The Emergence of the Antique and Curiosity Dealer in Britain 1815-1850: The Commodification of Historical Objects (The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700-1950) [1 ed.] 1409405796, 9781409405795

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The Emergence of the Antique and Curiosity Dealer in Britain 1815–1850

Rather than the customary focus on the activities of individual collectors, The Emergence of the Antique and Curiosity Dealer in Britain 1815–1850: The Commodifcation of Historical Objects illuminates the less-studied roles played by dealers in the nineteenth-century antique and curiosity markets. Set against the recent ‘art market turn’ in scholarly literature, this volume examines the role, activities, agency and infuence of antique and curiosity dealers as they emerged in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. This study begins at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when dealers began their wholesale importations of historical objects; it closes during the 1850s, after which the trade became increasingly specialised, refecting the rise of historical museums such as the South Kensington Museum (V&A). Focusing on the archive of the early nineteenth-century London dealer John Coleman Isaac (c.1803–1887), as well as drawing on a wide range of other archival and contextual material, Mark Westgarth considers the emergence of the dealer in relation to a broad historical and cultural landscape. The emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer was part of the rapid economic, social, political and cultural change of early nineteenth-century Britain, centred around ideas of antiquarianism, the commercialisation of culture and a distinctive and evolving interest in historical objects. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, histories of collecting, museum and heritage studies and nineteenth-century culture. Mark Westgarth is Associate Professor in Art History & Museum Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. Cover image: Fenton’s ‘Old Curiosity Shop’ Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, circa 1850 (SROB/K511/1100). Reproduced by kind permission of Suffolk Record Offce, Bury St Edmunds branch

The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700–1950 Series Editor: Stacey J. Pierson University of London

The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700–1950 provides a forum for the broad study of object acquisition and collecting practices in their global dimensions. The series seeks to illuminate the intersections between material culture studies, art history, and the history of collecting. It takes as its starting point the idea that objects both contributed to the formation of knowledge in the past and likewise contribute to our understanding of the past today. The human relationship to objects has proven a rich feld of scholarly inquiry, with much recent scholarship either anthropological or sociological rather than art historical in perspective. Underpinning this series is the idea that the physical nature of objects contributes substantially to their social meanings, and therefore that the visual, tactile, and sensual dimensions of objects are critical to their interpretation. This series therefore seeks to bridge anthropology and art history, sociology and aesthetics. For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/The-Historiesof-Material-Culture-and-Collecting-1700-1950/book-series/ASHSER2128 Private Collecting, Exhibitions, and the Shaping of Art History in London The Burlington Fine Arts Club Stacey J. Pierson Nature and the Nation in Fin-de-Siècle France The Art of Emile Gallé and the École de Nancy Jessica M. Dandona Collecting and Displaying China’s “Summer Palace” in the West The Yuanmingyuan in Britain and France Louise Tythacott Female Portraiture and Patronage in Marie Antoinette’s Court The Princesse de Lamballe Sarah Grant The Emergence of the Antique and Curiosity Dealer in Britain 1815–1850 The Commodifcation of Historical Objects Mark Westgarth

The Emergence of the Antique and Curiosity Dealer in Britain 1815–1850 The Commodifcation of Historical Objects Mark Westgarth

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Mark Westgarth The right of Mark Westgarth to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Westgarth, Mark, author. Title: The emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer in Britain 1815–1850: the commodifcation of historical objects / Mark Westgarth. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, [2020] | Series: The histories of material culture and collecting, 1700–1950 | Outgrowth of the author’s thesis (Ph.D.)–University of Southampton, 2006, under the title: The emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer 1815–c.1850: the commodifcation of historical objects. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: LCCN 2019056500 (print) | LCCN 2019056501 (ebook) | ISBN 9781409405795 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003028147 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Antiques business–Great Britain–History–19th century. | Art and society–Great Britain–History–19th century. | Isaac, John Coleman, approximately 1803–1887. | Great Britain–Commerce–History–19th century. Classifcation: LCC NK1133.28 .W47 2020 (print) | LCC NK1133.28 (ebook) | DDC 745.10941–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019056500 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019056501 ISBN: 978-1-4094-0579-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-02814-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

List of fgures Acknowledgements

Introduction

vii ix

1

The John Coleman Isaac archive 2 The spaces of the discourse 5 The emergence of historical objects 7 The emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer 9 The spaces of consumption 9 The commodifcation of historical objects 10 The emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer 1815–1850 12 Notes 15

Part One

The spaces of the discourse

20

Framing the subject I: Writing the art market, marginalia to mainstream 20 Framing the subject II: Writing the dealer, footnote to fulcrum 24 Framing the subject III: The ‘idea’ of the antique and curiosity dealer 26 ‘The Jew Broker’ 31 Fakes, forgeries and the nineteenth-century antique and curiosity dealer 33 Framing the subject IV: Figuring the dealer 35 Notes 40

Part Two

The emergence of historical consciousness

The consumption of the past 50 Specimens of Ancient Furniture: The emergence of the historical object 61 Notes 72

50

vi

Contents

Part Three

The emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer

78

John Coleman Isaac (c.1803–1887) 78 The market for antiques and curiosities 1815–1850 85 The market for ancient furniture and woodwork 89 Antique and curiosity dealing 95 Antique and curiosity dealers, ‘brokers’ and the second-hand trade 97 Antique dealers and ‘antiques’ 102 Classifying the trade 106 Notes 108

Part Four The spaces of consumption – shops, auctions, exhibitions 116 Spaces of consumption I: The antique and curiosity shop 116 The antique and curiosity shop: Locations 118 Wardour Street 124 Spaces of consumption II: Auctions 134 Spaces of consumption III: Exhibitions 141 Notes 152 Epilogue Bibliography Index

161 162 182

Figures

0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8

2.9

John Coleman Isaac/Henry A. Davies ‘Waste Book’, 1815–1845 John Coleman Isaac/Henry A. Davies ‘Waste Book’, 1815–1845 ‘An Antique Shop in the Victoria & Albert Museum!’, The Connoisseur, 1924 The Porcelain Collector (1868), Alfred Stevens (1823–1906) oil on canvas (1868) ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’, George Cattermole (1800–1868), wood engraving c.1840 Fenton’s ‘Old Curiosity Shop’, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, c.1850 The Old Curiosity Shop, John Watkins Chapman (1832–1903), c.1885, oil on canvas ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’, Portsmouth Street, London, postcard, c.1920 The Great Bed of Ware, Hertfordshire (1832), Henry Shaw (1800–1873), plate XXXVII, Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836) ‘A collection of old china’. Articles of China – Plate 3 in Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (1844) ‘Seats and Thrones from MSS Aurelius Prudentius, at Bennet College, Cambridge’, Plate XXIII from Joseph Strutt (1749–1802), Horda Angel-cynnan …, Volume I (1776) ‘Chair of the Time of Henry the Eighth …’ (1836), Henry Shaw (1800–1873), plate XI, Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836) Chair of John Wyclife, Samuel Ireland, Picturesque Views on the Warwickshire Avon (1795) The Cradle of Edward II, William Bingley, A Tour Round North Wales, Performed during the Summer of 1798 … (2 volumes) The Cradle of Henry 5th, in the Possession of George Weare Braikenridge Esq. – (1836), Henry Shaw (1800–1873), plate XLI, Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836) Ebony chair, formerly belonging to Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, now in the possession of Mr Webb, Old Bond Street – (1834), Henry Shaw (1800–1873), Plate XIII, Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836) Brass reading desk, in the possession of Mr Hull, Wardour Street – (1836), Henry Shaw (1800–1873), Plate XLV, Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836)

4 5 7 14 29 30 31 32 55 60 63 65 68 69 70

70 71

viii 2.10 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 4.1 4.2 4.3a 4.3b 4.3c 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8

Figures Table of the time of Henry 8th, from Hill Hall, Essex, in the possession of Mr Swaby – (1832), Henry Shaw (1800–1873), plate XIX, Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836) John Coleman Isaac/Henry A. Davies ‘Waste Book’, 1815–1845 Letter from John Coleman Isaac to Sarah Isaac, 22nd May, 1835 Interior of the library, Broomwell House, Bristol – (c.1825), W.H. Bartlett (1809–1854), pencil and watercolour Title page of catalogue of the stock of Horatio Rodd, Great Newport Street, London, 1842 The shop of William Schofeld, ‘Furniture Dealer’ 36 Holywell Street, London (1847), J.W. Archer (1808–1864), watercolour Trade card of William Neate, c.1825–1835 Printed invitation letter, DEALERS-IN-THE-FINE-ARTS’ Provident Institution, 27th May 1846 Interior of Broomwell House Lodge, Bristol – (c.1825), W.H. Bartlett (1809–1854), pencil and watercolour The shop of Samuel Isaacs, 131 Regent Street (c.1838–1840) Detail of Wardour Street c.1838–1840, showing the shop of John Coleman Isaac, 12 Wardour Street and the shop of Henry Farrer, 14 Wardour Street Part I of composed image of Wardour Street, c.1840 highlighting all known shops of antique and curiosity dealers in the period 1820–1870 Part II of composed image of Wardour Street, c.1840 highlighting all known shops of antique and curiosity dealers in the period 1820–1870 Part III of composed image of Wardour Street, c.1840 highlighting all known shops of antique and curiosity dealers in the period 1820–1870 Letter from Gabriel Davies to Sarah Davies with drawing of a suit of armour, dated December 10th 1821 Exhibition poster for Samuel Pratt’s exhibition ‘The Gothic Armoury’, 3 Grosvenor Street, London, 1838 S & H Pratt ‘The Gothic Armoury’ exhibition. Douglas Morrison (c.1810–1846/7) lithograph ‘Oak Table, Italian, c. 1600, possession of J. Swaby esq.’, C. Thurston Thompson (1816–1868), albumen print 1852 ‘Venetian Mirror, 1700, from the collection of John Webb’, C. Thurston Thompson (1816–1868), albumen print 1852

71 79 83 90 93 99 101 102 104 120 125 127 128 129 135 144 145 149 150

Acknowledgements

This book has been a particularly long time in development; it evolved from my PhD thesis (University of Southampton, 2007) of the same title, under the supervision of Dana Arnold, and I am eternally grateful to Dana for her support with the initial research project. I would also like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council who provided a research award for my PhD. The team at Ashgate/Routledge have been especially patient with the slow progress on the manuscript for the book, originally contracted with them back in 2009. Indeed, the project has been so long in gestation that many people at Ashgate/Routledge have since moved on, but I would still like to thank Meredith Norwich and Margaret Michniewicz for their help and support during the initial stages of the project. The current staff at Ashgate/Routledge have continued to support the project and I would especially like to thank Katie Armstrong, Stacey Pierson, Joshua Tranen, Isabella Vitti and Michael Yonan for their inordinate patience. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful and supportive comments on the working draft of the book. I am very grateful for the help and assistance of staff at several archives, including Christopher Woolgar, Karen Robson and the staff at the Hartley Library, University of Southampton, staff at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Bristol Record Offce, Cumbria Record Offce, The Guildhall Library, London, Lancashire Record Offce, the Royal Armouries archives at Leeds, Sheffeld City Archives, Warwickshire County Archives, West Yorkshire Archives, Westminster Archives and the V&A Art Library. There are many individuals that I would like to thank for their help and support during the long development of this book. All my colleagues in the School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds, especially Gail Day, I’d also like to thank Steven Adams, David Adshead, Patricia Allerston, Megan Aldrich, Anne Anderson, Susanna Avery-Quash, Jan Dirk Baetens, the late John Bedford, Antonia Bostrom, Lynn Catterson, Manuel Charpy, Jeremy Coote, Howard Coutts, Ilja Van Damme, Silvia Davoli, Charles Dawson, Eleanor Dew, David Dewing, Simona Dolari, Peter Finer, Pamela Fletcher, Anne Helmreich, Jeremy Howard, Alexandra Gerstein, Meriel Geolet, Simon Jervis, Brock Jobe, David Jones, Kirtsin Kennedy, Pat Kirkham, Barbara Lasic, Beverly Lemire, Martin Levy, Eumin Lim, James Lomax, Dries Lyna, Arthur MacGregor, Leela Mienertas, Patricia de Montefort, Anita Mosokowitz, Stefan Muthesius, Elizabeth Pergam, Kathrin Pieren, Barbara Pezzini, Eleanor Quince, Hadrien Rambach, Helen Rees Leahy, Charles Sebag-Montefore,

x

Acknowledgements

Jacob Simon, Kim Sloan, Tom Stammers, Andrew Stephenson, Jonathan Tavares, Louise Tythacott, Adriana Turpin, Filip Vermeylen, Rebecca Wade, Jane Wainwright, Jeffrey Weaver, Jane Whittaker, Christopher Wilk, Tim Wilson. If I have inadvertently missed anyone off my list I sincerely apologise. And of course, thank you as always to my wife Mo for putting up with me working all the time.

Introduction

The desire for historical objects dating from the ffteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which became such an important aspect of fashionable taste, furnishing and the culture of collecting during the frst half of the nineteenth century, was underpinned, promoted and disseminated via a wide range of activities, practices and publications. Historians of collecting have stressed the importance of the activities of individual collectors, highlighting the historical signifcance of such individuals as William Beckford (1760–1844), Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick (1783–1848), Ralph Bernal (1783–1854) or A.W. Franks (1826–1897) on changing tastes and fashions in collecting.1 Writers have also emphasised the impact of antiquarian publications as catalysts for promoting an increasing interest in furnishing interiors with historical objects and in the desire to collect and display objects from the past. For example, publications such as Thomas Hunt’s Exemplars of Tudor Architecture … and Furniture (1830), Sir Samuel Meyrick and Henry Shaw’s Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836) and Joseph Nash’s Mansions of England in the Olden Time (1838– 49) are consistently cited as key catalysts in promulgating an increasing interest in collecting historical objects and furnishing with historical materials. Historians have also stressed the impact of practical and didactic manuals on historical architectural styles and publications that sought to promote revivals and revisions in design practices in the period; volumes such as A.W.N. Pugin’s Gothic Furniture in the End of the 15th Century (1835) and John Claudius Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture and Furniture (1833).2 Several writers have also emphasised the importance of the emergence of Romantic fction and historical novels, most famously those of Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), as infuential catalysts for the promotion of the desire for historical objects in the early nineteenth century.3 Of course, there can be little doubt that changing tastes and fashions in collecting and furnishing with historical objects in the frst half of the nineteenth century was both a symptom of, and a catalyst for, the appearance of such publications. Nor could one deny that the increasing desire to collect and display historical objects was also shaped by the activities of individual collectors. However, as this book argues, the role that the antique and curiosity dealer played in these evolving historical interests, emerging collecting practices and fashions in furnishing and design in the frst half of the nineteenth century was also of considerable signifcance. It would of course be inaccurate to suggest that historians of collecting have not paid some attention to the nineteenth-century market for historical objects, but it

2

Introduction

would also be accurate to state that to date scholars have consistently underplayed the scale, infuence and signifcance of the nineteenth-century antique and curiosity trade in these markets. Gerald Reitlinger, Clive Wainwright and Stefan Muthesius, three scholars perhaps most associated with investigations into the history of the market for antiques and curiosities in the nineteenth century, have all suggested that market was primarily shaped by the activities of the collectors themselves and that antique and curiosity dealers played only a marginal role in the evolving markets during the opening decades of the nineteenth century.4 Wainwright, for example, commented, ‘even by the late 1840s there do not seem to have been large numbers of shops selling’, what he called ‘antiquities’.5 However, as this study suggests, the scale and rapid expansion of the number of dealers trading in antiques and curiosities during the opening decades of the nineteenth century suggests that the role, impact and signifcance of the antique trade in the period requires reconsideration. This book argues that far from being a peripheral fgure within the history of art and the history of collecting, the nineteenth-century antique and curiosity dealer was a signifcant agent in the promotion of the desire for historical objects and a primary catalyst in their wider dissemination into contemporary culture.6 The complex roles, activities and practices developed by the antique and curiosity trade are a testament to the importance of the dealer as a signifcant actor in early nineteenthcentury culture. Alongside the appearance of the dealer, the antique and curiosity shop also became an integral part of the cultural landscape in the nineteenth century. Indeed, as the social historian and critic Paul Bourget (1852–1935) put it, ‘a large part of our current literature remains unintelligible without the presence of the curiosity shop so common to our scenery’.7 It is all the more surprising then, given the key role played by nineteenth-century antique and curiosity dealers in the social and cultural fabric, in the structures of the art market and the formation of collections, both private and institutional, that little attention has been directed to them until very recently.

The John Coleman Isaac archive The primary archival resource for this investigation is the large corpus of archive material relating to the nineteenth-century antique and curiosity dealer John Coleman Isaac (c.1803–1887).8 Isaac has been the subject of a few introductory essays and short commentaries in recent years. He was frst introduced by the furniture historian Edward Joy in a short article published in The Connoisseur in 1962.9 Isaac was also very briefy noted by Clive Wainwright in his book The Romantic Interior in 1989.10 Isaac has more recently been the focus of a detailed biographical article by Martin Levy and Elaine Moss, published in 2002.11 Martin Levy returned to the subject of Isaac in a brief introduction to some of the correspondence between Isaac and the collector Ralph Bernal (1783–1854) in 2007.12 Isaac was an infuential dealer trading from various locations in London during the frst half of the nineteenth century, and the archive is a rare survival of material generated by an early nineteenth-century antique and curiosity dealer. There is of course a corpus of widely dispersed material relating to nineteenth-century antique and curiosity dealers surviving in the archives of many well-known collectors and

Introduction

3

in country house estate archives, but within such archives the material relating to dealers is fragmentary and partial. The Scarisbrick archive, for example, contains a relatively small number of bills and letter material relating to the relationship between the Lancashire landowner Charles Scarisbrick (d.1860) and the Wardour Street antique and curiosity dealers Edward and George Hull.13 The archive of the Bristol antiquarian collector George Weare Braikenridge (1775–1856), whilst rich in material relating to an antiquarian collector in the period, has only a small number of letters and bills from the London dealer Horatio Rodd (1798–1858).14 The archives of George Guy Greville (1818–1893), 4th Earl of Warwick, contain only 20 or so letters, bills and receipts from the ancient armour dealer, antique furniture dealer and furnisher Samuel Luke Pratt (1805–1878).15 Even an archive as comprehensive as that of the prominent collector William Beckford (1760–1844), which contains trading bills and letters from a number individuals involved in the trade in antiques and curiosities, including the London cabinetmakers and curiosity dealers Abraham Hume and Edward Holmes Baldock (1777–1845) and the ‘chinaman’ and curiosity dealer Robert Fogg, provides only a limited perspective into the activities and practices of dealers in the period.16 The Isaac archive therefore is a particularly important survival, focusing as it does on the activities of a nineteenth-century dealer rather than a collector. The Isaac archive covers the period from c.1815 up to the late 1880s, and whilst it is not a complete record of a dealer’s activities it does consist of a substantial body of business and private correspondence, comprising some 500 letters, as well as other business ephemera. Part of the archive relates to the initial curiosity business operated by Gabriel Davies (c.1760–1838) and his son and daughter, Henry Abraham Davies (d.1822) and Sarah Davies (d.1875), who were trading in Craven Street, London between c.1817 and 1828. The substantial portion of the archive relates to the business as it was continued by John Coleman Isaac after his marriage to Sarah (née Davies), whom he married in late 1824 or early 1825, and up to the retirement of Isaac from the trade in 1867 and his death in 1887. The archive includes correspondence with many other dealers as well as a corpus of letters from many well-known nineteenth-century collectors.17 It also contains a photographed copy of a ‘waste book’, the title page of which is inscribed ‘Waste-Book, – from April 23rd 1815 progressively’ (see Figure 0.1), which acted as the book-keeping record for the Davies and Isaac family businesses.18 The original copy of the waste book remains in a private family collection.19 A waste book was typically a bound volume detailing the daily trading activities of a business and included notices of sales and sometimes notes of events and incidents, as well as recording receipts and expenditure in order of their occurrence. ‘Waste Book’ and ‘Day Book’ were often used interchangeably in the nineteenth century. Entries in the waste book begin 1815 and after a break in the entries in May 1821, continue again from May 1825, concluding in August 1845.20 The image (see Figure 0.2) of two pages from the waste book, dated February and March 1838, gives a sense of the range of the business activities of a prominent early nineteenth-century antique and curiosity dealer. It records numerous deposits to Isaac’s bankers Coutts & Co; the shipment of ‘two crates of China’ to the collector Andrew Fountaine (1808–1873) at Narford Hall, Norfolk (15th February 1838); and ‘checks’ [sic]

4

Introduction

Figure 0.1 John Coleman Isaac/Henry A. Davies ‘Waste Book’, 1815–1845. Photograph copy of title page. AJ-53-467, Hartley Library, University of Southampton. © Hartley Library, University of Southampton.

from the dealer Edward H. Baldock (£39.10.0., 19th February 1838), the collector Ralph Bernal (1784–1854) (£63.0.0., 6th March 1838), the Marquis of Breadalbane (£40.0.0., 28th March 1838) and the dealer John Swaby (£87.0.0., 28th March 1838). As well as two ‘bills’ drawn on the Bond Street dealers Samuel and Henry Pratt (£100.0.0., 1st March 1838 and £141.0.0., 22nd March 1838), it also records a payment of ‘£2.10.0’ to the cabinetmaker ‘Jackson’ for ‘repairing and Colouring stands and french Polishing the tops of a Pair of Tables’ (19th March 1838). The pages also record the complex systems of exchange with collectors, as the note dated 4th April 1838 attests: Taken in exchange of Sir John McDonald three articles for which I have allowed him Forty pounds leaving a balance due to me of One Hundred and ffteen pounds ten shillings of the former account and this day I have sold him three bottles makes in all £117.10.0.21 The waste book and the related archive of letters provide a unique insight into the life and working practices of a signifcant early nineteenth-century antique and curiosity dealer and reveal the wide range of historical objects that were exchanged in this diverse economy.

Introduction

5

Figure 0.2 John Coleman Isaac/Henry A. Davies ‘Waste Book’, 1815–1845. Photograph copy, pp. 238–239, February 1838. AJ-53-467, Hartley Library, University of Southampton. © Hartley Library, University of Southampton.

The spaces of the discourse One of the key purposes of this book is to reinsert the antique and curiosity dealer into the historical narrative. The question of why the history of the antique and curiosity dealer has been marginalised in historical accounts is addressed in Part One of this investigation, titled the ‘Spaces of the discourse’. This section frames the subject of the dealer, placing the ‘idea’ of the dealer into the discursive context of the recent ‘art market turn’ in scholarly literature. Indeed, these recent developments have shifted the emphasis of agency in the history of the art market from a focus on collectors to a consideration of dealers as signifcant historical actors in their own right. As this opening section suggests, this shift, which amounts to more than a mere general expansion in the scope of historical investigations, has not only begun to disrupt established narratives in the history of art, but has started to move the dealer from a footnote in the historical record to a fulcrum in the discourse of art history and the history of collecting. The opening section also directs attention to the ‘idea’ of the dealer as it emerges in early nineteenth-century culture. Focusing on the ‘idea’ of the dealer as a discrete social and cultural identity, this section directs critical attention to some of the key tropes in the social and cultural biography of the dealer. Drawing on the characterisations of the antique dealer in the nineteenth-century novels of Balzac, Gautier and Dickens, this section places the ‘idea’ of the dealer into a wider discursive context.

6

Introduction

The Marxist art historian Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) in his fnal book, The Sociology of Art (1974), a wide-ranging ideological critique of the social and economic elements of art’s making, directed attention to the signifcance of the consequences of what he called the ‘intervention’ of the dealer into the market and the consequent emergence of the work of art as commodity; his observations have particular resonance for the discussion in Part One of the present study. However, Hauser also directed attention to the signifcance of the development of public art museums in the context of the art market; he writes: ‘The period which [created] the frst museums … also creates for the trade in works of art new bases of mediation between production and consumption’.22 Indeed, it is now becoming more acknowledged that the museum plays a crucial strategic role in the market for historical objects and, as Didier Maleurve suggests, the commercial trade in historical objects is no mere ancillary factor in the object-rich histories presented in the historical museum.23 The museum, as Joseph and Lisbet Koerner stress, ‘supports the value of the commercially marketed object by reverentially displaying its “priceless” twin, rather like the gold once held in public trust against paper currency’.24 As a culturally regulated space the museum is just as much involved in the business of trading art and antiques as the antique and curiosity shop. However, the museum is a place where the historical object veils its explicit status as commodity whilst simultaneously acting as intellectual prop in the systems of value of the collecting economy. In a sleight-of-hand performance, the objects in the museum are de-priced (although never de-valued), their commercial market value erased, as they are presented as the bearers of complex, inter-related historical, cultural, social and political meanings.25 The museum and the antique and curiosity shop may be contiguous spaces, but the perceived rivalry between the antique and curiosity shop and the public museum is an enduring trope in the history of the art market. For example, in 1923 when the Victoria & Albert Museum acquired an eighteenth-century shop-front that had formerly been the business premises of A. Hardingham ‘Dealer in Works of Art’, a short article on this recent acquisition, published in the September 1924 issue of The Connoisseur, openly questioned the appropriateness of the appearance of this antique shop-front within the hallowed spaces of the public museum26 (see Figure 0.3). The anonymous writer of the article exclaimed in the opening line – ‘An antique shop in the Victoria and Albert Museum! Such is the impression of a visitor to the West Hall of that great institution’.27 The writer could not resist the temptation to implicitly critique the all too explicit appearance of the ‘art trade’ in the public museum and the inclusion of an exclamation mark in the headline illustrates the writer’s anxiety. This is part of an enduring trope of course, one that exemplifes the often contentious and always ambiguous relationship between the public museum and the art trade. Indeed, the writer in The Connoisseur exposes the false dichotomy that lies at the heart of the complex relationship between the love of art and the perceived contaminating trope of commerce. Moreover, such a trope is notoriously diffcult to displace. For example, the decision to devote a small display at the (then) new British Galleries at the Victoria & Albert Museum (opened in 2001) to the trade in antiques during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may be evidence of the consolidation of the interest in the history of antique collecting in the public domain, but it was also perhaps inevitable, given the problematic trope of the dealer, that the implicit narrative of the display focuses on the fakes and forgeries that have inadvertently entered the

Introduction

7

Figure 0.3 ‘An Antique Shop in the Victoria & Albert Museum!’, The Connoisseur, Vol.LXX, No.277, September 1924, p.55. Private collection.

museum collections.28 The implication is that such aberrant objects are an inevitable consequence of the activities of the trade. In the fnal part of this opening section, this enduring trope is considered through a focus on the practices and identities of dealers and collectors and the perceived tensions between these respective identities. The notion of the dealer as ‘problem’ and the idea that the objects that the dealer sells are spurious or are consistently tainted by the commercial mode of acquisition, is a familiar theme in the social and cultural biography of the dealer. This opening section highlights key aspects of these enduring tropes and critically explores their effect in the processes of the marginalisation of the dealer.

The emergence of historical objects Part Two of this book considers the emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer in the context of nineteenth-century engagement with the past. Refecting on the notion of cultural transformation in the work of scholars such as Grant McCracken and Colin Campbell, this section places the emergence of the dealer into broader cultural and ideological contexts.29 As this book suggests, the emergence of the trade in historical objects was part of a much deeper shift in early nineteenth-century culture, one that involved the emergence of a distinctive and evolving historical consciousness

8

Introduction

in the period. Drawing from writers such as Stephen Bann, Susan Crane and, more recently, Tom Stammers, this section places the emergence of the dealer against these historical shifts.30 The emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer was a response to, and simultaneously acted as a catalyst for, these evolving historical interests. In this sense the concept and the descriptive category ‘historical objects’ is deliberate and purposeful and plays a central and strategic role in these discussions. The contention is that during the early part of the nineteenth century a conceptual framework evolved in which the ‘historicalness’ of objects became a dominant mode of interest, leading to a valorisation of ‘historical value’ in early nineteenth-century culture. It is true to say that many of the historical objects exchanged in the new patterns of consumption set in train by the antique and curiosity dealers had already been part of conventional antiquarian collecting economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For example, ‘ancient armour’, medieval ivories and stained glass, and ‘ancient furniture’ of the ffteenth and sixteenth centuries, had been of intense interest to antiquarian collectors during the eighteenth century. The emerging antique and curiosity trade of the early nineteenth century continued to rely on these well-established interests. However, the new trade inaugurated a shift away from the more discrete practices of antiquarian collecting, releasing this established range of historical material from the narrow confnes and discrete practices of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquarian collecting and putting them into much wider patterns of circulation. The important antiquarian text, Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836), written by the eminent antiquary and armour expert Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick (1783–1848) with illustrations by Henry Shaw (1800–1873), one of the most important antiquarian illustrators of the period, is central to the discussions in these sections.31 Specimens was the frst publication to be devoted primarily to the subject of ancient British domestic furniture and is a critical piece of evidence in both the evolving cultural biography of the antique and curiosity trade and the role played by the trade in the new patterns of consumption for historical objects. This section also highlights the implications of the development of a new interest among consumers in the period for historical objects dating from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a time much nearer to the contemporary present of the early nineteenth century. For example, commenting on an illustration of an ‘English Cabinet’ dating from the seventeenth century, in his Studies from Old English Mansions (frst series, 1841), the author and architect Charles James Richardson (1806–1871) wrote that such ‘Genuine old English furniture’ was already becoming ‘very rare’ and was ‘of great value’.32 Prior to the early nineteenth century, historical material dating from this period would have been perceived by all but the most dedicated of antiquarian scholars as merely old-fashioned or beyond effective use, their materials often recycled and reformed into more fashionable goods. The dual catalysts of nineteenth-century ‘Romanticism’ and ‘Historicism’ played a key role in the consumption of the past in the opening decades of the nineteenth century and provide complementary cultural frameworks through which the increasingly diverse range of historical objects were exchanged. The emergence of ‘Romantic’ fction acted as a primary catalyst in the promotion of the desire for historical objects and the contemporary fashion for historical revivals in architectural and interior design in the period created an expanding market for historical objects. Likewise, the insistence of the primary importance of historical context, a principle tenet in nineteenth-century historicism, is refected in the increasing stress that is laid on the notion of historical

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accuracy in the period and the renewed attention paid to appropriate historical context and evolving notions of authenticity. As this section suggests, the new antique and curiosity trade played a critical role in these developments, whilst paving the way for the embourgeoisement of the historical object by the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

The emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer Part Three of this investigation focuses on the various roles, functions and practices of the early nineteenth-century antique and curiosity dealer, drawing from the archive of the dealer John Coleman Isaac. This section provides a detailed commentary on the activities of the dealer and their acquisition and marketing practices, placing these activities and practices into the social, political and cultural contexts of early nineteenth-century Britain. The activities and effects of dealers in the market for historical objects are a key theme, as the expanding market for historical objects was shaped by, and shaped, responses to the destruction and recycling of cultural ‘heritage’ both in Britain and on the Continent. A key focus in this section is the evolving identity of the antique and curiosity dealer, together with an analysis of the signifcance of the diverse backgrounds and overlapping practices from which the traders in antiques and curiosities evolved. Here, the increasingly distinctive roles, functions and practices of the early nineteenth-century antique and curiosity dealer are considered in relation to the genealogy and contemporary practice of ‘broking’ and the second-hand trade in the period. The section also directs sustained attention to some signifcant changes in the descriptive nomenclature of both the dealers themselves and the historical objects that were exchanged in this diverse economy. By 1816, for example, we see the frst occurrence of the term ‘antique furniture dealer’ in the London trade and Post Offce directories.33 A host of related and complementary descriptive terms such as ‘ancient furniture warehouse’, ‘antique furniture importer’, ‘antique china dealer’, ‘antique repository’ also began to appear with increasing frequency in trade directories, publications and in letters and other contemporary evidence during the frst half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the notion of ‘antiques’ and the category of ‘Antique Dealer’, often considered to be terms that appeared in the late nineteenth century, had already begun to make their appearance by the 1840s.34 The distinctive and increasingly specifc classifcations and descriptive nomenclature adopted by the trade from the second decade of the nineteenth century were not only a refection of the diverse markets but were also indicative of the new patterns of consumption of antiques and curiosities in the period. The adoption of this distinctive descriptive terminology by the trade is particularly important and its signifcance appears to have been overlooked by those scholars who have previously studied the history of the antique and curiosity trade. Indeed, the employment of such a varied descriptive terminology in the early nineteenth century also disrupts the conventional account of a smooth progressive change from ‘curiosities’ to ‘antiques’ over the course of the nineteenth century.35

The spaces of consumption The fnal part of this book, called ‘The Spaces of consumption’, places the emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer against the context of the expanding consumer culture and unfolding modernity of early nineteenth-century Britain. The

10 Introduction strategic role that the dealer played in nineteenth-century exhibition culture, their role in commercial spaces such as auction rooms and the signifcance of the evolving geography of the antique and curiosity trade are key elements in these discussions. By drawing concentrated attention to the spaces of commercial exchange this section explores the signifcance of the increasing presence of the dealer in early nineteenth-century culture. The locations and the changing geography of the antique and curiosity trade in London are a dominant theme in these fnal sections. Here key locations such as Wardour Street loom large in the cultural biography of the antique and curiosity trade. From the 1820s until well into the 1850s Wardour Street was the primary location in Britain for the antique and curiosity trade. Wardour Street was a site that both attracted and repelled collectors and consumers at different historical moments in the nineteenth century and one that became a potent signifer for the more problematic associations of the trade. By the 1820s antique and curiosity shops had also begun to migrate from their established locations in the marginal and liminal spaces of the city, places associated with the second-hand trade in and around the tightly packed alleys in the City of London and began to appear in discreet locations associated with elite patterns of consumption, such as Regent Street and New Bond Street in London. In the context of the unfolding modernity of early nineteenth-century London the presentation of historical material through the ‘modern’ consumer spaces of these new antique and curiosity shops registered a renewed and distinctive engagement with the past. Disseminated through these new kinds of antique and curiosity shops, historical objects were woven into the wider commodity culture of early nineteenth-century Britain. As a space of commerce, as a key structural element in the consumer culture for historical objects in nineteenthcentury Britain, and as a potent signifer, the antique and curiosity shop occupied an infuential position in nineteenth-century culture. Indeed, as this book argues, by the second quarter of the nineteenth century the antique and curiosity shop had become the principal channel through which the historical object was articulated into the contemporary culture.

The commodifcation of historical objects In Capital (1867), Karl Marx (1818–1883) opened his discussion on commodity with a very broad defnition: ‘a commodity is, in the frst place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfes human wants of some sort or another’.36 More recently, the scholars Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff outlined a complex series of frameworks for the discussion of commodity and commodifcation.37 Appadurai drew attention to the fact that whilst the concept of commodity was a central part of Marx’s critique of nineteenth-century bourgeois political economy, Marx allowed for the defnition of commodities to extend prior to capitalist modes of production.38 Indeed, the concept of commodifcation, a key concept in relation to contemporary culture, is increasingly recognised as taking form in cultures previous to our own.39 A key aspect in these considerations is that the concept of commodity and the processes of commodifcation are always contingent; as Appadurai writes, ‘commodity made its appearance at an early date, though not in the same predominating and characteristic manner as nowadays’.40 In terms of the historical period that the present book takes as its focus, it is worth emphasising that this is also the period when the concept of commodity and the processes of commodifcation became so pressing for Marx. Indeed, as

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suggested in Part Two of the present study, by the opening decades of the nineteenth century a new and expanding range of historical objects entered, to borrow Arjun Appadurai’s phrase, their ‘commodity phase’.41 Appadurai was at pains to stress that the lengthy discussions that Marx subsequently provided on commodity are notoriously dense but what is of interest, as Appadurai highlighted, was a notation that Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) subsequently inserted into Marx’s commentary on the notion of commodity: ‘To become a commodity’, Engels wrote, ‘a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a usevalue, by means of exchange’.42 As Appadurai suggests, the notation by Engels ‘indicates that in order to produce commodities a man [sic] must produce use values for others and that these values must, by defnition, be social use values’.43 This indicates, Appadurai emphasised, that a commodity is frst and foremost a social thing. Indeed, as Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood proposed in The World of Goods (1979), one of the key roles of commodities is that they have been consistently deployed to delineate and sustain social relations.44 And so, if we can acknowledge that the expanding range of historical objects that were beginning to be exchanged in the consumption of the past in the early nineteenth century had previously had a ‘use-value’, that ‘use-value’ was being mobilised within a subtly different kind of social and cultural framework. For those who desired historical objects they would provide a catalyst for Romantic historical associations, or to suggest affnities with the social group of antiquaries and other collectors or used to demonstrate erudition and displayed as markers of wealth and status. For those who disparaged historical objects, for such material was also considered to have limited aesthetic appeal or be of dubious historical interest by many commentators in the period, ownership of historical objects represented arcane, obscure or dubious taste. Indeed, for some consumers such objects would have been considered as ‘rubbish’. ‘Rubbish’, however, as the social anthropologist Michael Thompson has demonstrated, can be an extremely useful category.45 As Thompson suggests, objects are ‘socially malleable’ and have a life-history of values that are capable of change over time. When objects make their initial appearance, they belong in the category of ‘transient value’ (decreasing economic value) and only later do some objects emerge to become objects of ‘durable value’ (increasing economic value). For objects to shift status from the transient to the durable they must, Thompson maintains, pass through a ‘region of fexibility’, which is the ‘zone of zero value’ we call ‘rubbish’.46 According to Thompson when an object reaches zero value ‘it does not always turn to dust’, but rather, ‘it exists in a timeless and valueless limbo’.47 What interests Thompson are the mechanisms by which objects move between these categories of value – ‘what sort of control mechanisms lie behind this real-life Midas touch?’, he writes.48 There are of course a wide range of infuences that project the notion of value onto the new range of historical objects that are the subject of the present study and a broad socio-cultural framework lies beneath the shifts that register the emergence of renewed interest in historical objects in the period. But there is no doubt that the emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer played a highly signifcant role in these evolving interests. The acquisition practices and selling strategies of the antique and curiosity dealers, their delivery of objects to the markets, the new commercial practices of antique and curiosity dealing and the new commercial spaces of the antique and curiosity shop, became a signifcant channel through which this transition occurs.

