information. His demands were exacting, and he expected his dealer to be thoroughly diligent on his behalf. He would think nothing of giving Marks apparently impossible commissions: ‘get me two thimble-shaped lids for two little round pots I have', he demanded on one occasion, sending Murray to scour the length and breadth of Holland for just the right lids, of the exact shape and size he required.
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But Marks was patient and amenable, and prepared to ride the peaks and troughs of his client's moods. He found Rossetti ‘the most amusing and at the same time the most intellectual man I ever met', and he was conscientious in his quests on Rossetti's behalf.
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His friendship with the artist flourished. Marks commissioned portraits of his wife, her face blooming in Rossetti's characteristic red chalk, her long neck and full lips, her flowing hair, typical of Pre-Raphaelite models. Rossetti borrowed objects from Marks to use in his paintings: a mirror from the drawing-room fireplace, a blue jar. And as he mixed his paints, blending and reblending to capture a particular shade, he sent Marks on errands to the markets of Covent Garden to find iris or tulips of a particular colour or a lemon tree in a china pot. When Rossetti's funds dried up, as they were apt to do, Marks would pay some of his bills or negotiate discounts until the crisis passed. He could be found at auctions, bidding up the price of Rossetti's works so that his friend could be sure of a profit. In particularly hard times, he bought parts of Rossetti's collection, at a good price, and kept them safe. Years later, in 1882, Marks was one of the few mourners who made the journey to Rossetti's bleak funeral on the Kent coast, where he had gone to escape both his paralysing addiction and his creditors.

* * *

Despite the evident closeness between the two men, Marks never forgot that the relationship was primarily founded upon the business of collecting and dealing. It was this attention to commercial opportunity, partnered with a sensitivity to the nuances of fashion and the market – and hard-nosed ambition – which made Marks in time, perhaps inevitably, a successful man. He was part of a new generation of art dealers that was changing the collectors' world. Born in 1840, he was a near contemporary of both Joseph Joel Duveen, Charlotte Schreiber's rival, who was born just three years later, and of the prominent and respected art dealer Asher Wertheimer, born in 1844. Like many other London dealers, all three came from Jewish émigré families: Marks and Duveen had roots in Holland, Wertheimer's father was German. They fell outside the social circles that filled museum posts and gentlemen's clubs. They were born into an established community that stretched across all the major cities of Europe, one that viewed art as a business enterprise, that combined connoisseurship with commercialism, and was open about the fact that collecting was a market activity.

Marks, Duveen and Wertheimer were all socially accomplished, knowledgeable and astute. While they had been raised in business families, their love of art was both genuine and inquisitive. All three combined a life dealing in historic works with befriending and supporting emerging young artists. Duveen happily loaned pieces from his showroom to furnish the backdrops to paintings, providing Millais in particular with a number of valuable tapestries; John Singer Sargent dined weekly with the Wertheimers at their house in Connaught Place and painted twelve portraits of the family which were left to the National Gallery after Wertheimer's death in 1918. As social outsiders, they mixed not with the gentry and royalty of Robinson's acquaintance but more commonly with an avant-garde artistic circle that challenged the establishment. But they were also
careful to maintain a precious air of respectability that attracted the wealthiest and most influential clients. By the 1860s and 1870s, when all three dealers were at their peak, they had become some of the most powerful men in the collecting world.

