Pictures
Detail, page one
"Catalogue of Ancient and Modern Pictures & Drawings Forming Part of The Cowper Collection
from Panshanger, Sold by Order of the Public Trustee as Executor of
The Late Lady Desborough"
Christie, Manson & Woods, Ltd., London, October 16, 1953.
8vo, 23 pages, unillustrated, self-wrappers with vertical fold, pencil markings in the text, ex-libris Ashmolean Library with cancellation stamp; offered on-line by a dealer in fine art catalogues in Wigton, Cumbria; purchased by the author
Scholarship is all about pictures now. Everyone wants a visual, can't you send me the jpeg, a scan, a link, a digital file. Even when the opportunity presents itself to see the genuine article, the thing itself, out of storage, unwrapped, unframed and set down right in front of you, what does your bright young scholar do these days but whip out a cell phone and snap a couple shots, never mind asking if a camera's permitted. Surprised, actually, to discover you seem to mind.
But have some compassion, it's publish or perish these days. Competition is fierce, whether it's posting on Flickr or anywhere else; it's dog eat dog In the art world. Better give them a visual, make the story come alive. And so yes, when the opportunity presented itself I thought, how difficult would it be to reconstruct the Cowper Collection by finding images of these 154 unillustrated lots? One of the Cowper Raphael Madonnas (there were two) had gone to Duveen, to Melon and thence to the National Gallery in Washington. Lady Desborough had lived off the proceeds of that sale for years. Must be a postcard of that one. What about the rest? A little googling, bit of snooping on the boundless world wide web should do the trick.
Lot #3, (see above). The Nativity by Burne-Jones. A quick search turns up the Provenance: The artist's studio sale, Christie's, 16 July 1898, lot 53 (44 guineas to Agnew); Francis 7th Earl Cowper, Panshanger, Hertfordshire and by descent to Lady Desborough, her sale Christies 1953 to William Scudamore Mitchell, images now courtesy of Peter Nahun of The Leicester Galleries, London.
Of course the Burne-Jones items, (five lots, all acquired by the 7th Earl) were atypical of the Cowper Collection as a whole, what with its heavy leaning toward Italian and Dutch Old Masters and family portraits by Kneller, Lely, and Van Dyck. Interesting to think the old sport would go for something modern toward the end of his collecting days. Curious. However, I was not out to dissect the collection but rather to recreate it. So far so good.
Lot #19 would appear after a cursory investigation to be the same work in the National Portrait Gallery listed as a Portrait of an Unknown Genleman, formerly known as Abraham Cowley and ascribed to Mary Beale. In fact, it seemed as if a great number of the works that once hung on the gallery walls of Panshanger had wound up in the NPG. At least until upon slightly closer examination, the NPG picture turns out to be distinctly smaller and described as having been purchased in 1882, which is to say well before the Panshanger sale.
As you and I know, however, painters often painted the same subject more than once, often lots of times, human engines of duplication as they cranked out copies of their popular works, thereby confusing matters. One stately home collection begins to look like another as a consequence. Lot #82 for instance is a portrait of Barbara VIlliers Duchess of Cleveland (1640 -1709) by Sir Peter Lely. The Duchess, mistress of Charles II, was a favorite subject of Lely's. He painted her frequently and the NPG has a number of his works and still others by his contemporaries. Finding the Panshanger Duchess (depicted "as the Magdalen, full-lengh, in yellow dress and blue scarf, seated holding the pot of ointment") [Author's note: it's the pot of ointment that helps us know it's the Magdalen, if you recall. She annointed His feet. She used her hair. Lely also painted the Duchess dressed as the Madonna, with her son, viz. the Chiswick portrait. Why the king's mistress would be depicted this way is, as you might expect, quite another story]... finding the Panshanger Duchess of Cleveland would not be as easy as I might have predicted.
Lot #20, however is clearly the Ferdinand Bol portrait of a scholar now in the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) identified with the following provenance: "Sir Francis Thomas de Grey Cowper, 7th Earl Cowper [1834-1905], by 1881; by inheritance to Ethel Grenfell, Lady Desborough [1867-1952], ca. 1913; auctioned at (Christie, Manson & Woods, London) in 1953; Probably purchased by Engel; David M. Koetser Gallery, New York); Colonel and Mrs. A.W.S. Herrington, Indiananpolis; given to the IMA, 1957." With footnotes. A very nice bit of scholarly work this, by the way. Very old school.
Having gotten this far, though, I had to stop and ask myself what I thought I was doing. Or rather, why. Besides the simple answer that it could be done, that is. Proving that you never have to go to a museum or a library again. Get a wireless connection and a laptop and you can work from bed. You don't even have to get dressed.
There are even sites now you can type in an artist or a subject and order a copy of practically anything by anyone at almost any size and priced to fit any budget. Take Van Dyck's Portrait of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Stafford, which is almost certainly the Cowper Collection's Van Dyck, lot #134 ["full-length, in armour and buff riding boots, standing on a terrace, holding a baton and resting his right hand on the head of a dog, 84in. by 51in. Purchased by Anthony Earl of Kent"]. Order a small one for next to nothing or a large version at about half the dimensions of the original for $179.00 plus shipping and handling.
The point is, dear friend, you can reproduce anything and everything. Which makes everything very simple. Except it makes the point I'm trying to make more complicated. Complicated because I'm a collector of rarities and remnants, of ephemeral evidence like this old obscure catalogue, creased down the center from being folded so it fit in the breast pocket of some gentleman who was there for the auction and is long gone now, although perhaps like me he was looking for the same thing, a hoarder of pieces of lost places, or else just a bargain hunter taking his chances. 1953 was not a banner year for the post war art market; the prices realized were dismal. There were bargains everywhere in those days for anyone who had any money. The problem is, practically nobody did.