12 Introduction

The emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer 1815–1850 The book investigates the emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer in the period commencing in 1815 and concluding in about 1850. The chronology is a reference to the wider political and social changes as well as the broader conceptual ideas that underpin this investigation. The starting chronological sequence of this study marks the end of the political wars in Europe with the fnal defeat of Napoleon in 1815. Several scholars have suggested that this period is of considerable importance in the history of collecting.49 This was a moment, as the historian Francis Haskell (1928–2000) has written, when ‘focks of dealers and agents’ emerged in response to the expanding art market that had been set in train by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.50 The political, social and economic consequences of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars led to a greater availability of a whole range of artworks and artefacts as sections of the continental aristocracy, dislodged from power by the Revolution, impoverished by the war and censured by the emerging political order, sold off artworks and interior furnishings. As Part Three of this investigation highlights, the Napoleonic Wars also led to a disruption of the existing religious orders in Europe resulting in the dismantling and sale of interior fttings and stained glass from many religious establishments. The conclusion of the wars led to much freer access to the Continent, the consequences of which can be seen in the rapid expansion of importation consignments of historical objects by antique and curiosity dealers during the period after 1815. The concluding chronology of c.1850 is marked by several other important developments. The increasing specialisation of collecting activities, both private and institutional, is a key development in the period after 1850. For example, the establishment of ‘The Collector’s Club’ in 1857 was symptomatic of the increasing interest in more specialised collecting practices. The Collector’s Club brought discussion and debate to the evolving subject of ‘decorative art’ and was also the location where a number of infuential academic papers on such topics as the history of ceramics and the history of silver manufacturing were read and frst disseminated into the public domain.51 It is perhaps also worth highlighting here that ‘decorative art’ remains more properly a category associated with institutional collecting, especially museums, and in scholarly literature; ‘antiques’, by contrast, albeit a term describing the same objects, is more properly associated with the market, trade and private collecting. The term ‘material culture’ is now more generally designated in academic discussions, but the term ‘decorative art’ remains current amongst collectors and other enthusiasts. Indeed, the National Association for Decorative & Fine Arts Societies, established in 1968, continues to thrive in the UK.52 Of course, the categories of ‘fne art’ and ‘decorative art’ are historically and culturally contingent, but by the 1840s and 1850s the term ‘decorative art’ was already an acknowledged category of objects and had become more frmly established as a discrete category of objects within the emerging culture of museums and exhibitions.53 The category ‘decorative art’ was used interchangeably alongside related terms such as ‘applied art’ and ‘ornamental art’ throughout the nineteenth century.54 Indeed, in the frst catalogue of the newly established circulating exhibition of ‘Museum of Ornamental Art’ at Marlborough House, London (1855), the precursor to the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria & Albert Museum), the curator John Charles Robinson (1824–1913) indicated the symbiosis between the terminology, writing that ‘The object of the museum [of Ornamental Art] is to illustrate the history, theory and practical application of decorative art’.55 However, ‘decorative

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art’, ‘antiques’, no less ‘curiosities’, are complex, mutable, socially malleable and historically contingent categories and the categories of ‘antiques’ and ‘curiosities’ as they were conceptualised in the nineteenth century have their own frames of reference, as discussed further in Part Three of the present study. The public museum itself gave a signifcant social, cultural and economic endorsement to the increasingly wide range of historical material circulating on the market in the decades after 1850. In Britain, the emergence of the South Kensington Museum during the 1850s is a key example of the development of a museum that began to assemble and display an expanding range of historical objects. One of the contentions of the current study is that after the 1850s the knowledge of and interest in historical objects shifts signifcantly as the museum itself, and the knowledge created and crystallised by its displays and classifcations, became a signifcant platform through which the historical object is articulated into later nineteenth-century consumer culture. Indeed, John Charles Robinson drew attention to the impact that the emergence of the public historical museum was playing in the democratisation of collecting even by the mid-1850s. ‘The establishment of public museums’, wrote Robinson, ‘has rendered the taste for collecting almost universal amongst educated persons’.56 Equally signifcant in respect to the kind of knowledge that is brought to bear in the changing value structures that underpin the evolving markets for antiques and curiosities in the later nineteenth century was the emergence of specialised classifcatory texts. Publications on historical objects produced in the opening decades of the nineteenth century refected the evolving interest in the objects as a focus for antiquarian study and emerged as a result of antiquarian investigations, allowing collectors to map their purchases of historical material into an acknowledged feld of legitimate historical investigation. For example, in respect to the evolving interest in ‘ancient furniture’, Meyrick and Shaw’s Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836), provided antiquarians with a substantial corpus of illustrations of ‘ancient furniture’ and other objects together with brief discussions of their history.57 After the 1850s the publications that emerged became more specialised, with identifcation and classifcation of objects the predominant methodology. The requirements for such texts were driven by the more specialised collecting economy itself and provided systematic classifcatory information that allowed the process of identifcation and ordering that became so important to later nineteenth-century collectors. In the feld of collecting ceramics, for example, specialist publications included information on how to identify the factory and the date marks located on the bases and undersides of pottery and porcelain. By the 1850s collectors had several publications that provided such information. The year 1850, for example, saw the publication of Joseph Marryat’s Collections, Towards a History of Pottery and Porcelain, and which was republished twice before 1868 and included detailed information on European ceramics, especially that of the Sèvres factory, which had been part of the market for ‘old ceramics’ since the opening decade of the nineteenth century.58 By the late 1850s collectors began to direct their attention to collecting to eighteenth-century British ceramics from manufactories such as Plymouth, Bow and Lowestoft, as the journals of the collector Lady Charlotte Schreiber (1812–1895) clearly demonstrate.59 Henry Bohn’s A Guide to the Knowledge of Pottery and Porcelain (1857), which was essentially a copy of the auction sale of the collections of Ralph Bernal that had been sold in 1855, highlighting the prices that the objects had realised, also included a section on a wide range historic ceramic factory marks.60

14

Introduction

The relationships between the markets after 1850 and the specifc requirements of its value structures were no more in evidence than in the classifcatory texts that emerged from within the antique and curiosity trade itself. In 1863, for example, William Chaffers (1811–1892), a well-known curiosity dealer trading from Jermyn Street, London, published a text on ceramic marks and also in the same year produced the frst publication to provide silver collectors with information that would enable them to identify the silver hall-marking system.61 Chaffers’ Marks and Monograms on Pottery and Porcelain provided the ceramics collector with the frst substantial and authoritative text reproducing historic ceramic factory marks. Chaffers’ publication also included sections on the reign marks for historic Far Eastern ceramics, keying into the expanding interest in collecting Chinese porcelains in the period. This ‘chinamania’ was facilitated by the abolition of the monopoly of the East India Company in 1858, which allowed the importation of greater quantities of Chinese porcelain into Britain. Other legislative changes, such as the abolition of Government duty on the importation of ‘foreign china’ in 1860, also fed the expanding collecting market in the second half of the nineteenth century.62 Publications such as those of William Chaffers became fundamental to the practices of collecting. In The Porcelain Collector, by the Belgian artist Alfred Stevens (1823–1906), painted in 1868 shortly after the publication of the book by Chaffers, a female collector examines the base of a Chinese vase, whilst a book, which may be the one by Chaffers, lies open on the table63 (see Figure 0.4). By the late 1860s texts also began to appear that were specifcally directed at the practice of collecting as a discrete activity itself. The Adventures of a Bric-a-Brac Hunter,

Figure 0.4 The Porcelain Collector (1868), by Alfred Stevens (1823–1906). Oil on Canvas, 68.3 × 45.7 cm. North Carolina Museum of Art, the gift of Dr and Mrs Henry C. Landon III. Courtesy of North Carolina Museum of Art. © North Carolina Museum of Art.

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written by Major Herbert Byng-Hall (1868) exemplifes this development. The symbiotic relationships and the social rivalry between collectors and dealers no doubt encouraged the collector Mrs Bury Palliser to publish The China Collector’s Pocket Companion (1874).65 Mrs Palliser is an important but neglected fgure in the history of collecting antiques in the nineteenth century. She was instrumental in the promotion of interest in French and Italian antique furniture, publishing an English translation of Albert Jacquemart’s History of Furniture (1876) in 1878.66 Mrs Palliser’s Pocket Companion on ceramics was, as the title suggests, one which collectors could carry around whilst they were visiting the antique and curiosity shops and auction sales and unlike William Chaffer’s bulky volume provided the collector with a tool that would allow them to compete with the knowledge of the antique and curiosity dealer at the critical moment of exchange. Later in the nineteenth century, another dealer, Frederick Litchfeld, the son of the antique and curiosity dealer Samuel Litchfeld (1818–1894), continued the by then well-established practice of publishing specialist texts for collectors, with Pottery and Porcelain, a Guide for Collectors (1879).67 By the third quarter of the nineteenth century the activity of collecting was shifting radically, with a further broadening audience of consumption and an evolving and expanding range of collectable objects. The new systematic classifcatory structures inherent in emerging institutions such as the historical public museum and the emergence of specialised texts that began to appear with greater frequency during the decades after 1850 allowed historical objects to be placed in sequences and taxonomies that themselves formed the basis of further collecting activities. One of the consequences of these structures, which provided an ever more specifc language of identifcation and classifcation, was that they began to erase the broad category of antiques and curiosities that comprised the market in the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s. Indeed, the texts produced from the 1850s and the collecting practices that they signifed also contributed to the demise of the curiosity shop itself. ‘Curiosity dealer’, was a common descriptive classifcation operating alongside ‘antique furniture dealer’ ‘ancient furniture dealer’ and other related descriptive terms right up to the third quarter of the nineteenth century. By the 1860s the category ‘antique dealer’ was becoming more frmly established and the descriptive category of the ‘curiosity dealer’ was beginning to disappear from the trade directories. Whilst the objects that the dealers sold could still be ‘curious’, they were no longer, in the pejorative sense, merely ‘curiosities’. The origins of this conceptual and categorical shift, together with the wider discursive, contextual and historical questions that this study into the emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer considers, are layered into the four discrete but interrelated parts of this book. Each part can be read as a lens through which the emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer can be examined. But we begin with a consideration of the ‘idea’ of the dealer as it has been fgured in the literature, in the section titled the ‘Spaces of the discourse’. 64

Notes 1 See for example, Frank Herrmann, The English as Collectors (London, Chatto & Windus, 1972); Clive Wainwright, The Romantic Interior, the British Collector at Home 1750–1850 (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1989); Marjorie Caygill and John Cherry (Eds.), A.W. Franks, Nineteenth-Century Collecting and the British Museum (London, British Museum Press, 1997); Derek Ostergard (Ed.), William Beckford, 1760–1844: An Eye for the Magnifcent (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2001).

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2 See, for example, Jules Lubbock, The Tryanny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain 1550–1960 (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1995). 3 See, in particular, Stephen Bann, ‘Historical Text and Historical Object: the Poetics of the Musee De Cluny’, History and Theory, vol.17, no.3, (1978), pp. 251–66. Judith Pascoe, The Hummingbird Cabinet; a Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2006). 4 Gerald Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste: Volume II, The Rise and Fall of Objet d’Art Prices since 1750 (London, Barrie & Rockliff, 1963), pp. 89–123; Wainwright (1989); Stefan Muthesius, ‘Why Do We Buy Old Furniture? Aspects of the Authentic Antique in Britain 1870–1910’, Art History, vol.11, no.2, (June 1988), pp. 231–54. Muthesius concentrates on the antiques market in the later nineteenth-century, but still suggests that the dealer’s role in the earlier market was limited; see Muthesius (1988), p. 242. 5 Wainwright (1989), p. 36. 6 For an initial discussion on the nineteenth-century antique and curiosity trade and more detailed information on over 600 individual dealers trading in the nineteenth century see my earlier text, Mark Westgarth, ‘A Biographical Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Antique and Curiosity Dealers’, Regional Furniture (Special Issue), vol.XXIII, (2009, republished 2011), pp. 1–204. See also my discussion of the expansion of the picture and curiosity trade in the same period; Mark Westgarth, ‘Florid-Looking Speculators in Art and Virtu: The London Picture Trade c.1850’, in Anne Helmreich and Pamela Fletcher (Eds.), The Rise of the London Art Market 1850–1939 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 41–68, p. 44; for a general summary of the history of the antique trade in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries see Mark Westgarth, SOLD! The Great British Antiques Story (Leeds, Archipelago, 2019), pp. 18–26, the exhibition catalogue for the exhibition of the same name held at The Bowes Museum, 26th January to 5th May 2019. 7 Paul Bourget, ‘Edmond de Jules de Goncourt’, in Essais de psychologie contemporaine: Etudes littéraires (Paris, A. Lemerre, 1881–1886), p. 319. I use here the translation of Janell Watson, Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust, the Collection and Consumption of Curiosities (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 25. 8 The Isaac archive is held at the Hartley Library, University of Southampton, MS139/ AJ53. The archive was transferred from the Anglo-Jewish archives at the Mocatta Library, University College London, to the University of Southampton in 1990. The papers were deposited at the Mocatta Library, University College London, by the late Joseph Pollitzer, John Coleman Isaac’s great, great nephew. Several letters are written in Hebrew and were translated into English in the late 1960s by a Rabbi Feld. A brief summary of the archive, and in particular its signifcance in relation to Jewish cultural history, was completed during the early 1970s by the late Alex Jacob and the late G.H. Whitehill, director of the Anglo-Jewish archives at the Mocatta Library; see Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.468, Add 3. 9 Edward T. Joy, ‘John Coleman Isaac: An Early Nineteenth-Century London Antique Dealer’, The Connoisseur, vol.CLI, (December 1962), pp. 241–4. 10 Wainwright (1989), pp. 43–4. 11 Martin Levy and Elaine Moss, ‘John Coleman Isaac, “Importer of Curiosities”, an Outline of His Life and the 1846 Continental Diary’, Journal of the History of Collections, vol.14, no.1, (May 2002), pp. 97–114. 12 Martin Levy, ‘John Coleman Isaac and Ralph Bernal: Some Correspondence’, Furniture History, vol.XLIII, (2007). 13 Lancashire County Record Offce (DDSC78/4). 14 Bristol Record Offce (14182HB). 15 Warwickshire County record Offce CR1886/Box 789/82-100 & CR1886/Box 834/9-21. I am very grateful to Jonathan Tavares for kindly providing transcripts of the Warwick archive. See also Jonathan Tavares, ‘Whence the Splendor of Our Ancient Baronial Halls May Be Revived’, Samuel Luke Pratt and the Arms and Armor Trade in Victorian Britain (Unpublished PhD Thesis, Bard Graduate Center, New York, 2013). 16 Bodleian Library, Oxford (d27/2). 17 The Isaac archive contains three substantial parcels of letters from the collectors, Ralph Bernal (1783–1854) (covering the period 1834–1841), Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick

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19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

29

30

31 32

17

(1783–1848) (covering the period 1831–1842) and Captain Henry Augustus Langley (d.1834) (covering the period 1827–1828). Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53, No.467. The photographed copy of the waste book appears to have been obtained in the 1960s for a display at the Jewish Museum in London at the time the archive was lodged at the Mocatta Library at University College London. The transactions in the waste book are recorded in various hands. Levy and Moss (2002) suggest that entries up to 1821 are those recorded by Henry Abraham Davies, or perhaps by a clerk, and those of his sister, Sarah Davies. The entries after 1825 are identifable with John Coleman Isaac’s hand from comparisons to the letter archive. The private collection also holds photocopies of three diaries (the location of the original diaries is unknown) relating to John Coleman Isaac’s buying trips to the Continent during the 1840s. The frst entry, 23rd April 1815, records a payment of £10 to the bankers Rothschild & Co, whilst the fnal entry is for 1st August 1845; ‘Paid for a book at Kitsons Portland Street…9s 6d’, Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53, No.467. The break of entries in the waste book is possibly associated with the death of Henry Abraham Davies, who died sometime in May 1822. Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53, No.467, ‘Waste Book’. Arnold Hauser, The Sociology of Art (1974) (translated by Kenneth J. Northcott) (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 506–17, p. 509. Didier Maleurve, Museum Memories, History, Technology, Art (Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1991), esp. pp. 203–6. Joseph Leo Koerner and Lisbet Koerner, ‘Value’, in Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff (Eds.), Critical Terms for Art History (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1996), pp. 292–306, p. 299. See, Westgarth, ‘SOLD!’ (2019), p. 13 and Mark Westgarth, ‘The Art Market Is Fundamental to the History of Museums’, Apollo, (February 2019), p. 21. The shopfront was formerly the antique shop of Mrs Amelia Hardingham, 32 York Street, Westminster, London; Hardingham established the business in the late nineteenth century. The author of the article in The Connoisseur (1924) stated that the shop was formerly 32 Petty France, Westminster (York Street was renamed Petty France prior to 1923 when Hardingham’s shop, along with several others, was demolished). The shopfront was gifted to the V&A Museum by the Army Council (V&A W.88-1923); see also Wainwright (1989), p. 41; Westgarth ‘SOLD!’ (2019), pp. 12–13. Anon. ‘Current Art Notes’; ‘An “Antique Shop” and Other Acquisitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum’, The Connoisseur, vol.LXX, (September 1924), pp. 52–3. The interpretation on the objects in the display cases in the British Galleries at the Victoria & Albert Museum (opened 2001) includes reproductions and ‘fakes’; this is the only place in the museum where ‘fake’ objects are displayed, or where the interpretation involving the narrative of the antique dealer explicitly appears. Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1988); Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (London, Basil Blackwell, 1987). See Bann (1978), and Stephen Bann, ‘“Views of the Past” – Refections on the Treatment of Historical Objects and Museums of History (1750–1850)’, in Gordon Fyfe and John Law (Eds.), Picturing Power: Visual Depiction and Social Relations (London and New York, Routledge, 1988), pp. 39–64. Susan Crane, Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-century Germany (Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2000); Tom Stammers, Collecting Cultures, Historical Consciousness and the Artefacts of the Old Regime in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2010); Tom Stammers, ‘The Bric-a-Brac of the Old Regime: Collecting and Cultural History in Post-Revolutionary France’, French History, vol.22, no.3, (2008), pp. 295–315. Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick and Henry Shaw, Specimens of Ancient Furniture (London, William Pickering, 1836). Charles James Richardson, Studies from Old English Mansions (London, T. McClean, 1841), notes to plate XIX.

18

Introduction

33 William Holl, ‘antique furniture dealer’, 17 Hanway Street, London (London Post Offce Directory for 1816); Edward Baldock, a former partner of William Holl, is also listed as ‘antique furniture dealer’ in the post offce directories at the same time. 34 ‘Charles Lush, Antique Dealer’ was listed at ‘no.98 – [word missing] London’ in Webster’s Royal Red Book (1849). 35 See, for example, Mark Girouard, whilst writing on the Rothschilds’ preference for the old things in the mid-nineteenth century, ‘for what were called at the time “curiosities” rather than “antiques”’; Mark Girouard, ‘Insatiable and Discerning: Curiosity-Hunting with the Rothschilds’, Apollo, (April 1994), pp. 14–18, p.15; Michael Hall suggested that the term ‘antiques’ did not come into common currency until the end of the nineteenth century; Michael Hall, ‘Bric-a-Brac, A Rothschild’s Memoir of Collecting’, Apollo, (July and August 2007), pp. 50–77, p. 53; see also the summaries by Reitlinger (1963); Wainwright (1986 and 1989); Arthur MacGregor, ‘Collectors, Connoisseurs and Curators in the Victorian Age’, in Marjorie Caygill and John Cherry (Eds.), A.W. Franks, NineteenthCentury Collecting and the British Museum (London, British Museum, 1997), pp. 6–33. 36 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, volume 1 (1867) (Chicago, Charles H. Kerr, 1906), p.1. 37 Arjun Appadurai (Ed.), The Social Life of Things, Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986), introduction; Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in Appadurai (1986), pp. 64–91. 38 Appadurai states that Marx left the door open in this respect, see Appadurai (1986), p. 9. 39 See for example, Michael Saenger, The Commodifcation of Textual Engagement in the English Renaissance (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006). 40 Appadurai (1986), p. 9. 41 Appadurai (1986), p. 15. 42 Appadurai (1986), p. 6. 43 Appadurai (1986), p. 6. 44 Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods, towards an Anthropology of Consumption (London and New York, Routledge, 1979), p. 60. 45 Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory, the Creation and Destruction of Value (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979). 46 Thompson (1979), pp. 9–10. 47 Thompson (1979). p. 9. 48 Thompson (1979), p. 52. 49 See, for example, Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art, Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France, 1750–1900 (1976) (Oxford, Phaidon, 1980); Stammers (2008). 50 Haskell (1980), p. 26. 51 Ann Eatwell, ‘The Collector’s or Fine Arts Club 1857–1874, the First Society for Collectors of the Decorative Arts’, Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 1850 to Present, vol.18, (1994), pp. 25–30. 52 NADFAS was rebranded in 2017 to become ‘The Arts Society’. 53 See, for example, C.H. Wilson, ‘Observations on Some of the Decorative Arts in Germany and France, and the Causes of the Superiority of These, as Contrasted with the Same Arts in Great Britain’, Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal (1843); Catalogue of Specimens of Recent British Manufactures and Decorative Art…at the House of the Society of Arts, 19 John Street, Adelphi (London, 1849). 54 See Anthony Burton, Vision and Accident: the Story of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, V&A, 1999), p. 38. 55 John Charles Robinson, A Catalogue of the Museum of Ornamental Art… (London, Chapman & Hall, 1855), introduction; see also John Charles Robinson, The Treasury of Ornamental Art (London, Chapman & Hall, 1857). 56 John Charles Robinson, Catalogue of the Soulages Collection…Museum of Ornamental Art, Marlborough House (London, Chapman & Hall, 1856), p. iii. 57 Meyrick and Shaw (1836).

Introduction

19

58 Joseph Marryat, Collections, towards a History of Pottery and Porcelain in the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th centuries: With a Description of the Manufacture, a Glossary, and a List of Monograms (London, John Murray, 1850). 59 Lady Charlotte Schreiber (1812–95) was one of the most well-known collectors of eighteenth-century European ceramics in the second half of the nineteenth century. She donated over 2,000 pieces of English pottery and porcelain to the South Kensington Museum in 1885. Her extensive diaries of her collecting activities were published by her son, Montague Guest, after her death. See Montague Guest (Ed.), Lady Charlotte Schreiber’s Journals (2 volumes) (London, John Lane, 1911). For a brief overview of ceramic collecting over the period see Aileen Dawson, ‘Franks and European Ceramics, Glass and Enamels’, in Caygill and Cherry (Eds.) (1997), pp. 200–19. 60 Henry Bohn, A Guide to the Knowledge of Pottery and Porcelain (London, H.G. Bohn, 1857). 61 William Chaffers, Marks and Monograms on Pottery and Porcelain (London, J. Davy, 1863). Chaffers’ other publication, Hallmarks on English Silver, also published in 1863, was equally important; it was the frst text to show a series of tables indicating the various marks used in the British hallmarking system. The discovery of the meaning of the system of silver hallmarking is credited to the collector and M.P. Octavius Morgan, who announced his discovery at a meeting of the Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1851. Morgan later delivered an expanded and revised paper on the same subject at the Society of Antiquaries in 1853. 62 See, Geoffrey Wills, ‘The Study of English Pottery and Porcelain’, Apollo, vol.CXI, (June 1980), pp. 454–8. 63 As well as illustrations of pottery and porcelain marks and monograms Chaffers’ text included illustrations of a variety of ceramic objects, although it is not possible to identify the open page depicted by Stevens in The Porcelain Collector. Chaffers’ book was originally published with a blue embossed binding, but the 1866 second edition of Marks and Monograms was published with a yellow embossed binding and could be the text depicted in the painting. The only other text which included information on ceramic marks that was published before 1868 was the small handbook to the Ralph Bernal auction sale (1855) by Henry Bohn in 1857, which is not the text depicted in the painting. 64 Herbert Byng-Hall, The Adventures of a Bric-a-Brac Hunter (London, Tinsley Brothers, 1868). This volume was republished in 1875 as The Bric-a-Brac Hunter; or Chapters on Chinamania (Philadelphia, Lippincottt & Co., 1875). 65 Mrs. Bury Palliser, The China Collector’s Pocket Companion (London, Sampson Low, 1874). 66 Albert Jacquemart, History of Furniture (1876) (translated by Mrs Bury Palliser) (London, Chapman & Hall, 1878). 67 Frederick Litchfeld, Pottery and Porcelain, a Guide to Collectors (London, Bickers & Son, 1879); Litchfeld also produced Illustrated History of Furniture (London, Truslove & Shirley, 1892), notable as the frst systematic text that provided a history of English furniture; see Muthesius (1988) and Lucy Wood, ‘Lever’s Objectives in Collecting Old Furniture’, Journal of the History of Collections, vol.4, no.2, (1992), pp. 211–26, for discussions of the development of specialist texts devoted to the history of furniture in the period post 1890. For more information on Litchfeld see Westgarth (2009).

Part One

The spaces of the discourse

Framing the subject I: Writing the art market, marginalia to mainstream This book is a symptom of the renewed and increasing interest in the history of the art market over the past few years. Indeed, the rapid expansion of scholarship on the history of the art market over the last decade is of considerable signifcance, and it is now more widely acknowledged that the art market and its mechanisms play important roles in both the production and consumption of art, and indeed in the discourses of art history itself. The art market is, after all, as the scholar Ivan Gaskell has already suggested, ‘one of the cornerstones of art’s institutions, and hence art history’.1 As far back as 1938, the German art historian Martin Wackernagel (1881–1962), with his pioneering study of the Italian Renaissance art and the conditions of its making, The World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist, began a process of critical engagement with the history of the art market.2 Wackernagel’s text did not make the art market a primary focus of investigation, but the fact that he was one of the frst art historians to direct critical attention to the art market adumbrated the subject of the art market as a legitimate focus for art history. However, it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that scholars began again to direct attention to the subject of the art market and not until the 1980s that these attempts were sustained enough to place the art market as a central focus for historical investigations.3 The scholarly attention on the history of the art market in the 1960s and 1970s was still mostly liminal, and the lens on the subject had yet to be suffciently focused to draw the study of the market in from the margins of art history. Harrison and Cynthia White’s Canvases and Careers (1965), with its focused critique of the institutional process of the Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris and critical attention to the role that art dealers played as part of the nexus of mediation that included the art press, art critics and exhibition strategies, was a key early intervention in the 1960s.4 Michael Baxandall’s magisterial study of the social and economic conditions of art in Italy in the ffteenth century, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (1972), in which he formulated his key concept of ‘The Period Eye’, was also a key intervention. However, Baxandall’s text drew only oblique attention to the role of the art market in its discussions of commercial practices of art production in the period.5 A more sustained focus on the art market began to emerge in the 1970s, typical of which was the series of essays on the Italian art market in the nineteenth century by the historian John Fleming (1919–2001).6 The historian Francis Haskell (1928–2000) was perhaps one of the most pioneering scholars in this period. His account of the changing taste for collecting art, Rediscoveries in Art (1976), directed

The spaces of the discourse

21

focused attention to the important role that the art market has played in the changing fashions for art collecting.7 As with Baxandall, Haskell is credited with an innovative approach to the subject of the changing taste in art, moving away from investigations based on formal analysis of style or that of biography to ones that sought to place the production and consumption of art into increasing layers of social and cultural context. This approach was also symptomatic of the new approaches to art historical investigations taking place in the 1970s in the development of the so-called ‘New Art History’. Although it would be fair to say that Haskell’s texts were not so obviously engaged in critical theory in the way that many of the approaches of the New Art History would subsequently take.8 However, it is perhaps no coincidence that the steady stream of investigations into the history of the art market accelerated from the early 1980s given that Wackernagel’s text was republished in English for the frst time in 1981.9 The early 1980s saw scholars such as Malcolm Gee, with his novel investigation of the art market in Paris in the period 1910–1930, and Hugh Brigstocke, with his detailed commentary on the activities of the early nineteenthcentury art dealer William Buchanan (1777–1864), drawing further attention to the rich potential of the study of the art market for art history.10 At the same time, in the feld of economic history, John Michael Montias (1928–2005) began to produce ground-breaking examinations of the structures of the Early Modern Dutch art market, unlocking the enormous potential of art dealer business and artists’ archives and drawing new insights from city archives such as that of the Guild of St. Luke, the painter’s Guild.11 Montias employed the methodological tools derived from economic and social historians (longitudinal surveys and statistical analysis) and this approach has continued to dominate the methodologies of investigations that have taken the art market as their focus in recent times.12 Since the early 1990s, however, the study of the art market has expanded considerably and has begun to attract the attention of specialists from a much wider range of scholarly disciplines, with art historians, cultural historians, urban historians, social historians, anthropologists and social scientists all directing their attention to the art market and its mechanisms.13 These interdisciplinary investigations have demonstrated the rich potential for furthering our understanding of the complex histories of the art market, and of art history.14 This renewed impetus has continued to accelerate at a rapid pace and during the last decade there has been a concentration of investigations and critical analyses of the contemporary art market. Scholars such as Olav Velthuis, Isabelle Graw and Iain Robertson, to name but a few, have produced ground-breaking work on the role, functions and meanings of the contemporary art market.15 There is now a dedicated academic journal, Journal for Art Market Studies, solely focused on the subject of the art market, and academic publishers have developed publication series specifcally themed on the art market.16 Much of this research has led to increased research capacity within academia and to considerable developments in the establishment of research networks, academic research centres and conferences, and an increasing number of PhD research projects have also begun to make the art market the focus of their study.17 One can also detect an increasing interest in the idea of the art market in public museum exhibitions, consolidating the presence of the art market and its histories in the wider public consciousness.18 These wide-ranging and diverse developments clearly demonstrate the signifcant interest that the art market and the history of its mechanisms are currently enjoying. This ‘art market turn’, if one could suggest that such a development is occurring, has consolidated the idea that a new

22

The spaces of the discourse

academic discipline is emerging, moving the study of the art market from the margins to the mainstream in scholarly literature. The signifcance of the expanding feld of study on the art market may be of considerable note, but the majority of these new developments have focused the market for ‘fne art’ (and that of paintings in particular), rather than the market for ‘decorative art’ that is the focus of the present study. Indeed, despite the recent scholarship on the concept of ‘decorative art’ which has sought to rebalance the critical attention on the subject, it is fair to say that the history of the market for decorative art has been subject to comparatively little sustained critical analysis.19 There is a long tradition of scholarly work on the related feld of the history of collecting of course.20 Although one should discount the considerable volume of publications generated to assist collectors to identify, classify and value their collections, which are an intimate part of the discourse of collecting itself.21 Survey studies, such as those produced by Maurice Rheims in the 1950s, Gerald Reitlinger in the 1960s and Joseph Alsop in the 1980s, have provided broad historical summaries of the history of collecting.22 The detailed investigations by the distinguished historian of collecting and museums, Arthur MacGregor, have also made an immense contribution to the feld.23 Indeed, the Journal of the History of Collections, established by MacGregor in 1989, is a testament to the wide range of research on the subject. The late 1980s and the early 1990s were also a signifcant moment for more critical and theoretical engagements with the cultural history of collecting, exemplifed by the innovative work of scholars such as Krzystof Pomian.24 Dianne Sachko MacLeod, whose own ground-breaking investigation into the consumption of art in nineteenth-century Britain was published as long ago as 1996, has also continued to lead the way in widening the theoretical parameters and ideological contexts for the study of the history of collecting.25 The practices of collecting antiques and curiosities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were frst given detailed attention in the work of Clive Wainwright (1942–1999) in The Romantic Interior (1989).26 Nineteenth-century collecting practices have also been summarized by Arthur MacGregor, and eruditely considered in relation to notions of bourgeois identity and the ‘democratisation of collecting’ by Rémy Saisselin.27 Saisselin’s text charts the consumption of antiques as it expanded in the 1880s, linking the evolving desire for antiques as extensions to the consolidation of bourgeois culture and in the emergence of new spaces devoted to commerce such as arcades and department stores. The antique and curiosity markets of the midnineteenth century have also been investigated by Manuel Charpy in a rare and more recent example of a discrete focus on the subject.28 The innovative work of Stefan Muthesius on the collecting of antique furniture in Britain in the early twentieth century, in an essay published in the infuential journal Art History in 1988, was one of the frst pieces of scholarship that investigated the history of antique collecting through a critical lens.29 Muthesius placed the desire for antique furniture in a discrete cultural context, setting those desires against the design-led imperatives of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain.30 He returned to the signifcance of nineteenth-century antique collecting in the context of the designed interior in his more recent study of nineteenth-century interior design.31 More recently, the study of collecting antiques as a discrete cultural activity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has also been gaining momentum in the work of established and emerging scholars.32 There has also been a small number of publications on antique collecting in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the

The spaces of the discourse

23

USA. In 1980, for example, the journalist Elizabeth Stillinger provided a historical survey of collecting antiques in America, and Briann Greenfeld provided a focused study of antique collecting in early twentieth-century New England, Out of the Attic (2009).33 Notwithstanding these developments in the study of history of antique collecting, the work of Gerald Rietlinger often dominates the landscape. Reitlinger’s brief survey on the market for antiques and curiosities in the context of the nineteenth century appeared in volume II of The Economics of Taste (1963), and is one of the frst texts to focus more specifcally on the history of collecting ‘antiques’.34 Reitlinger’s book is also a key example of the application of a specifc methodological approach in the literature of the history of collecting, one that concentrates on the signifcance of the changing prices of objects sold at auction. Reitlinger’s use of historic auction sales data rehearse a long-standing tradition within the history of art collecting dating back to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1803, for example, the art dealer N. Alexander published the art auction records for paintings sold at auction in Brussels from 1773 to 1803 one of the earliest compendia of published art auction prices.35 The phenomenon of publishing the auction prices of paintings appears to have occurred simultaneously in cities associated with concentrated activity in the art market such as Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris and London.36 Publications by the art dealer John Smith in the 1820s and Charles Blanc in the 1850s continued the tradition.37 Indeed, the publication of auction price records for paintings reached a metaform in the later nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the multi-volume works of George Redford (1816–1895) and Algernon Graves (1845–1922), with similar developments in the records of arms and armour auction sales in the work of Sir Francis Cripps-Day (1864–1945).38 The focus on the price of art and antiques and the publication of price guides has remained a constant theme throughout the twentieth century and accelerated signifcantly from the late 1960s, mirroring Reitlinger’s publications.39 These later developments owe their legacy to the increasing need for access to information on prices from the growing number of individuals involved in the expanding art and antiques businesses in the Post-War boom in the art and antiques trade. More recently, the internet boom and the ‘Big Data’ revolution have resulted in a proliferation of online, internet-searchable art price data sites, such as Artprice. com and Blouin Art Sales Index, and commercial companies such as ArtTactic have emerged in response to contemporary art market conditions.40 However, it is worth highlighting here that the auction price of a painting or ‘antique’ object is subject to so many unknown factors, such as availability, condition, contemporary notions of authenticity, as well as the more general economic background and attitudes towards it, that the evidence of prices in art auction sales seems too much of a blunt instrument to consider complex historical changes in taste and fashion in collecting. Indeed, Francis Haskell made a similar observation in his own assessments of the study of the art market back in 1976.41 In disciplines such as cultural economics, where longitudinal surveys and statistical analyses are the norm, it is now widely acknowledged that Reitlinger’s approach was both selective and partial. Guido Guerzoni, for example, has suggested that Reitlinger’s data suffers from signifcant distortions.42 Moreover, the economic theorist William J. Baumol, whilst praising the data that Reitlinger produced, was not entirely satisfed that it was even possible to draw any signifcant conclusions from the data set.43 Notwithstanding the suggested defciencies in the approach of scholars such as Reitlinger and the narrative of economic value (price) within the discourses of

24

The spaces of the discourse

collecting, it is also clear that the primary focus in the history of collecting has been on the individual collector, privileging the activities and signifcance of the collector within the discourse. What is important to note here is that the collector can only exist insofar as there is an infrastructure of available objects and a framework of mechanisms and practices through which those objects are circulated, consumed and valorised. Such narratives dislocate the practices, incentives and activities of collecting from their wider social and cultural contexts and for the most part ignore the broader socio-economic and cultural structures that underpin collecting activities. Inevitably, in such studies the antique and curiosity dealer has been presented as a peripheral, marginal fgure.

Framing the subject II: Writing the dealer, footnote to fulcrum One of the most striking aspects of the renewed interest in the history of the art market in recent years has been the increasing focus on the history of art dealers. These recent developments have shifted the emphasis of agency in the history of the art market from a focus on collectors to a consideration of dealers as signifcant historical actors in their own right. This shift in focus has also recalibrated the historical signifcance of collectors, drawing more emphasis on the role and practices of art dealers in development of collections, both private and institutional. This shift, which amounts to more than a mere general expansion in the scope of historical investigations, is also disrupting many established narratives in the history of art, provoking the question of why the art dealer has been, until very recently, marginalised from the discourse. The innovative research published in the 1990s on The Grosvenor Gallery, the art dealership established in 1877 by Sir Coutts and Lady Lindsay, was a key moment in foregrounding the potential for historical investigations on art dealers.44 More recent examples of this increasing engagement with the history of art dealers include publications on the history of major art dealing frms such as Colnaghi, John Smith & Sons and Thomas Agnew & Sons.45 Scholars such as Anne Helmreich and Pamela Fletcher have produced ground-breaking research on leading nineteenth-century art dealerships such as Goupil Gallery and The French Gallery.46 The appearance of several publications and republications of existing primary source material, such as the memoirs of the art dealers Paul Durand-Ruel (1831–1922) and René Gimpel (1881–1945), is a testament to the increasing appetite for further research on art agents and art dealers.47 Whilst this focus on the function, role and signifcance of art dealer has been increasing over the last few decades, a critical focus on the activities, practices and signifcance of nineteenth- and twentieth-century antique and curiosity dealers has been comparatively limited in scale. Indeed, as far back as 1986 the historian of collecting Clive Wainwright drew attention to the lack of serious study on the subject, writing that whilst the history of picture dealing had been well covered in print, the trade in what he termed ‘antiquities’ had yet to be written.48 Arthur MacGregor reiterated Wainwright’s statement about the lack of research on the history of antique dealers, writing in 1997 that the wider role of dealers in the supply of historical artefacts would repay serious study.49 This is not to say that since the 1990s ‘antique dealers’ have not been the subject of some scholarly writings.50 For example, the development of the British antique trade in the late twentieth century was the focus of an essay by the American historian

The spaces of the discourse

25

Howard Malchow, who set the trade against the context of the neo-liberal policies of Margaret Thatcher and evolving notions of ‘heritage’ in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s.51 The historian Charles Tracey also directed attention to the role that nineteenthcentury dealers played in the market for ‘ancient woodwork’ for church interiors in England.52 And the activities and practices of the twentieth-century British antique trade in the market for architectural salvage were also part of the architectural historian John Harris’ work on ‘Period Rooms’.53 Throughout the twentieth century, antique dealers have also been the subject of a small number of biographical investigations. As far back as 1919 saw the frst biographical study of a major nineteenth-century antique and curiosity dealer, with a publication on the London dealer Murray Marks (1840–1919).54 This text foregrounded the dealer as a socially meaningful subject, although to be fair the focus of the biography was on Marks as a collector rather than on his activities as a dealer. The most detailed historical study of an individual dealer to date has been on the nineteenth-century antique and curiosity dealer Edward Holmes Baldock (1777–1845) composed by Geoffrey de Bellaigue in the 1970s.55 Geoffrey de Bellaigue’s investigations on Baldock appear to have ushered in a renewed interest in dealers and agents in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Boyd Alexander’s work on the William Beckford’s agent Gregory Franchi (1770–1828) and John Ingamells’ publication of a series of letters between the Fourth Marquis of Hertford and his art agent Samuel Mawson (1793– 1862) are two key examples from the period.56 The main protagonist in the present investigation, the antique and curiosity dealer John Coleman Isaac, has been the subject of a small number of essays, beginning in 1962, as the introduction to the present book has already outlined.57 The biographical study of individual antique dealers has also gained momentum in recent decades. Information on the activities of E.H. Baldock has been rehearsed and expanded.58 The well-known dealer John Burton (d.1907), who owned the ‘Old Curiosity Shop’ in Falmouth, Cornwall, which was one of the most high-profle establishments in Britain in the late nineteenth century, was included in the discussions on the collections of the Horniman Museum in London.59 The London dealer in ethnographic antiques, William Oldman (1879–1949), was the subject of a short biographical essay in 2009.60 The 2003 issue of Regional Furniture emphasised the increasing interest in the history of the antique trade by devoting a whole issue to the memoirs of the twentieth-century antique dealer Roger Warner (1913–2008).61 My own Biographical Dictionary of Nineteenth-century Antique and Curiosity Dealers (2009) was explicitly designed to draw the nineteenth-century antique and curiosity dealer in from the margins of scholarship, emphasising that they be ‘granted their own biography’.62 More recently, Charles Dawson has also recovered the history of the dealer, collector and writer William Chaffers (1811–1892) in an essay published in 2013.63 The Italian dealer Stefano Bardini (1836–1922) has been one of the most enduring biographical subjects. This is perhaps not surprising, given the extent and signifcance of Bardini’s activities as a dealer and the extensive Bardini archives that remain in Florence. Italian scholars have inevitably led the way in studies of Bardini, but there is also an increasing interest in Stefano Bardini from British and American scholars.64 One of the most sustained investigations of an American antique dealer in recent times has been the extensive study by Wayne Craven of the architect, interior decorator and antique dealer Stanford White (1853–1906).65 Craven resituated White within the complex nexus of antique dealers and decorators that supplied the objects to the American collectors of the so-called ‘Gilded Age’. He devoted several chapters in his book on White’s activities as a dealer and his relationships with many of the leading

26

The spaces of the discourse

antique dealers of the day, including the Duveen Brothers and the Durlacher Brothers in London and New York and Bardini in Florence.66 Other American antique dealers have been the subject of biographical studies, including Israel Sack (1884–1959), one of the most important dealers in the American antique markets, and Sypher & Company, who were trading in New York from 1866 to 1907.67 These publications continue to highlight the rich potential for further critical studies of this signifcant social and cultural phenomenon. The increasing attention given to the antique dealer in academic scholarship has begun to move the focus on the history of the antique and curiosity dealer and the practices of antique dealing from a footnote in the historical record to a fulcrum in the discourse of art history and the history of collecting.