Marks had known connoisseurs and collectors since his earliest childhood, helping out in the shop which his father, Emanuel Marks, had opened around 1850 on London's Oxford Street, on the edge of the antiques heartland of Victorian Soho. He was a precocious child: by the age of ten, he was said to be fond of chattering happily to his father's customers, discussing fine points of art history, comparing the masterpieces of the past and arguing the case for forgotten painters. He developed an interest in Chinese art and pestered his father, unsuccessfully, to allow him to undertake a tour of the Far East. A few years later, he attended one of Europe's leading universities in Frankfurt, studying Spinoza and exploring the art of France, Italy, Austria and Germany as he holidayed with his friend, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. He was unusually well educated for a dealer – erudite, articulate and cultured. As we have seen, Duveen's training in the docks of Hull was more practical, and Wertheimer learned his trade in his father's showroom. Marks, on the other hand, was an intellectual and a connoisseur; he could stand his own in society and, according to Rossetti, his ‘taste amounted to genius'.
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After returning to London from Frankfurt, Marks settled to business, joining his father in the expanding Oxford Street shop that shared a building with Pickford & Co., then just starting out in the removals trade. In the early 1860s, he was conscientious and dutiful, but to a young man with ambition, Emanuel Marks' approach to trade seemed dull and lifeless. There was no sparkle to it. Marks, meanwhile, enjoyed nights at the theatre, spending hours at stage doors waiting for late-night actresses; talking politics and poetry and music with noisy young men; visiting
artist's studios with the fashionable crowd for private views. He was warm and witty. He impressed with his learning, but wore his knowledge lightly. He was stylish and modern and smart. And so, despite his father's disapproval, Marks edged his way into the heart of society, to the dinners and dances and parties that mattered. He scoured his father's client list for the names he needed to know; he pressed for invitations; he was seen at all the right occasions. Before long, he had a bohemian circle of influential friends. As well as becoming part of the Pre-Raphaelite coterie, he was close to other men whose names dotted the fashionable journals and pages of
Punch
: the satirical artist and dandy George Cruikshank, who had once received a bribe of £100 from George III ‘not to caricature His Majesty in any immoral situation'; the son of Charles Dickens, a lively, and often inebriated, socialite; and
The Times
journalist, and soon-to-be actor and entertainer, George Grossmith.

With this somewhat outré crowd, Marks kept late hours and attended all the new shows. But he did not forget himself, nor his profession. He was, even as a carousing young man, decorous and slightly reserved. He continued to work diligently, sensing that he was on the verge of making his business one of the most sought after and desirable in London. So, while he might on occasion be fashionable and frivolous, he was also comfortable assuming the character of scholar and intellectual on evenings spent with John Ruskin, or Charles Hercules Read, who worked with Augustus Franks at the British Museum. He took care of his credentials, continuing to read and study widely, and developing links with dealers abroad. And he discovered that even his more ostentatious friends and clients could be useful in sustaining a scholarly network: both Rossetti and James McNeill Whistler belonged to the Fine Arts Club, connecting Marks to the most prominent and active collectors of his day.

In a campaign to attract the kind of customers he wanted,
Marks sought to shed the stereotype of the grimy backstreet dive that Dickens had featured in
The Old Curiosity Shop
; the ‘receptacles for old and curious things which seem to crouch in odd corners of this town and to hide their musty treasures from the public eye in jealousy and distrust'. He aimed instead for the bright and accessible, the professional but unstuffy, creating a business which would woo the fashionable without alienating serious collectors and the museums. He began by reinventing the Marks name, and with it the character of the art dealer. By 1862, the Marks entry in the London business directory, which for years had simply read ‘curiosity dealer', was puffed and polished, and had become instead ‘Importer of antique furniture, Sèvres, Dresden, oriental china and curiosities'. It was a statement of Marks' intent and ambition: the business was no longer just about unidentified ‘curiosities' nor was he simply a ‘dealer', tainted with overtones of the noisier, dirtier London trades. He was an ‘Importer', a man who travelled, discerning and learned and slightly exotic; a man with contacts. The new entry associated him with the best and most desirable of European objects and, by association, the leading European dealers. And it kept him ahead of the competition. About the same time, Joseph Joel Duveen was similarly remarketing his own business, printing new stationery as ‘Importer of Antique China, Silver and Works of Art' and looking to move to London from Hull, visiting premises on both Oxford Street and Bond Street. In the end, Duveen had to postpone the London move until 1876, but Marks was no doubt aware that other dealers were looking to expand and modernize, and that to succeed he had to find new ways of doing things.