But it's not about the buying. What I really want to do is conjure. Show you the whole out of pieces. Let you see how little is left, how much was at stake. Everything is precious and nothing lasts, and then it ends up being scattered here and there and sometimes I am stunned by the bait and switch of history, I am startled by the duplicity of then and now. I am intrigued by what survives and what doesn't, I am fascinated by pictures and their absence. By pictures of pictures. I am dazzled by the magic of glimpses.
In the last shabby days of rationing and privation after the war when Ettie was confined to two rooms in the west wing of the house, her granddaughter Rosemary brought a young man she'd met at Oxford to visit her grandmother at Panshanger The young man was Sir Oswald Mosley's son Nicholas. He didn't realize he was being taken to meet the great Lady Desborough. "They motored into Hertfordshire and eventually reached the closed gates to a great park... They reached a house which looked as long as a battleship, entered by a back door, and padded down sombre stone passages where life seemed to have halted." (Davenport-Hines, p. 362, citing Mosley's Time At War, 2006, p. 164-5). Nicholas was ushered into a small sitting room and introduced to an old lady in a wheelchair who told him she'd been a friend of his grandfather's.
'She gave Rosemary a huge old-fashioned key and we went down a central corridor of tattered grandeur and into a long high picture gallery where, when Rosemary had opened a creaking shutter, there appeared through cobwebs -- a Van Dyck? An Italian Rensaissance Holy Family? A huge portrait of a soldier on a horse that could be -- surely not! -- a Rembrandt? (Rosemay said, "Yes, they say it is.").'
Lot #20, however is clearly the Ferdinand Bol portrait of a scholar now in the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) identified with the following provenance: "Sir Francis Thomas de Grey Cowper, 7th Earl Cowper [1834-1905], by 1881; by inheritance to Ethel Grenfell, Lady Desborough [1867-1952], ca. 1913; auctioned at (Christie, Manson & Woods, London) in 1953; Probably purchased by Engel; David M. Koetser Gallery, New York); Colonel and Mrs. A.W.S. Herrington, Indiananpolis; given to the IMA, 1957." With footnotes. A very nice bit of scholarly work this, by the way. Very old school.
Having gotten this far, though, I had to stop and ask myself what I thought I was doing. Or rather, why. Besides the simple answer that it could be done, that is. Proving that you never have to go to a museum or a library again. Get a wireless connection and a laptop and you can work from bed. You don't even have to get dressed.
There are even sites now you can type in an artist or a subject and order a copy of practically anything by anyone at almost any size and priced to fit any budget. Take Van Dyck's Portrait of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Stafford, which is almost certainly the Cowper Collection's Van Dyck, lot #134 ["full-length, in armour and buff riding boots, standing on a terrace, holding a baton and resting his right hand on the head of a dog, 84in. by 51in. Purchased by Anthony Earl of Kent"]. Order a small one for next to nothing or a large version at about half the dimensions of the original for $179.00 plus shipping and handling.
The point is, dear friend, you can reproduce anything and everything. Which makes everything very simple. Except it makes the point I'm trying to make more complicated. Complicated because I'm a collector of rarities and remnants, of ephemeral evidence like this old obscure catalogue, creased down the center from being folded so it fit in the breast pocket of some gentleman who was there for the auction and is long gone now, although perhaps like me he was looking for the same thing, a hoarder of pieces of lost places, or else just a bargain hunter taking his chances. 1953 was not a banner year for the post war art market; the prices realized were dismal. There were bargains everywhere in those days for anyone who had any money. The problem is, practically nobody did.
But it's not about the buying. What I really want to do is conjure. Show you the whole out of pieces. Let you see how little is left, how much was at stake. Everything is precious and nothing lasts, and then it ends up being scattered here and there and sometimes I am stunned by the bait and switch of history, I am startled by the duplicity of then and now. I am intrigued by what survives and what doesn't, I am fascinated by pictures and their absence. By pictures of pictures. I am dazzled by the magic of glimpses.
In the last shabby days of rationing and privation after the war when Ettie was confined to two rooms in the west wing of the house, her granddaughter Rosemary brought a young man she'd met at Oxford to visit her grandmother at Panshanger The young man was Sir Oswald Mosley's son Nicholas. He didn't realize he was being taken to meet the great Lady Desborough. "They motored into Hertfordshire and eventually reached the closed gates to a great park... They reached a house which looked as long as a battleship, entered by a back door, and padded down sombre stone passages where life seemed to have halted." (Davenport-Hines, p. 362, citing Mosley's Time At War, 2006, p. 164-5). Nicholas was ushered into a small sitting room and introduced to an old lady in a wheelchair who told him she'd been a friend of his grandfather's.
'She gave Rosemary a huge old-fashioned key and we went down a central corridor of tattered grandeur and into a long high picture gallery where, when Rosemary had opened a creaking shutter, there appeared through cobwebs -- a Van Dyck? An Italian Rensaissance Holy Family? A huge portrait of a soldier on a horse that could be -- surely not! -- a Rembrandt? (Rosemay said, "Yes, they say it is.").'
Just a comment on 'William Scudamore Mitchell', or Bill Mitchell, who worked at Shell up to 1957 and was a friend of John Betjeman, who edited the Shell County Guides series. I believe Mitchell went on to head up marketing for the British Egg Marketing Board and is credited for the famous 'go to work on an egg' slogan. He wrote the Shell Guide to East Sussex in 1978.
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