Framing the subject III: The ‘idea’ of the antique and curiosity dealer During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the idea of the antique and curiosity dealer as a discrete social and cultural identity was indelibly inscribed into the contemporary cultural consciousness. The increasing presence of the antique and curiosity shop within the landscape of the city simultaneously embedded the dealer into the visible practices and rhythm of contemporary daily life. At the same time, the idea of the antique and curiosity dealer began to trace a familiar trajectory of association with contentious and dubious practices in the art market. These associations became potent signifers in the social and cultural biography of the dealer. Indeed, this enduring trope arguably remains a key marker in the history of the antique trade. The idea of the antique and curiosity dealer is constructed through the activities and practices of the antique and curiosity trade itself, but is also refected in the characterisation of the dealer in fctional literature; both ‘historical fact’ and ‘historical fction’ provide the dialectic that fgures the dealer.68 In the feld of nineteenth-century literature, the novels of Balzac, Gautier and Dickens in the period provide exemplary models for the evolving characterisation of the antique and curiosity dealer and the antique and curiosity shop. In 1831, for example, the French novelist Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) introduced an anonymous old curiosity dealer in his novel La Peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin).69 Balzac’s famous and formidable description of the antique shop in the opening chapter of the novel not only draws attention to the extent to which antiques and curiosities had become an integral part of the consumer culture in the period but also begins to fgure the curiosity shop as a contentious, problematic space. In the opening sequences of Balzac’s novel, the chief protagonist, Raphaël de Vallin, enters an antique and curiosity shop situated on Quai Voltaire in Paris. Quai Voltaire, like Wardour Street in London as I discuss in detail in the fnal sections of the present book, was already famous for its traders in antiques and curiosities in Paris by the 1820s.70 We can note that Balzac, described by Donald Adamson as a ‘historian of his own times’, fxed his fctionalized representation of the antique shop as authentic by situating the shop in this important location.71 In Balzac’s novel, de Vallin makes his way through the four foors of antiques and curiosities to his eventual quarry, the wild ass’s skin of the title of the novel. As he does so, he is overwhelmed by the sheer profusion of historical material in the shop: A Sèvres vase, bearing Napoleon’s portrait by Madame Jacotot stood beside a sphinx dedicated to Sesostris. A kitchen jack leaned against a pyx, a republican

The spaces of the discourse

27

saber on a medieval hackbut … Instruments of death, poniards, quaint pistols, weapons … porcelain soup-tureens, Dresden china plates, translucent cups from China, old salt-cellars, comft-boxes belonging to feudal times. A carved ivory ship … a Salt-cellar from Benvenuto Cellini’s workshop … a Milanese suit of armour, brightly polished and richly wrought … votive shields, panoplies, carved shrines and fgures on the walls at every step … a writing-desk made at the cost of a hundred thousand francs … a lock with a secret worth a king’s ransom … An ebony table that an artist might worship, carved after Jean Goujon’s designs … precious caskets … classic bas-reliefs, fnely-cut agates, wonderful cameos … a priceless vase of antique porphyry.72 The curiosity shop was a ‘confused picture in which every achievement, human and divine, was mingled’.73 Balzac presents us with ‘the debris of ffteen hundred vanished years’:74 curiosities, relics, precious artefacts, objects of domestic origin, comprising all manner of materials from the past, assembled and offered for sale in the galleries of the antique and curiosity shop, exemplifying their emerging status as commodities within the contemporary culture. Balzac’s description of the ‘merchant’, the un-named curiosity dealer in the story, emphasises the stereotype of the dealer as driven by commerce; it was as if, Balzac writes, ‘Gerard Dow’s “Money Changer” had come down from his frame’.75 In Balzac’s later novel, Cousin Pons (1847), he focused on the relationships between the collector and the dealer, consolidating the problematic characterisations of the curiosity dealer through the fctional dealers Monistrol, Rémonecq and Elias Magus, whose activities provided a negative counterfoil to the main character, the collector Sylvan Pons.76 Balzac based his fctional characterisations of dealers on several contemporary antique and curiosity dealers he encountered in Paris.77 As a collector himself, Balzac was a frequent visitor of antique and curiosity shops; indeed, it is known that he purchased objects from several well-known dealers of the time, including Louis Wolf, Charles Mannheim, Lazard and Schwab, from whom Balzac satisfactorily recorded he obtained ‘a whole year’s credit’.78 Balzac’s description of the fctional dealer Rémonencq in the novel reinforces the trope of the dealer as ‘problem’. Rémonencq was a ‘monster’, standing in his shop ‘like an old madam amidst the bevy of girls she offers for sale’.79 Balzac’s withering description of Rémonencq continued: The beauty and marvels of art mean nothing to this man, who is simultaneously subtle and vulgar, fguring out the proft he is going to make and browbeating ignoramuses. He has become quite an actor and feigns attachment to his canvases and his inlays; or he pleads poverty, lies about the prices he has paid and offers to show you his bills of sale. He changes shape like a Proteus. He is everything by turns … a cheap-jack, a bumpkin, a lumpkin, a Scrooge, a stooge and a clown.80 In The Mummy’s Foot (1840), by Theophile Gautier (1811–1872), the writer sets his ghostly story against the background of an antique and curiosity shop.81 In Gautier’s story, the curiosity shop itself was an archetypal location for the inauthentic: ‘the cobwebs are more authentic than the guimp laces; and the old pear-tree furniture on exhibition is actually younger than the mahogany which arrived but yesterday from

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America’.82 Gautier also rehearses the contemporary trope that structured the problematic stereotype of the antique and curiosity dealer: his two little yellow eyes, which trembled in their orbits like two louis-d’or upon quicksilver … his hands – thin, slender, full of nerves which projected like strings upon the fnger-board of a violin, and armed with claws like those terminations of bat’s wings – shook with senile trembling; but those convulsively agitated hands became frmer than steel pincers or lobster’s claws when they lifted any precious article – an onyx cup, a Venetian glass, or a dish of Bohemian crystal. This strange old man had an aspect so thoroughly rabbinical and cabalistic that he would have been burnt on the mere testimony of his face three centuries ago.83 The novels of Balzac and Gautier evolved out of the antique and curiosity trade as it emerged in Paris, Marseille and other locations in France and provided potent stereotypes that shaped the emerging idea of the antique and curiosity dealer in midnineteenth-century culture. In London, at the same time as Balzac and Gautier were directing attention to the antique and curiosity trade, the British public were introduced to perhaps one of the most famous characterisations of both the dealer and the antique curiosity shop itself with the publication of Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). Dickens’ interior descriptions of the shop are well known and rehearse the trope of the shop as problematic space, one that was retentive with its knowledge and in which the dis-ordered objects in its interior provided the antithesis to the ordered collections assembled by the collector. The Old Curiosity Shop was one of those receptacles for old and curious things which seem to crouch in every corner of this town, and hide away their musty treasures from the public eye in jealousy and distrust. There were suits of mail standing like ghosts in armour, here and there; fantastic carvings brought from monkish cloisters; rusty weapons of various kinds; distorted fgures in china, and wood, and iron, and ivory; tapestry, and strange furniture that might have been designed in dreams.84 Dickens’ story was published in serial form, beginning on 25th April 1840 in Master Humphrey’s Clock, before appearing as a single volume in December 1841. It was extremely popular, estimated to have a circulation of 100,000 copies. The novel was illustrated with woodblock prints produced by several artists, including George Cattermole (1800–1868), providing enduring visual characterisations of both the shop and the curiosity dealer at the centre of the novel (see Figure 1.1). Indeed, the popularity of Dickens’ novel acted as a catalyst for a wide range of responses in visual culture, reinforcing the stereotypical identity of the dealer and the curiosity shop throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. One early example is Fenton’s Old Curiosity Shop, established by George Fenton in Bury St. Edmund’s in Suffolk by the late 1840s.85 In a photograph of c.1850, Fenton’s shop is presented as an archetypal Old Curiosity Shop (see Figure 1.2 and cover), demonstrating the extent to which the idea of the Old Curiosity Shop had become a powerful marketing strategy even as early as the 1850s. The photograph of Fenton’s Old Curiosity Shop with its profusion of objects, spilling out in front of the shop, is a conceit of course. It must have taken far too many hours to set up the tableaux and dismantle it each day for this example to be anything but

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Figure 1.1 ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’, George Cattermole (1800–1868), wood engraving c.1840. Private collection.

contrived. Indeed, on the verso of the photograph is an inscribed note, ‘arranged by T. Smythe, painter’, indicating that the assemblage must have been a conjured scene.86 The Old Curiosity Shop was the catalyst for many more representations in nineteenthcentury visual culture. Perhaps one of the most intoxicating is the painting by John Watkins Chapman (1832–1903), The Old Curiosity Shop (c.1885) (see Figure 1.3). Chapman’s painting is a later nineteenth-century representation and includes many ‘antique’ objects that are indicative of the markets of the 1880s, rather than those of the 1840s, the period of Dickens’ novel. However, Chapman has included the anonymous owner of the curiosity shop, seated in the small anteroom at the rear of the shop, and ‘little Nell’, his granddaughter, depicted sitting on an antique X-frame chair in the centre of the painting.87 Almost as soon as Dickens’ novel had been published, the ‘Old Curiosity Shop’ slipped from ‘fction’ to ‘fact’ and became a distinctive material presence in London when a shop at 13 & 14 Portsmouth Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, was suggested as the actual shop at the centre of the story.88 By the 1860s, the then owner of the shop, a bookbinder named Charles Tessyman, took full advantage of the opportunity and began trading as a curiosity dealer; he even commissioned a sign-writer to have ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ painted on the plaster frontage of the shop. In 1870, after the death of Dickens, the illustrator Clayton Clarke, better known as the illustrator

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Figure 1.2 Fenton’s ‘Old Curiosity Shop’, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, c.1850 (SROB/ K511/1100). Reproduced by kind permission of Suffolk Record Offce, Bury St Edmunds branch.

‘Kyd’, suggested that the phrase ‘Immortalized by Charles Dickens’ should also be emblazoned on the front of the shop (see Figure 1.4).89 The signifcance of this Old Curiosity Shop as a ‘fctional-fact’ led to the publication of many heated debates concerning the authenticity of the Portsmouth Street shop as the model for Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop. In 1891, an anonymous writer openly questioned the identity of the Portsmouth Street shop as the defnitive ‘Old Curiosity Shop’, citing the shop of ‘Mrs Haines, 24 Fetter Lane’, in Holborn, London, as the actual model.90 In defence of the Portsmouth Street shop, the painter and writer Hanslip Fletcher (1874–1955) made an attempt to match the descriptions in Dickens’ novel with the interiors at the Portsmouth Street shop, writing ‘the small sitting-room behind [the main shop space] agrees with Dickens’ description in the novel’.91 Fletcher concluded: ‘on the whole, I think, there is no strong reason to doubt that Dickens had Old Tessyman’s shop in his mind when he invented the Old Curiosity Shop in his novel’.92 Many Dickens scholars and other writers suggested other locations in London as models for the shop, including Green Street, off Leicester Square.93 However, regardless of the subsequent questions in respect of the veracity of the Portsmouth Street shop as the model for Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop the presence of this most famous curiosity shop contributed to the consolidation of the idea of the curiosity dealer as a discrete cultural identity and the curiosity shop as a discrete consumer space in the public consciousness.

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Figure 1.3 The Old Curiosity Shop, John Watkins Chapman (1832–1903), c.1885, oil on canvas. Private Collection. © Christie’s & Bridgeman Art Library.

‘The Jew Broker’ Whilst this investigation cannot devote extensive discussion to the relationships between the antique and curiosity dealer and Jewish cultural identity, it is important to highlight the signifcance of the enduring trope of the ‘Jew Broker’ in formalisation of the idea of the antique and curiosity dealer in the nineteenth century. Aviva Briefel has eruditely investigated the problematic association with fakes and forgeries as an infuential signifer in the ideological construction of Jewish cultural identity.94 Breifel’s book is an important work on the cultural identity of the art dealer and provides a comprehensive analysis of nineteenth-century racial attitudes routed through problematic ideas that are framed through the notion of the Jewish dealer. In the nineteenth century, as Briefel suggests, ‘the Jewish dealer became a locus of anxiety about the commodifcation of the art world’ and came to represent ‘a ruthless commodifcation of art-works that stimulated forgery production’.95 Other scholars, such as Kathleen Adler, have also drawn critical attention to the relationships between the antique and curiosity trade and Jewish cultural identity, highlighting the signifcance of the enduring trope and characterisation of the ‘Jew Broker’.96 Bryan Cheynette has suggested that in times of social, political and cultural crisis, the cultural stereotype of ‘the Jew’ provided a convenient screen on which to project a wide range of social ills.97 One only has to read the descriptions of the dealer character in the novels of Balzac and Gautier, and the subsequent characterisations of

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Figure 1.4 ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’, Portsmouth Street, London. Postcard, Gordon Smith, c.1920. Private collection.

the dealer in novels of Wilkie Collins, A Rogue’s Life (1879), or George Du Maurier, Trilby (1894), or Henry James, The Golden Bowl (1904), to encounter the force of these tropes as literary form. Beyond the literary construction of the ‘Jew Broker’, the associations between the antique and curiosity trade and Jewish culture remain a key marker in the cultural biography of the dealer. For example, in his text on collecting, Adventures of a Brica-Brac Hunter (1868), the writer Herbert Byng-Hall recommended collectors should call on a dealer in Germany called ‘Herr Levy’, adding that Levy was ‘an unquestionable Israelite, as indeed, nearly all bric-a-brac dealers are’.98 Indeed, many early nineteenth-century dealers emerged from European Jewish communities as part of the German-Jewish settlement in early nineteenth-century Britain, often a result of poverty and restrictions on the Jewish communities in Holland, Poland and the German states. As Todd Endelman explains, many of the Jewish migrants who arrived in England in the early nineteenth century had limited artisan skills and entered low-status trades to earn a living, often buying and selling old clothes and other second-hand goods.99 Several antique and curiosity dealers evolved out of those traditions to become leading dealers in antiques and works of art in the nineteenth century. The Isaac/Davies family were also part of this established tradition of migrants and Jewish migration into England in the early nineteenth century. Endelman also suggests that ‘many of the new arrivals [to England] from Germany were merchants and commercial clerks

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with links to or previous experience in large-scale trading ventures’. The eventual success of the Davies/Isaac business was no doubt due to the specifc set of skills and European networks that the family brought to London; the fact that Gabriel Davies, Isaac’s father-in-law, remained in Germany as part of their commercial network is also indicative of the structure of the business and the social, religious and familial bonds with European Jewish communities. Of course, in the social, political and economic history of the antique and curiosity trade, there remain some inherently notorious Jewish cultural tropes. In a short essay published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1846, for example, the fgure of ‘the Jew’ was presented as innately problematic, peddling worthless objects; the writer described a visit to Naples to buy ‘antiquities’, where he was 100

besieged all day and every day by a host of dealers, jewellers and Jews, whom the waiters were weary of announcing, and were still obliged to announce, who came with bundles under their arms, flled with things ‘ugly and old exceedingly’, which they wished to dispose of as bargains.101 The activities of Jewish curiosity dealers on the continent are a consistent theme in the biography of the nineteenth-century antique and curiosity trade. Here, the ‘Jew broker’ is often fgured as stereotypically money-driven, mercenary and purely proftseeking. In 1829, whilst in Antwerp attempting to buy carvings, woodwork and other antiques and curiosities for his house, Audley End, the 3rd Lord Braybrooke, found almost nothing to buy: ‘the Jews collect it all’, he wrote, ‘and send it back to England’.102 In the antique and curiosity markets in London, the associations between the antique and curiosity trade and Jewish cultural identity remained a constant point of critical commentary. In 1864, for example, the writer ‘Aleph’ nostalgically mused on the consequences of recent changes to Hanway Yard in London, long associated with the curiosity trade. ‘One of my favourite haunts’, he wrote, was ‘now widened, improved and called Hanway Street’.103 At one corner (and it is still there) was Baldock’s old china shop, a sort of museum for Chinese horses and dragons, queer-looking green vases, and doll-size teacups … the rest of the yard was tenanted by Jew dealers in curiosities, or indeed, anything that turned up, and though in the widening and smartening process the shop fronts have caught plate-glass fever, the class of occupants and their trade is still much the same.104 The ‘Jew broker’ in the nineteenth century remains a leitmotif in the cultural biography of the antique and curiosity dealer and is a potent reminder of how the ‘idea’ of the dealer is framed through this well-established and enduring cultural and ideological trope.

Fakes, forgeries and the nineteenth-century antique and curiosity dealer Whilst fakes and forgeries have historic racial, political and ideological associations with the trope of the ‘Jew broker’, the trope of fakes and forgeries itself has also long been part of the cultural biography of the art dealer. From at least the mideighteenth century, with the mythical, duplicitous art dealer ‘Puff’ who passed off

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fake ‘Old Master’ paintings to gullible collectors in the play Taste (1752) by Samuel Foote (1720–1777), the art dealer has often been presented as peddling spurious objects.105 Since the early twentieth century, several scholarly publications have continued to rehearse the association of the dealer with fakes and forgeries. Indeed, as Clive Wainwright himself noted: It is a curious aspect of objects which have been in the hands of dealers that if they have ever been suspected of being fakes, or of having been in some way altered or improved, then this reputation clings to them however hard scholars try to dispel it.106 In the investigations of the dealer Samuel Pratt (1805–1878), who was one of the most important dealers in ancient armour in the nineteenth century, his activities as a propagator of ‘fake’ armour have been consistently foregrounded. In 1925, for example, in his study of the market for arms and armour, the armour collector and historian Francis Cripps-Day wrote of Samuel Pratt ‘the notorious dealer in New Bond Street,’ duping collectors.107 In 1933 Charles Beard, the editor of The Connoisseur, reinforced the stereotype, writing of the ‘wickedness of the late Mr. Samuel Pratt’, who ‘in the history of faking deserves a chapter to himself’.108 In the 1990s, Karen Watts, formerly a senior curator at The Royal Armouries, highlighted the implications of these associations, writing that a provenance to Pratt would automatically place an object within the fake category unless and until proven to be otherwise.109 The narrative of the history of the curiosity dealer Salomon Weininger (1822–1879) is almost overshadowed by his practices as a forger.110 Essays on other leading nineteenth-century dealers are dominated by their activities as fakers and forgers. The dealer Louis Marcy (1860–1945) is described as ‘anarchist and faker’; the Venetian dealers Meneghetti, ‘antiques dealers and forgers’; and the dealer and goldsmith Reinhold Vasters (1827–1909), who worked for the Paris-based curiosity dealer Frederic Spitzer (1815–1890), the ‘prolifc faker’.111 It appears that when the dealer makes an appearance in the biography of an object the notion of ‘fake’ and ‘forgery’ is never very far behind. As the market for antiques and curiosities expanded rapidly in the nineteenth century, fraudulent and dishonest activities of the dealer became an inevitable and fundamental part of the biography of the dealer. In an infuential essay, On Spurious Works of Art (1891), the curator of the South Kensington Museum, John Charles Robinson (1824–1913), described the ‘notorious activities’ of the early nineteenth-century antique and curiosity dealer John Boykett Jarman.112 Robinson portrayed Jarman as inherently nefarious, confating the persona of Jarman with his problematic activities and rehearsing the by then well-worn stereotype of the dealer constructed in the novels of Balzac and Gautier: Jarman I knew personally after his retirement, full of years and notoriety. He was a dapper, ferret-eyed little man, dressed in summer and winter in a black swallowtailed coat, full-blown shirt, and Hessian boots with a tassel in front ... he found no diffculty in enlisting any number of clever manipulators into his questionable service. Innumerable were the spurious Hilliards, Olivers and Coopers, mostly copied from undoubted originals, which proceeded from Jarman’s manufactory .... Jarman’s knowledge, however, was not on a par with his audacity.113

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Robinson was equally dismissive of Henry Farrer (1798–1866), the highly regarded Wardour Street dealer, who ‘dealt largely in forgeries’.114 He was even more damning in his condemnation of the dealer ‘Herr Dux of Hanover’, who he suggested had been passing fakes to his colleague Henry Cole (1808–1882) whilst Cole was buying for the South Kensington Museum in the early 1860s.115 When Dux sent a ‘Nautilus Shell’ to the museum as a prospective purchase in 1865, Robinson dismissed both the object and its sender; the object belonged, wrote Robinson, to a clan of spurious fabrications … of which any number of equally precious examples may be found in the third rate curiosity shops at Oxford Street, Holborn and the City … . I have no doubt that Herr Dux is perfectly aware of the real character of these objects and I recommend that they are returned to him with a sharp rebuke for having attempted so impudent an imposture.116 The associations of the antique and curiosity dealer with fakes and forgeries were often given extra legitimacy through lurid newspaper reports on some spectacular cases. One of the most infamous cases of forgery of Italian Renaissance artworks in the second half of the nineteenth century involved the dealer Giovanni Freppa (1795–1870), who was trading in Florence between the 1830s and 1860s.117 Freppa was patron and employer to the sculptor Giovanni Bastianini (1830–1868), allegedly encouraging him to make copies of Renaissance sculptures during the 1860s. The case was widely reported in the London press.118 It was also subsequently the subject of an infuential essay by the writer Nina Barstow in The Magazine of Art in 1886 and repeated and expanded upon by John Charles Robinson in his essay of 1891.119 In Barstow’s essay, the dealer Freppa was presented as the architect of the fraud, enslaving and subverting the artistic endeavours of the young and talented sculptor Bastianini: Freppa the antiquarian and ex-charcoal-seller, cast his eye upon the youth and marked him for his own. For a man who made his living by the selling of old basreliefs, busts, or fragments, genuine or otherwise, what a treasure was this! ... he [Bastinini] was installed in Freppa’s dingy workshop in the Borgoguissanti, bound as a gallery-slave to his bench.120 These associations between the antique and curiosity dealer and fakes and forgeries are amongst the most enduring tropes in the cultural biography of the dealer. In the fnal part of this opening section on the idea of the dealer, the architecture of these tropes is investigated further.

Framing the subject IV: Figuring the dealer In the eighteenth century, Sir William Hamilton (1730–1803), British Minister Plenipotentiary to the Kingdom of Naples, collector of classical antiquities and connoisseur, was conscious of transgressing the social boundaries between collecting art and dealing in art. ‘I am delicate as to the manner of selling’, wrote Hamilton in a letter to one of his friends in 1790, ‘as I should hate to be looked upon as a dealer’.121 Hamilton’s pre-emptive response to the potential charge of being a trader in antiquities is understandable given his social and cultural position. ‘What is at stake’, as the social anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) informs us, is ‘personality, i.e. the

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quality of the person, which is affrmed in the capacity to appropriate an object of quality’.122 As an eighteenth-century connoisseur, Hamilton perceived himself to be the rightful custodian of the socially signifcant objects signifed by his famous collections of antiquities. Hamilton belonged to a social class in the eighteenth century that regarded art and the collecting of its products as an aspect of morality, or ‘virtu’ as it was known, and his concern to uphold those values are overtly demonstrated through his statement.123 His remarks, however, also exemplify attitudes towards those involved in the commercial trade in objects that were so socially and culturally signifcant. Indeed, even acknowledged connoisseurs in the period could be damned by faint praise if their expertise of artworks was seen to run too close to the commercial imperatives of the market. As an anonymous commentator writing in The Times following the death of the collector William Beckford in 1844 stated, ‘his judgements as to the originality of pictures was that of a regular dealer, and not a mere connoisseur’.124 Moreover, such notions continue even in the present day. The contemporary art collector Frank Cohen, for example, who made his wealth from DIY stores in the 1980s, was questioned recently about the comparison between his activities as a collector of contemporary art and those of his more famous rival Charles Saatchi. In response to the suggestion that through his collecting activities Cohen was attempting to challenge the status of Saatchi as the most important collector of contemporary art, Cohen responded: ‘There’s a big difference between us, I’m a collector; Charles Saatchi is basically a dealer’.125 The philosopher and historian of ideas Michel Foucault’s succinct critique of the authorial voice in his now famous essay ‘What Is an Author?’ (1979) provides a useful starting point from which to further consider the idea of the antique and curiosity dealer. Foucault begins his discussion of the notion of authorship by repeating the words of the author and playwright Samuel Beckett (1906–1989): ‘What does it matter who is speaking? … What does it matter who is speaking?’126 Foucault uses this exhortation exclusively as a basis for investigating the notion of authorship in its literary sense, but he allows the room, insists even, that the notion of the author can be transposed to other areas of cultural activity.127 I use it here to suggest that the antique and curiosity dealer, as the voice behind the historical object, ‘speaks’ on behalf of objects from a specifc position within the social and cultural fabric. Indeed, historians of collecting have regularly aired a note of caution when the dealer makes an appearance in the biography of an object. For example, in his discussions of leading nineteenth-century collectors such as William Beckford, Samuel Meyrick and Sir Walter Scott, Clive Wainwright suggested that a key aspect of the quality of the collections was that they ‘had not been through the trade’, and ‘importantly’, he wrote, ‘the objects had not been “improved” by an unscrupulous dealer’.128 In his discussion of the activities of the collector William Hesketh Lever (1851–1925), 1st Lord Leverhulme, the founder of the Lady Lever Art Gallery at Port Sunlight in Liverpool, the historian Arthur MacGregor contrasted the collecting activities of individuals such as the famous collector Ralph Bernal (1783–1854) in the frst half of the nineteenth century with those of Lever in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Macgregor observed that because a collector like Lever ‘bought mainly through dealers’ he ‘attracts less admiration today’ than earlier collectors like Bernal, who acquired their objects ‘by dint of shrewdness and the exercise of connoisseurship’.129 These assertions are of course inaccurate. As the current study demonstrates, collectors such

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as Bernal frequented antique dealers in the frst half of the nineteenth century just as much as Lever was to do in the later nineteenth century, but it is the desire to distance the activities of the collector from any association with such commercial modes of acquisition that is of interest here. The enduring notion that the objects that the dealer sells are spurious, or tainted by commerce, or that the dealer has an inauthentic relationship to the collectable object and is a dangerous threat to the legitimate practices of the collector, plays a signifcant structuring role within the narratives of collecting. In the 1850s, for many leading collectors, even the social discourse inherent in the practice of collecting needed to be protected from the contaminating practices of the dealer. The Art Journal in 1857 announced the establishment of ‘The Collector’s Club’, ‘a new society of amateurs of vertu … consisting solely of such gentlemen as collect for their own tastes, objects of antiquity and are not dealers therein’, thus ensuring that the boundaries between collectors and dealers were maintained.130 And in 1864, for example, whilst curator of the South Kensington Museum, John Charles Robinson questioned the legitimacy of the expertise of the dealer William Chaffers (1811–1892), gained, as it was, in the world of commerce: ‘Mr Chaffers’ acquired knowledge is only enough to give him a dangerous amount of self-confdence’, Robinson suggested.131 Even when there was a faint hint of recognition of the role that dealers had played in the development of the collections at the South Kensington Museum there was still a reluctance to break down the social and cultural stereotype. Robinson, for example, wrote that the French dealer Couvreur was ‘suffciently honest’ in adding the caveat, ‘for a dealer’.132 In the late nineteenth century, the designer and social activist William Morris (1834– 1896) was, perhaps unsurprisingly given his deep mistrust of Capitalism, highly critical of dealers and the commercial imperatives that he saw as driving the circulation of objects put in motion by the antique and curiosity trade. Writing in 1882 to the painter and collector Henry Wallis (1830–1916) about the collections at the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A Museum) he wrote: ‘the SKM has exhibited all sorts of sickening rubbish; fans; rococo embroideries; the sweeping of the Venice dealers shops and other twaddle’.133 Morris suggested that there should be a ‘weeding out of the useless articles’, but stressed that in this process ‘no dealer’s opinion to be asked on them’.134 Similarly, ‘Viator’, a writer protecting their identity with the pseudonym for ‘traveller’, wrote to the editor of The Times in 1892 in response to a visit to the South Kensington Museum where they had seen a display of newly acquired objects with a label indicating that they had been purchased from the well-known Italian antique dealer Stefano Bardini (1836–1922).135 ‘Viator’ was highly critical of the objects on display; a ‘16th century shrine’, for example, was on closer examination obviously made-up of ‘old fragments, patched and joined together’.136 We can note here that the notion of the inauthentic historical object is inevitably associated with the possessions of the dealer. ‘Viator’ focused most condemnation on what they saw as a dealer’s stock classifed as the ‘Bardini collection’. ‘Hitherto’, the writer stated, ‘it has not been usual to dub objects occasionally purchased from a dealer as from his, Signor or so-and-so’s ‘collection’, they are part of his stock in trade’.137 ‘Viator’ draws attention to the anxiety that arises when the perceived social and cultural boundaries of collecting and dealing are transgressed. At the same time, the writer implicitly disassociates the spaces of knowledge and understanding (the museum) from those of the world of commerce (the antique and curiosity shop).

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Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century the curiosity shop was often invoked as an inappropriate model for the display of a collection. In 1849, an anonymous writer in The Times commented on the display of the Vernon Collection at the Royal Academy: ‘there is not a broker’s shop in the metropolis so crowded or so ridiculously arranged as the “gallery” of sculpture in the exhibition of the Royal Academy’.138 In 1878, in her directions to collectors, Mrs Bury Palliser also stressed the importance of an appropriate display of ‘antique furniture’ by invoking its negative counterpart, writing that ‘a rich interior should not resemble the well-furnished shop of a dealer’.139 In 1872, the novelist and critic Edmond de Goncourt (1822–1896) mocked the display of antiques and curiosities at the famous Rothschild chateau at Ferrières: ‘it is not a furnished château, but a curiosity shop’, he wrote.140 These problematic notions and associations cohere around the notion that collecting and dealing are distinctive social and cultural practices, and that dealers and collectors are discrete identities. Such tropes and cultural stereotypes form part of the ideological camoufage of connoisseurship and taste.141 However, whenever the practice of collecting has emerged there must have always been a status of collectordealers. The process of collecting itself involves a degree of trading, swapping objects and off-loading things as a collection develops. Moreover, many of the antique and curiosity dealers in this investigation combined the practices of dealing and collecting throughout their careers. But the desirability of becoming a collector rather than remaining a dealer is demonstrated by the frequency with which dealers, when they became fnancially successful enough, transformed themselves into collectors. The dealer Edward Holmes Baldock is perhaps the most obvious case during the period under review. Baldock’s immense fnancial success as an antique and curiosity dealer during the opening decades of the nineteenth century enabled him to retire in 1843, when the contents of his antique and curiosity shop, including ‘Florentine cabinets, ancient carvings and Sèvres’, were sold at auction by Messrs Foster & Son.142 He registered a coat of arms with the College of Heralds in the same year, taking a house in fashionable Hyde Park Place which he rented from the Earl of Lucan for £275 per annum.143 Baldock appears to have been keen that his new found social status would continue and he made stringent requirements in his Will to ensure that this would happen.144 He would have been no doubt suitably proud of his son, Edward Baldock junior, who was made heir to Baldock senior’s considerable estate and eventually married the daughter of Sir Andrew Corbett and took a seat at the House of Commons as Conservative member for Shrewsbury between 1847 and 1857.145 Similarly, the dealer John Webb, an active trader from addresses in Old Bond Street and Grafton Street in London for over 25 years, and famous for his acquisitions for the South Kensington Museum during the 1850s and 1860s, had retired to his villa in Cannes by 1865 with a large collection of objects.146 The John Webb Trust Fund, established in a legacy of £10,000 left to the South Kensington Museum by his daughter Edith Cragg after her death in 1925, perpetuates institutional collecting activities in his memory.147 The dealer Abraham Hertz, who was trading from Regent Street and Marlborough Street in the 1830s and 1840s, built up a substantial collection, which was eventually acquired, according to the nineteenth-century publisher Henry Bohn, by the well-known collector Joseph Mayer of Liverpool during the 1850s.148 John Coleman Isaac himself, who retired from the antique and curiosity trade in 1867, living in a comfortable house in Gordon Street, London, retained a collection of objects, including ‘pictures, curiosities, objects of vertu etc.’, which he eventually left to his

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niece Matilda Levy on his death in 1887. Likewise, John Swaby, the antique and curiosity dealer who traded from Wardour Street, retired from trading during the mid-1830s, vacating his Wardour Street shop in 1834. Swaby does not appear in trade directories after 1835, but it appears that he was still active in the antique and curiosity markets; indeed, he made a fairly substantial purchase from Isaac in 1838.150 By the end of the 1840s, however, Swaby appears to have discharged himself completely of any association with the trade. He is still recorded as a purchaser at several highprofle auction sales after 1840, including the Stowe sale in 1848 and the Bernal sale in 1855.151 However, unlike the scores of names recognisable as dealers that were published alongside the sale results after these auctions, Swaby is recorded as ‘J. Swaby Esq.’ In truth though it seems that separation between the dealer and collector is never so clear cut and that for all but the very poorest dealers the trading in historical objects and the collecting of them were parallel activities. But why is it so important for collectors to make such obvious attempts at proscription? There are two main themes to suggest here: one relates to the activity of collecting as a personal and indeed intimate act, and the other draws attention to the act of collecting as a collective and social activity. Each of these themes provides an explanatory structure through which these critical responses to the antique and curiosity dealer can be better understood. In a brief essay on collecting written in 1994, the philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) made a distinction between collecting and accumulating.152 Accumulating is a process of merely acquiring things, something that happens, one could say, in the course of everyday life. We all accumulate things – kitchen storage jars, paper clips, old Tesco shopping bags. Collecting is something quite different; indeed, the concept of collecting, as Baudrillard informs us, is a matter of discriminating between objects, it emerges, he says, ‘with an orientation to the cultural’.153 Similarly, for the philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) the activity of collecting is bound up with the personal: collecting is about ‘ownership’, and for ‘the real collector’, ‘ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have with objects’.154 As Benjamin asserts, for a collector the activity of collecting is almost a matter of self-preservation, it is ‘not that they [objects] come alive in him; it is he who lives in them’.155 Baudrillard reiterates Walter Benjamin’s assertion, stressing that ‘possession’ is intimately bound up with the notion of the self: 149

the exchange value of an object depends entirely upon the fact that it is I who possess it – which in turn, allows me to recognize myself in it as an absolutely singular being … For it is invariably oneself that one collects.156 Shifting from this framework, which suggests that collecting is a deeply introverted act, to another that suggests that collecting embodies social and collective practices, Susan Crane has suggested that collecting involves a ‘performance of ownership’ which ‘invariably plays best before an appreciative audience comprising individuals whose desires to own will also be tantalized’.157 The collections of Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), one of the most well documented and studied collections, are an exemplary example in the period under review here.158 It is well known that Scott purchased the majority of the historical objects in his collection at Abbotsford from the antique and curiosity trade; he frequently made purchases from the Wardour Street dealer John Swaby in the 1820s and 1830s. However, during 1812, when Scott’s collection at Abbotsford was still at an early stage in its development, his friend Joanna Baillie wrote

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to him suggesting that as his fame expanded so it would be inevitable that his collections would do so as well, but rather than being assembled by acquisitions through the dealers that underscored his early collecting activities these later collections would refect Scott’s personal friendships and his enduring fame. Baillie wrote: ‘We shall see then, some years hence a collection … with contributions from your numerous admirers rather than purchases from curiosity brokers’.159 The gift exchange system implied in Baillie’s comment performs an important social and cultural function, as the anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) has suggested.160 Gifts are also, according to Baillie, a superior mode of acquisition to the commodity exchange model exemplifed by the transactions enacted through the antique and curiosity trade. Important as gift exchange is as an appropriate method for the establishment of a collection, the superior social system implied by gift exchange can be superseded. Indeed, an exemplary mode of acquisition for collectors is through bequest. As Walter Benjamin writes: ‘Inheritance is the soundest way of acquiring a collection, for a collector’s attitude towards his possessions stems from an owner’s feeling of responsibility toward his property’.161 The notion of ‘Provenance’, the chain of ownership that is often viewed as critical to the establishment of an authentic object, implied here, was, and remains, central to the discourse of authenticity. A consistent aspect in the problematic identity of the dealer is that their activities are consistently seen to disrupt this chain. In 1831, for example, in a letter published in the journal Archaeologia, the collector Sir Samuel Meyrick described a pair of ‘twelfth-century’ candlesticks that he had recently acquired and had exhibited at the Society of Antiquaries, writing ‘they had been purchased at the house of a travelling dealer’ and as such, ‘it is impossible to ascertain their original locality’.162 In the 1850s the well-known collector A.W. Franks (1826–1897) of the British Museum went even further: ‘the value of objects is frequently lost when they pass through a dealer’s hands’, he wrote, ‘their authenticity is destroyed and their history mutilated. Or they acquire a pedigree which only misleads the unwary archaeologist’.163 As sketched out here, collecting is at the fulcrum of individual and collective identity, it is an individual act, one that is part of the essential creation of the self, and it is also part of social activity, one that allows participation in the social sphere, drawing together social groups and reinforcing the social and cultural values of a social class. In this sense, we can begin to see why the activities of the antique and curiosity dealer are presented as being so problematic. The dealer provides an ambiguous beneft for collectors, as Arnold Hauser writes: thanks to dealers’ publicity, works of art come more and more often and more easily into the possession of new enthusiasts and they acquire a relationship to them more rapidly and more unconditionally [but] this relationship is more superfcial and short-lived.164

Notes 1 Ivan Gaskell, ‘Tradesmen as Scholars: Interdependencies in the Study and Exchange of Art’, in Elizabeth Mansfeld (Ed.), Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline (New York, Routledge, 2002), pp. 146–62, p. 158. 2 Martin Wackernagel, The World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist: Projects and Patrons, Workshop and Art Market (Leipzig, Verlag, 1938).