While the description of the business was a good place to start, Marks was eager to go further. He tried talking to his father, making suggestions for ways in which they could improve and update the shop, but Emanuel Marks was suspicious of fashion and would not countenance change. So it was after his father set
off to Europe for a long trip in 1864 that Marks took his next step, closing a deal on premises in stylish Sloane Street in south-west London, converting them into a showroom and, with a few selected objects carefully displayed, setting himself up alone, as ‘Murray Marks, dealer in works of art'. The showroom at 21 Sloane Street was the epitome of fashionable chic: it was everything Emanuel's old shop was not. Its broad windows glistened in the evening gas lights; its heavy door was freshly painted and latticed in gold. The chattering window shoppers, parading between Chelsea and Knightsbridge, could not help but notice the new premises, while the artists and poets and collectors of Marks' crowd were delighted to have somewhere new to be seen. And Marks, sensing what might draw them in, chose for the focus of his display the intense colour and bold forms, the exotic oriental patterns, of blue-and-white china.

Rossetti's raucous bird, boldly displaying in the Cheyne Walk entrance hall, was a living, squawking testament to the popularity of the deep blues and glittering eye of the peacock feather. From curtains to carpets, from wallpapers to writing papers, the peacock motif became ubiquitous in fashionable homes as a symbol of the avant-garde and the daring, a motif for those wanting to throw off the mustiness of the mid-century and stand at the vanguard of a changing taste. It was an icon for the poets, writers, artists and designers clustering under the banners of the Pre-Raphaelites, the Aesthetes and the Art Nouveau that, by the end of the century, would be making claims for new ways of representing the world. It was beautiful and ephemeral, detached from establishment arguments about the importance of utility, and so the perfect symbol for those wanting to celebrate and collect art for its own sake. ‘Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for example,' urged John Ruskin in
The Stones of Venice
.

Alongside the peacock feathers – on Whistler's mantelpiece and in Rossetti's parlour, in William Morris's country house at Kelmscott Manor and in Oscar Wilde's university rooms – stood the blue-and-white china that Marks' new shop was showcasing. In his premises on Sloane Street, he was pioneering a trend and promoting one of the biggest collecting crazes of the Victorian age. The fashion for pots and plates with willowy Japanese and Chinese designs would soon create an apparently insatiable market; the homes of the stylish rich and the aspirational middle classes would soon be full of themed rooms, extravagantly decorated in an oriental style with prints, fans, screens and matting and with the distinctive blue-and-white china taking pride of place.

The techniques of making a pure white ceramic with cobalt-blue decoration beneath the glaze had been introduced to China from the Middle East as early as the ninth century. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it was already being exported to Europe: during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) for example, China was part of the Mongol empire that controlled much of Asia, and blue-and-white travelled swiftly to the Mediterranean on its expanding maritime networks. By the end of the seventeenth century, sophisticated pieces from the K'ang-hsi period (1662– 1722) were becoming available to the wealthiest collectors, and the Dutch East India Company was investing heavily in the profitable trading routes that supplied the growing demand in Europe. Blue-and-white became enormously desirable, a way for rich collectors to display their elegance and wealth. The royalty and nobility of Europe created a huge demand and fine examples became so highly prized that they appear in many seventeenth-and eighteenth-century paintings, either as the backdrop to portraits or extravagant allegories, or as subjects in their own right. As early as 1514, Giovanni Bellini's
Feast of the Gods
showed a satyr and nymph serving fruit to the gods from blue-and-white
Chinese bowls. A century later, blue-and-white was even more widely in evidence. The Dutch painter Jan Treck painted a still life in 1649 with two blue-and-white bowls (probably Ming), while in the 1650s Willam Claesz Heda, another Dutchman, evoked the luxury lifestyle of the seventeenth-century merchant with a still life of lobster, crafted gold goblets and blue-and-white; both works are now in the National Gallery in London.