Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (60 page)

The Peacock Room in the house of Frederick Richards Leyland, decorated by James Whistler in 1877. The photograph shows Whistler's portrait of ‘La princesse du pays de la porcelaine' and some of the blue-and-white collection assembled by Murray Marks.

Murray Marks in his London home. The photograph shows Rossetti's characteristic portrait of Marks' wife, as well as some choice pieces from Marks' collection of blue-and-white on the mantlepiece.

Murray Marks' distinctive trade card, designed as a result of a collaboration between Whistler, Rossetti and William Morris.

Joseph Mayer's first portrait, painted around 1840 by William Daniels, shows Mayer at the heart of his growing collection.

A view of the ‘Mummy Room' in Mayer's Egyptian Museum in Liverpool, complete with stuffed crocodile.

Stephen Wootton Bushell's visiting card with a portrait photograph taken shortly after his arrival in China in 1868.

The semi-ruined Bronze Pavilion at the Imperial Summer Palace in Peking. This picture was taken by the pioneering Scottish photographer, John Thomson, on a trip to the city in 1871–2, during which he almost certainly worked with Stephen Wootton Bushell to document historical sites. Bushell owned an album of Thomson's photographs.

This pair of engravings by George du Maurier appeared in the
Punch Almanack
in December 1875. They present collectors as obsessive and strange, physically frail and emotionally incapable of interacting with family and friends around them.

The architect Aston Webb was chosen to create a new complex of buildings on the South Kensington site in 1891; it finally opened in June 1909. The intervening years saw Webb modify many of his ideas, moving towards the finished buildings we recognize today as the Victoria and Albert Museum.

An exterior view of the domed glass palace at Old Trafford, Manchester, that housed the Art Treasures Exhibition in 1857. This picture appeared in an illustrated weekly periodical, the
Art-Treasures Examiner: A Pictorial, Critical and Historical Record of the Art-Treasures Exhibition
, which was published especially for the duration of the exhibition.