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3 For a useful summary of the historiography of art history and economics see Guido Guerzoni, Apollo and Vulcan: The Art Markets in Italy 1400–1700 (2006) (Michigan, Michigan State University Press, 2011), pp. 1–28. 4 Harrison White and Cynthia White, Canvases and Careers, Institutional Change in the French Painting World (New York, Wiley, 1965); for a critical counterpoint to the White text see Jan Dirk Baetens, ‘Vanguard Economics, Rearguard Art: Gustave Coûteaux and the Modernist Myth of the Dealer-Critic System’, Oxford Art Journal, vol.33, no.1, (2010), pp. 25–41. 5 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1972). For a more recent focus on commercial practices and the Renaissance art market, see Michelle O’Malley, The Business of Art: Contracts and the Commissioning Process in Renaissance Italy (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2005). 6 John Fleming, ‘Art Dealing in the Risorgimento – I’, Burlington Magazine, vol.CXV, no.838, (January 1979), pp. 4–16; John Fleming, ‘Art Dealing in the Risorgimento – II’, Burlington Magazine, vol.CXXXI, no.917, (August 1979), pp. 492–508; John Fleming, ‘Art Dealing in the Risorgimento – III’, Burlington Magazine, vol.CXXXI, no.918, (September 1979), pp. 568–80; see also Brinsley Ford, ‘Thomas Jenkins, Banker, Dealer and Unoffcial English Agent’, Apollo, vol.XCIX, (June 1974), pp. 416–25; Brinsley Ford, ‘James Byres, Principal Antiquarian for the English visitors to Rome’, Apollo, vol.XCIX, (June 1974), pp. 446–61; Lilian C. Randall, The Diary of George A. Lucas: An American Art Agent in Paris, 1857–1909 (2 vols.) (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1979); and also a short discussion of art dealers in Trevor Fawcett, The Rise of English Provincial Art: Artist, Patrons, and Institutions outside London 1800–1830 (London, Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 72–80. 7 Francis Haskell (1976). 8 For an excellent overview of the ‘New Art History’ see, Jonathan Harris, The New Art History: a Critical Introduction (London and New York, Routledge, 2001). 9 Wackernagel (1938), republished in 1981 with a translation by Alison Lucas. 10 Malcolm Gee, Dealers, Critics, and Collectors of Modern Painting: Aspects of the Parisian Art Market between 1910 and 1930 (New York and London, Garland, 1981); Hugh Brigstocke, William Buchanan and the 19th Century Art Trade (London, Paul Mellon Centre, 1982); Louise Lippincott, Selling Art in Georgian London: The Rise of Arthur Pond (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1983). 11 John M. Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Study of the Seventeenth Century (Princeton University Press, 1982); John M. Montias, ‘Cost and Value in Seventeenth Century Dutch Art, Art History, vol.10, (1987), pp. 93–105. 12 See, for example, Richard Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy 1300– 1600 (Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1993); Michael North and David Ormrod (Eds.), Art Markets in Europe 1400–1800 (Aldershot, Ashgate, 1998); Neil de Marchi and Cranfurd Goodwin (Eds.), Economic Engagements with Art (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1999); Marcello Fantoni, Louisa C. Matthews and Sara F. Mathews-Grieco (Eds.), The Art Market in Italy, 15th–17th Centuries (Modena, Franco Cosimo Panini, 2003); Guido Guerzoni (2006); Neil de Marchi and Hans J. Van Miegrot (Eds.), Mapping Markets for Paintings in Europe, 1450–1750 (Turnhout, Brepols, 2006); Dries Lyna, Filip Vermeylen and Hans Vlieghe (Eds.), Art Auctions and Dealers: The Dissemination of Netherlandish Art during the Ancien Régime (Turnhout, Brepols, 2009). 13 A selection of such publications include, Jayne Anderson, Collecting and Connoisseurship and the Art market in Risorgimento Italy: Giovanni Morelli’s Letters to Giocanni Melli and Pietro Zavaritt (1866–1872) (Venice, Instituto Veneto di Scienze Lettre de Arti, 1999); Malcolm Goldstein, Landscape with Figures, a History of Art Dealing in the United States (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000); Jeremy Warren and Adriana Turpin (Eds.), Auctions, Agents and Dealers: the Mechanisms of the Art Market 1660–1830 (Oxford, Beazley Archive and Archaeopress and the Wallace Collection, 2007); Anne Helmreich and Pamela Fletcher (Eds.), The Rise of the London Art Market 1850–1939 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2011); Thomas M. Bayer and John R. Page, The Development of the Art Market in England: Money as Muse 1730–1900 (London, Chatto & Windus,

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14 15

16 17

18

19 20 21

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The spaces of the discourse 2011); Charlotte Gould and Sophie Mesplède (Eds.), Marketing Art in the British Isles, 1700 to the Present, a Cultural History (Farnham, Ashgate, 2012); Inge Reist (Ed.), British Models of Art Collecting and the American Response (Farnham, Ashgate, 2014); Lynn Catterson (Ed.), Dealing with Art on Both Sides of the Atlantic: 1860–1940 (Leiden, Brill, 2017); Michael Brennan and Barbara Pezzini, ‘Provenance as a History of Change: From Caliari in Scotland to Tintoretto in America, the Commercial and Connoisseurial Trajectories of a Venetian Portrait’, Journal of the History of Collections, vol.30, no.1, (2018), pp. 77–89. See my brief commentary of the complexity and the potential for interdisciplinary studies of the art market, Mark Westgarth, ‘The Art Market and Its Histories’, The Art Book, vol.16, no.2, (May 2009), pp. 32–3. See, for example, Olav Velthius, Talking Prices. Symbolic of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005); Isabelle Graw, High Price, Art between the Market and Celebrity Culture (Berlin, Sternberg Press, 2009); Iain Robertson, A New Art from Emerging Markets (Farnham, Lund Humphries, 2011); Olav Velthius and Stefano Baia Curioni (Eds.), Cosmopolitan Canvases, the Globalization of Markets for Contemporary Art (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015). Journal for Art Market Studies, an Open Access journal launched in 2017; see Centre for Art Market Studies, Department for Modern History, TU Berlin; www.fokum.org; see, for example, Bloomsbury series Contextualizing Art Markets. For example, see the conferences focusing on the mechanisms of the art market, ‘The Art Market in Italy – 15th–17th Centuries’, Florence (19th, 20th and 21st June 2000); ‘Beauty and Truth for Sale, the Art of the Dealer’, The Getty Centre, Los Angeles (29th and 30th March 2004); ‘The Elephant in the Room; the Art Market in Art History 1815–1945’ AAH, Manchester (2nd–4th April 2009); ‘London and the Emergence of a European Art Market (c.1780–1820)’, National Gallery, London, and The Getty Research Institute, 21–22 June 2013; research projects such as the pioneering Getty Provenance Index, founded by Burton Frederickson in the early 1980s at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; The Centre for the History of Collecting at The Frick Art Reference Library, New York (2007); Centre for Art Market Studies, TU Berlin (2012); and the Centre for the Study of the Art & Antiques Market, University of Leeds (2015). See, Salvaging the Past: Georges Hoentschel and French Decorative Arts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Bard Graduate Centre, New York, 2013); Inventing Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market (Musée du Luxembourg, Paris; National Gallery, London; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 2015); ‘Lock, Stock and Barrel’: Norton Simon’s Acquisition of Duveen Brothers Gallery (Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, 2015); Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery 1959–1971 (National Gallery, Washington, 2016); SOLD! The Great British Antiques Story (The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, 2019). See especially the special issue of the Journal of Art Historiography, no.11, (December 2014) devoted to the critical investigation of the notion ‘decorative art’. For a useful summary of texts dealing with these collecting practices see ‘A Brief History of Collecting’ in Russell Belk, Collecting in a Consumer Society (London, Routledge, 1995), pp. 42–6. See, for example, the publications generated by collecting societies formed in the early twentieth century such as the Oriental Ceramic Society (1921) and The English Ceramic Circle (1927); The Antique Collector’s Club, founded in 1966, is also a major publisher of books on collecting, including scores of texts on the history of specifc categories, such as furniture and ceramics, of interest to collectors. Maurice Rheims, Art on the Market, 35 Centuries of Collecting and Collectors from Midas to Paul Getty (London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1961), frst published in 1959 as The Strange Life of Objects; Gerald Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste, volume I (London, Barrie & Rockliff, 1961); Gerald Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste, volume II (London, Barrie & Rockliff, 1963); Gerald Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste, volume III (London, Barrie & Rockliff, 1970). Volume I focuses on the changing prices for paintings and sculpture, volume II considers ‘objets d’art’, and volume III considers the art market in the 1960s and 1970s – Reitlinger based his own three volumes on the book by Rheims; see

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23 24 25

26 27 28

29

30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38

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also Joseph Alsop, The Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art Collecting and Its Linked Phenomena Wherever These Have Appeared (London, Thames & Hudson, 1982). See, for example, Arthur MacGregor, Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London, Yale University Pres, 2008). Krzystof Pomian (1987/1991); see also Geurzoni (2006), pp. 27–8. Dianne Sachko Macleod, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects, American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800–1940 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2008); see also Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996). Wainwright (1989). Arthur MacGregor, ‘Collectors, Connoisseurs and Curators in the Victorian Age’, in Caygill and Cherry (1997), pp. 6–33; Rémy Saisselin, The Bourgeois and the Bibelot (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1984). Manuel Charpy, ‘Amatuers, Collectionnuers, et chineurs parisiens du XIXe siècle. Le commerce des apparences du passé, entre centre et périphérie’, in Isabelle Paresys (Ed.), Paraître et Appearances en Europe occidentale du Moyen Age á nos jours (Lille, University Press of the North, 2008); Manuel Charpy, ‘The Auction House and Its Surroundings: The Trade in Antiques and Second-Hand Items in Paris during the Nineteenth Century’, in Blondé, Coquery, Stobart and van Damme (Eds.), Fashioning Old and New, Changing Consumer Patterns in Western Europe (1650–1900) (Turnhout, Brepols, 2009), pp. 217–31. Stefan Muthesius (1988). The publication of an essay on ‘antiques’ in the journal Art History at the time is also worthy of note and was a signifcant endorsement to the subject of ‘decorative art’, not to say ‘antiques’, by one of the leading journals associated with the ‘New Art History’. Muthesius (1998); see also, Wood (1992). Stefan Muthesius, The Poetic Home: Designing the 19th-Century Domestic Interior (London, Thames & Hudson, 2009), esp. pp. 232–6. See, for example, Deborah Cohen, Household Gods, the British and Their Possessions (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2006), chapter 6, ‘Designs on the Past: Antiques as a Faith’, pp. 145–68; Heidi Egginton, Popular Antique Collecting and the Second-Hand Trade in Britain, c.1868–1939 (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2017); see also Heidi Egginton, ‘In Quest of the Antique: The Bazaar, Exchange and Mart and the Democratization of Collecting, 1926–42’, Twentieth Century British History, vol.28, no.2, (June 2017), pp. 159–85. Elizabeth Stillinger, The Antiquers (New York, Knopf, 1980); Briann G. Greenfeld, Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England (Amherst & Boston, University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). Reitlinger (1963), ‘Antiquarian and Eclectic Taste’, pp. 55–88. N. Alexandre, Catalogue de tableaux, vendue à Bruxelles, depuis l’année 1773, avec les noms de maitres mis en ordre alpabetique, et la grandeur et du prix de chaque pièce en argent de change, avec l’extrait de la vie de chaque peintre (Brussels, N. Alexandre, 1803). See, Hans van Miegroet, ‘The Market for Netherlandish paintings in Paris 1750–1815’ in Warren and Turpin (2007), pp. 41–52; and North and Ormrod (1998), pp. 152–66, and pp. 167–86. John Smith, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters, 9 volumes (London, Smith & Son, 1829–42); Charles Blanc, Le Trésor de la curiosité (Paris, Renouard, 1857). George Redford, Art Sales: a History of Sales of Pictures and Other Works of Art (2 vols.) (London, privately printed, 1888); Algernon Graves, Art Sales, from the Early Eighteenth Century to the Early Twentieth Century (3 vols) (London, Algernon Graves, 1918–1921); Francis Cripps-Day, A Record of Armour Sales 1881–1924 (London, G. Bell & Sons, 1925). For example, the Antique Collectors’ Club began to issue price guides for antiques in 1968, starting with their well-known Price Guide to Antique Furniture by John Andrews. The Times-Sotheby Art Sales Index, begun by Geraldine Keen in 1967 is another key example,

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49 50 51

The spaces of the discourse underpinning and popularizing developments of the form. And companies such as Art Sales Index (established in 1968) and series publications on the prices of art and antiques such as Lyle’s Price Guides published from the 1970s, and Millers’ Antiques Guides published from the 1980s. For a useful summary of these recent developments, which are outside the scope of the present study, see Iain Roberston and Derrick Chong (Eds.), The Art Business (Abingdon, Routledge, 2008), pp. 17–21. See Haskell (1976), p. 5. Guido Guerzoni, ‘Refections on Historical Series of Art Prices: Reitlinger’s Data Revisited’, Journal of Cultural Economics, vol.19, (1995), pp. 251–60. See William J. Baumol, ‘Unnatural Value: Or Art Investment as Floating Crap Game’, The American Economic Review, vol.76, no.2, (May 1986), pp. 10–14. Susan P. Cateras and Colleen Denny (Eds.), The Grosvenor Gallery, A Palace of Art in Victorian England (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996); the publication accompanied an exhibition of the same title that was staged at the Yale Centre for Art and Denver Museum of Art in the USA and at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, in the UK. The Grosvenor Gallery had been the subject of a short essay in Apollo by Barrie Bullen in 1975, but these exhibitions widened the signifcance of the subject and introduced the museum visiting public to the signifcance of the history of art dealing; see Barrie Bullen, ‘The Palace of Art: Sir Coutts Lindsay and the Grosvenor Gallery’, Apollo, (November 1975), pp. 352–7. See, for example, Jeremy Howard et al., Colnaghi, Past, Present and Future, an Anthology (Colnaghi, 2016); Charles Sebag-Montefore with Julia Armstrong-Totten, A Dynasty of Dealers, John Smith and His Successors 1801–1924: A Study of the Art Market in Nineteenth-Century London (The Roxburghe Club, privately printed, 2013); Barbara Pezzini, ‘Days with Veláquez: When Lockett Agnew Bought the Rokeby Venus for Lockett Agnew’, Burlington Magazine, (May 2016), pp. 358–67. The history of the frms of Colnaghi and that of Agnews had been summarised in some earlier publications generated by the art dealerships themselves; see Colnaghi’s 1760–1960 (London, Colnaghi, 1960), published in celebration of the Centenary of the frm; and Donald Garstang et al., Art, Commerce, Scholarship: A Window on the Art World – Colnaghi 1760–1984 (London, Colnaghi, 1984), an exhibition catalogue for the exhibition at Colnaghi’s gallery, Nov– Dec., 1984; and for Agnews, see Agnew’s 1817–1967 (London, Agnew’s, 1967), in celebration of Agnew’s 150th anniversary, and A Dealer’s Record: Agnew’s 1967–1981 (London, Barrie & Jenkins, 1981). Anne Helmreich, ‘The Art Dealer and Taste: The Case of David Coral Thompson and the Goupil Gallery 1885–1897’, Visual Culture in Britain, vol.6, no.2, (Autumn 2005), pp. 31–49; Pamela Fletcher, ‘Creating the French Gallery: Ernst Gambart and the Rise of the Commercial Art Gallery in Mid-Victorian London’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, vol.6, no.1, (Spring 2007). Paul Durand-Ruel, Memoirs of the First Impressionist Art Dealer (1831–1922), revised, corrected and annotated by Paul-Louis Durand-Ruel and Flavie Durand-Ruel (Paris, Flammarion, 2014); Diana Kostryko, The Journal of a Transatlantic Art Dealer: René Gimpel (1918–1939) (Turnhout, Brepols, 2017). Wainwright (1989), pp. 26–53. Prior to his death in 1999 Wainwright was preparing a publication on the history of the antique trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; his notes for this project were edited and prepared for publication by Charlotte Gere and Carolyn Sargentson in a special edition of the Journal of the History of Collections in 2002 devoted to the relationships between the commercial trade in historical objects and the establishment of the South Kensington Museum (The Victoria & Albert Museum) in the middle decades of the nineteenth century; see, Charlotte Gere and Carolyn Sargentson (Eds.), Journal of the History of Collections, vol.14, no.1, (2002). Appropriately, given the peripheral place granted to the role of the antique dealer in the histories of collecting, MacGregor relegates this opinion to a footnote. MacGregor (1997), fn.62. Westgarth (2009); Westgarth (2019). Howard Malchow, ‘Nostalgia, “Heritage”, and the London Antiques Trade: Selling the Past in Thatcher’s Britain’, in George K. Behlmer and Fred M. Leventhal (Eds.), Singular

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52 53 54

55 56

57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67

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Continuities, Tradition, Nostalgia, and Identity in Modern British Culture (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 196–214. Charles Tracey, Continental Church Furniture in England: a Traffc in Piety, (Woodbridge, Antique Collector’s Club, 2001), esp. pp. 39–78. This work, Tracey states, was published after encouragement from Wainwright. John Harris, Moving Rooms: The Trade in Architectural Salvage (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2007), esp. pp. 37–59 and pp. 101–19. George C. Williamson, Murray Marks and His Friends (London, John Lane, 1919). Murray Marks was also recently the subject of a chapter in a study of nineteenth-century collecting practices by Jacqueline Yallop, Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves, a text that is part novel-writing, part historical investigation, see Jacqueline Yallop, Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves: How the Victorians Collected the World (London, Atlantic, 2011). Geoffrey de Bellaigue, ‘Edward Holmes Baldock’ (parts I & II), Connoisseur, vol.190, (August and September 1975), pp. 290–9 and pp. 18–25. Boyd Alexander, From Lisbon to Baker Street: The Story of the Chevalier Franchi, Beckford’s Friend (Lisbon, BHSP, 1977); John Ingamells (Ed.), The Hertford Mawson Letters, the 4th Marquis of Hertford to His Agent Samuel Mawson (London, Wallace Collection, 1981). Joy (1962); Wainwright (1989); Levy and Moss (2002); Levy (2007). See for example the essays by Bet Macleod and Adriana Turpin in Derek Ostergard (Ed.) (2001) and Amin Jaffer, Furniture from British India and Ceylon (London, Victoria and Albert Museum, 2001), p. 130. The subject of E.H. Baldock is presently the subject of a text in preparation by Diana Davis, whose PhD thesis focused on dealers and the designed interior in Britain in the frst half of the nineteenth century; see Diana Davis, British Dealers and the Making of the Anglo-Gallic Interior, 1785–1853 (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Buckingham, 2016; embargoed until 2020); see also Westgarth (2009). Nicky Levell, Oriental Visions: Exhibitions, Travel, and Collecting in the Victorian Age (London, Horniman Museum, 2000), pp. 305–9. Hermione Waterfeld, ‘William Ockeford Oldman’ in Hermione Waterfeld and J.C.H. King (Eds)., Provenance, Twelve Collectors of Ethnographic Art in England 1760–1990 (London, Paul Holberton, 2009), pp. 65–78. Roger Warner (David Jones, Ed.), ‘Memoirs of a Twentieth Century Antique Dealer’, Regional Furniture, vol.XVII, (2003). Westgarth (2009), p. 1. Charles Dawson, ‘In Search of the Marksman – William Chaffers’, Transactions of the English Ceramics Circle, vol.24, (2013), pp. 195–222. See, for example, in the context of Italian scholarship, Valerie Niemeyer Chini (Ed.), Stefano Bardini e Wilhelm Bode: Mercanti e connoisseur fra Ottocento e Novecento (Florence, Edizioni Polistampa, 2009); Anita Moskowitz, Stefano Bardini, ‘Principie degli Antiquari’ (Florence, Centrop, 2015); see also Annalea Tunesi, Stefano Bardini’s Photographic Archive: A Visual Historical Document (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Leeds, 2014); and in the context of American scholarship, see the work of Lynn Catterson in particular; Lynn Catterson, ‘Stefano Bardini and the Taxonomic Branding of Market Place Style: From the Gallery of a Dealer to the Institutional Canon’, in Eva-Maria Troelenberg and Melania Savinio (Eds.), Images of the Art Museum: Connecting Gaze and Discourse in the History of Museology (Berlin, de Gruyter, 2017), pp. 41–64. Wayne Craven, Stanford White, Decorator in Opulence and Dealer in Antiquities (New York, Columbia University Press, 2005). Craven (2005), pp. 19–73. Stillinger (1980), pp. 257–8 and passim; Israel Sack was also a key protagonist in the work of Briann Greenfeld; see Greenfeld (2009), pp. 57–8; pp. 64–7; pp. 75–6; F.J. Sypher, ‘Sypher & Co., A Pioneer Antique Dealer in New York’, Furniture History, vol.28, (1992), pp. 168–79. F.J. Sypher, ‘More on Sypher & Co., A Pioneer Antique Dealer in New York’, Furniture History, vol.40, (2004), pp. 151–206. I draw here from the work of Hayden White, especially his infuential essay, ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation’, in Angus Fletcher and Hayden White (Eds.), The Literature of Fact (New York, Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 21–44.

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69 Honoré de Balzac, The Wild Asses Skin (1831) (translated by Herbert J. Hunt) (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977). 70 Mons. Escudier, for example, from whom the British dealer Edward Holmes Baldock recorded the purchase of ‘Old Sévres’ in 1836, traded from a shop at 21 Quai Voltaire; see de Bellaigue (1975). 71 Donald Adamson, The Genesis of Cousin Pons (Oxford, Oxford University, 1966). 72 Balzac (1977), pp. 14–19. 73 Balzac (1977), p. 19. 74 Maleuvre (1999), p. 197. 75 Balzac (1977), p. 20. 76 Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Pons (1847) (translated by Herbert J. Hunt) (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968). 77 Gerald Reitlinger suggested that the dealer Charles Mannheim was the model for Balzac’s Elias Magus, see Reitlinger (1963), p. 130. Donald Adamson suggested that the name Magus may derive from ‘Mage’, who was a dealer trading at 1 Quai Voltaire in Paris; he also suggests that the well-known dealer Frederick Spitzer believed that Magus was modelled on the dealer Lazard, who Balzac visited in Marsielle in 1845. See Adamson (1966), p. 116. 78 Werner Muensterberger, ‘Two Collectors: Balzac and His Cousin Pons’, in Muensterberger (Ed.), Collecting, an Unruly Passion – Psychological Perspectives (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 132–3. 79 Balzac (1968), p. 120. 80 Balzac (1968). 81 Theophile Gautier, ‘The Mummy’s Foot’ (1840), in Theophile Gautier (Ed.), Tales and Romances (London, London Press Company, 1900), pp. 181–91. 82 Gautier (1900), p. 182. 83 Gautier (1900), p. 183. 84 Dickens (1841), p. 3. 85 George Fenton, ‘picture and curiosity dealer’ is listed at 5 & 6 Meat Market, Bury St. Edmunds in White’s History and Gazetteer of Suffolk, 1855; the Fenton family of dealers continued well into the twentieth century, with shops run by Samuel G. Fenton in Suffolk and London by the 1920s. See www.antiquetrade.leeds.ac.uk 86 Probably Thomas Smythe (1825–1907) a prolifc artist based in and around Ipswich and Bury St. Edmunds; he was the brother of the artist Edward Robert Smythe (1810–1899) and lived at Berners Street, Ipswich; the brothers had 12 children between them, several of whom became artists, most famously E.W. Smythe (1874–1950). I am very grateful to Victoria Savoulidis, archivist at Suffolk Record Offce for providing the information on the note on the photograph and on the Smythe family of artists. 87 The X-frame chair seems to have been inspired by the famous ‘Archbishop Juxon’s chair’, thought to have been used by Charles I at his execution in 1649. It was widely discussed in antiquarian journals in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and was included in the ‘Royal House of Stuart’ exhibition at the New Gallery, Regent Street, London, in 1889. See James Yorke, ‘Archbishop Juxon’s Chair’, Burlington Magazine, June 1999, volume CXLI. The chair is now in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum (W.13-1928). 88 Bernard Lewis, About the Old Curiosity Shop (London, 1964), unpaginated. 89 Lewis (1964). 90 ‘The Last of the Old Curiosity Shop’, The Manchester Weekly Times, (9th January 1891), p. 5. 91 Hanslip Fletcher, London Passed and Passing: A Pictorial Record of Destroyed and Threatened Buildings (London, Sir Isaac Pitman & Son, 1908), pp. 239–40. 92 Hanslip Fletcher (1908), p. 240. 93 10 Green Street is suggested by Robert Allbut, ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’, Dickensian, vol. VI, (1910), pp. 44–5; the suggestion of 24 Fetter Lane is also suggested by Edwin Beresford Chancellor, The London of Charles Dickens (London, Grant Richards, 1924), pp. 139–43. Wainwright (1989), p. 37, discounted all the locations as unfounded. 94 Aviva Briefel, The Deceivers, Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2006), see especially chapter 4, ‘The Real Sons of Abraham, Jewish Dealers and the Traffc in Fakes’, pp. 117–45.

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95 Briefel (2006), p. 15 and p. 118. 96 Kathleen Adler, ‘John Singer Sargent’s Portraits of the Wertheimer Family’, in Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb (Eds.), The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity (London, Thames & Hudson, 1995), pp. 83–96. See also, Nead (2000), pp. 173–9. 97 Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society, Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993). 98 Byng-Hall (1868), p. 102. 99 Todd M. Endelman, ‘German-Jewish Settlement in Victorian England’, in Werner E. Moss (Ed.), Second Chance: Two Centuries of German-Speaking Jews in the United Kingdom (Tübingen, J.C.B. Mohr, 1991), pp. 37–56. John Coleman Isaac, like his father before him, emerged from the clothing and tailoring trades. 100 Endelman (1991), p. 38. 101 Anon. ‘Birboniana: or, Italian Antiquaries and Antichita’, Blackwood’s Magazine, (May 1846), pp. 543–53, p. 543. 102 Journal of the 3rd Lord Braybrooke, Acc.6767, Essex County Record Offce. Also quoted in Wainwright (1989), p.53, and Tracy (2001), p. 64. 103 Aleph (pseud. William Harvey), The Old City, and Its Highways and Byways (London, W. Collingridge, 1864), p. 39. 104 Aleph (1864), p. 39. 105 Samuel Foote, Taste, a Comedy in Two Acts (London, T. Lowndes, 1752). 106 Clive Wainwright, Apollo, February 2000, p. 41. 107 Cripps-Day (1925), p. LVI. 108 Charles Beard, ‘Vicissitudes of a Helmet’, Connoisseur, vol.91, no.180, (1933), pp. 245–8. 109 K.N.Watts, ‘Samuel Pratt and Armour Faking’, in Mark Jones (Ed.), Why Fakes Matter, Essays on the Problem of Authenticity (London, British Museum Press, 1992), pp. 100–5. 110 Weininger is infamous for making copies Renaissance objects that he was engaged to repair and restore and which he subsequently substituted for the originals; see John Hayward, ‘Salomon Weininger, Master Faker’, Connoisseur, vol.187, no.753, (November 1974), pp. 170–9. Weininger was sentenced in the Vienna Courts to fve years’ imprisonment in 1876, and to two years’ imprisonment in 1877 for forgery offences. 111 See, for example, Marion Campbell and Claude Blair, ‘”Vive le vol”, Louis Marcy Anarchist and Faker’, in Mark Jones (Ed.) (1992), pp. 134–47; Claude Blair and Marion Campbell, Louis Marcy: Oggetti d’arte della Galleria Parmeggiani di Reggio Emlia (2008); See also, Anna Maria Massinelli, ‘The Meneghetti, Venetian Antique Dealers and Forgers’, Apollo, vol.cxxxii, (August 1990), pp. 90–4; High Tait, ‘Reinhold Vasters: goldsmith, restorer and prolifc faker’, in Mark Jones (Ed.) (1992), pp. 116–23; Wainwright (2000). 112 John Charles Robinson, ‘On Spurious Works of Art’, The Nineteenth Century, (November 1891), pp. 677–98, pp. 684–6. 113 Robinson (1891); see also Westgarth (2011), pp. 60–1. 114 See, Helen Davies, ‘John Charles Robinson’s work at the South Kensington Museum’, parts I & II, Journal of the History of Collections, vol.10, no.2, (1998), pp. 169–88, and vol.11, no.1, (1999), pp. 95–115, p. 97. 115 Davies (1999), p.111. 116 Quoted in Somers Cocks (1980), p. 21. 117 John Pope-Hennessy, ‘The Forging of Italian Renaissance Sculpture’, Apollo, vol.XCIX, no.146, (New Series), (April 1974), pp. 242–7; See also, Craven (2005), pp. 71–2; Briefel (2006), pp. 23–4; and Westgarth (2009). 118 Daily News, (20th December 1867), (31st January 1868); Pall Mall Gazette, (5th, 6th and 12th March 1868); Daily News, (14th July 1868). 119 Nina Barstow, ‘The Romance of Art, The Forgeries of Bastianini’, The Magazine of Art, (January 1886), pp. 503–8; see also J.C. Robinson, ‘On Spurious Works of Art’ The Nineteenth Century, no.CLXXVII (November, 1891), pp. 677–98, and pp. 691–9. 120 Barstow (1886), p. 503. See also Anita Moskowitz, Forging Authenticity: Bastianini and the Neo-Renaissance in Nineteenth-century Florence (Florence, Leo Olschki, 2013). Moskowitz challenges the conventional view that the sculptor Bastianini deliberately created his sculptures to deceive, suggesting that his artistic intentions were a symptom of

48

121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142

143 144

145 146

The spaces of the discourse the historicizing practices of the period. However, this reassessment has come under further scrutiny, and it is now suggested that Bastianini was much more complicit in the production of these Renaissance artworks than Moskowitz suggested; see Tina Őcal, ‘Shape-Shifters of Transculturation, Giovanni Bastianini’s Forgeries as Embodiment of an Aesthetic Patriotism’, in Becker, D., Fischer, A., and Schmitz, Y (Eds.), Faking, Forging, Counterfeiting Discredited Practices at the Margins of Mimesis (Bielefeld, TranscriptVerlag, 2017), pp. 111–26; also Jeremy Warren, ‘Forgery in Risorgimento Florence: Bastianini’s ‘Giovanni della Bande Nere’ in the Wallace Collection’, Burlington Magazine, vol.147, (2005), pp. 729–41. Quoted in Ian Jenkins and Kim Sloan, Vases and Volcanoes, Sir William Hamilton and His Collection (London, British Museum, 1990), p. 62. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (translated by Richard Nice) (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 281. For a useful overview of connoisseurial collecting in the eighteenth century see Iain Pears, The Discovery of Painting (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1988), ‘The Connoisseur and Connoisseurship’, pp. 181–206. The Times, (23rd May 1844). Richard Brookes, The Sunday Times, (18th June 2006), p. 10. Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, in Josue V. Harari (Ed.), Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (New York, Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 197–210, p. 197. Foucault suggests that the notion of authorship can also include authors of artworks, music, flm and other forms of cultural production; Harari (Ed.) (1979), p. 205. Wainwright (1989), p. 26. MacGregor (1997), p. 13. See Ann Eatwell (1994), pp. 25–30, p. 25. Quoted in Anna Somers Cocks, The Victoria and Albert Museum: The Making of a Collection (Leicester, Windward, 1980), p. 20. My emphasis in italics. Quoted in Wainwright (2002), pp. 47–8. Quoted in Timothy Wilson, ‘A Victorian Artist as Ceramic-Collector: The Letters of Henry Wallis, part 1’, Journal of the History of Collections, vol.14, no.1, (2002), pp. 139–59, p. 154. Wilson (2002), p. 154. The Times, (5th October 1892); also quoted in Wainwright (2002), p. 73–4. Wainwright (2002), p. 74. Wainwright (2002), p. 74. The Times, (7th April 1849), p. 4. Mrs Bury Palliser, A History of Furniture, Translated from the French Albert Jacquemart (1876) (London, Chapman & Hall, 1878), p. 14. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal (1851–1896) (edited by Robert Ricatte) (3 vols.) (Paris, Fasquelle and Flamarion, 1956), vol.2, p. 531. Bourdieu (1984); see also Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, The Love of Art, European Museums and Their Public (Oxford, Polity Press, 1991). Catalogue of the Remaining Stock of Edward Baldock…Sold by Messers Foster & Son… 25th to 27th May 1843. A further sale, also undertaken by Foster took place on 21st July 1843. Both auction sales were held at Baldock’s shop in Hanway Street. See Bellaigue (1975), p. 292. Bellaigue (1975), p. 290. Baldock required that if his heir was female, in the event of her marrying, her husband must assume the Baldock name in lieu of or in conjunction with his own, provided that Baldock always came last. Her husband would also be required to adopt the Baldock coat of arms, either unaltered or quartered with his own armorial bearings; de Bellaigue (1975), p. 290. de Bellaigue (1975), p. 290. For information relating to Webb and his role in the collections at the South Kensington Museum see Davies (1998) and Clive Wainwright (edited for publication by Charlotte Gere), ‘The Making of the South Kensington Museum IV, Relationships with the Trade: Webb and Bardini’, Journal of the History of Collections, vol.14, no.1, (2002), pp. 63–78.

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147 Mrs Edith Cragg, of Wrotham Place, Kent died on 18th March 1925. The John Webb Trust Fund was ‘established for the purchase for the Nation of works of art of the French and Italian schools, dating from 1500 to 1800 inclusive’; see The Times, (24th June 1925). 148 Henry Bohn, Guide to the Knowledge of Pottery and Porcelain and Other Objects of Vertu, Comprising an Illustrated Catalogue of the Bernal Collection (London, H. Bohn, 1857). 149 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53, No.104. See also Levy and Moss (2002), p. 104. 150 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No. 467, ‘Paid to Messrs Coutts & Co….a Check Drawn by Mr Swaby…£87’. Entry dated 28th March 1838. 151 Forster (1848); for a brief discussion of the auction sale of the contents of Stowe, which followed the spectacular bankruptcy of the Duke of Buckingham, see Herrmann (1972), pp. 274–81. For more on the Bernal auction sale see Reitlinger (1963), pp. 103–9; Herrmann (1972), pp. 293–9; MacGregor (1997), pp. 32–3. 152 Jean Baudrillard, ‘The System of Collecting’, in John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Eds.), The Cultures of Collecting (London, Reaktion, 1994), pp. 7–24. 153 Baudrillard (1994), p. 22. 154 Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking My Library’, in Hannah Arendt (Ed.), Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn (London, Cape, 1970), pp. 61–9, p. 69. 155 Benjamin (1970), p. 69. 156 Baudrillard (1994), p. 12. 157 Crane (2000), p. 61. 158 See, in particular, Clive Wainwright, ‘Myth and Reality, Sir Walter Scott and His Collection I,’ Country Life, (16th September 1982), pp. 804–6 and ‘Objects of Natural Curiosity – Sir Walter Scott and his Collection II’, Country Life, (23rd September 1982), pp. 886–8, and also Wainwright (1989), pp. 146–207. 159 Letter from Joanna Baillie to Scott written in 1812; quoted in Wainwright, Country Life, (16th September 1982), p. 806. 160 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1925) (translated by Ian Cunnison) (London, Cohen & West, 1954). 161 Benjamin (1970), p. 68. 162 Samuel Meyrick, ‘Observations upon a Pair of Candlesticks and a Pix, Both of the Twelfth Century, Preserved at Goodrich Court …’, Archaelogia: or Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity, vol.XXIII, essay XVIII, (1831), pp. 317–22, p. 317. 163 Archaeological Journal, vol.IX, (1852), p. 14. Also quoted in Marjorie Caygill, ‘Franks and the British Museum – the Cuckoo in the Nest’, in Caygill and Cherry (Eds.), pp. 51–114, p. 98. 164 Hauser (1982), p. 506.

Part Two

The emergence of historical consciousness

The consumption of the past The early nineteenth century was a period when the desire for the past was expressed in myriad new activities. It was also a period in which interest in collecting and furnishing with historical objects was beginning to become, for the frst time, the prerogative of a mass public. The opening decades of the nineteenth century saw a broadening of interest in the historical past which is registered in the move away from a primary focus on the Classical Greek and Roman historical material that had been the central preoccupation of the eighteenth century to a broadening interest in British and European historical material dating from the Medieval and Renaissance periods, as well as from much more recent periods of history. This is not to say that there were not several notable collectors of historical objects dating from the Medieval and Renaissance periods in the eighteenth century. The collections of historical objects assembled by leading antiquarian collectors such as Horace Walpole (1717–1797) and John Carter (1748–1817) were well known and well publicised, and familiar to collectors and writers in the period. Such collecting practices were part of an established antiquarian tradition and were far from unique, even if the objects of antiquarian desire were considered by some commentators at the time have limited aesthetic appeal and the collecting practices themselves to be symbolic of arcane and insular knowledge.1 Walpole’s collection was wide-ranging, comprising objects from the ancient Classical past and objects from the Medieval period, as well as the usual curiosities associated with signifcant historical fgures such as a lock of hair of ‘Mary Tudor’ and Cardinal Wolsey’s hat.2 Besides such eclectic collections, there were also examples of more specialist collecting activities, such as the extensive collections of sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Italian maiolica assembled in the eighteenth century by Sir Andrew Fountaine (1676–1753) at Narford Hall in Norfolk.3 But such collections aroused contemporary interest precisely because of their singularity, and the market for historical objects in this earlier period remained predominantly the domain of the limited class of eighteenth-century antiquarians. The new and evolving historical interests that emerged in the early nineteenth century share a genealogy with the culture of antiquarian collecting of the eighteenth century, but the scale and expansion of interest and ways in which the historical material was conceptualised and engaged with in the early nineteenth century, far out-strip these earlier antiquarian interests. Moreover, and more signifcantly, a key aspect of the new markets for historical objects that emerged in the opening decades of the nineteenth century was an increasing interest in historical material dating from periods much closer to the

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contemporary world of the early nineteenth century than eighteenth-century antiquaries had to their own, more recent, past. The catalysts for the evolving interest in the past in the opening decades of the nineteenth century are complex and interwoven, as indeed are the motives and desires for the consumption of the vast range of historical objects that were exchanged in this diverse economy. As part of the network of supply and distribution, the antique and curiosity dealer played a critical role in the promotion of this consumption of the past. However, whilst it is argued here that the antique and curiosity dealer was an infuential catalyst for the expanding interest in historical objects in the early nineteenth century it is also important to acknowledge that the emergence of the dealer was also part of a wider social, economic, political and cultural transformation in the period. Indeed, whilst the emergence of the dealer and the antique and curiosity shop can be related to the social, demographic and economic changes of the opening decades of the nineteenth century, the emergence of the trade in historical objects in the period appears to be such an unusual phenomenon that its appearance cannot be wholly explained with reference to the changes in the social body and the expansion of economic and consumer capacity. To explore this proposal, I draw on the ideas of writers such as Grant McCracken and Colin Campbell in an attempt to place what one might call the ‘consumer revolution’ for antiques and curiosities into a broader cultural context: for, as McCracken suggests, ‘consumption is a thoroughly cultural phenomenon … shaped, driven and constrained at every point by cultural considerations’.4 Both McCracken and Campbell’s publications were a reaction to the explanatory framework that had been suggested for the consumer revolution in the eighteenth century, which had been the subject of several accounts in the early 1980s.5 McCracken’s text was a historical and methodological analysis of the phenomenon of the so-called ‘great transformations’ of Western consumer culture, described by scholars such as Braudel and McKendrick, and that marked ‘fundamental shift in the culture of the early modern and modern world’.6 Campbell’s work provided a more general and conceptual analysis of the particular revolution in the history of consumption that occurred during the eighteenth century. For Campbell, the suggested explanation that the eighteenth-century expansion in consumption was underscored by new industrial and commercial capacity, shifting demographics and population growth, was particularly problematic and unsatisfactory.7 Campbell considered that such changes can underpin revolutions in consumer behaviour, but there were occasions when the shifting patterns of consumption required an account that transcends such socio-economic explanations. His own account for the expansion in consumption in the eighteenth century was based on a more abstract concept, which he called the ‘Romantic Ethic’, suggesting that the consumer revolution was underpinned by the ‘the pursuit of pleasure’.8 As suggested by the title of Campbell’s work, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, his framework implies that motivations for consumption are driven by deeper conceptual and indeed ideological perspectives.9 The observations and analysis of Campbell and McCracken are a useful model through which the phenomenon of the emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer can be further explored. Indeed, the phenomenon of the emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer appears to be so unusual that it requires setting against some broader, deeper and more profound shifts in the period. The conceptual frame underlying this suggestion is drawn from the work of the cultural historian and theorist Michel Foucault

52 The emergence of historical consciousness (1926–1984) and his text The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969).10 The principle developed by Foucault is that discourses are structured as an epistemological totality, or ‘episteme’, and form a coherent system of knowledge in particular periods. These apparently continuous systems of knowledge are fractured at various historical periods by epistemological breaks which signify a shift from one episteme to another. The emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer coincides with the emergence of Foucault’s Modern (Romantic) episteme at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, and in this sense the emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer can be considered as a symptom of the much-vaunted emergence of historical consciousness in the early nineteenth century. Several writers have drawn on this notion of the Foucauldian shift in their investigations into the historical changes in the early nineteenth century. The historian Chris Brooks, for example, makes an oblique reference to Foucault’s notion of epistemological fracture in his work on nineteenth-century Historicism; ‘it is discontinuity, not continuity that brings historical consciousness into being’, writes Brooks.11 Stephen Bann, in The Clothing of Clio (1984) and Romanticism and the Rise of History (1995), also detects a decisive transformation both in attitudes to the past and in the conceptual framework of historical knowledge in the early nineteenth century.12 Bann writes that the early nineteenth century was a highly signifcant moment, a time when history and historical data became meaningful for a much broader public than had been the case previously and when a ‘whole range of our contemporary concerns with the past became accessible to representation’.13 The Marxist philosopher and writer Georg Lukács (1885–1971), in his investigation of the development of the historical novel, detects a similar shift during this period.14 Indeed, Lukács directed attention to the changing signifcance of the notion of historical experience in the early nineteenth century and in particular the specifcity of the rupture caused by the French Revolution and the revolutionary wars which, as Lukács writes, ‘for the frst time made history a mass experience, and moreover on a European scale’.15 More recently, an increasing number of scholars have drawn further attention to the French Revolution as a catalyst for an increasing interest in historical materials and objects during the early nineteenth century.16 In her study of collecting practices in Germany in the same period, the cultural historian Susan Crane also suggests that the early nineteenth century saw the emergence of new and distinctive reactions to the past.17 For Crane this shift is fgured through aesthetics and gave rise to what she described as the ‘aesthetic sublime’.18 Underlying this more eruditely conceptualized notion, which, framed through contemporary aesthetic theory, would be accessible only to the educated elite of early nineteenth-century culture, was also a broader feeling of historical awareness in early nineteenth-century society and an emerging perception of the past as ‘past’.19 One of the consequences of this broad conceptual shift was a remarkable change in the types of historical objects that came to be of interest, as well as a signifcant change in the perspective and scale of collecting activities themselves. As Susan Crane indicates, interest in collecting historical objects shifted from the personal, idiosyncratic and elite networks of eighteenth-century antiquarian collecting to more expansive and representative collecting activities underscored by broader political and national agendas.20 Such a shift is also registered in the change from collections held in private cabinets to the emergence of the public historical museum by the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

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It is also no coincidence that the increasing cultural interest in historical objects takes on its distinctive form during a period when, as Marshall Berman has suggested, there was the most radical shift in the trajectory of ‘modernity’.21 For Berman, modernity has had three distinct historical phases: the frst stage began in the sixteenth century and ended with the close of the eighteenth century, whilst the third and fnal phase of modernity emerged in the early twentieth century. It was the ‘second phase’ of modernity, itself a product of the Enlightenment and part of the Revolutionary wave of the 1790s, which acted as a catalyst for these more general engagements with the ‘past’. As Berman indicates, the peculiarity of this ‘second phase’ of modernity was that it offered up ‘a sense of living in two worlds simultaneously’; at the same time as being ‘modern’, people could ‘remember what it is like to live, materially and spiritually, in worlds that were not modern at all’.22 The increasing interest in historical objects exemplifes the synchronic experience of the ‘second phase’ of modernity that Berman described. The dual catalysts of nineteenth-century ‘Romanticism’ and ‘Historicism’ also play a key role in the consumption of the past in the opening decades of the nineteenth century and provide complementary cultural frameworks through which the increasingly diverse range of historical objects were exchanged. The emergence of ‘Romantic’ fction, most fttingly for the purposes of the present study in the novels of Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), acted as a primary catalyst in the promotion of the desire for historical objects. Indeed, one of the expressed reasons for acquisition of historical objects in the period was that the desire for the past that arose from the reading of Romantic fction would be further aroused by their collection and display. Indeed, in that most important multi-volume publication on medieval objects, Les Arts au Moyen Age (1838–1846), the author, collector and founder of the Musée de Cluny in Paris, Alexandre du Sommerard (1779–1842), acknowledged the possibility that objects from the past could act as a stimulus for emotional feeling and imaginative speculation: ‘A methodical collection of the brilliant remains of our ancestors’, wrote Du Sommerard, ‘would contribute a lively interest to the reading of our chronicles’.23 In terms of the contemporary fashion for historical revivals in architectural and interior design in the period, ‘Romanticism’ also reinforced the continuing appeal of the British ‘Gothic’ past.24 The Gothic revival, or more properly perhaps ‘Gothic Revivals’, for there have been a number of periodic and distinctive reinterpretations of gothic design stretching back as far as the early eighteenth century, provided a broad cultural frame for a wide range of collecting, furnishing and design-based activities throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.25 In the early nineteenth century, the ‘Gothic’ was routed through the Elizabethan and Jacobean revivals and was both a dominant design aesthetic through which historical objects were deployed and a potent ideological frame in the shifting social and political landscape of early nineteenth-century Britain, as discussed in the following section of this book. However, whilst it is certainly accurate to draw attention to the infuence of the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival in the wider consumption of historical objects, it is also important to point out that the furnishing and collecting practices that evolved out of the interest in the Gothic past provide only a partial explanation of these evolving patterns of consumption. Indeed, one of the distinctive features of the shift in historical interest in the period under review here was a desire for historical material from a much more recent time period than that constituted by the medieval ‘Gothic’.

54 The emergence of historical consciousness If Romanticism was a key driver for the increasing interest in the past, equally signifcant to the emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer was the development of the notion of historicism in the opening decades of the nineteenth century.26 It is not the intention of this study to attempt an account of the complex nature and development of nineteenth-century historicism, given that such an account must, by defnition, begin with the present, but it is important to highlight some of the most relevant changes that mark its emergence in the period under review. The insistence of the primary importance of historical context, a principal tenet in nineteenth-century historicism, is refected in the increasing stress that is laid on the notion of historical accuracy in the period. In the introduction to Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836), for instance, which is a critical text in this investigation as subsequent discussions demonstrate, the author Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick criticised the contemporary practice of historical painting, which had become an increasingly important visual medium in the evolving historical consciousness in the period. Historical painting, wrote Meyrick, had become so ‘full of incongruities and anachronisms’ that it was failing in its purpose to instil in the viewer an accurate sense of the past.27 Meyrick stressed: In an historical composition, correctness in the auxiliaries is scarcely less important than in the prominent parts, for the introduction of a wardrobe or a chair of the time of Queen Anne in the representation of an apartment of the reign of Henry the Sixth is a glaring error.28 To illustrate his point, Meyrick included a drawing of the famous ‘Great Bed of Ware’ in plate XXXVII in Specimens, and which was the only illustration in the whole publication that set the historical objects into a mise en scene (see Figure 2.1).29 Meyrick’s commentary on the plate draws further attention to the anachronisms in the image: This celebrated piece of furniture is amply illustrated by the quotation on the copper-plate. It is in a fne state of preservation, and has some remains of colour in its frieze. The wardrobe in the room where it stands is of the time of Charles the First, and the chair of that of George the Second.30 Meyrick’s call for historical accuracy exemplifes the changing historical attitudes in the period. Indeed, his own more specifc interests similarly refect these concerns. Meyrick was an acknowledged expert on ancient armour and the frst person to treat the history of arms and armour both systematically and chronologically. He published a monumental study on the subject, A Critical Inquiry into Antient Armour (1824).31 Meyrick’s chronological rearrangement of the armour in the Royal Armouries at the Tower of London in 1827, and also at Windsor Castle, resulted in him being conferred with the Royal Hanoverian Order by William IV in 1832.32 He was proud of his work at the Tower, writing in a letter to the Board of Ordnance that ‘it was now the only collection that is truly and historically arranged’.33 Meyrick’s own extensive collections of armour at Goodrich Court near Hereford, which was also his private museum, were described and illustrated by the antiquary Joseph Skelton (c.1781–c.1850) in a published description in 1830 and were amongst the most well known in the period.34 Meyrick adopted the same historically accurate approach to display at Goodrich Court, which contained several ‘period rooms’ arranged in chronological sequence. An anonymous writer in Gentleman’s Magazine

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Figure 2.1 The Great Bed of Ware, Hertfordshire (1832), Henry Shaw (1800–1873), plate XXXVII, Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836). Private Collection.

commented that visitors to Goodrich Court would be ‘delighted by various objects of antiquity ... [and] especially by that chronological arrangement which presents a useful series of furniture and decorative ornaments, never before attempted’.35 Goodrich had rooms decorated in the style of ‘Edward II’ and ‘Henry VI’, and also included a series of rooms devoted to more recent British monarchs, including a ‘Charles I Room’ and a ‘Charles II Room’, which refected the increasing interest in more recent periods of history.36 In typical antiquarian fashion, further rooms were dedicated to historical fgures that were important in the genealogy of the Meyrick family, such as ‘Sir Gelley’s Chamber’.37 All of the rooms at Goodrich Court were furnished with historical objects which dated from (or were believed to have dated from) the period corresponding to the date of the Monarch or individual. The antiquary and writer Thomas Roscoe, who visited Goodrich Court in 1837, described the various rooms, which included ‘Henry the Sixth’s Gallery’, where on a table ‘of the time of Henry VIII’ were ‘caskets, candlesticks, inkstands etc of the same period’.38 This increasing desire for historical accuracy was also refected in the staging of theatrical performances. The playwright and antiquary J. R. Planché (1796–1880), who was also a member of Meyrick’s circle of antiquarian friends, was well known in the period for instituting the adoption of correct historical costume for the theatre. Planché famously convinced the actor-manager Charles Kemble (1775–1854) that his 1823 production of Shakespeare’s King John at Covent Garden would beneft from having all the actors clad in historically

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The emergence of historical consciousness

appropriate costumes. Planché was an expert advisor for the costumes for theatre productions and used his antiquarian knowledge, drawing on ‘authorities – monumental effgies, seals, illuminated manuscripts, and similar sources’.39 Historians of theatre have also drawn attention to the impact of increasing historical awareness in the viewing public as a key catalyst for performers and theatre managers to present characters in appropriate historical costume.40 The new accuracy required of historical performances at the theatre during the opening decades of the nineteenth century inevitably led to commercial opportunities for dealers such as Isaac. The Isaac waste book records several entries in respect of payments received for the hire of suits of armour to various theatres in the 1830s.41 Armour was one of the most valuable commodities that the dealers sold, and Isaac was inevitably concerned to protect his stock; the waste book records a payment of ten shillings in January 1836 to Thomas Whitton, an ‘armourer’ for ‘attending the armour at the Coburg Theatre for two weeks’.42 Isaac’s suits of armour may have been the examples that the early nineteenth-century diarist Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867) saw in a production of The Antiquary which he recorded that he had seen at the Coburg Theatre on 12th December 1836: ‘I could – bad as it was – interest myself in the story’, wrote Robinson.43 Costume was a kind of touchstone for historical accuracy and had been employed for the purposes of accurate dating in antiquarian discourse since at least the late seventeenth century. The consistent reference to representations of costume in tomb monuments and stained-glass in antiquarian debates and the numerous antiquarian publications devoted to costume are a testimony to its importance.44 Many of the letters in the Isaac archive indicate the continued importance of such sources in the nineteenth century. For example, in a letter sent to the dealer John Coleman Isaac from the collector Ralph Bernal in September 1838, Bernal indicated the importance of expert antiquarian opinion and directed attention to the type of evidence utilized in the assessment of historical objects. Attempting to confrm the authenticity of a ‘salade’ (helmet with tail) in a selection of ancient armour he had reserved at the dealers Samuel and Henry Pratt in New Bond Street, Bernal wrote: there appears to have been some little misunderstanding as to the supposed date; Samuel Pratt said it was about the time of Henry 5th to Edward 4th (I think) … . I never saw one of these salads before … . I am very desirous that you should see the other articles at Pratt’s, and believe me I am most careful in not committing you in any way.45 Bernal suggested that the matter of the accuracy of the date of the salade could be resolved by the recourse to a contemporary illustrated manuscript source: ‘in the British Museum’, he wrote, ‘is an old illuminated MS there and (I hear) are men painted with such salades’.46 In a letter Bernal sent to Isaac in October 1838, he writes of a buckler (a round shield) which he was attempting to purchase, suggesting that its date could be ‘of the time of Henry 8th … as appears in a painting of the embarkation of that King at Dover’.47 Notwithstanding the importance of historical accuracy as a catalyst for the evolving market for historical objects, equally signifcant was the widening scope of antiquarian investigations in the period. By the opening decade of the nineteenth century, antiquarians were directing attention away from historical investigations based on important Royal and political archives to consider the more everyday aspects in the

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history of human society. We see this, for example, in publications such as The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England by the antiquary Joseph Strutt (1749–1802).48 Texts such as Sports and Pastimes began to draw attention to the possibility that the more mundane aspects of the past could be the focus of legitimate historical investigation. Indeed, in a call that modern historians would recognise, Strutt suggested that these more ordinary aspects of the past could provide more legitimate historical knowledge. Writing in the introduction to Sports and Pastimes Strutt suggested: War, policy, and other contingent circumstances, may effectually place men at different times, in different points of view but when we follow them into their retirements, where no disguise is necessary, we are likely to see them in their true state.49 Strutt’s investigations were a legacy of the already established eighteenth-century antiquarian study of the ‘manners and customs of the time’, which had been advocated by scholars such as the French antiquarian the Comte de Caylus (1692–1765) from the 1750s.50 However, by the early nineteenth century the prospective audience for such historical interests were extending beyond the narrow confnes of eighteenth-century antiquarianism. Directing attention to the signifcance of such everyday activities in the past would also imbue a wider range of historical objects surviving from that past with greater historical interest. Perhaps more signifcantly, nineteenth-century antiquarians had also begun to move beyond the interest in the medieval and pre-medieval British past that was the primary concern of British eighteenth-century antiquarianism and were pushing the chronological parameters of antiquarian investigation ever closer to their respective contemporary time. Specimens of Ancient Furniture, for example, provided illustrations of ‘all articles used for domestic purposes, from the earliest period of which specimens exist to the reign of Queen Anne’.51 Goodrich Court also refected these shifting interests, with rooms devoted to the time of ‘William III’ and ‘Queen Anne’. Thomas Roscoe, on his visit in 1837, described the Queen Anne room, which was furnished with the gorgeous furniture and fowing patterns of the days of Queen Anne of which the pannels on the walls, the window curtains and hangings of the recess, the gilt pier table, the stand in the centre of the room, the looking-glass, Seve [sic] and Dresden porcelain, and the splendid clock, are originals from that age.52 Whilst we now understand that it would be inaccurate to place production of Sèvres porcelain as occurring during the reign of Queen Anne (1702–1714) (the Sèvres factory, a continuation of the Vincennes factory, was not established until 1740), this was a common understanding in the period. What is signifcant to note is that a range of objects from the relatively recent past, some from a past as recent as the early eighteenth century, were displayed and presented as ‘historical’. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century the consumption of the past was expanding well beyond the focus that it had in the opening decade of the nineteenth century. In his study of exhibition culture in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century in London, the historian Richard Altick directed close attention to the signifcance of these developments for the evolving consumer culture in the period: this ‘broadened sense of history’, Altick wrote, was ‘one of the most infuential developments

58 The emergence of historical consciousness in nineteenth-century culture’.53 From the mid-1830s, as Peter Mandler has demonstrated, historical interests became part of a much broader social and cultural framework.54 We see, for example, the beginning of mass ‘historical tourism’ in Britain by the working classes for the frst time from the second quarter of the nineteenth century.55 As Mandler suggests, for this new audience the primary appeal of old buildings was in their social and historical value rather than through the complex cultural registers suggested by aesthetic theories such as the picturesque and the sublime.56 This expansion in historical interests is demonstrated, in part at least, by the wider circulation of inexpensive publications that described and illustrated the historical fabric of Britain. The Penny Magazine, for instance, contained numerous discussions of monuments, abbeys and churches. The popularity of novels such as The Tower of London by W. Harrison Ainsworth (1805–1882), which was frst published as a ‘shilling shocker’ in 1840, led to an increasing interest in visiting such historical attractions. The desire to see such attractions was also facilitated by reductions in the admission price; the admission to the armoury had been cut to just sixpence by 1839, resulting in a nine-fold increase in attendance from that of the early 1830s.57 The expansion and consolidation of historical interests by the second quarter of the nineteenth century and the greater involvement of the social body in the consumption of the past is refected in the evolution of the antique and curiosity trade in the period, which expanded most rapidly during the 1830s and 1840s. Indeed, by the second quarter of the nineteenth century, further categories of historical material were being drawn into the consumption of the past. Indeed, one of the earliest pieces of evidence of the evolving interest in an expanding range of historical objects was the History of the Staffordshire Potteries, by Simeon Shaw and published by the author in 1829.58 Shaw complied the text, in part, from the reminiscences of the famous eighteenth-century potter Enoch Wood (1759–1840), who had worked briefy at Josiah Wedgwood’s ceramic factory before establishing his own pottery business by 1783.59 Shaw’s book was, and was decidedly, antiquarian in its methodology and approach, relating a somewhat dry descriptive account of the historical development of the Potteries. The book was also a panegyric to the history of British ceramic manufacturing, and one of its main purposes was as a catalyst to commerce and to raise the standards of British ceramic manufacturing production at the time.60 In this sense, Shaw’s text can be placed more properly within the general climate of mercantile, manufacturing and political concerns that would give rise to the Parliamentary Committees into Arts and Manufactures in 1835 and Arts and Principles of Design in 1836. Shaw’s book may not have been composed specifcally for collectors of ceramics in terms of assisting with the identifcation of objects, but texts that began to address the increasing desire for information by ceramic collectors began to appear soon after its appearance. In 1844, for example, Alexandre Brongniart (1770–1847), the Director of the Sèvres porcelain manufactory, published Traité des arts céramiques. Brongniart’s text drew heavily from Shaw’s History of the Staffordshire Potteries in its discussions of the ceramic industry, providing a similar history of the Sèvres factory, but was also the frst text to provide systematic information on the marks and monograms that the Sèvres ceramic manufactory applied to the bases and undersides of their productions in the eighteenth century.61 The collecting markets for ‘Old Sèvres’, ‘Old Dresden’ and other continental ceramic manufactories were already highly developed in Britain by the opening decade of the nineteenth century and were led by infuential

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collectors such as the Prince Regent and William Beckford, amongst others. The diarist Thomas Raikes, who was travelling in France in the 1830s, wrote satisfactorily in 1836: 62

years ago, when we [the English] were buying up with eagerness the buhl, the Sèvres, the bronzes, and other objects of taste, the French would ridicule our fancy for vieilleries and rococo, now they are collecting them with the greatest eagerness, and the prices are more than doubled.63 By the mid-1840s, when Brongniart published his text, Thomas Raikes wrote that there had been an ‘extraordinary rise in the price of old Sèvres china’.64 Writing in 1843 Raikes described how a few years earlier one half of ‘one of the fnest [Sèvres] services’ had been bought by ‘the well-known collector Demidoff’65 and another quarter of the collection by another collector, ‘for which was paid 1500 francs’.66 Raikes continued, ‘the remaining quarter is now on sale, and the owner asks for it, 20,000 francs, which he will probably obtain’.67 During the 1840s the wider interest in history and historical objects was also demonstrated through the establishment of new learned and professional societies such as The British Archaeological Association and the Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. These societies evolved out of the desire to promote the view that the medieval and pre-medieval past of Britain was of much greater signifcance than had been previously acknowledged by the majority of their antiquarian predecessors.68 The primary focus of these societies was the deeper British past, particularly Romano-British antiquities, but the members had a broad range of interests, and their meetings included discussions of historical objects from a wide historical time frame and encompassing an extensive range of material and techniques. Such interests also refected the increasing interest in historic ceramics from eighteenth-century British factories adumbrated by texts such as that produced by Simeon Shaw. For example, the pottery manufacturer Enoch Wood Jr displayed his large collection of historic Staffordshire ceramics at the Archaeological Institute in 1845. As a result of these interests, members began to undertake investigations into the history of the ceramic manufactories of Britain, both as a purely antiquarian and historical endeavour and with the view of promoting British manufacturing. The focus of the investigations at these new societies was also linked to elevating the contemporary status of British design and manufacturing, a concern that was central to politicians, manufacturers and designers throughout this period.69 The new antique and curiosity trade emerged in response to these developing mercantile objectives, new collecting and furnishing practices and evolving historical interests. What is perhaps more striking in respect to the present investigation’s suggestion that new kinds of historical interest were being directed to the objects from the past is the emergence of a more general value of ‘oldness’ being ascribed to objects from the past. To be sure, the use of the descriptive category of ‘old’ is acutely vague in any historical period, but nonetheless there does appear to be something quite distinctive about the application of the description of ‘old’ in the period under review. A specifc focus on the increasing interest in ‘old’ ceramics may reinforce the point. For example, in The Pencil of Nature (1844) the publication produced by the pioneer photographer Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877), to promote his invention, he included an image of a collection of ceramics to highlight the commercial possibilities of photography. Talbot’s

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Figure 2.2 ‘A collection of old china’. Articles of China – Plate 3 in Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (1844). Wikicommons Freemedia Repository.

‘photogenic image’, ‘Articles of China’, was ‘Plate 3’ in his book (see Figure 2.2).70 Alongside the plate, Talbot explained the potential of his invention: From the specimen here given it is suffciently manifest, that the whole cabinet of a Virtuoso and collector of old China might be depicted on paper in little more time than it would take him to make a written inventory describing it in the usual way. The more strange and fantastic the forms of his old teapots, the more advantage in having their pictures given instead of their descriptions.71 As Talbot indicated, his invention would not only be more effcient, it would also provide a more accurate ‘description’ of the objects depicted than was possible by even the most comprehensive written account. He also added, astutely, that if the collection was unfortunately stolen, the ‘photogenic image’ would make identifcation of the objects a much easier process.72 However, we can note the description of ‘old china’ in Talbot’s explanation. The distinctive nature of the use of the term ‘old china’ in The Pencil of Nature is that it has been applied to ceramics from eighteenth-century English manufactories such as Chelsea and Worcester, objects that were thought to be only 80 or 100 years old by the 1840s.73 In the market, too, classifcations such as ‘old Chelsea china’ were also beginning to appear regularly in auction notices and catalogues; Christie’s, for example, began to introduce the classifcation ‘rare old Chelsea’ in their auction catalogues during the early 1830s.74 The apparent basis of this emerging

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interest, i.e. ‘age-value’, is signifcant. In his study of the changing value structures of art objects, Joseph Alsop suggests that ‘old-for-old’s sake’ is the fnal stage of the social valuation of objects.75 Similarly, Gerald Reitlinger places the value of ‘antiquity’, ‘as a quality in itself’, much later than the period under review here, suggesting that such a value structure only appears towards the end of the nineteenth-century’.76 Likewise, in his investigation of the consolidation of the notion of the authenticity of ‘antique furniture’, Stefan Muthesius also suggests that it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that ‘age-value’ became a predominant value structure in the desirability of such objects.77 However, as Stephen Bann has demonstrated in yet another of his accounts of the importance of the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century, the notion of ‘age-value’, as a historical phenomenon, can also be ascribed to an earlier period than that in which it has been given ‘theoretical status’.78 Whilst it is not in doubt that ‘age-value’ consolidated towards the end of the nineteenth century, this notion is clearly evident as a desirable quality for objects in this earlier period and the appearance of such a value structure is a further discrete indicator of the emergence of a distinctive historical consciousness in the early nineteenth century. Of course, the conception of ‘age-value’ owes acknowledgement to the work of the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl (1858–1905) and his essay ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments’ (1903), in which he provided a detailed analysis of the complex system of changing values imbued in the objects from the past.79 In his attempt to present a historical explanation for the early twentieth-century inclination to value monuments, buildings or artefacts from the past Riegl, as Henri Zerner has demonstrated, split apart the notion of value into components such as ‘historical value’, ‘age-value’ and ‘art value’, only to draw attention to the fact that they are actually more intimately connected in the frst place.80 Indeed, Riegl was acutely aware of the interdependences of such categorisations and their implied value systems. Historical value necessarily has aesthetic content, just as aesthetic preferences are historically and culturally specifc. Paintings and sculpture inevitably become historical objects in their own right, as the discursive practice of ‘art history’ testifes. The market for what we now call ‘fne art’, that is the market for paintings and sculpture, has since at least the seventeenth century had its own specifc dynamic, one that has evolved within an intellectual discourse grounded in the practice and theory of art and a tradition of criticism and connoisseurship.81 By comparison the market for the ‘antique’ furniture, ‘old’ ceramics, ‘ancient’ glass, ‘antique’ textiles and ‘ancient’ metalwork that comprised the broad category of historical objects that emerged to be of interest during the frst half of the nineteenth century evolved within a comparative knowledge and critical vacuum. Indeed, it was not until the middle decades of the nineteenth century that there were any systematic attempts to classify and categorize the wide range of historical objects that entered the market from the eighteen-teens onwards. This lack of a substantive critical framework allowed the values of the market and the practices of antique and curiosity dealing to marshal and shape resultant taxonomies and classifcations.

Specimens of Ancient Furniture: The emergence of the historical object This investigation into the emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer was initially prompted by a close study of Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick and Henry Shaw’s Specimens of Ancient Furniture. The book was frst published as a single volume in 1836, but like many other antiquarian publications at the time was originally

62 The emergence of historical consciousness published periodically in part form, appearing as separate illustrated sheets during 1832–1835.82 The text for Specimens was written by the eminent antiquary and armour expert Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick (1783–1848), and it contained illustrations by one of the most important antiquarian illustrators of the period, Henry Shaw (1800–1873). Specimens was the frst publication to be devoted primarily to the subject of ancient British domestic furniture. An anonymous reviewer, writing in 1833 for the Gentleman’s Magazine, described the publication as ‘part of an antiquarian delineation hitherto very little trodden’.83 Specimens remained the standard text on the subject well into the 1870s (it was republished as late as 1866), when it was superseded by publications such as John Hungerford Pollen’s handbook to the furniture and woodwork collections at the South Kensington Museum (1875) and Albert Jacquemart’s A History of Furniture (1879).84 A key text in the history of ‘ancient furniture’ published around the same time as Specimens was Thomas Hunt’s Exemplars of Tudor Architecture, Adapted to Modern Habitations and Observations on the Furniture of the Tudor Period (1830). Despite the title of Hunt’s book, it was primarily devoted to extensive discussions of ‘Tudor Furniture’ and interior furnishings which included a ‘Tudor cupboard’, ‘a curious moveable from Conishead Priory, Lancashire’, which was also illustrated in Specimens.85 Texts such as Exemplars and Specimens represent a tradition of antiquarian publications that stretches back as far as the late seventeenth century and were fundamental to the practices of antiquarianism itself and were part of the larger antiquarian project to investigate the indigenous culture of Britain.86 Texts such as Specimens were also, as the authors acknowledged, employed by a wider audience and provided source material for design and interior decoration for those furnishing in what was known at the time as the ‘ancient decorative style’.87 Indeed, this emerging interest in historical objects from the more recent past during the early nineteenth century is refected by a number of publications in the period aimed at promoting design and interior decoration in the then fashionable ‘Gothic’, ‘Elizabethan’, and ‘Jacobean’ styles of architecture and ornament, such as A.W.N. Pugin’s Gothic Furniture in the End of the 15th Century (1835). The Mansions of England in Olden Time (1838–1840) by the architect Joseph Nash, with its pictorial representations of interiors, populated by historical characters, reinforces the notion that the consumption of the past was also fgured through Romanticism. However, such publications did not appear until after 1830, by which date the antique and curiosity dealers were already well established. Indeed, prior to the 1830s the lack of publications was worthy of comment by the actor-manager Daniel Terry in a letter sent in 1822 to his friend Sir Walter Scott whilst Terry was assisting Scott with the acquisition of ‘ancient furniture’ for his home at Abbotsford. Terry’s letter highlights the lack of publications on ‘ancient furniture’ in the period, but also draws further attention to the central role that the antique and curiosity trade played in the evolving markets for furnishing and collecting in the period in the 1820s and 1830s. Terry commented: I have hunted London for a book on furniture and have ascertained that there is none of any character (and) not one of a style appertaining with your castle … I have been hunting through a variety of old broker’s shops, I have seen numbers of articles of exquisite beauty and character for your purposes and from the prices marked would indeed recommend the principle [sic] portion of your furniture … be so obtained.88

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Specimens is a critical piece of evidence in the cultural biography of the antique and curiosity trade and the new patterns of consumption for these objects, but the signifcance of this publication in respect to the emergence of historical consciousness is brought into sharper focus if we direct attention to the illustrations of the historical objects in Specimens themselves. Conventionally, antiquarian publications that considered what is now described as material culture laid stress on the importance of the authority of their representation by reproducing illustrations from ancient manuscript sources.89 Indeed, many antiquarian publications found it more convenient to leave out illustrations of such objects preferring to rely on written descriptions reproduced from inventories and other manuscripts. Horda Angel-cynnan, by the antiquary Joseph Strutt, the frst volume of which was published in 1775, provides a useful example.90 Strutt’s work investigated material culture from a very broad period and presented the interested antiquarian reader with information on a wide array of historical objects, including ancient chairs, tables, combs, shoes, and armour. Strutt outlined the importance of his sources in the preface to his study: ‘chief materials of the present work’, he wrote, ‘are collected from ancient MSS’.91 Plate XXII, for example, in volume I of Horda Angel-cynnan illustrates various objects, including seats and thrones, reproduced from the manuscript ‘Aurelius Prudentius, at Bennet [sic] College, Cambridge’ (Corpus Christi) (see Figure 2.3). It could be argued, of course, that the furniture and

Figure 2.3 ‘Seats and Thrones from MSS Aurelius Prudentius, at Bennet College, Cambridge’, Plate XXIII from Joseph Strutt (1749–1802), Horda Angel-cynnan …, Volume I (1776). The Brotherton Library Special Collections, University of Leeds.

64 The emergence of historical consciousness other objects illustrated in this particular plate from Strutt’s work originated from a period in history, ‘the time of the Saxon’s’, from which there were no known surviving examples, and for this reason Strutt was unable to illustrate any actual specimens. However, even with furniture from a more recent period, such as that of the Tudor period, and for which there were examples existing in several notable collections, Strutt still chose to include objects illustrated in manuscript authorities. Plate XXXV, for example, of volume I of Horda Angel-cynnan, illustrated various chairs, beds, chandeliers and tables taken from various fourteenth- and ffteenth-century manuscripts rather than from any real specimens themselves.92 Furthermore, the brief discussions that provided further information on the ancient furniture were also reproduced from the descriptions of the objects in sixteenth-century inventories and other manuscript sources, further highlighting the signifcance of the authority of the manuscript source for antiquarian investigations in the period. Strutt emphasised this further in volume III of his publication: ‘the variety of materials which compose the present volume are not conjectural, but real facts, collected from the best and most undoubted authorities’.93 The choice of evidence that Strutt employs demonstrates a reliance on a particular notion of historical authority, one that was vested in the manuscript source rather than in the material properties of the objects themselves. To be sure, since the middle decades of the eighteenth century, antiquarian methodologies had begun to suggest that the physical remains of the past could provide more accurate historical knowledge and had begun to move away from text-dominated historiographies to an archaeological methodology based on induction from material evidence. By the closing decades of the eighteenth century, antiquaries were arguing that artefacts and monuments could furnish important information with a greater foundation of accuracy and could be considered as evidence in their own right rather than simply be used to corroborate existing written accounts.94 As Sam Smiles has written: the hesitancies of eighteenth-century historians had been overcome by the early nineteenth century. Increasingly, antiquarians such as William Borlase, proselytizing for the study of Ancient Britain, were arguing for deductions to be made from material evidence rather than insisting on text-dominated historiography.95 The distinctive feature of the illustrations in Specimens is the primacy given to the historical authority of the material specimens themselves. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of the objects illustrated in Specimens are actual examples of furniture that existed as material entities rather than being reproduced from manuscript illustrations. For example, plate XI illustrated a ‘Chair of the Time of Henry Eighth’ (see Figure 2.4), then in the possession of the antiquary ‘Joseph Abel Esq. Surgeon, Mitchel Dean, Gloucestershire’.96 Indeed, of the 74 illustrations reproduced in Specimens only 8 were reproduced from manuscript sources. However, to emphasize the newly emerging legitimacy of the practice of illustrating actual material specimens of the objects, Samuel Meyrick, the author of the text, included an apology where he had been forced to include illustrations reproduced from a manuscript. Plate IX, for example, a ‘table from a drawing in an MS at Oxford’, came with the caveat, ‘although not from any real specimen, was too valuable to be omitted’.97 A similar shift, and one that foregrounds the emerging signifcance of the historical object in the period, is detected by Stephen Bann in his analysis of the museums of Alexandre de Lenoir (1761–1839), the Musée des Monuments Français in Paris

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Figure 2.4 ‘Chair of the Time of Henry the Eighth …’ (1836), Henry Shaw (1800–1873), plate XI, Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836). Private Collection.

(established in 1795) and its direct heir, the Musée de Cluny established by Alexandre du Sommerard (1779–1842) (opened in 1834).98 In his contrast of the museological displays in each museum, Bann observed that in the earlier museum of Lenoir the museum displays included reproductions and recreations alongside authentic historical materials. In the later museum of Alexandre du Sommerard a signifcant shift had occurred, and, as Bann indicates, copies and reproductions that merely ‘represented’ the past were banished from the displays and only ‘authentic’ historical material were admitted. Bann’s main concern was to reveal the rhetorical structures that lie beneath the narratives of historical discourse, a project initiated by the American writer Hayden White, but this shift also has resonance in the context of the illustrations in Specimens. Just as Specimens exemplifes the increasing authority of the actual specimens of ancient furniture over their illustrations from manuscript sources, so, as Bann writes, the display at du Sommerard’s museum suggests ‘priority of the historical object over the historical text’.99 Moreover, the new priority given to the material object in Specimens implicitly privileges the historical object as a ‘fact’ of history at a moment when historical discourse itself was undergoing a similar rhetorical shift. Hayden White writes: in the early nineteenth century it became conventional, at least amongst historians, to identify truth with fact and to regard fction as the opposite of truth …

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Of course, there are few contemporary historians, even the most entrenched empiricists, who would propose that history is a simple objective enterprise and is composed of ‘facts’, be they ‘textual descriptions’ or ‘material remains’. We now acknowledge that history itself is part of a complex ideological framework, structured through its own discursive practices, as writers such as E.H. Carr, Hayden White, Roland Barthes, Stephen Bann and many other theorists besides have admirably demonstrated.101 Moreover, far from being the bearers of a stable and consistent truth the physical remains of the past offer no more of a degree of historical accuracy than that supplied by a text. The physical remains of the past are mute and only speak when the historian begins to interpret them; far from being immutable the physical remains of the past are endlessly reconstituted in the present.102 However, the important point to be made here is that not only does Specimens demonstrate that a wider range of historical objects had become a legitimate part of historical discourse during the opening decades of the nineteenth century, but that the historical object itself had become a material representative of history – a historical artefact. There is, however, an equally signifcant aspect in the shift registered in the changing emphasis of the illustrations in Horda Angel-cynnan compared to those in Specimens of Ancient Furniture: one that illuminates the symbiosis between a discourse, such as the historical discourse of furniture history we see emerging in the pages of Specimens, and the expanding market for the objects that are its focus. A key example in such a shift is the work of the antiquarian Francis Grose (1731–1791) and his book A Treatise on Ancient Armour and Weapons (1788).103 Grose, like Strutt in Horda Angel-cynnan, relied on images from ‘sepulchral monuments, the great seals of our Kings and ancient barons, and fgures on painted glass’, but, like Meyrick and Shaw in Specimens, Grose used these as ‘sparingly and cautiously as possible’, preferring to use illustrations ‘taken from the original armour in the Tower of London and other Arsenals, Museums and Cabinets’.104 Of course, the important aspect to note here is that ancient armour was already a key aspect of collecting and display at the time that Grose composed his treatise. Several high-profle collections of arms and armour, including those of ‘Mr Rawle’, ‘the military accoutrement maker, of The Strand’ (Grose included several articles from Rawle’s collection in his publication), were well known at the time. It is perhaps therefore unsurprising that ‘ancient armour’ was amongst the frst types of historical objects to be illustrated in antiquarian publications. This was, after all, a symptom of the consolidation of interest in such material by antiquarian collectors in the late eighteenth century in the same way that ‘ancient furniture’ was becoming more common and popular in publications such as Specimens of Ancient Furniture in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, when Joseph Strutt published Horda Angel-cynnan in the third quarter of the eighteenth century there were a very limited number of collectors of ancient furniture. The antiquary Richard Bateman (c.1705–1773) had a small collection of ‘ancient Welch [sic] chairs’,105 and the architect and antiquary John Carter (1748– 1817) also had a small collection of ‘ancient chairs’ and other ancient furniture, which were sold after his death in 1818.106 Perhaps most famously the collections of Horace Walpole (1717–1797) at Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, contained a number of specimens of ancient furniture.107 Reference to ancient furniture occasionally appears in

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commentaries and diaries in the eighteenth century. For example, in the diaries of Hon. John Byng, 5th Viscount Torrington, that seemingly indefatigable British traveller, he directed attention to the ancient furniture at Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire during a visit in the 1780s. Torrington commented that Hardwick had ‘a curiously inlaid oak table … and a very ancient cabinet, that I wished to have explored’.108 Interest in ancient furniture is also very occasionally registered in published sources in the late eighteenth century, but in general the interest in objects such as ancient domestic furniture was, compared with the interest shown in the early decades of the nineteenth century, extremely limited. The pages of Archaeologia, the journal of the Society of Antiquaries, and perhaps the principal medium in which such arcane interest would be most evident, devoted only a handful of articles on ancient furniture from its initial publication in 1770 until the end of the eighteenth century. Inevitably, with eighteenthcentury antiquarianism being so closely associated with the attentions of and investigations by the clergy and others of that semi-professional class, the primary focus of the antiquaries’ interest in ancient furniture appears to have been in the context of its use in ecclesiastical buildings. ‘Mr Clark’s Observations on Episcopal Chairs’ which appeared in Archaeologia in 1794, was a singular example of published interest.109 However, Archaeologia published only one illustration of ancient domestic furniture during the late eighteenth century, the ancient cradle ‘in which Edward II was rocked’, which was then in the possession of Rev. Mr Ball of Newland, Gloucestershire.110 Publications such as the Gentleman’s Magazine and the London Magazine were similarly parsimonious in their discussion and illustration of ancient domestic furniture during the late eighteenth century. The most signifcant discussion in the pages of these journals amounted to brief considerations of the chair which King Charles I was believed to have used at his trial in 1649.111 In other antiquarian publications in the eighteenth century there were only very occasional inclusions of illustrations of ‘ancient furniture’. In Picturesque Views on the River Avon (1795), the antiquary Samuel Ireland (1744–1800) took the opportunity to incorporate illustrations of two pieces of ancient furniture: the bedstead in which Richard III was believed to have slept prior to the battle of Bosworth in 1485, and a chair which the fourteenth century theologian ‘John Wickliff’ [sic] had once used112 (see Figure 2.5). The antiquarian William Bingley (1774–1823) included an illustration of another famous cradle, which is said to have belonged to King Henry V, in his Tour Round North Wales Performed during the Summer of 1798 (published in 1800), reproducing an illustration of the cradle that had been previously published in the London Magazine in 1774113 (see Figure 2.6). Such was the fame of this particular historical object within the networks of antiquarian culture that it was also chosen by Meyrick and Shaw to be illustrated in Specimens of Ancient Furniture in 1836, albeit with a more detailed and accurate representation; as Meyrick stated, Bingley had only ‘pretended to give representations of the interesting piece of antiquity’ (see Figure 2.7).114 We can note that the dominant frame of interest for all these pieces of ancient furniture was through their association with signifcant historical individuals, or signifcant historical events, which was itself a primary antiquarian interest and methodology.115 But it is also clear that the authority of the manuscript source, which had remained virtually unchallenged in antiquarian investigations for ancient furniture had now been joined to an increasing degree by the material presence of the historical specimens themselves. In Specimens therefore we have a publication that adumbrates the history of furniture as a discourse and through its illustrations demonstrates shifting notions of historical authority and

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Figure 2.5 Chair of John Wyclife, Samuel Ireland, Picturesque Views on the Warwickshire Avon (1795). © British Library Board.

one that simultaneously reveals such objects to be emerging as part of the broader consumption of the past. These symbiotic shifts are all equally registered in the process of transformation from illustrations reproduced from manuscript sources to objects that existed as material entities. However, the signifcance of the illustrations in Specimens provides one further piece of evidence in this investigation of the emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer. The illustrations of historical objects in Specimens all have declarations of ownership appended beneath each plate. Such declarations had been rehearsed in scores of antiquarian publications throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, identifying the all-important provenance of the historical object. In the eighteenth century, in his Description of Strawberry Hill, the inventory of his collection which was frst published in 1774, the antiquarian collector Horace Walpole appropriately called this ‘pedigree’.116 In the preface to his catalogue Walpole set out the purpose of his descriptions: The following account … is given with a view to their future dispersion. The several purchasers will fnd a history of their purchases … an authentic certifcate of their curiosities … well attested descent is the genealogy of objects of virtu.117 If we examine the illustrations in Specimens we can see that many of the historical objects are indeed stated to be in the possession of well-known antiquarian collectors or

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Figure 2.6 The Cradle of Edward II, William Bingley, A Tour Round North Wales, Performed during the Summer of 1798 … (2 volumes) (London, J. Smeeton, 1800), Vol.1, p. 164. Private Collection.

are cited to be in appropriate historically signifcant locations. For example, an ancient bed is said to be at ‘Hardwicke Hall, a seat of his Grace, the Duke of Devonshire’, and a ‘Napkin Press’ was ‘in the possession of Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick, Goodrich Court’, the author of the commentary in Specimens and, as we have seen, one of the most famous antiquarian collectors of the period. Many other objects were also cited to be in the possession of other noted collectors, including the famous ‘cradle of Henry 5th’, which, by the 1830s was in the possession of George W. Braikenridge (1775–1856), the Bristol antiquarian.118 However, what is highly unusual in Specimens is that several of the declarations appended to the illustrations also cite the historical objects to be in the possession of antique and curiosity dealers. An oak cabinet and an ebony chair, ‘formerly at Strawberry Hill’,119 are ‘in the possession of Mr Webb, Bond Street’ (see Figure 2.8); a brass reading desk is ‘in the possession of Mr Hull, Wardour Street’ (see Figure 2.9);120 ‘a pair of brass fre-dogs are ‘in the possession of Messrs Samuel & Henry Pratt, Bond Street’;121 a sixteenth-century chamber organ is cited to be ‘in the possession of Mr Gwennapp’;122 and a table ‘time of Henry 8th’ is ‘in the possession of Mr Swaby’ (see Figure 2.10).123 As named individuals, John Webb, Edward & George Hull, Samuel & Henry Pratt, Thomas Gwenapp and John Swaby were amongst the most well-known antique and curiosity dealers of the frst half of the nineteenth century. This is the frst time that any antiquarian publication had illustrated a corpus of

Figure 2.7 The Cradle of Henry 5th, in the Possession of George Weare Braikenridge Esq. – (1836), Henry Shaw (1800–1873), plate XLI, Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836). Private Collection.

Figure 2.8 Ebony chair, formerly belonging to Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, now in the possession of Mr Webb, Old Bond Street – (1834), Henry Shaw (1800–1873), Plate XIII, Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836). Private Collection.

Figure 2.9 Brass reading desk, in the possession of Mr Hull, Wardour Street – (1836), Henry Shaw (1800–1873), Plate XLV, Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836). Private collection.

Figure 2.10 Table of the time of Henry 8th, from Hill Hall, Essex, in the possession of Mr Swaby – (1832), Henry Shaw (1800–1873), plate XIX, Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836). Private Collection.

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objects that were cited to be in the possession of antique and curiosity dealers as well as in the possession of antiquarian collectors. Indeed, even if the interested reader was unaware of the personal identity of these individual possessors, the addresses associated with their names would have explicitly identifed their locations as acknowledged places of commerce. John Webb and Samuel & Henry Pratt’s location in Bond Street was an area associated with some of the most fashionable shops in London, and Wardour Street in particular, as this study discusses later, was synonymous with the antique and curiosity trade during the period that Specimens of Ancient Furniture was published. The locations alone would have implicitly suggested that historical objects such as these were part of a wider system of commercial exchange. In one sense the illustrations in Specimens draw further attention to the important links between the commercial trade in historical objects and the practices of antiquarianism, which, as Paul Baines has already demonstrated, were already rooted in a system of economic exchange even as early as the opening decades of the eighteenth century.124 But the importance of the illustrations in Specimens is that by the opening decades of the nineteenth century these relationships were becoming much more explicitly registered through the emerging profle of the antique and curiosity trade itself. Specimens of Ancient Furniture therefore marks the consolidation of the dealer as a discrete social and cultural identity in the period whilst simultaneously embedding the historical object as a commodity in the contemporary culture.

Notes 1 Myrone, Martin and Peltz, Lucy (Eds.), Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice, 1700–1850 (Brookfeld, VT, Ashgate, 1999); see also Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste (vol. II), (1963), ‘Antiquarian and Eclectic Taste’, pp. 55–67. 2 See, Horace Walpole, A Description of the Villa of Mr Horace Walpole… (London, Strawberry-hill Press, 1784); for an excellent history and analysis of Walpole’s collection see Michael Snodin (Ed.), Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2009). 3 For a useful discussion of this collection see Andrew Moore, ‘The Fountaine Collection of Maiolica’, Burlington Magazine, vol.CXXX, (June 1988), pp. 435–47. The collection, with subsequent editions by members of the family in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was eventually sold by auction in 1884; see Christie, Manson & Woods, Catalogue of the Celebrated Fountaine Collections of Majolica, Henri II Ware, Palissy Ware, Nevers Ware…..June 16th 1884. 4 McCracken (1988), p. xi. 5 See, Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society – The Commercialisation of Eighteenth-Century England (London, Europa, 1982). 6 McCracken (1988), p.3. 7 See especially, Colin Campbell, ‘Understanding Traditional and Modern Patterns of Consumption in 18th Century England: A Character-Action Approach’, in John Brewer and Roy Porter (Eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods (London, Routledge, 1993), pp. 40–56. 8 Campbell (1987). 9 For an extended discussion of Campbell’s ideas see Colin Campbell, ‘Capitalism, Consumption and the Problem of Motives’, in Jonathan Friedman (Ed.), Consumption and Identity (Amsterdam, Harwood, 1994), pp. 23–46; see also, Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (translated by Talcott Parsons) (London, Unwin, 1930). 10 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (1969) (New York, Pantheon, 1972). For an excellent and cogent discussion of Foucault’s work see Hayden White, ‘Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground’, History and Theory, vol.XII, (1973), pp. 23–54.

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11 Chris Brooks, ‘Historicism and the Nineteenth Century’, in Vanessa Brand (Ed.), The Study of the Past in the Victorian Age’ (Oxford, Oxbow Books and the British Archaeological Association, 1998), p. 3. 12 Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York, Twayne, 1995); Stephen Bann, ‘Poetics of the Museum: Lenoir and Du Sommerard’, in Stephen Bann (Ed.), The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in 19th Century Britain and France (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 77–92. 13 Bann (1995), p. 5. 14 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (London, Merlin Press, 1962), pp. 19–21. 15 Lukács (1962), p. 23. Emphasis in original. 16 See, for example, Tom Stammers (2008) and Tom Stammers, ‘The Homeless Heritage of the French Revolution c.1789–1889’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, vol.25, (2018), pp. 1–13; see also Ilja van Damme, ‘Recycling the Wreckage of History, on the rise of an “Antiquarian Consumer Culture” in the Southern Netherlands’, in Ariane Fennetaux, Amélie Junqua and Sophie Vasset (Eds.), The Afterlife of Things, Recycling in the Long Eighteenth Century (New York and London, Routledge, 2015), pp. 37–48. 17 Crane (2000). 18 Crane (2000), p. x–xi. 19 Crane (2000), p. x–xi. 20 Susan Crane, ‘Story, History and the Passionate Collector’, in Martin Myrone and Lucy Peltz (Eds.) (1999), pp. 187–200. 21 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1982), pp. 16–17. 22 Berman (1982), p. 17. 23 Alexandre and Edmond du Sommerard, Les Arts au Moyen Age (5 volumes) (Paris, 1838– 1846); also quoted in Bann (1984), p. 79. 24 For an excellent introduction to the diverse meaning and interpretation of Gothic, particularly in respect of its aesthetics, see Paul Frankl, The Gothic, Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1960). For a useful overview of Gothic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries see Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival (London, Phaidon, 1999). And for a discussion of the Gothic design and taste in the eighteenth century (styled ‘Gothick) see Michael McCarthy, The Origins of the Gothic Revival (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1987). 25 For a consideration of the political relationships between Gothic and English and British history see Samuel Kliger, The Goths in England, a Study in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Thought (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1952), and for an excellent application of an ideological reading of eighteenth-century Gothic at Strawberry Hill, the home of Horace Walpole, see David McKinney, ‘The Castle of My Ancestors: Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill’, British Journal for 18th Century Studies, vol.13, no.2, (1990), pp. 199–214. 26 For a comprehensive introduction to the wide-ranging notion of historicism see Paul Hamilton, Historicism (London and New York, Routledge, 1996). For a more specifc account in relation to the current study see Chris Brooks, ‘Historicism and the Nineteenthcentury’, in Vanessa Brand (Ed.), The Study of the Past in the Victorian Age (Oxford, Oxbow, 1998), pp. 1–19. 27 Meyrick and Shaw (1836), p. 2. 28 Meyrick and Shaw (1836), p. 2. 29 The Great Bed of Ware dates from c.1590–1600. It was purchased from the then owners in 1931 by the London antique dealer Frank Partridge (1875–1953) for £4,000 and sold at cost to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, where it remains (W.47:1 to 1931). 30 Meyrick and Shaw (1836), p. 40. 31 Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick, A Critical Inquiry into Antient Armour…(3 volumes) (London, R. Jennings, 1824). 32 See Wainwright (1989), p. 243. 33 Samuel Rush Meyrick, ‘A Letter Concerning the Horse Armoury in the Tower of London’, Connoisseur, vol.CIV, (1832), pp. 90–1, p. 91. 34 Joseph Skelton, Engraved Illustrations of Ancient Arms and Armour from the Collection of Llewelyn Meyrick at Goodrich Court (2 volumes) (London, Schultze, 1830).

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35 Anon. ‘Goodrich Court’, Gentleman’s Magazine, vol.CI, (January to June, 1831), p. 156. 36 For an extended discussion of Meyrick’s collections at Goodrich Court see Wainwright (1989), pp. 241–68, and Rosalind Lowe, Sir Samuel Meyrick and Goodrich Court (Logaston, Logaston Press, 2003). 37 Sir Gelly Meyrick (1556–1601) was prominent Welsh soldier. 38 Thomas Roscoe, Wanderings and Excursions in South Wales (London, Tilt & Bogue, 1837), p. 102. 39 George D. Odell, Shakespeare – from Betterton to Irving (1920) (New York, Dover, 1966), pp. 169–72; See also Fawcett (1974), p.159. 40 See for example, Richard Schnoch, Shakespeare’s Victorian Stage: Performing History in the Theatre of Charles Kean (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998). 41 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53, No.467, entry dated ‘December 28th 1835’, ‘Rec’d from Messr Levy Ten Pounds for the hire of two suits of Armour for four weeks at the Victoria Theatre’. 42 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53, No.467, entry dated ‘January 1st 1836’. 43 Eluned Brown (Ed.), The London Theatre 1811–1866, Selections from the Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson (London, Society for Theatre Research, 1966), p. 116. 44 See, for example, Thomas Jefferys, Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations (London, T. Jeffreys, 1757 and 1772); Joseph Cooper Walker, Dress of the Ancient and Modern Irish (Dublin, George Grierson, 1788). For an excellent consideration of antiquarian speculation on costume see Sam Smiles, ‘British Antiquity and Antiquarian Illustration’, in Myrone & Peltz (1999), pp. 55–66. 45 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53, No.144, letter dated ‘11th September 1838’; underlining in original. 46 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53, No.144, letter dated ‘11th September 1838’. 47 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.152, letter dated ‘12th October 1838’. 48 Joseph Strutt, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (London, Reeves, 1830) – originally published as Clic Caoonea Angel Deod or the Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (London, J. White, 1801). 49 Strutt (1830), p. xvii. 50 Caylus, in his antiquarian publication Recueil d’Antiquités (1752–1767), advocated the value of studying simple household objects as well as great monuments because they could provide insights into past cultures not supplied by the study of great monuments alone. See Francis Haskell, History and Its Images, Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 180–5. 51 Meyrick & Shaw (1836), p. 2. 52 Roscoe (1837), p. 103. 53 Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 288. 54 Peter Mandler, ‘The Wand of Fancy: The Historical Imagination of the Victorian Tourist’, in Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward and Jeremy Aynsley (Eds.), Material Memories (Oxford, Berg, 1999), pp. 125–41. 55 Mandler (1999). 56 Mandler (1999). 57 Altick (1978), pp. 449–50. 58 Simeon Shaw, History of the Staffordshire Potteries; and the Rise and Progress of the Manufacture of Pottery and Porcelain (Hanley, G. Jackson, 1829). See also, Geoffrey Wills, ‘The Study of English Pottery and Porcelain’, Apollo, (June 1980), pp. 454–8. 59 Wills (1980), p. 454. 60 Shaw (1829), preface. 61 Alexandre Brongniart, Traité des Arts Céramiques ou des Poteries…(2 vols.) (Paris, Béchet Juene & Mathias, 1844). 62 See for example, Ostergard (2001); Hugh Roberts, ‘“Quite Appropriate for Windsor Castle” George IV and George Watson Taylor’, Furniture History, vol.XXXVI (2000), pp. 115–37. 63 A Portion of the Diary of Thomas Raikes Esq from 1831 to 1847 (London, Longman, Brown, Green & Longman, 1856) (vol. II), p. 361, entry dated ‘Wednesday 4th May 1836’. 64 Raikes (1856) (vol. IV), p. 284, entry dated ‘Saturday 19th August 1843’.

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65 Perhaps Nicholas Demidoff (1773–1828), or his son Paul Demidoff (1798–1840), members of the family of fabulously wealthy Russian industrialists. 66 Raikes (vol. IV), p.284. 67 Raikes (vol. IV), p.284. 68 Arthur MacGregor, ‘Antiquity Inventoried: Museums and ‘National Antiquities’ in the Mid Nineteenth Century’, in Vanessa Brand (Ed.), The Study of the Past in the Victorian Age (Oxford, Oxbow, 1998), pp. 125–37, p.125. 69 For a general overview of the history of the political economy of design, see Jules Lubbuck, The Tyranny of Taste: the Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain 1550–1960 (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1995), especially pp. 233–65. 70 Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London, Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1844) (unpaginated), ‘plate 3’. 71 Talbot (1844), plate 3. 72 Talbot (1844), plate 3. 73 Whilst we now understand that the Chelsea porcelain manufactory was begun in the late 1740s, in the early nineteenth century the manufactory was believed to have begun sometime in the 1720s. The writer Simeon Shaw writes; ‘as it is known that an establishment for manufacturing porcelain was in operation at Chelsea between 1720 and 1730’; Shaw (1829), p. 120. 74 See Reitlinger (1963), p. 169. 75 Alsop (1982), p. 17. 76 Reitlinger (1963), p. 13. 77 Muthesius (1988). 78 Stephen Bann, ‘Views of the Past – Refections on the Treatment of Historical Objects and Museums of History (1750–1850)’, in Gordon Fyfe and John Law (Eds.), Picturing Power: Visual Depictions and Social Relations (Routledge, London and New York, 1988), pp. 39–64, p. 43. 79 Alois Riegl, ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin’ (translated by K.W. Forster and D. Ghirardo), Oppositions, vol.25, (Fall 1982), pp. 21–51. See also Henri Zerner, ‘Alois Riegl: Art, Value, Historicism’, Daedalus: The Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol.105, (1976), pp. 177–88, in particular pp. 184–7; For an excellent discussion of the wider range of Riegl’s theories see Margaret Iverson, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1993). 80 Zerner (1976), pp. 177–88. 81 See, for instance, in relation to the importance of the notion of connoisseurship, Carol Gibson-Wood, Studies in the Theory of Connoisseurship from Vasari to Morelli (New York and London, Garland, 1982). 82 For contemporary responses to the text see Gentleman’s Magazine, vol.CIII, (February 1833), pp. 155–6; (June 1833), pp. 544–5, and vol.I (New Series) (January 1834), p. 87; (April 1834), p. 419. For a useful summary of the text see Clive Wainwright, ‘Specimens of Ancient Furniture’, Connoisseur, vol.CLXXXIV, no.740, (1973), pp. 105–13. 83 Anon., ‘Specimens of Ancient Furniture’, Gentleman’s Magazine, vol.CIII (26th of the New Series) (February 1833), pp. 155–6, p. 155. 84 Albert Jacquemart, A History of Furniture (1876), with an English translation by Mrs Bury Palliser in 1878. This text did not include discussion of British furniture however, its main subject being French and Italian furniture of the 16th to 18th centuries. The equivalent study of English furniture did not appear until 1892; see Frederick Litchfeld, Illustrated History of Furniture (London, Truslove and Shirley, 1892). Litchfeld incidentally was also an antique dealer, see Westgarth (2009). For a discussion of the development of publications devoted to the history of British furniture see Muthesius (1988), pp. 231–55, pp. 241–2. 85 Hunt (1830), p.148 and plate XXXIII. In Specimens (1836) the cupboard was newly drawn by the stained-glass artist Thomas Willement FSA (1786–1871); see Meyrick and Shaw (1836) plate XXVI. 86 See, for example, Myrone and Peltz (1999). 87 Meyrick and Shaw (1836), p. 26. 88 Quoted in Clive Wainwright, ‘Walter Scott and the Furnishing of Abbotsford: Or the Gabions of Jonathan Oldbuck Esq.’, The Connoisseur, vol.194, no.779, (January 1977), pp. 3–15, p. 9, and in Wainwright (1989), p. 181.

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89 See, for example, Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley and Oxford, University of California Press, 1990), chapter 3, ‘The Rise of Antiquarian Research’, pp. 54–79, esp. pp. 73–4. 90 Joseph Strutt, Horda Angel-cynnan: Or a Complete View of the Manners, Customs, Arms Habits etc. of the Inhabitants of England from the Arrival of the Saxons ‘til the Reign of Henry the 8th (3 volumes) (London, Benjamin White (vols. I–II), London, Walter Shropshire (vol. III), 1775–1776). 91 Strutt (vol. II) (1775), p. 11. 92 Strutt’s source is the Inventory of Goods and Chattels of Sir Adriane Foskewe, Dated 30th Year of King Henry 8th. Strutt (vol. III) (1776), pp. 65–71. 93 Strutt (vol. III) (1776), p. i. 94 Rosemary Sweet, ‘Antiquaries and Antiquities in Eighteenth-Century England’, EighteenthCentury Studies, vol34, no.2, (Winter 2001), pp. 181–206. 95 Sam Smiles in Myrone and Peltz (1999), pp. 59–60. 96 Meyrick and Shaw (1836), p. 31. 97 Meyrick and Shaw (1836), p. 31. 98 Bann (1984), pp. 77–92. See also Stephen Bann, ‘Historical Text and Historical Object: The Poetics of the Musee De Cluny’, History and Theory, vol.17, no.3, (1978), pp. 251–66. 99 Bann (1984), p.78. 100 Hayden White, ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation’, in Angus Fletcher (Ed.), The Literature of Fact (New York, Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 216. 101 See E. H. Carr, What Is History? (1961) (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2001); for the most penetrating analysis of these ideas see, White (1973); Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, in The Rustle of Language (translated by Richard Howard) (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989); Stephen Bann, The Inventions of History; Essays on the Representation of the Past (1990); Foucault (1972); and Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London, Tavistock, 1970). 102 See Christopher Tilley, ‘Interpreting Material Culture’, in Susan Pearce (Ed.), Interpreting Objects and Collections (London and New York, Routledge, 1994), pp. 67–75. 103 Francis Grose, A Treatise on Ancient Armour and Weapons… (London, S. Hooper,1788). 104 Grose (1788), preface. 105 Richard Bateman lived at The Old Priory, Windsor; see A Catalogue of That Much Esteemed and Valuable Museum, of the Hon. Richard Bateman, Deceased….Sold by Mr Christie…3rd May 1774. 106 See Wainwright (1989), pp. 270–1. 107 Horace Walpole, A Description of the Villa of Mr Horace Walpole (London, Strawberryhill Press, 1774); see also Clive Wainwright (1989), pp. 54–108; Michael Snodin (2009). 108 C. Bruyn Andrews (Ed.), The Torrington Diaries, Containing the Tours through England and Wales of the Hon. John Byng (Late 5th Viscount Torrington) between the Years 1781 and 1794 (4 vols.) (London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1934–8). Vol. 2, p. 31. 109 ‘Mr Clarke’s Observations on Episcopal Chairs’, Archaeologia, vol.XI, (1794), pp. 317–74. 110 Archaeologia, vol.VIII, (1787), appendix, fg.1, plate XXXI. 111 The Gentleman’s Magazine, vol.LXIV, (June 1794), p. 507; vol.LXIV, (July 1794), p. 618; and vol.LXXVIII, (November 1808), pp. 970–1. 112 Samuel Ireland, Picturesque Views on the River Avon (London, R. Faulder, 1795), p. 20 and p. 52. Given the propensity for Ireland to be duped by historical forgeries (he was most famously taken in by forgeries of works purportedly by Shakespeare, propagated by his son, William Henry), one does not have any confdence in the ‘authenticity’ of the objects, which, anyway, appear to far post-date the possible age that is assigned to them. 113 William Bingley, A Tour round North Wales Performed during the Summer of 1798… (London, J. Smeeton, 1800) (2 vols.), vol. 1, p. 164. 114 Meyrick and Shaw (1836), p. 41. The cradle is currently part of the collection of the Museum of London, having been donated to the museum in 1912 by King George V following its sale from the Braikenridge collection at Christie’s, London, in 1908. 115 See in Smiles (1999); and more specifcally Susan Crane (2000), pp. 60–74. 116 Walpole (1774), preface. 117 Walpole (1774), preface.

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118 Meyrick and Shaw (1836), plate XXXVI. For a discussion of the collecting activities of Braikenridge see Sheena Stoddard, Mr Braikenridge’s Brislington (Bristol, City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, 1981). 119 Meyrick and Shaw (1836), plate XXVIII and plate XIII. It is interesting to note that the ebony chair was in the possession of John Webb at least 10 years before the dispersal of the collections at Strawberry Hill by Earl Waldegrave in 1842. 120 Meyrick and Shaw (1836), plate XIV. The brass reading desk is now in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum in New York (Cloisters Collection, 1968 (68.8), see Peter Barnet and Nancy Wu, The Cloisters, Medieval Art and Architecture (New York, Metropolitan Museum and Yale University Press, 2005), p. 155. The ffteenth-century lectern was made in Flanders and was known as the ‘Oscott Lectern’ because of it being in possession of Oscott College, Birmingham, in the nineteenth century. In 1967 it was offered to the Metropolitan Museum, New York, for £107,100 and was subject to an Export Reviewing Committee temporary export stop. The funds to allow the lectern to remain in the UK were not forthcoming, and it was eventually sold to the Metropolitan Museum in 1968. 121 Meyrick and Shaw (1836), plate LVI. 122 Meyrick and Shaw (1836), plate XXXIII. 123 Meyrick and Shaw (1836), plate XIX. The table is now in the collections of Viscount De L’Isle at Penshurst Place, having been acquired by Lord De L’Isle following the auction sale of Swaby’s collection in 1860. A Catalogue of the Rare and Beautiful Works of Art…of John Swaby Esq…Sold by Mr. Phillips…March 1860. Lot 587, ‘A CARVED OAK TABLE, of the Period of Henry VIII, from Hill Hall, Essex…’. The table was sold for £13.10s to the antique dealer Henry Durlacher; see also Westgarth (2009). 124 Paul Baines, ‘Our Annius’: Antiquaries and Fraud in the 18th Century’, British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol.20, (1997), pp. 33–51.

Part Three

The emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer

John Coleman Isaac (c.1803–1887) The antique and curiosity business that John Coleman Isaac (c.1803–1887) developed was initially established by Gabriel Davies (c.1760–1838). Davies appears to have begun the business as general merchants, perhaps in the late eighteenth century, although no business records survive prior to c.1815. The Davies family were listed in the Post Offce Directories and Trade Directories as ‘Davies & Co., Merchants’ between c.1810 and the 1820s.1 The earlier parts of the Isaac archive are peppered with references to the supply of general goods associated with wholesale merchant trading. During the period 1815–1820, for example, the entries in the waste book record numerous transactions devoted to the purchase and sale of general goods, mostly in relatively large quantities, alongside the sales of ancient armour and other curiosities. In 1815 a payment is recorded for ‘glazing 42 Gross pocket Looking glasses’,2 and in 1817 large quantities of ‘Black Lead Pencils’, ‘Leaden Toys’ and ‘East India Rice’.3 From 1818 onwards, however, the regular and very large consignments of modern manufactures that the Davies family imported with such frequency no longer take up such substantial space in the waste book entries. By 1820 the evidence from the waste book indicates that the sales of general trading merchandise have all but disappeared, and the quantity and range of antique objects and curiosities began to expand as the antique and curiosity side of the business became the primary trading activity. When John Coleman Isaac entered the business in c.1823/4 the waste book entries indicate that the activities of the frm were almost exclusively associated with the trade in historical objects. Indeed, in 1826 Isaac made a conscious attempt to distance himself from the earlier general merchant activities of ‘Davies & Co’ and took the opportunity to describe himself as ‘Dealer in Curiosities’ when he subsequently insured his household goods and stock.4 These changes are indicative of the changing landscape of the wider markets for antiques and curiosities over the period. Such a trend is also refective of the gradual drift away from the wide range of disparate historical material categorized as ‘curiosities’, to the more discrete and specialized categories of historical objects from the 1850s. Gabriel Davies operated part of the business from Fürth, Bavaria, in Germany, sending regular shipments of historical objects back to the London base. The ‘waste book’ entries for March/April 1819, for example, record dozens of antiques and curiosities sent from Fürth to London by Gabriel Davies (see Figure 3.1). Gabriel’s son Henry Abraham Davies (d.1822) had already developed a very successful curiosity dealing business with his sister Sarah Davies (d.1875) by the 1810s. Henry Abraham Davies

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Figure 3.1 John Coleman Isaac/Henry A. Davies ‘Waste Book’, 1815–1845. Photograph copy, pp. 38–39, March/April 1819. AJ-53-467, Hartley Library, University of Southampton. © Hartley Library, University of Southampton.

died sometime before May 1822, when ‘S. Davies & Co.’ (Sarah Davies, Henry’s sister) of 41 Craven Street advertised the sale of a ‘most splendid and rare collection of Ancient Armour’, which had been ‘just imported’.5 On 22nd June 1822 The Times announced that the auctioneer ‘Mr Smallbone’ would be selling the ‘ancient armour… costly weapons … rare specimens of Dresden china…antique cabinets and bronzes … the entire property of Mr H Davis [sic] deceased’, on the premises at 41 Craven Street.6 After the death of her brother, the archive indicates that Sarah initially took charge of the business, and there are several letters from various collectors addressed to ‘Miss Sarah Davies’ and which suggest that she was an erudite and knowledgeable dealer in her own right.7 Sarah Davies continued the business with the help of Isaac, who was about ten years younger than Sarah, for two or three years after her brother’s death, before her eventual marriage to Isaac in 1824 or 1825. By late 1823 the archive letters begin to be addressed to ‘Mr John Isaac and Miss Sarah Davies’, and by the time of their marriage John Coleman Isaac was leading the business, although Sarah continued as an active partner. As Levy and Moss have already indicated, Isaac initially worked as a tailor and ‘Clothes Salesman’, following the trade of his father, Joseph, and he appears to have had some business dealings with the Davies family from c.1818.8 Isaac moved the business from Craven Street in 1829, taking a shop in Wardour Street, which was then at the centre of the curiosity trade, on 1st April

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1829.9 Gabriel Davies died on 5th October 1838; a letter in the archive addressed to Isaac from the family friend and business agent in Germany, John Adam Gebhardt, elaborately describes the death of Isaac’s father-in-law: I inform you with the present of the death of our good friend Mr Davies, who expired freeday [sic] the 5th at 11 o’clock in the evening, after an illness of three months … the art of two physicians could not prevent the progress of a lingering consumption, who united with the hydropsy, fnished the life of the good man, who took the esteem of the public along to his grave.10 Isaac and his wife Sarah continued to operate a highly successful antique and curiosity business for over 40 years. He often invested the considerable profts from antique and curiosity dealing into government stock and in property.11 By 1867 Isaac had retired from business and had moved to 30 Gordon Street, Gordon Square, London.12 His wife Sarah died on 21st February 1875, aged about 95, and Isaac on 16th March 1887, aged 85, their marriage bore them no children.13 His Will, sworn on 4th April 1887, was valued for probate at £23,630.12s.9d.14 Isaac left a number of relatively small bequests (£19.19s) to seven various Jewish institutions and organisations and made larger bequests (between £300 and £2000) to six of his nieces and nephews; he left his collection of ‘furniture, pictures, curiosities and objects of vertu etc’ and the residue of his estate to his niece Matilda Levy, daughter of his sister Hannah Levy (d.1882), who lived with him at Gordon Street, Gordon Square.15 The waste book records a great many sales, purchases and exchanges of historical objects with members of the antique and curiosity trade in the period. Indeed, it is a veritable roll-call of all the prominent dealers: Henry and Samuel Pratt, Henry Farrer, Edward H. Baldock, John Swaby, John Webb, Horatio Rodd, William Forrest, George and Edward Hull, William Tuck, Isaac Falcke, Dominic Colnaghi, William Foster, Abraham Hertz, Samuel Mawson, William Gibbs Rogers, Charles Redfern and many more besides, all appear as customers of Isaac.16 The sheer scale of these transactions is indicative of the expansion in the numbers of those involved in the trade in historical objects and illustrates the close social and business networks of the London trade in the period. However, the early nineteenth century not only saw a rapidly expanding number of dealers, but also ushered in a widespread diversifcation in the social base in the consumption of historical objects. Isaac sold hundreds of objects to many of the leading collectors of the time, such as Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick (1783–1848), Ralph Bernal (1784–1854), Bernard Brocas (d.1840), Andrew Fountaine (1808–1873), and Hollingworth Magniac (1786–1867). He also sold objects to many important aristocratic customers; in the 1830s, for example, he sold quantities of ancient armour to William Henry Quin (1782–1850), 2nd Earl of Dunraven, who was rebuilding Adare Manor in County Limerick during the 1830s and 1840s with the assistance of the architect Lewis Nockells Cottingham.17 Other clients included the 1st and 2nd Marquis of Breadalbane, at Taymouth Castle, which was being remodelled by the architect A.N.W. Pugin during 1837–38; Lady Charlotte Bury (1775–1861); George Cadogen (1783–1864), 3rd Earl of Cadogen; Charles Stanhope (1780–1851), 4th Earl of Harrington of Elvaston Castle, Derbyshire; Sir John Lowther (1759–1844), 1st Lord Lowther of Lowther Castle; John Henry Manners (1778–1857), 5th Duke of Rutland of Belvoir Castle; and John Talbot (1791–1852), 16th Earl of Shrewsbury

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of Alton Towers. Customers from the landed gentry, statesmen and politicians, and members of the professional classes dominate the archive. The Rev. Champion John Dymoke (d.1873), of Scivelsby Court, Horncastle, in Lincolnshire, Captain Henry Augustus Langley (d.1834) of Brittas Castle in Ireland, and Sir John Erskine of Torry (1776–1836) of Fife in Scotland, were all regular customers. Many of Isaac’s customers had similar antiquarian interests and were rebuilding or extending existing houses in the fashionable Gothic and Elizabethan style. The Baronet Sir Edward Blackett (1805– 1885), to whom Isaac sold several objects, including a ‘gold watch’ in January 1830,19 was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and member of the British Archaeological Society. In the 1830s Blackett was rebuilding Matfen Hall in Northumberland, spending as much as £70,000 on the project, engaging the Gothic revival architect Thomas Rickman (1776–1841), author of An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of Architecture in England (1817), to design his new ‘old’ house.20 As well as Isaac, Blackett used several other London based antique and curiosity dealers to furnish his property in an appropriate ‘Gothic’ style, including Benjamin Moses, trading in Hanway Street, and the Old Bond Street dealers Webb and Cragg, from whom he bought an ‘Elizabethan Chimney-piece’ which remains in the library at Matfen Hall.21 These evolving patterns of consumption took place against a period of considerable political and social change in Britain. Early nineteenth-century society evolved within a dynamic of contested ground in which old power and new money were in constant fux.22 The Great Reform Act of 1832, the Chartist revolts of 1839, and the activities of the Anti-Corn Law League in the late 1840s all contributed to the anxiety of the socio-political elite. The desire of the existing political order to reinforce their social and political power, which was being dislocated from its inherited position of ‘noblesse oblige’ through the changing social and political landscape of early nineteenth-century Britain, provided a ready audience for historical material. The Tudor and Elizabethan revivals were underpinned by overt political dimensions, and the furnishing and collecting activities of the opening decades of the nineteenth century provided the political hegemony with the opportunities to reinforce their ‘right’ of a natural succession to power through the adoption of appropriately national ‘English’ residences and flling them with the trappings of their lineage. As Chris Brooks writes: 18

The Elizabethan century was lauded as England’s frst great age, when a reformed church headed by the crown was established, and the foundations of naval supremacy, worldwide commerce and Empire … its architecture, for the conservatively minded squirearchy, hit all the right notes.23 Sir Samuel Meyrick, writing in Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836), made a specifc point of the appropriateness of the revival of Tudor and Elizabethan interiors in the period: ‘A feeling has now arisen for the ancient decorative style, which it is hoped the present work will materially assist … to produce an effect that should be given to the interior of an English residence’.24 This historical revival of ‘Old English’ taste in the frst quarter of the nineteenth century provided an important catalyst for the increasing consumption of historical material from the Tudor and Elizabethan periods. As a part of these evolving interests, antique and curiosity dealers such as Isaac played a signifcant role in the formation of changing tastes and in the development of these new furnishing and collecting practices.

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During more than 40 years trading, Isaac became one of the leading antique and curiosity dealers in London. He appears to have been very highly regarded and had very good relationships with many of the most signifcant collectors in the period. In a letter sent to Isaac in November 1839, the antiquarian collector Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick was especially generous in his comments: The high opinion I have of you is solely the result of your own honourable conduct, which during a period of twenty years [of] strict observance I have invariably found to be the same. Your dealings have always been grounded in such justifable principles that I feel more pleasure in making purchases of you than of any one else, and in this sentiment I am sure Mr Bernal coincides.25 Indeed, the letters in the archive from the eminent collector Ralph Bernal indicate that he and Isaac had a very amicable and obviously mutually benefcial relationship.26 Bernal made consistent attempts to cultivate their relationship; for example, whilst on a trip to Antwerp in 1835 Bernal wrote to Isaac about some of the ‘large and handsome collections of glass and other antiquities and curiosities’ he had seen in Belgium and took time in the letter to reiterate some promises that he had made to Isaac in respect of his own buying activities.27 Bernal writes: ‘I might have purchased some good things, if I had wished to, but as I already have many fne articles and am waiting to see your last acquisitions, I abstained, as I told you I would’.28 Bernal continued in the letter, reassuring Isaac: As you know I prefer purchasing of you, to purchasing articles abroad’.29 In another letter, sent to Isaac in September 1838, Bernal stressed: ‘I can say (candidly) that I have always much pleasure in acquiring objects of curiosity through you I always feel a confdence about them.30 Collectors such as Meyrick and Bernal relied heavily on the trading activities of dealers such as Isaac to supply them with historical objects and developed mutually benefcial relationships with key members of the antique and curiosity trade. However, we get a sense of the other side of the relationship between Bernal and Isaac from some of Isaac’s letters to his wife Sarah. Indeed, one of the most important aspects of the Isaac archive is that it reveals intimate social insights into the mechanisms of the transactions between nineteenth-century collectors and dealers from this perspective. Several letters in the archive indicate that in his dealings with collectors Isaac appears to be aware of the importance of consumer psychology. On 15th May 1835, Isaac writes to Sarah: You had better not tell Bernal anything more about the Glass with the exception of that one piece … You had better say that this letter is from Vienna and that I intend to post it part of the way home, so that I may be home for the holydays, but don’t take this letter out at all before Him, tell him what I write, for his eyes is dangerous (so knowing).31 In another letter, dated 22nd May 1835, Isaac again writes to his wife Sarah whilst he was on one of his continental buying trips, outlining the objects he had acquired and was sending back to London (see Figure 3.2). He added a note in small script in

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Figure 3.2 Letter from John Coleman Isaac to Sarah Isaac, 22nd May, 1835. AJ-53-31, Hartley Library, University of Southampton. © Hartley Library, University of Southampton.

parenthesis in the top right-hand corner of the letter; ‘If you think it expedient after you have made a little ceremony with Mr Bernal you may read him what I have written on the outside, but keep the letter folded in your hand’.32 In these letters, Isaac encapsulates the competition between the dealer and the collector; it is, as the novelist Balzac suggested, ‘a close contest between two pairs of eyes’.33 The Isaac letter archive is full of these fascinating insights into the daily life of an early nineteenth-century antique and curiosity dealer. For example, even in the mid1830s, when the trade appears to have been at its height, trading in antiques and curiosities could be a slow and laborious process. Sarah wrote to her husband from their Wardour Street shop in May 1835, whilst Isaac was on one of his extended buying trips to the Continent: I regret to say that I have only taken four pounds since I last wrote to you and that was for four gilt pewter plates, of young Mr Rothschild of Paris, the same as bought the ewer and dish. This is all I have done nearly three weeks. I really think this business will drive me crazy.34 In March 1844 Sarah complained bitterly: ‘Our shop is enough to give anyone the miserables for I sit here day after day, and scarcely a soul comes in and that is enough

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to give anyone the horrors’.35 Indeed, it was perhaps inevitable in such fuid and rapidly changing markets, built on emerging and fuctuating interests for a wide range of objects, that some dealers would withdraw from the markets in the face of increasing competition for historical objects. Isaac draws attention to the fact that these markets often went through periods of diffcult trading conditions and that even some wellestablished dealers did not appear to survive the shifting patterns of consumption. In 1841, for example, whilst on a buying trip to Munich, Isaac wrote to Sarah, commenting on the well-known Oberndörffer family of dealers: ‘I think the Obendorffers [sic] is nearly done up; they have commenced an Exchange Offce’.36 At this date, according to Isaac, Obendörffer still retained ‘a good many of their old curiosities’, although he writes that they were not worth buying.37 By 1844, whilst he was in Fürth in Germany, Isaac informed Sarah that he had heard that Obendörffer had eventually given up their curiosity shop in Munich.38 The mid-1840s appear to have provided some diffcult trading conditions for other Continental dealers as well. In 1844, Mr Zen, a wellknown curiosity dealer in Venice, who, according to Isaac, ‘used to send those fne things to Emanuel [the dealer]’ had ‘nothing at all’ and had ‘commenced business in Stationary and Colours for Artists – that is a proof there is nothing more here’.39 After Isaac joined the Davies family business in the early 1820s he very quickly appears to have acquired the knowledge to make judgements on a very wide range of antiques and curiosities. By the 1830s he was considered to have considerable expertise of antiques and curiosities, and appears to have been highly regarded by dealers and collectors alike. In September 1838, for example, the collector Ralph Bernal wrote to Isaac, asking if he had been to see some ‘ancient armour’ he had reserved with the dealers Samuel and Henry Pratt at their shop in New Bond Street: ‘You have been rather brief in your description of the Salade helmet I really wish to have a more full account of your opinion of it … I always like also to have your opinion on them.40 There is also clear evidence from the Isaac archive of the changes in the market for antiques and curiosities in the period after 1850. Isaac made many buying trips to Venice in the 1850s, searching for antiques and curiosities, and sent several letters to his wife Sarah back in London, commenting on his purchases. In one letter for example, sent from Venice in 1855, Isaac indicated the desirability of dated pieces of Raphaelware.41 The market for such material was becoming so concentrated that even damaged examples were now becoming highly prized. Isaac wrote: to shew [sic] you the state of the market, Mr Riatti, the one in the Ghetto (not the rich one) had two very much broken raffael [sic] ware plates in his hand, and as he informed me had just returned from Mr Tironi, who had offered him 20 napoleons for them or £16. But he refused that sum for them, one had a date 1500 (and something – either 30 or 40) … so anything with early dates of that kind, they are quite awake to.42 The market for antiques and curiosities in the 1850s were changing rapidly, as the introduction to this investigation has outlined. In 1857, whilst in Venice, Isaac commented in a letter to Sarah: ‘Business now is quite different to formerly, when I used to buy a fne lot, and see a certain proft. But now I only buy a single small article at a large price, and perhaps the next minute regret buying it’.43 In a letter dated 1st October 1857 Isaac commented on the kinds of objects other dealers buying, including

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‘bronze inkstands and a number of small bronzes, which we used to fnd not saleable, but I suppose they are now’.44 In the same letter, Isaac listed some objects he had recently purchased and was sending back to London, including ‘a torquois [sic] Blue China Vase or Bottle for 12/-, I think it may be worth 20 or 30 pounds’.45 Isaac’s comments towards the conclusion of this letter are revealing: You will perceive that all the things I mention, a few years ago I should not have purchased, but the times are different … formerly I bought things I understood and they gave me no further considerations, but now … I buy things I do not understand.46 Isaac continued in this letter: ‘I never bought such a dear lot of Rubbish before … One thing is certain’, he writes, ‘all the fne things are gone, and the dealers here pay large prices for Rubbish, but they can sell them again’.47 It is clear that Isaac was fnding the shifting tastes of the antique and curiosity markets at mid-century diffcult to deal with, both in terms of the knowledge required to identify the new kinds of objects that were entering the markets and in terms of the fnancial risks involved in the speculation required to acquire them. By 1857 Isaac had been trading for over 25 years, and his extensive knowledge of curiosities, antique furniture, ancient armour and other historical material that he had been trading for much of his life did not necessarily ft with the changing tastes and patterns of consumption of antiques and curiosities that were emerging in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The market for antiques and curiosities 1815–1850 In the 30-year period covered by the Davies/Isaac waste book (1815–45) and the 40 or so years that span the period of the archive letters (c.1819–c.1860) there are also references to an astonishing range of items. The archive records the sale of ‘ancient armour and weapons, ancient stained glass, old oak carvings; antique furniture, Buhl and Riesener furniture, Dresden clocks, paintings; Raffael ware, Old Dresden, Old Sévres and rare Nankeen china, carved ivories, Venetian glass, and silver tankards’, as well as myriad other objects that were sold under the catch-all categories of objects of virtu and curiosities.48 An advertisement in 1833, for the auction of the stock of a colleague of Isaac, the Wardour Street dealer John Swaby, reinforces the sense of the bewildering array of objects that made up the stock of an early nineteenth-century antique and curiosity dealer. Swaby’s stock comprised a splendid melange of ancient property ... extensive collections of oak carvings, sets of carved high-backed chairs, an assemblage of old French, Dutch and English decorative furniture, in marqueterie, Reisner, [sic] and old Boule [sic]....a rare Elizabethan armoire, a Gothic ditto, ebony and boule regulators and clocks, a pair of massive ormolu girandoles, specimens of Dresden and Chelsea porcelain, delft and Rafaelle ware, tapestry, rich fgured velvet and brocade hangings, Italian bronzes, fne sculptures in marble, Florentine mosaics and tessellated slabs of the fnest quality, rare ancient stained glass...a great quantity of scarce Old English armour...Old japan lacquer, enamels, silver fligree work, gemstones and an infnity of articles of great rarity associated with the fne arts.49

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One of the primary social, economic and political catalysts for the development of this vigorous and diverse market for historical objects in the early nineteenth century was the Napoleonic Wars and the resultant economic and social instability on the Continent.50 The wholesale dismantling of interior decorations and furnishings from palaces in locations such as Italy and the removal of stained glass, interior woodwork and architectural elements from churches and chapels in Holland and in Belgium, particularly after the second invasion by the French army in 1794, provided a rich source of material for antique and curiosity dealers in Britain. The buying activities in the Low Countries of the Norwich glass-painter and dealer in ancient stained-glass John Christopher Hampp (1750–1824) and his partner Seth W. Stevenson during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are well known.51 Many more dealers and collectors travelled to the Continent during the periodic lulls in the confict between Britain and France in the frst decade of the nineteenth century.52 Following the eventual defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, travel to Continental Europe was made much easier and led to a rapid increase in the importation of historical objects from the Continent. The frequent announcements of ‘importation sales’ at auction in early nineteenth-century newspapers are a testament to these activities.53 The Isaac archive also clearly demonstrates the importance of ‘importation sales’, as an effective mechanism to redistribute the large amounts of antiques and curiosities that had been acquired on the Continent. Indeed, it was such a highly effcient mechanism to access the expanding markets in London that members of the Continental trade sometimes adopted the practice on consigning shipments direct to the London auction rooms. The curiosity dealer Van Minden, for example, who owned a shop in Paris, regularly used the London auctioneers Oxenhams to redistribute large amounts of stock he gathered on the Continent during the 1830s. In April 1832, Isaac raised concerns about the effect on the market of such practices, expressing his disquiet that members of the Continental trade were saturating the London market, writing to his wife Sarah that [Van Minden] has had a two day sale at Oxenhams of the fnest goods that ever has [been] seen consisting of the most handsomest buhl library tables … and Dresden china, beautiful painted Sevres porcelain … fne old oak carvings, in part the fnest lots of goods that ever [came to] sale, that fellow is the ruination of the shopkeeper for he brings goods so fast that he spoils the whole trade.54 The Davis family had already begun importing a wide variety of antiques and curiosities into Britain from the Continent by 1815.55 Gabriel Davies, John Coleman Isaac’s father-in-law, who was based at Fürth in Germany, sent regular cases of objects to the London and continued to send regular shipments until his death in 1838. The importation of goods from the Continent was subject to Importation Duties levied by the British Government in the period. Such taxes were ostensibly intended to restrict imported manufactured goods entering the market and stifing indigenous manufacturing. The 1820s saw increased petitioning to Parliament from business owners for ‘free trade’, leading to the Reciprocity of Duties Act (1823) which promoted mutual trading agreements with foreign countries. A wide series of taxes on imported goods remained in place throughout the opening decades of the nineteenth century, ranging from a 10% levy on the importation of furniture and

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ceramics and other manufactured objects, to a 5% levy on ‘works of art’, unless it could be proved that such artworks were to be used as a stimulus for contemporary design and were ‘not intended for sale’.56 Antiques and curiosities were subject to Import Duty, and Isaac often had to write to the customs offce to request the release of his imported goods which had been seized because of undervaluation. On one occasion, in November 1834, Isaac noted in the waste book that he had written to ‘Mr. Dennison’ at the Customs Offce to ‘plead for the release of his goods’, which he had undervalued by £40, commenting that ‘no fraud was intended’.57 A month later, on 26th December 1834, the waste book records – ‘Bought a very fne Turkey for one Pound and sent it as a present to Mr Dennison’.58 Maintaining a good relationship with Customs Offcials was clearly important, and Isaac appears to have devoted much attention to ensuring that his relationship with his local Customs Offcer was as cordial as possible, with consistent notes in the ‘waste book’ recording the presentation of gifts to Mr Dennison.59 From the 1820s, Isaac made frequent buying trips to the Continent, often visiting at least twice a year, for periods of between a few weeks and three months, continuing for more than 30 years, until the late 1850s.60 The Continental buying trip was a common practice amongst all the major antique and curiosity dealers based in Britain in the period, particularly during the period 1830–1840, when the expansion of the trade was at its height. The Isaac archive includes several letters from prominent collectors anxiously requesting information on dealers returning from their buying trips, reinforcing the importance of the Continent as a key resource in the supply of antiques and curiosities.61 Isaac also frequently records his encounters with well-known members of the trade whilst he is abroad, often meeting dealers from familiar trading locations in London such as Wardour Street and Bond Street.62 The New Bond Street dealer John Webb, for example, who appears to have had a very cordial business relationship with Isaac over many decades, was regularly encountered by Isaac on buying trips to the Continent. In 1857, whilst on one of his last buying trips to the Continent, Isaac recorded that Webb was ‘travelling in rather a good style’.63 By that date Webb was one of the leading dealers in London and had begun to act as an agent for the newly established South Kensington Museum. These regular meetings between dealers on the Continent indicate a clearly discernible network of communication and highlight the rich buying opportunities on the Continent. In the early 1830s, as the market for antiques and curiosities expanded, Isaac wrote to his wife Sarah whilst on a buying trip to Germany highlighting the impact of the growing audience for the consumption of the past, complaining: ‘a bargain is almost impossible to meet with, there are so many purchasers now’.64 In another letter, sent later the same month Isaac lamented: I assure you it is all up with coming to Germany to buy. In the frst place nothing comes onto the market; the Continent is drained, and the people here begin to collect themselves [and] a great many strangers travel to buy.65 In the same letter Isaac directed attention to the consequences of the expanding market of the 1830s – ‘They make a noise with one’, he writes, ‘and tell me I want to buy for the same price as 20 years ago, and they want to buy of me. You would be surprised to see the prices the dealers give for goods here; they don’t understand anything, and

88 Emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer they buy on speculation’.66 Whilst on a buying trip to Venice in 1836 Isaac appeared to be confdent that the opportunities for buying antique and curiosities would still be of such a scale to warrant the arrangement of substantial storage facilities, writing to Sarah that he had ‘hired a very large warehouse … for a month for ten shillings’ and hoped to ‘fll it with fne goods’.67 But at the same time he lamented the diminishing supply of curiosities and remained sceptical about continuing the expense of travelling, writing: ‘This really must be the last journey in search of curiosities’, Isaac wrote, ‘for every time it is less, and it will not pay to come here to buy a few things’.68 Contemporary responses by collectors in the period also consistently stress the impact that the expanding markets and the increasing competition from dealers were having on the supply and demand for antiques and curiosities in the period. Writing to Isaac in November 1839, the antiquarian collector Samuel Rush Meyrick complained: ‘not only armour, but everything else is now so high priced that I fear I shall be obliged entirely to give up collecting’.69 In the 1830s and 1840s the activities of the dealers on the Continent in the 1830s and 1840s were of such a scale in the period that the Government authorities in several countries created special ministerial posts to preserve ancient architecture and monuments from the vicissitudes of the market and to stem the fow of architectural fragments, stained glass and other ancient remains.70 In France, the Post of Inspecteur des Monuments was instituted in 1830 and in newly created Belgium the Royal Commission for Monuments and Sites was established by 1835. The antiquary Alphonse Didron (1806–1867) wrote regular reports of the ‘acts of vandalism’ in France in his Annales Archéolgiques from 1844.71 In Italy, which was in the early nineteenth century still composed of City States and would remain so until the Unifcation of Italy in 1861, there had been attempts to restrict the movement of what one might today call ‘cultural property’ since the late sixteenth century. Such attempts have their own cultural contexts of course – key examples are the measures taken in The Grand Duchy of Tuscany in 1571 to prohibit the removal of emblems and inscriptions from historic buildings and in 1602 the formal prohibition of the export of paintings without permission of the lieutenant of the School of Design.72 By the early nineteenth century the introduction of legislation to restrict the removal of cultural artefacts was being more systematically rolled out across Italy. In Rome, for example, the Edict of Cardinal Pappa, which was promulgated during the Papacy of Pius VII in 1820, was designed to safeguard historical objects and works of art. This edict became a model for similar responses to the expanding art market in several City States across Italy at the time. The Kingdom of Naples and Two Sicilies introduced similar laws in 1822 and 1827, and in the Kingdom of Sardinia and Piedmont the authorities established the Council of Antiquities and Fine Arts in 1832 with the express purpose of protecting works of art and ancient objects.73 In Venice, too, in the 1830s, the authorities made attempts to protect the destruction of buildings and their interior fttings and to restrict the activities of the dealers. In 1838, the merchant banker, traveller and diarist Thomas Raikes (1777–1848), who was travelling in Venice that year, wrote: the fne hotels of the once proud Venetians were gradually falling into decay, and the impoverished families ready to sell the costly materials to the best bidder, when an Imperial mandate came out forbidding the destruction of these ancient monuments of past glory, which put a stop at once to the sales.74

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However, the Venetian mandate appears to have been only partially successful, and by the early 1840s the market for historical material in Italy at least appears to have virtually dried up. The collector Ralph Bernal cautioned Isaac to reconsider undertaking a buying trip to Venice in 1840, writing, ‘I would advise you to refect a little, before you decide on going to the Continent at this Season … I am informed that most of the pallazzi [sic] are entirely stripped of everything, nothing to be got’.75 In another letter sent by Isaac from Venice in 1841 to his wife Sarah, he mentioned he had seen the New Bond Street dealer Samuel Pratt, then one of the leading specialist dealers in ‘ancient armour’, Isaac wrote: I dare say Mr Pratt is returned before this, but I should very much doubt his doing any good, for I think it is quite done up with travelling, Bargains is not likely to be met with at all, and without good luck in selling the things, it will not pay. But at the same time, without the goods one stands no chance at all.76 The artist William Lake Price (1810–1896) in Interiors and Exteriors in Venice, published in 1843, suggests that Bernal’s comments to Isaac in 1840 were an accurate assessment of the effects of such destruction, but also illustrates the emotive responses such destruction evoked. Price wrote: many of the Palaces in that most picturesque of all cities have been stripped of their gorgeous decorations, having, as in the case of the three Palazzi Foscari, only their vast and deserted halls, and the traditions of what they have been, to make the antiquary and the man of taste regret what they are.77 Whilst the increasing development of restrictive legislation and the establishment of these protective bodies across Europe signal a wider project, in the emergence of National consciousness that was such a signifcant aspect of Romanticism, we can also see that these restrictive laws and sentiments emerged, in part at least, because of the scale of the activities of the antique and curiosity trade.

The market for ancient furniture and woodwork Collecting and furnishing with ancient furniture and ancient woodwork was one of the most dominant aspects of the market in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. This was not an entirely new phenomenon of course; there was already an emerging interest in ancient carved woodwork during the last decades of the eighteenth century. The installation of ancient woodwork from the late 1790s at Plas Newydd (New Hall) by Sarah Ponsonby (1755–1831) and Lady Eleanor Charlotte Butler (1739–1829), the famous ‘Ladies of Llangollen’, is perhaps the most well known and has been the subject of several publications.78 The antiquarian collections of ancient furniture and woodwork assembled by Thomas Lister Parker and which he installed at Browsholme Hall in the years prior to 1800 are another key example of such collecting practices.79 But the market for ancient furniture and woodwork during the opening decades of the nineteenth century far outstrips any latent interest that had existed during the late eighteenth century. Antiquarian collections such as those of John Holmes of East Retford, Nottinghamshire, demonstrate how extensive the interest in such ancient woodwork became by the 1820s and 1830s. A description of the house of

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John Holmes, published in 1828, illustrates the signifcance of such historical material for contemporary antiquarian collectors: The interior of the library is wholly composed of very ancient carved oak, brought from distant places, and forms a rich storehouse of interesting materials, well preserved from decay and arranged in a method harmonizing with a building supposed to be enacted in early times. The book-stands, tables, desks, chairs and other furniture exactly correspond.80 The collections of the antiquary George Weare Braikenridge (1775–1856) at Broomwell House, Brislington, near Bristol, some of which were supplied by the dealer Horatio Rodd, also exemplify this taste (see Figure 3.3). Many writers in the period, such as the antiquary Thomas Hunt, had already suggested that although ancient furniture was eminently interesting, specimens that survived were of little practical use for modern living.81 Loudon recognised that ‘ancient carvings’ could act as potent catalysts for inculcating the ‘emotional’ effects of old associations and that this was something that could not be achieved by the use of modern carved work alone.82 But modern carved work was technically diffcult to produce, and it was consequently often more expensive than recycled ancient woodwork. Indeed, Loudon suggested that one of the reasons for using the abundance of ancient carvings to be found in the curiosity dealer’s shops was that they were relatively cheap in comparison to modern woodcarving

Figure 3.3 Interior of the library, Broomwell House, Bristol – (c.1825), W.H. Bartlett (1809– 1854), pencil and watercolour. Museum and Art Gallery, Bristol. © Bristol’s Museums, Galleries & Archives.

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techniques when making furniture or ftting out interiors. It was widely acknowledged at the time that the skills of the woodcarver had declined considerably during the eighteenth century through the introduction of ‘cast-work’ (the use of wooden and plaster moulds to produce repetitive designs). When called to the Parliamentary Select Committee into Arts and Manufactures in 1835, the architect Charles Robert Cockerell (1788–1863) drew attention to the lack of skilled wood carvers, which, he suggested, was a result of ‘Adams the architect, Chambers and others…when castwork was very much introduced into ceilings and walls, cast-work in putty decorations instead of carvings in wood’.84 The revival of the ‘ancient decorative style’ in the 1820s came on the back of the tastes for the much plainer furniture of the late eighteenth century derived from pattern books such as those of George Hepplewhite and Thomas Sheraton.85 The fashion for plain furniture with veneered surfaces had resulted in a diminishing pool of craftworkers familiar with the skills of woodcarving by the 1830s. When the fashion for ‘ornamental furniture’ symptomatic of the historic revivals of ‘Louis XIV’ style furniture and decoration and interiors of the ‘Elizabethan’ and ‘Jacobean’ revivals were in vogue, the designs required much more carved work. John Claudius Loudon suggested that considerable expense could be involved in these new styles of furniture because ‘modern workmen are unaccustomed to this kind of workmanship’.86 There were several attempts in the period to provide inexpensive alternatives for the increasing demand for carved furniture and woodwork in revived historical styles. By the 1840s entrepreneurs and industrialists had adapted new industrial processes to the supply of the large quantities of carved woodwork necessary to meet the demands of the markets. The ‘Patent Woodcarving Company’, who had offces in Covent Garden and the Strand in the 1840s, published catalogues of the wide range of carvings and reproduction ‘ancient furniture’ they supplied.87 As their catalogue indicated, 83

the amateur may now possess fac-similies of the fauteuil or prie-dieu, or the reliquary of the Middle Ages … the proprietor of an ancient manor may transform his apartments into the chambers, saloons, and banqueting-rooms of the style of Francis I.88 T.B. Jordan’s steam-powered patent cutting machine, which was most famously used for the enormous amount of carved work required at the New Palace of Westminster in the 1840 and 1850s, was the most well known in the period.89 Indeed, the machine carvings supplied by Jordan & Company were used by the dealers Edward and George Hull in their capacity as interior furnishers and decorators for Charles Scarisbrick for work undertaken at Scarisbrick’s London house in Suffolk Street.90 Despite the obvious advantages of industrial production these new techniques also had their limitations. Machine carving still required a degree of hand-fnishing and the metal templates used to produce the carvings required constant maintenance. Perhaps more importantly the metal templates themselves were expensive to produce and proved to be infexible in a market where the kind of carved work in demand was constantly changing.91 These limitations provide one of the explanations why the trade in ancient carvings and woodwork continued to thrive against the background of expanding industrial production. As Loudon suggested, the man who desired to furnish in the ancient decorative style ‘cannot attain his end at less expense than by having recourse to Elizabethan fragments’.92

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However, the activities of the antique and curiosity dealers as suppliers of recycled material were not always perceived as benefcial by some commentators. In the prevailing climate of the promotion of commerce and manufacturing in the 1830s and 1840s the activities of the antique and curiosity dealers were often seen as undermining the promotion of good design and the economic benefts of the expanding industrial economy. The importation of enormous quantities of ancient woodwork by the antique and curiosity trade was itself also seen as part of the problem of the regressive state of ornamental furniture manufacture in Britain. The architect John Buonarotti Papworth (1775–1847), called as a witness by the 1835 Select Committee to provide information on reasons why the standard of design and manufacture of ornamental furniture in Britain was declining in comparison to France, drew attention to the activities of the dealers. Papworth’s explanation for falling standards of design: ‘the great deal of that very old matter of furniture from abroad, which arrives in ship-loads, and which is adopted instead of new furniture, much to the disadvantage of our designers and our workmen’.93 A considerable amount of ancient carved woodwork was imported from the Continent, often acquired by landed, often catholic, patrons for re-installation into their country houses. John Talbot (1791–1852), 16th Earl of Shrewsbury, acquired much of the ancient woodwork that he had re-installed at his country seat, Alton Towers in Staffordshire from the ‘ancient furniture dealers’ Edward and George Hull. The Lancashire landowner Charles Scarisbrick (d.1860) also used the same dealers for the supply and installation of ancient woodwork at Scarisbrick Hall.94 Following the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 and the consequent greater religious freedom the Act ushered in for the indigenous Catholic population, Catholic patrons such as the Earls of Shrewsbury and Charles Scarisbrick also regularly paid for ancient woodwork to be re-installed in their local country churches.95 Indeed, it was only after the 1850s that this particular part of the market diminished considerably, through a combination of dwindling patronage of the dealers (a consequence of serious decline in rental and land values) and, perhaps more importantly, the shifting focus of liturgical practices with the reform of the Anglican church through the Ecclesiological movement.96 The Ecclesiologists, led by Alexander Beresford Hope (1820–87), commissioned new churches from architects such as George Edmund Street (1825–81) and William Butterfeld (1814–1900), who advocated modern reformed Gothic interiors rather than reconstructed ancient woodwork for their new churches.97 However, it was not only the Continent that was the focus of the expanding antique and curiosity trade. The interest in ancient woodwork and fttings also resulted in many buildings in Britain being stripped of their interiors and demolished. The demolition of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century properties in London provided a steady supply of architectural fragments, as well as whole ‘period rooms’ for the expanding market. The range of architectural elements in the well-known Museum of Medieval Architecture and Sculpture assembled by the architect Lewis Nockells Cottingham (1787–1847) and sold in 1850 after his death, is a testimony to the potential offered by the demolitions.98 Cottingham’s museum displayed the ceiling from Crosby Hall and the ceiling from the Palace of Bishop Bonner at Lambeth. It also included ‘an exceedingly elaborate chimney piece ... from the Star Chamber in Westminster Abbey’, as well as linenfold panelling from Layer Marney, Essex and carvings from the demolished churches at Westley in Suffolk and St. Mary’s, Bury St. Edmunds.99 The antique and curiosity trade, of course, was a key catalyst in the wider patterns of circulation

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and consumption of historic architectural fragments and interior fttings. The frontispiece of the Great Newport Street dealer Horatio Rodd’s sales catalogue, for example, published in 1842, advertised ‘an Elizabethan chimney-piece. From an old house at Bow, Middlesex, said to have been the residence of Sir Francis Drake, clean oak, 8ft 6in long by 6ft wide, £15. 15s’100 (see Figure 3.4). Rodd’s catalogue also included thirty feet of cornice, ‘the Moulding of the Elizabethan Room, painted, £3.3s’ and ‘An ancient pulpit, a fne elaborately Carved Oak Pulpit, designed by Inigo Jones, and formerly in the Old Church in Broadway, Westminster, with staircase and &c complete’.101 The writer J.C. Loudon was a great evangelist for the recycling of such material, which, he suggested, had the beneft of economy; ‘whoever at the present time’, wrote Loudon, ‘wishes to furnish and ft up a house in such a manner as to produce new and strange effects on the spectator, cannot attain his end at less expense than by having recourse to Elizabethan fragments’.102 The opportunities for the trade in architectural fragments were facilitated by the destruction of many historic buildings in London as new housing developments, the railway and large-scale engineering projects cut their way through the capital. These changes to the historic architectural fabric of London were part of a scheme of ‘Metropolitan Improvements’, but it was inevitable that such activities would also give rise to some condemnation. The Gothic Revival architect and illustrator Edward Buckton Lamb (1806–1869) was one of many people who lamented the destruction of

Figure 3.4 Title page of catalogue of the stock of Horatio Rodd, Great Newport Street, London, 1842. © The Art Library, The Victoria and Albert Museum.

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the historic fabric of Britain during the 1830s and 1840s, caused, as he suggested, by ‘tasteless improvers and modern innovations’.103 ‘Even the railways’, Lamb continued, ‘those wonders of modern times, which are now sweeping everything before them, might, perhaps, sometimes, be just suffciently turned to prevent the wholesale demolition of ancient buildings’.104 One solution to these particular problems, proposed by an anonymous contributor to the Architectural Magazine in 1838 called ‘M’, was the establishment of a ‘Society for the Restoration of Ancient Buildings’, an interesting development decades before the eventual foundation of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) by William Morris and Philip Webb in 1877.105 Lamb’s solutions to the problem was perhaps more pragmatic, he called for collections of architectural fragments to be assembled and displayed in the increasingly redundant Naves of great cathedrals: ‘any objections that could be started to this arrangement’, he wrote, ‘surely would be made by the over-fastidious; in this part of the cathedral none of the forms and ceremonies of our religion are performed’.106 Such collections, Lamb suggested, ‘would be of use to all; and, by becoming the objects of laudable curiosity, would imperceptibly assist in refning the taste of the lower orders, and securing the patronage of the higher’.107 However, in a short polemic, Some Remarks on the Taste and Effects of Collecting Fragments of Ancient Architecture (1832), the antiquary and draughtsman William Twopeny (1797–1873) had roundly censured the destruction that was being caused to ancient buildings and focused on the collecting of architectural fragments in particular: The love of collecting fragments of ancient architecture has risen to such a height, that it is high time some one raised his voice against a taste which, I think is false in its foundation, and I know to be mischievous in its effects.108 Twopeny continued his polemic, pointing out the feeble defence, as he saw it, of those who collected these fragments. The amateur collectors, Twopeny stressed, cited ‘their great admiration for specimens of ancient taste, and the strong desire to preserve them from destruction’, whilst the architects defended their actions by suggesting they required ancient fragments for ‘their professional studies’109 However, such collecting, suggested Twopeny, resulted in ‘unmeaning fragments’, and was ‘mischievous in spirit’.110 In an oblique acknowledgement of the strength of the London antique and curiosity trade in the Continental markets in the period, Twopeny stressed that the collecting of fragments of ancient woodwork was a peculiarly ‘English’ activity: ‘There is too much truth in the satire which places in the frst leaf of an Englishman’s album, a small piece of black paper, “torn from one of Raphael’s Cartoons”’, concluded Twopeny.111 The comments of a writer such as Twopeny draw attention to the signifcance of early nineteenth-century historicism. The importance of historical context, exemplifed in Considérations morales sur la destination des ouvrages de l’art (1815) by the French archaeologist Antioine-Chrystome Quatremère de Quincy (1755–1849), was brought into sharper focus against the background of this destruction. One of the ironic consequences of these critical responses to the wholesale destruction of the historic fabric in Britain and on the Continent was that while the publications of Twopeny and Lake Price censured the destruction of architecture and interiors they also highlighted the desirability of such historical material, making it more marketable and adding extra layers of signifcance to the material on sale in the antique and curiosity dealers’ shops.

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Antique and curiosity dealing The trade in antiques and curiosities had of course already existed long before dealers such as John Coleman Isaac entered the trade in the early nineteenth century, and the history of the antique and curiosity trade shares a common genealogy with earlier practices and activities. Indeed, as Pomian and Wainwright have demonstrated, there was already a sophisticated market for curiosities on the Continent by the early 1600s.112 In the seventeenth century, traders in such objects customarily sold their stock at markets and fairs. For example, during a visit to Rome in 1645 the diarist and collector John Evelyn (1620–1706) recorded that he took the time to visit a market in the Piazza Navona, ‘to see what Antiquities I could purchase among the people, who hold Mercat there for Medaills, Pictures, & such Curiosities’.113 Shops that specialized in the supply of curiosities also began to appear in cities such as Rome, Venice, Amsterdam and Paris in the seventeenth century.114 Evelyn mentioned visiting a curiosity shop called ‘Noah’s Ark’ in Paris in 1644, ‘where are to be sold all sorts of Curiositys, naturall & Artifcial’.115 It seems likely, given the activities of collectors such as Evelyn, that there would also have been some traders in London in the seventeenth century selling such objects, although as Wainwright noted there is very little surviving evidence of their existence.116 Traditionally seventeenth-century curiosity dealers sold a wide range of natural and artifcial curiosities, objects that would be of interest to natural philosophers and antiquarian collectors and would have comprised the exotic and the rare, objects gathered on trading and military expeditions, and from the realm of scientifc endeavour and antiquarian investigation.117 By the early part of the eighteenth century, dealers in curiosities had begun to make a more regular appearance in London. In 1710, for example, the early eighteenth-century German book collector and traveller Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach (1683–1734), whilst on a visit to London, recorded in his diary a visit to a dealer named Campe, trading in Charing Cross, ‘a sword cutler by trade, though he shows no signs of it, for he has now taken to dealing in ancient coins’.118 For much of the eighteenth century the curiosity trade mainly congregated within the boundaries of the City of London amongst the book and print sellers in and around the area surrounding St. Paul’s Cathedral.119 The dealers’ strategic location amongst the print sellers and book dealers demonstrates that the principal consumers of antiques and curiosities during this earlier period comprised the class of antiquarian collectors. Antiquarianism and the antiquarian economy were centred on the wider diffusion of knowledge of historical objects and ancient sites through the print and book trade, and it would be obvious therefore that the associated trade in historical objects would choose a location close to their main consumers. By the middle of the eighteenth century, as Wainwright has previously indicated, the so-called ‘Broker’s Row’ in Moorfelds was already a celebrated haunt of the antiquarian collectors.120 On the Continent, whilst it was more common for eighteenth-century Grand Tourists to acquire their classical antiquities through direct negotiation with agents involved in archaeological excavations, such as Thomas Jenkins (1722–1798) or James Byers (1734–1817), they could also acquire these objects in specialist consumer spaces such as curiosity shops.121 The emergence of the trade in antiques and curiosities that arose in the opening decades of the nineteenth century evolved out of these already well-established practices. However, the early nineteenth-century trade also developed through a complex patchwork of contemporary overlapping trades and commercial practices.122 Indeed, in his

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study of the nineteenth-century picture trade in Paris, Nicholas Green has observed that picture dealers also emerged from a series of related and intersecting trades such as picture cleaners, copyists, gilders and frame-makers in the same period.123 One of the problems of trying to assign the early nineteenth-century trade in antiques and curiosities distinctive status is complicated by the hybrid nature of trading activities in the period. Patricia Allerston, who studied the secondary markets for paintings in the seventeenth century, suggested that it is inherently diffcult to isolate dealers in specifc kinds of objects, such as art or antiques, from other traders and commercial practices in earlier periods.124 Allerston found a wide range of disparate traders engaged in the trade in ‘old paintings’ in the seventeenth century, including artists themselves, traders in household goods, merchants and even, she writes, the occasional barber.125 In the early nineteenth century the practice of trading in antiques and curiosities could be combined with some quite surprising trading activities. John Cuffe, for example, trading from 46 Strand, London, was listed in the records of the Sun Insurance Company in 1816 as ‘dealer in curiosities and straw hat maker’.126 James Shankey was listed as ‘curiosity dealer and East Indian china tea dealer’ in the trade directories in the 1830s.127 As indicated, the curiosity dealer Henry Abraham Davies, Isaac’s brother-in-law, emerged from the broader structures of the merchant economy itself and developed his trading activities, supplying curiosities alongside his business as general merchant wholesale supplier. Many traders whose activities intersected with the antique and curiosity trade continued to combine their initial trading activities with that of trading in antiques and curiosities. Samuel and Henry Pratt, one of the foremost dealers in ancient armour in the early nineteenth century, began as trunk, luggage and furniture manufacturers and retailers. Samuel’s son, Samuel Luke Pratt (1805–1878), who became the leading specialist in ancient armour and subsequently infamous for his production of ‘fake’ arms and armour, continued to operate the manufacturing and retailing business alongside antique and curiosity dealing activities throughout the middle decades of the nineteenth century.128 Other dealers combined their activities as dealers in antiques and curiosities with complementary trades and practices. The curiosity dealer James Dantzigger was also a ‘working jeweller’, combining his skills as an artisan with trading in antiques and curiosities during the 1830s.129 There were especially close synergies between the trade in antique and ancient furniture and that of the woodworking and furniture trade. John Webb (1799–1880), arguably one of the most important antique dealers of the nineteenth century, traded as a cabinetmaker and upholsterer for much of the period he worked as a dealer in antiques and curiosities. Many other dealers emerged from the furniture making and woodcarving communities, and several dealers continued to combine their role as traders in historical objects with that of assembling ‘ancient’ furniture made up of fragments of ancient woodwork and carvings. The famous woodcarver William Gibbs Rogers (1792–1875), a great admirer of the Dutch born British seventeenth-century woodcarver Grinling Gibbons (1648–1721), was also well known for trading in ancient carvings.130 James Nixon and Sons, who traded from Great Portland Street, were listed as ‘cabinet-makers’ in the trade directories but were also well known in the period for the supply of ‘ancient furniture’; the writer John Claudius Loudon wrote that Nixon had ‘curious collections’ of antiques and curiosities.131 The dealer in ‘ancient furniture’ Samuel Hanson also worked as a cabinetmaker; William Manser ‘dealer in ancient furniture’ was also a ‘chair jappanner’; James Hadnutt,

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‘carver and gilder’, also traded in ancient furniture. The cabinetmaker Wilkinson in Oxford Street, as the publications of Loudon have also indicated, was also a major supplier of ‘Elizabethan and Dutch carvings’.133 Even if a dealer was not a trained cabinetmaker or woodcarver, many dealers still chose to locate their shops within the clusters and networks of woodcarvers and furniture-makers. Such locations made them ideally placed to respond to evolving tastes and fashions for ‘ancient furniture’. Isaac, for example, regularly sub-contracted work for remodelling antique furniture and making-up ancient fragments into new and fashionable objects to cabinetmakers in and around Wardour Street, the location of his shop.134 Members of the early nineteenth-century picture trade also sold antiques and curiosities, including one of the most famous art dealers in the period, William Buchanan (1777–1864), whose purchases of antique furniture for the Lucy family at Charlecote Park in Warwickshire via the curiosity dealers Samuel Isaacs and John Swaby are well known.135 Henry Farrer (1798–1866), who was a close neighbour of Isaac, trading from 14 Wardour Street during the 1830s and 1840s, and one of the most well-known art dealers of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, was also a major dealer in antiques and curiosities.136 Farrer was an acknowledged expert on paintings; the artist William Powell Frith (1819–1909) commented that Farrer knew ‘so much about old masters that his opinion is constantly asked, and paid for, and considered conclusive’.137 His business was also recommended by the art historian and director of the Berlin Museum, Gustav Waagen (1794–1868), in Treasures of Art in Great Britain (1854).138 Farrer was also one of the leading dealers in ‘antique furniture’ as well as a wide range of antiques and curiosities, counting many of the most signifcant private and public collections in the period among his customers.139 And just as picture dealers sold antiques and curiosities, antique and curiosity dealers also traded in paintings when the opportunities arose. Isaac made regular attempts to access these consumer markets early in his career as a dealer, and the waste book records several transactions involving paintings in the mid-1820s.140 His ambitions as an art dealer appear to have expanded by the late 1820s, and he had the confdence to purchase 175 paintings, together with a large number of carved picture frames, on one of his buying trips to Germany, sending them back to England.141 However, the discrete knowledge and collector networks required for the proftable acquisition and sale of paintings ultimately led to Isaac to concentrate on trading in antiques and curiosities rather than paintings. Indeed by 1833 Isaac wrote to his wife Sarah that he had managed to get out of a deal to buy some paintings from the dealer Wimpfen in Germany, lamenting in the letter: ‘the fact is we cannot sell any picture’.142 The overlapping trading practices of the picture trade and the evolving antique and curiosity trade are a further demonstration of the new and diverse audiences involved in the consumption of antiques and curiosities in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. 132

Antique and curiosity dealers, ‘brokers’ and the second-hand trade One of the key aspects in the history of the antique and curiosity trade is the continued relationship between antique and curiosity dealers and the second-hand trade. The trade in second-hand goods is itself a highly signifcant social and cultural activity and a rich resource for study, involving, as it does, complex exchange systems, including gift and loan as well as through the more overtly commercial networks

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of dealers, auctions and private sales. Evelyn Welch has suggested that the recirculation of goods, from clothes and linen to books and household effects, must have taken place in all societies and all periods.143 Despite the ubiquity of these practices and the rich patterns of consumer behaviour in the recycling and second-hand good markets in all historical periods, the history of second-hand markets has only recently been receiving concentrated scholarly attention. There has, for example, been much work on the history of second-hand consumer culture and second-hand markets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the work of historians such as Jon Stobart and Ilja van Damme.144 Contemporary second-hand cultures and the development of key notions such as ‘vintage’ and ‘retro’ have also provided a rich seam for research.145 The innovative work by the historian Beverley Lemire in particular has unpicked the signifcance of second-hand clothing markets in the history of consumerism.146 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the markets for second-hand goods were much more important than they are now, particularly the markets for clothing, which for the lower classes often comprised the cast-offs of the wealthy. The ‘rag-trade’, as the name suggests, involved a wide series of processes and economic activity as clothing materials were fragmented, reused and recycled. It is perhaps not surprising, given the close association between these aspects of the second-hand trade and the antique and curiosity trade, that John Coleman Isaac was initially recorded as a ‘clothes salesman’ in insurance records in 1817, and trained as a tailor, like his father before him, before he took up dealing in antiques and curiosities.147 When he entered the business in the mid-1820s Isaac appears to have initially continued to trade in second-hand goods alongside his more discrete trading activities as a dealer in curiosities. The Isaac waste book records, for example, a large quantity of what was obviously ordinary household furniture that Isaac sold to his fellow ‘curiosity dealer’ Nathanial Nathan in March 1828, including ‘2 chests of drawers, 2 beds, bolsters & pillows, mattresses & straw pallias, 4 blankets … a sofa, a chimney glass, 2 old carpets’ for ‘£29.7.0’.148 Many other curiosity dealers did the same. When asked about his trade during a court case heard at the Old Bailey on 2nd February 1835, the curiosity dealer John Manning, then trading at 23 Great Saint Andrew Street, Seven Dails, London, replied: ‘I am a general dealer in curiosities, and glass, and clothes, and anything that is useful’.149 The shop of William Schofeld, trading as a ‘furniture broker’ at 36 Holywell Street, London, in the 1840s, directs further attention to contiguity of the trade in antiques and curiosities and the trade in second-hand goods during the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Schofeld’s shop, illustrated in a watercolour by J. W. Archer in 1847 (see Figure 3.5), illustrates the types of second-hand objects that a ‘furniture broker’ sold in the period. Unlike the historical objects that comprised the more discrete trading activities of antique and curiosity dealers the objects in Schofeld’s shop can be considered more frmly within the ambit of the second-hand trade. The watercolour illustrates a jumble of furniture discarded by its owners, who deemed it either unfashionable or beyond practical utility. To the left of the doorway is a mahogany wine cellarette dating from the 1790s, not yet a fashionable antique, and several other domestic and utilitarian objects, some contemporary, others 20 or 30 years old at the time, are scattered on the pavement. Whilst there is no doubt that dealers like Schofeld would have sold antiques and curiosities when they had the opportunity, it is clear from the illustration that Schofeld was a dealer in second-hand goods. Indeed, the Isaac waste book regularly records the purchase of ‘curiosities’ from ‘furniture brokers’ such as Schofeld, including ‘a small quantity of carved woodwork’

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Figure 3.5 The shop of William Schofeld, ‘Furniture Dealer’ 36 Holywell Street, London (1847). ‘Old Entrance to Lyon’s Inn, Holywell Street, Strand, April 1847’, J.W. Archer, from Drawings of Buildings in London and the Environs, vol.10–4. Watercolour. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

purchased in 1832 from a ‘Mr Stockley’, also trading, as it happens, from Holywell Street.150 Whilst ‘brokers’ such as William Schofeld remained at the margins of the more discrete trade in antiques and curiosities their activities illustrate the continuing relationships between the more specialised practices undertaken by dealers such as Isaac and the second-hand trade. The descriptive classifcation of ‘broking’ has often been used by historians to describe the early nineteenth-century antique and curiosity trade.151 A ‘broker’ in the eighteenth century was, according to Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), ‘one who deals in second-hand goods’, a classifcation that was still current in early nineteenth-century editions of the Dictionary.152 Indeed, the term ‘broker’ was frequently used by collectors, writers and the trade itself during the early nineteenth century. The writer Sir Walter Scott, a keen collector of curiosities, employed the term when writing to his friend, the actor-manager Daniel Terry, in 1822: ‘I would to Heaven I could take a cruize with you through the brokers, which would be the pleasantest affair’.153 Here though perhaps Scott used the term ironically, playfully underplaying the signifcance of the discrete expertise of the many high-profle dealers that he counted as regular suppliers – Scott was a consistent customer of the leading Wardour Street curiosity dealer John Swaby for example. However, by the 1820s and 1830s, as the antique and curiosity trade expanded, many dealers appear to have been sensitive to the negative

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cultural values of the term ‘broker’, perhaps because of their desire to draw a distinction between the marginal trading activities of broking and the more discrete practices of antique and curiosity dealing. By the 1830s, when Isaac had frmly established himself as one of the leading antique and curiosity dealers in London, he was keen to draw a line between his activities as a curiosity dealer and the practices of a secondhand dealer. For example, in a letter that Isaac sent from Germany to his wife Sarah in March 1833 he mentioned the kinds of objects he has been able to purchase and send back to England, commenting, ‘I think if Mr Swaby sees the things this time, what I have bought, he then will say that it is nothing but old broking, but the fact is, it is the only thing that I am likely to bring out my expenses’.154 Isaac may indulge in ‘old broking’ out of economic necessity, but his comments indicate he perceives the buying and selling of socially and culturally signifcant objects such as antique and curiosities a distinctive activity. A similar pattern of distinction was also developing on the Continent, where in late eighteenth-century Venice, for example, the Guild registers for the second-hand traders began to make distinctions between dealers in ‘anticaglie’ (antique stuff) and dealers in second-hand goods in their registers.155 The early nineteenth-century antique and curiosity dealing emerging as a conspicuous trade is evident in the increasing levels of distinctiveness in the marketing strategies adopted by the trade and the production of characteristic business ephemera in the period. Horatio Rodd, for example, an antique and curiosity dealer trading in Great Newport Street in London in the second quarter of the nineteenth century was well known for producing elaborate catalogues of his stock during the period 1820s to 1840s.156 John Coleman Isaac produced a trade card, probably in the early 1830s, proclaiming his ‘profession’ as ‘Importer of Dresden China & Curiosities’.157 Many other dealers did the same, including William Neate, listed as ‘curiosity dealer’ at Sweetings Alley in the 1820s and 1830s158 (see Figure 3.6) Some dealers also adopted the practice of the high-class furniture trade and attached labels to the furniture that they sold; for example a table supplied in 1837 to the Lucy family at Charlecote Park, Warwickshire, by the dealer James Robinson, of Oxford Street and Rathbone Place, bears a label, ‘Robinson … Decorater and Furnisher a l’Antique’.159 However, the practices of antique and curiosity dealing as a distinctive trade becomes more problematic when we attempt to assign these practices as signifying the emergence of a specialised profession. In the realm of trading in ‘antiques’ it was not until the early twentieth century that we begin to see the antiques trade establish professional bodies.160 Yet the suggestion that the antique trade only became recognised as such in the twentieth century denies the earlier trade in historical objects any distinctive status. It is true to say that ‘professional’ is a contested idea, as well as a contentious and ideologically signifcant classifcation. As several writers have suggested, the concept of professionals and professionalisation is one of the defning characteristics of industrial societies, with their increasing stratifcation and hierarchies of professional occupations.161 There have been advocates of the positive, emancipatory possibilities of the professional class, but also those who see ‘professionalism’ as leading not to emancipation but to a replacement of one system of control by another.162 However, even in its broadest defnition, i.e. a loosely assembled body of individuals who earn a living from habitual employment (in this case selling antiques and curiosities), many of the dealers trading in the early nineteenth century ft this classifcation. Moreover, if we take the defnition of professional in a narrower sense, i.e. a clearly defned body with socially and culturally recognised skills or knowledge and, most

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Figure 3.6 Trade card of William Neate, c.1825–1835. © Bodleian Library, John Johnson Collection.

importantly, legitimised in the public sphere through a signifcant endorsement, then by the second quarter of the nineteenth century, antique and curiosity dealers appear to have begun to conform to a notion of ‘professionalism’. For example, we can note that John Coleman Isaac was a member of the Dealers-in-the-Fine-Arts Provident Institution (also known as The Virtuoso Provident Fund), a legal and commercial body that was established in 1842.163 In the 1840s ‘Dealers-in-the-Fine-Arts’ incorporated traders selling a wide range of by now familiar historical material, as a letter dated 1846 from the Institution to John Coleman Isaac indicates: ‘stained glass, china, shells, coins, carvings, enamels, fossils’ and the more obvious categories of ‘paintings and drawings’164 (see Figure 3.7). The dealer Horatio Rodd was the frst secretary of the Institution, which was established for the assistance of members and their wives and children. Consisting of masters in the above trade who shall have kept shop, showroom or gallery, principally for the sale of works of art, for three years; assistants of three years standing.165 To be sure, the ‘Dealers-in-the-Fine-Arts’ is perhaps more properly aligned with the Guild systems of Early Modern Europe than with any evolving ‘professional’ bodies at the time such as the Institution of Civil Engineers, established 1818 (now the ICE), or the Institute of British Architects established in 1834 (now the RIBA). The language of

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Figure 3.7 Printed invitation letter, DEALERS-IN-THE-FINE-ARTS’ Provident Institution, 27th May 1846. AJ-53-467, Hartley Library, University of Southampton. © Hartley Library, University of Southampton.

the foundation statement, referring to ‘masters’, clearly demonstrates that genealogy. Indeed, its stated purpose, ‘for the assistance of members and their wives and children’, mirrors one of the primary purposes of the Guild structures. However, to place a further emphasis on the distinctiveness of the ‘Dealers-in-the-Fine-Arts’, it is useful to note that the ‘brokers’ also had their own charitable body, the Furniture Brokers Benevolent Institution, established in 1839, with the ‘furniture broker’, James Winter, 101 Wardour Street, as Treasurer and Hon. Secretary.166

Antique dealers and ‘antiques’ Whilst the categories of ‘antique dealer’ and ‘dealer in antiques’ were much more commonly used in the Trade Directories after 1900, as scholars such as Stefan Muthesius have suggested, it is important to note that such categories began to appear in trade directories with increasing regularity in the 1840s, much earlier than is generally thought.167 For example, Charles Lush is listed as an ‘antique dealer’ in London in Webster’s Royal Red Book as early as 1849. Indeed, by the 1860s the terms ‘dealer in antiques’ and ‘antique dealer’ were regularly adopted in the trade directories: for example, ‘T. Thornton, Dealer in Antiques ... Bristol’, Slater’s Directory (1868); ‘Stubbs, Dealer in Antiques … Malton, North Yorkshire’ (1879); and ‘W. H. Campbell, antique

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dealer … York’, Stevens Directory for York (1885). In the broader context of the trade in historical objects over the course of the nineteenth century it is also certainly true that there was a gradual drift in the conventional usage of the term ‘antique’ from an adjective to a noun – from, for example, the descriptive, ‘antique furniture’, to the general collective noun, ‘antiques’. But the increasing application of the classifcation ‘antique’ in the opening decades of the nineteenth century to a more varied and more extensive range of historical objects than had previously been the case is something that merits attention. Indeed, attention to the specifc descriptive terminology adopted by the antique and curiosity trade during the early nineteenth century also suggests some signifcant shifts in contemporary meaning. If we take, for example, two of the key descriptions in the trade directories, ‘Antique Furniture Dealer’ and ‘Ancient Furniture Dealer’, both commonly adopted throughout the opening decades of the nineteenth century. ‘Antique’ and ‘ancient’ had a broad defnition of meaning and application and were used interchangeably throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as an appropriate term for objects dating from the Roman and Greek Classical past as well as for objects dating from historical periods up to the late mediaeval period. In the eighteenth century, however, there were attempts to frame the defnitions of the terms ‘antique’ and ‘ancient’ and to restrict such terms to more precise chronological meaning. The historian Jacques Le Goff has directed attention to such an attempt in the eighteenth century in France. Le Goff writes: In his Historical Dictionary of Old French La Curne de Saint-Palaye (d.1781) put antique, ancient and old in a curious hierarchical order: “Antique was above ancient, and ancient above old: to be antique something must have existed more than one thousand years ago; to be ancient, more than two hundred years ago; to be old, more than a hundred years ago.168 By the mid-1830s, when the antique and curiosity trade had begun to adopt the term ‘ancient’ more frequently, there were also attempts to limit the chronological parameters for the designation. The architect and antiquary Thomas Frederick Hunt (1791–1831), in the preface to his publication Exemplars of Tudor Architecture … and Furniture (1830), wrote: ‘It may be observed that I have, throughout, used the term ‘ancient’ as applied to a period not more remote than three centuries’.169 It is clear that Hunt felt that he needed to qualify his defnition of the term ‘ancient’ in order to avoid confusion in his readership, who were perhaps more used to ‘ancient’ being applied to a much more distant (Roman and Greek) time period. Hunt’s proscription also allowed historical material from the more recent past to be granted a signifcant semantic endorsement and coincided with the increasing numbers of ‘ancient furniture dealers’ in the 1830s. ‘Antique’ is, of course, more than a merely oblique chronological classifcation and was a familiar term employed within erudite collecting cultures, applied to objects of signifcant cultural and social value, such as Classical Roman and Greek sculptures, in the eighteenth century. The term was therefore also intimately connected to notions of connoisseurship and taste. It is signifcant, therefore, that by the 1820s the term ‘antique’ was being applied to historical objects of much more recent historical periods. In 1824, for example, one of the catalogues produced by the dealer Horatio Rodd included a description of ‘a set of six Antique High Back Chairs, very fnely

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carved in walnut-tree, perfect but want new seats … £7.7s’.170 They were not illustrated in Rodd’s 1824 catalogue, but fortunately we do have an illustration of these chairs, as they were sold by Rodd in the same year, and for the seven guineas advertised, to George Weare Braikenridge.171 Braikenridge installed the chairs in the lodge to Broomwell House, his home in Brislington, near Bristol, where they were sketched by the amateur artist W.H. Bartlett (1809–1854) (see Figure 3.8). The chairs sketched so precisely by Bartlett date from c.1700 and, as key antiquarian texts such as Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836) demonstrated, such material was being dated much more accurately by the opening decades of the nineteenth century. We can certainly assume that Rodd and Braikenridge would have been aware that the chairs were only 120 or so years old when they were sold as ‘antique’. Indeed, the category ‘antique’ was more consistently applied to a wide range of material from the more recent past in the period. At the auction sale of the contents of Wanstead House in 1822, for example, the old furniture and effects were given an extra gloss of cultural signifcance and economic value by being valorised as ‘antique’; ‘an Antique Parisian Marquetry Rotary Work Table’ (lot 63, 3rd day of auction); ‘A Curious Antique Square Lady’s Work Box’ (lot 34, 4th day of auction); ‘Two Very Valuable Antique Oriental Ebony Panelled Frame Chairs’ (lot 13, 16th day of auction).172 In 1834 the dealer ‘E. Terry’ sold Charles Winn (1795–1874) of Nostell

Figure 3.8 Interior of Broomwell House Lodge, Bristol – (c.1825), W.H. Bartlett (1809–1854), pencil and watercolour. Museum and Art Gallery, Bristol. © Bristol’s Museums, Galleries & Archives.

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Priory, near Wakefeld, ‘sundry pieces of antique oak furniture’ for the sum of £15.173 In 1839 the collector Ralph Bernal also used the descriptive term ‘antique’ when listing objects that he wished Isaac to set aside for him with a view to purchase; Bernal wrote, ‘I shall be obliged to you to let me know when your importations arrive, [especially] the antique candlestick [and] the antique chased silver salt cellar’.174 And in 1840 the writer Charles Dickens (1812–1870), when considering some illustrations for the publication of his novel The Old Curiosity Shop, directed the artist George Cattermole (1800–1868) to make ‘a little sketch for a woodcut … the subject of an old quaint room, with antique furniture’.175 One can also detect instances when ‘antique’ was used to denote a discrete category of objects that illustrates a shift in the grammatical use of the word, from adjective to noun. In 1854, for example, at a court case heard at The Old Bailey in London, when questioned about the high value (£2.0.0.) assigned to a ‘silver tobacco box’ stolen from his home, the witness George Webster, responded its high value was because ‘it was an antique’.176 The adoption of the descriptive word ‘antique’ for such objects reinforces associations with an already well-established and distinctive frame of social and cultural meaning – the objects were signifers of ‘taste’ and erudition, and of signifcant social, cultural and economic value. Leon Rosenstein is one of the few scholars that have subjected the notion of ‘antique’ to rigorous critical study.177 Rosenstein’s wide-ranging discussions are full of insightful observations on the uses, categorisations and the historical contexts for the notion of ‘antique’. His work provides a fascinating overview of the cultural genealogy of the idea of ‘antique’ from the Ancient Worlds of Greece and Rome to the interest in objects such as ‘antique furniture’ in the late twentieth century. As a philosopher, Rosenstein was keen to establish a defnition for an ‘antique’ and suggests: An antique is a primarily handcrafted object of rarity and beauty that, by means of its associated provenance and its agedness as recognized by means of its style and material endurance, has the capacity to generate and preserve for us the image of a world now past.178 Rosenstein’s defnition is framed by current cultural contexts, and may seem a little proscriptive, especially when one considers the wide range of objects that are now circulated and exchanged within the ambit of the contemporary antique trade. Indeed, ‘antiques’, as a category of objects, is a much more complex and multifaceted term than is generally thought. Objects do not start off as ‘antiques’ of course; antiques are constantly evolving with the passage of time. The category of objects that comprise antiques is also constantly shifting and is continuously reframed by contemporary value structures. Even if we accept that antiques must be of a specifc degree of age, varying degrees of oldness have been used to defne antiques at different times. In the eighteenth century, as we have seen, an antique was an object from the Ancient Classical World of Rome and Greece – at that time at least 1500 years old. The term ‘antique’ as it is currently employed in the UK has a very specifc defnition, enshrined in the Government legislation on import tax and custom duty. ‘Antique’ in this proscribed defnition ‘are goods manufactured or produced … more than 100 years before the date of importation’.179 This defnition was established in the USA by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which exempted objects from import duty made before 1830, and thus defned as at least 100 years old at the time.180 The 100-year rule was reinforced in 1966 when the USA introduced a new tariff law that specifcally

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stipulated that the defnition of antiques should be any objects ‘made prior to 100 years before the date of entry’ into the USA. Since that time the ‘100-year rule’ has been generally adopted by the antiques trade both in the USA and in Britain. However, whilst a widely accepted defnition of an antique the 100-year rule has not been always applied universally. For example, the Grosvenor House Antiques Fair, the premier antiques fair in the UK, established in 1934 and which continued until 2009, retained the defnition of an antique as objects ‘made prior to 1830’ in their antique fairs until 1979. The defnition of an antique in this context was proscribed by the idea that industrial production diminished the handmade quality of objects and the general lack of interest in objects from the Victorian period by leading members of the antique trade at the time. In the 1950s, new export licensing in Britain defned an antique as ‘any article manufactured 75 years ago, or more’ (which then meant objects that were produced prior to the 1870s). In the same period, the British Antique Dealers’ Association would only issue certifcates of authenticity for antiques that were over 100 years old (or objects that were produced prior to 1850). But antiques, as previously suggested, are not solely defned by their oldness and are much more than a dry, legally proscribed defnition. Antiques have associations with wealth, especially hereditary wealth, and are intimately bound up with notions of social identity and cultural competence. In this sense, the notion of ‘antiques’ must always be situated within broader felds of social and cultural meaning. However, the application of the term ‘antique’ to an increasing range of historical material during the opening decades of the nineteenth century is worthy of note.

Classifying the trade A key piece of evidence for the increasing distinctiveness of the antique and curiosity trade in the opening decades of the nineteenth century is the categories and classifcations adopted by British Trade and Post Offce Directories. It is important, however, to acknowledge the limitations of relying on the evidence deployed in the trade directories as a tool for reading the changing practices of the trade in historical objects. Naming is an unstable cultural register and many descriptive terms adopted by the trade were used interchangeably in the period. Notwithstanding the purpose of the trade directories to provide contemporary consumers with information on the specifc locations and specialised trading activities of traders and professions, and that there must be a contemporary social logic in the way that the terminology was deployed, one still needs to be sensitive to drawing the terminology too closely into present day cultural meaning. Furthermore, with respect to the detail of the information that the trade directories contain, it is also well known that they are notorious for their mistakes and inaccuracies, particularly in the period up to the 1850s.181 But even so, there can be little doubt that the trade directories provide us with concrete evidence that the trade in historical objects began to take on a distinctive form in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. The directories also provide clear evidence of the rapid expansion in the numbers of individuals involved in the trade in antiques and curiosities in the period. Further attention to the classifcatory structures of the trade directories also provides evidence of the increasingly diverse and complex structure of the trade in historical objects and demonstrates that the trade was becoming increasingly more specialised. This is revealed by the increasingly sophisticated nomenclature adopted by the trade during the opening decades of the nineteenth century.

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One of the frst things to note is that despite the ubiquity of the term ‘curiosities’ in eighteenth-century culture more generally, the trade directories of the late eighteenth century rarely appear to have listed ‘curiosity dealers’ as a specifc trading activity. By 1805, however, there appear more frequent references to ‘curiosity shop’ in the London Directories.182 One of the earliest references to ‘dealer in curiosities’ in the directories is that of the dealer Thomas Gwenapp, who appears under this classifcation in 1808.183 Indeed, the changing descriptions that Gwenapp assigns himself in subsequent annual directories indicate a desire to present his trading activities as progressively more distinctive. By 1810 Gwenapp described himself as both dealer in ‘old china’ and ‘Antique Repository,’ but by the eighteen-teens he is listed as ‘dealer in ancient armour’, a specialisation for which he became most well known in the period. These changes also signal Gwenapp’s attempts to present a more nuanced and discrete expertise within the expanding market for historical objects. More generally, the early nineteenth-century antique and curiosity trade appears to have begun to adopt more elaborate descriptive terms for their business operations during the opening decades of the nineteenth century, which in turn also refected the evolving markets. As well as the by then ubiquitous ‘curiosity dealer’ in the directories, we see such descriptions as ‘Dealer in Antiquarian Curiosities’ (Robert Heslop, Beech Lane, 1817); ‘Dealer in Antiquities’ (John Swaby, Wardour Street, 1820); ‘Importer of Foreign Curiosities’ (Nathanial Nathan, Wardour Street, 1829); ‘Antique Furniture Dealer’ (Moses Kasner, Wardour Street, 1832); ‘Foreign China and Antique Furniture Warehouse’ (E.H. Baldock, Hanway Street, 1832); and ‘Ancient Furniture Dealer’ (Hadnutt, Wardour Street, 1838). The most frequently adopted descriptive categories during the opening decades of the nineteenth century were ‘Antique Furniture Dealer’ and ‘Ancient Furniture Dealer’, which in turn refected the expanding market for such material.184 Specialist categories of antique and curiosity dealers also began to emerge by the 1830s and 1840s. John Coleman Isaac was listed as ‘Importer of Dresden China and Curiosities’ by 1838, but we also fnd ‘Dealer in Ancient Coins’ (T. Whelan, The Strand, 1839); ‘Importer of Ancient Furniture and Armour’ (Samuel Pratt, New Bond Street, 1840), and ‘Antique Lace Warehouse’ (Jane Clarke, Regent Street, 1840) – an important early specialisation established by Jane Clarke (c.1794–1859).185 There was even, as we have seen, a ‘Furnisher a l’antique’ (James Robinson, Oxford Street, 1837), an illustration that the market for antiques and curiosities was expanding far beyond antiquarian collecting interests and was also becoming a key part of fashionable furnishing and decoration in the period. Perhaps more signifcantly, from the 1820s the trade directories began to group antique and curiosity dealers under separate and distinctive category headings. These developments are related to the increasing degree of classifcation of the ‘trades’ and ‘professions’ within the trade directories in the period. The editors of the new system of classifcation adopted in Johnstone’s London and Commercial Guide, 1818, for example, was based on this new and ‘original and scientifc classifcation’.186 Directories begin to cluster dealers together under group headings such as ‘Ancient Furniture Importers’, ‘Curiosity Dealers’, ‘Antique Furniture Dealers’ and ‘Antique Furniture & China Dealers’. Crucially, by the 1820s the directories also began to isolate the ‘furniture brokers’ from ‘brokers’ as discrete classifcations, indicating that the division between the second-hand trade and the antique and curiosity trade was becoming more established and that the emerging antique and curiosity trade was taking on a distinctive and recognisable formation.

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Beyond the use of these descriptive classifcations in the directories there were also a host of related terms used to categorise antique and curiosity dealers during the early nineteenth century. The term ‘nicknackitarian’ appears to have been coined in 1824 by the writer and satirist William Hone (1780–1842) as a synonym for ‘curiosity dealer’.187 Hone did not invent the concept underpinning his neologism; the word ‘knick-knack’, meaning ‘any pleasing trife of furniture, dress or food’, was already in common use by the late seventeenth century.188 Closely related to the term ‘knickknack’ are the nineteenth-century (and especially French) terms of ‘bibelot’ and ‘brica-brac’. Both terms are more properly associated with later nineteenth century, often derogatory and pejorative, descriptions of antiques and curiosities. Indeed, in Michael Hall’s introduction to Baron Ferdinand Rothschild’s 1897 memoir of his collecting activities, Bric-a-Brac, Hall rightly suggests that Rothschild used the term ‘partly as a joke’.189 By 1879 the writer Frederic Vors, in Bibelots and Curios, provided defnitions of such terms: ‘bibelot’, he writes, was ‘a French word which is the equivalent of the English “thing”, but has of late years been applied to objects worthy of collection’; ‘bric-a-brac’, ‘derived from “de brie et de broc” [from hither and thither] is used to express a collection of odds and ends, similar to the stock of a second-hand dealer’.190 ‘Bric-a-brac dealer’ does not appear in the British trade directories in the early nineteenth century, but the category ‘bric-a-brac dealer’ begins to appear, albeit very infrequently, in the British trade directories by the end of the nineteenth century. No doubt its limited appearance was a result of the continued associations with the second-hand trade and the negative cultural connotations of the term as suggested in the text by Frederic Vors. However, it is clear from the evidence presented in the nineteenth-century Trade and Post Offce Directories there was an increasing degree of specialisation and diversifcation within the trade in historical objects. The evolving nomenclature of the directories inevitably refect the marketing practices and the evolving patterns of consumption in the period, but these changes in terminology are also indicative of the desire by the dealers to assign distinctive cultural value to their respective activities and draw our attention to the increasing social and cultural signifcance of the antique and curiosity trade in the period.

Notes 1 Kelly’s Directories continued to list Davies & Co as ‘Merchants’ as late as 1829. 2 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467, entry dated ‘October 26th 1815’, Paid Mr [?] for glazing 42 Gross pocket Looking glasses … £4.4.0. 3 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467, entries dated ‘August 30th 1817’, … Forwarded Mr John Hawkes one case containing 49 Gross Black Lead Pencils, 35 Doz. boxes Leaden Toys; ‘September 4th 1817’ … Bought of William Rees Thomas, broker to the East India Company, 34 Bags of East India Rice’. 4 See Levy and Moss (2002), p. 101. 5 The Morning Chronicle, (22nd May 1822), p. 1. 6 The Times, (22nd June 1822), p. 1. 7 See, for example, Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.269; letter addressed to ‘Miss Sarah Davies’ dated ‘25th March 1822’ from John Dymoke (d.1873) of Scrivelsby Court, Horncastle, Lincolnshire, regarding some ‘old stained glass’. 8 Levy and Moss (2002), p. 97–8. 9 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467, entry dated ‘1st April 1829’. 10 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.379, letter dated ‘8th October 1838’.

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11 See for example, entries in the ‘Waste Book’: ‘October 29th 1833 – £400 Government Stock’; August 7th 1837 – £1000 Government Stock’, Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467. See also a letter (undated but probably late 1850s) to Isaac from ‘Mr George Michelmore(?), offering the sale of property, following an advertisement for ‘real estate’ that Isaac had placed in the newspapers, Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.287. 12 Levy and Moss state that 30 Gordon Square was renumbered to 20 sometime around 1875; Levy and Moss (2002), p. 104. 13 See Levy and Moss (2002), p. 104. 14 Hartley Library MS139/AJ53 No.104; Isaac was very wealthy; by modern standards he was a multi-millionaire; his estate converts to a ‘real wealth’ value of £2,498,000; see www.measuringworth.com. 15 Hartley Library MS139/AJ53 No.104; see also Levy and Moss (2002), p. 99 and p. 104. 16 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467, ‘Waste Book’. See also Westgarth (2009). 17 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467. 18 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467. 19 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467. 20 For a full account of the Blackett family and the rebuilding of Matfen Hall see A.W. Purdue, The Ship That Came Home: The Story of a Northern Dynasty (London, Third Millennium, 2004). Matfen Hall is at present a Country House hotel. 21 Purdue (2004), p. 119. The dealer John Webb (1799–1880) was in partnership with Joseph Cragg from c.1825 until c.1830. See Westgarth (2009). 22 See, for example, F.M.L. Thomspon, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963); David Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy, Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 10–14. 23 Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival (London, Phiadon, 1999), p. 187. 24 Meyrick and Shaw (1836), p. 26. 25 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53. No.193, letter dated 20th November 1839. 26 See also Levy (2007) on the letter exchanges between Levy and Bernal. 27 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53. No.136, letter dated 16th October 1835. 28 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53. No.136. 29 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53. No.136. 30 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53. No.145, letter dated 14th September 1838. Underlining in original. 31 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53. Add 1, No.30,letter dated 15th May 1835. 32 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53. No.31, letter dated ‘22nd May 1835’. Underlining in original. 33 Balzac (1847), p. 52. 34 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.30, letter dated ‘15th May 1835’. 35 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.62, letter dated ‘22nd March 1844’. 36 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.49, letter dated ‘5th September 1841’. 37 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.49. 38 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.61, letter dated ‘13th April 1844’. The Oberndörffer dynasty of dealers became leading specialists in antique coins and medals; the family business was established by Nathan Abraham Oberndörffer (1760–1829), a jeweller in Ansbach and continued by his sons Samson Oberndörffer (1791–1866) and Joseph Oberndörffer (1793–1866); the member of the family that Isaac writes about was either Maier Oberndörffer (1801–1849) or his brother Joel Nathan Oberndörffer (1799–1863), who both operated branches of the business in Munich during the period between the 1820s and 1850s. It is unlikely that Isaac was correct in his assertion that the Oberndörffer business ceased completely in trading in curiosities as the family business continued, expanding with coin-dealing branches in Vienna and Paris by the 1870s. See Hadrien J. Rambach, ‘Collecting Coins in Nineteenth-Century Germany’, in Stefan Krmnicek and Henner Hardt (Eds.), A Collection in Context, Kommentierte Edition der Briefe und Dokumente Sammlung Dr. Karl von Schäffer (Tübingen, Tübingen University Press, 2017); I am very grateful to Hadrien Rambach for sharing his research with me. 39 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.64, letter dated ‘2nd April 1844’.

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40 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.142, letter dated ‘7th September 1838’. 41 Raphaelware and ‘Romanware’ were names given to ffteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian maiolica in the nineteenth century. 42 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53, Add 1, No.83, letter dated ‘4th September 1855’. For more information on Riatti and Tironi; see Westgarth (2009). 43 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.97, letter dated ‘25th September 1857’; underline in original. 44 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.98, letter dated ‘1st October 1857’. 45 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.98 46 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.98. 47 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.98. 48 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53, No.467, passim. 49 The Morning Chronicle, (April 11th 1833), p. 1. 50 See for example, Haskell (1976), introduction; Wainwright (1989), p. 46, p. 292; MacGregor (1997), pp. 7–9; see also Tracey (2001), whose research focuses entirely on the importation of church furnishings and woodwork, and who quite rightly cautions against an oversimplifcation of the French Revolution as the only catalyst for such ‘traffc’; Tracey (2001), p. 39. 51 See Bernard Rackham, ‘English Importations of Foreign Stained Glass in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Journal of the British Society of Master Glass Painters, vol.II, no.2, (October 19270, pp. 86–94; Jean Lafond, ‘The Traffc in Old Stained Glass from Abroad during the 18th and 19th Centuries in England’, Journal of the British Society of Master Glass Painters, vol.XIV, no.1, (1964), pp. 58–67; Michael Archer, ‘Monmorency’s Sword’ from Écouen’, The Burlington Magazine, vol.29, no.1010, (May 1987), pp. 298–303; Mary B. Shepard, ‘“Our Fine Gothic Magnifcence”: The Nineteenth-Century Chapel at Costessey Hall (Norfolk) and Its Medieval Glazing’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol.54, no.2, (June 1995), pp. 186–207; See also Wainwright (1989), p. 66. 52 See for example, Turpin (2002), pp. 178–9. 53 See Wainwright (1898), pp. 55–6. 54 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.6, letter dated ‘20th April 1832’. According to Sarah Isaac, van Minden was intending to hold another auction sale of imported stock in 1833; ‘I am told that van Minden is home and has got 30 cases of goods at the Custom House and I suppose he will have a sale again’, Hartley Library MS139/AJ53/15, letter dated ‘29th March 1833’. Van Minden is recorded as a curiosity dealer at 31 Rue Saint Onge, Paris, in the 1830s; see Westgarth (2009). 55 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467, ‘waste book’, 1st entry recorded ‘April 23rd 1815’, ‘Paid Messrs Rothschild & Co for a check upon their house at Frankfort am for…£10’. 56 ‘J. & R. McCracken, shippers…’, printed list of Duties (1846). Hartley Library MS139/ AJ53 No.468. 57 Hartley Library MS139/AJ53 No.467, entry dated ‘November 21st 1834’. 58 Hartley Library MS139/AJ53 No.467, entry dated ‘December 26th 1834’. 59 Hartley Library MS139/AJ53 No.467, passim. 60 Letters dating from late 1857 indicate that Isaac was still undertaking Continental buying trips at this date; Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53. 61 In a letter dated 3rd October 1838, the collector Ralph Bernal requested to know, ‘is Mr Hertz still abroad? And is Mr Farrer returned?’; Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.151. And in another letter dated 4th November 1838 Bernal asks, ‘is Mr Baldock returned?’ MS139/AJ53 No.161. 62 ‘There has arrived here Four picture dealers from London, one has a shop in Wardour Street….’ MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.69, letter dated ‘9th May 1844’, sent from Venice. 63 MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.102, letter dated ‘11th October 1857’; Isaac wrote, ‘Yesterday Mr & Mrs Webb call’d on me … He had been to see Mr Zen & bought Four Bottles with handles, which he wished me to send home’. Zen was a dealer trading in Venice in the 1840s and 1850s; see Westgarth (2009). 64 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.3, letter dated ‘16th March 1833’. 65 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.11, letter dated ‘4th March 1833’. 66 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.11, letter dated ‘4th March 1833’.

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90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

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Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.40, letter dated ‘19th November 1836’. Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.40. Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.192, letter dated ‘16th November 1839’. See, for example, Wainwright (1989), pp. 56–7, and Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival (London, Phiadon Press, 1999), pp. 270–77. Alphonse Didron, Annales Archéolgiques (Paris, 1844); see Myles, (1996), p. 44–5. For a useful summary of the development of cultural property legislation in Italy see L. Degrassi, Italian Cultural Heritage: Laws & Rights (Torino, Giapichelli, 2012), pp. 1–10. Degrassi (2012), p. 3. Raikes (volume II), p. 307, entry dated ‘Tuesday 11th September 1838’. Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53/161 No.57, letter dated ‘4th November 1840’; underlining in original. Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.50, letter dated ‘12th October 1841’. William Lake Price, lithographed by Joseph Nash, Interiors and Exteriors in Venice (London, T. Maclean, 1843), introduction, unpaginated. See for example, Elizabeth Mavor, The Ladies of Llangollen (1971) (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973). See Description of Browsholme Hall… (London, S. Gosnell, 1815). John Cole, The Scarborough Collector and Journal of the Olden Time (Scarborough, John Cole, 1828), p. 109. Thomas Frederick Hunt, Exemplars of Tudor Architecture, Adapted to Modern Habitations (London, Longmans, 1830). Loudon (1833), p. 1102. Loudon (1833), p. 1102. Report from the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures (1835), 28th August 1835, p. 101, no.1431. George Hepplewhite, The Cabinetmaker and Upholsterer’s Guide, 1st edition (1788); Thomas Sheraton, The Cabinetmaker and Upholsterer’s Drawing Book, 1st edition (1793). Loudon (1833), p. 1040. Rosamond Allwood, ‘Machine Carving of the 1840s and the Catalogue of the Patent Wood Carving Company’, Furniture History, vol.XXXII, (1996), pp. 90–126. See also, Clive Edwards, ‘The Mechanization of Carving: The Development of the Carving Machine, Especially in Relation to the Manufacture of Furniture and the Working of Wood’, History of Technology, vol.20, (1998), pp. 73–102. Catalogue of the Patent Woodcarving Company (London, 1845). The furniture maker and antique dealer John Webb also supplied much of the most important furniture, designed by the architect A.W.N. Pugin, for the New Houses of Parliament, including the Royal Throne. See Clive Wainwright, ‘Furnishing the New Palace: Pugin’s furniture and fttings’, Apollo, vol.CXXXV, no.363 (New Series) (May 1992), pp. 303–6. Lancashire County Record Offce, DDSC 78/4, Scarisbrick Papers, parcel marked 78/4 (1) (10), Account supplied by George Hull to Charles Scarisbrick, dated August 2nd 1848, ‘Paid Jordan & Co Wood Carving Company for Gothic Carvings…£8.17.4’. Allwood (1996), pp. 100–1. Loudon (1833), p. 1039. Report (1835), 21 August 1835, p. 90, no.1247. For archive information in respect of Scarisbrick’s relationships with the dealers Edward and George Hull, see Scarisbrick papers, Lancashire County Record Offce, DDSC 78/4. See Charles Tracey, Continental Church Furniture in England: A Traffc in Piety (Woodbridge, Antique Collector’s Club, 2001). Tracey (2001), p. 79. For an overview of the Ecclesiologists and ‘Reformed Gothic’ architecture see Stefan Muthesius, The High Victorian Movement in Architecture 1850–1870 (London, Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1972). Tracey (2001), pp. 79–80. For more information on Cottingham’s collections see Janet Myles, L.N. Cottingham, 1787–1847: Architect of the Gothic Revival (London, Lund Humphries, 1996). Catalogue of the Museum of Medieval Art Collected by the Late L.N. Cottingham...Foster & Son, 1850 (London, Foster & Son, 1850). See also Harris (2007), pp. 120–1.

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100 Horatio Rodd, A Catalogue of Portraits, Pictures, Drawings, Carvings in Oak, Ivory and Boxwood, Antique Furniture & Plate … for Sale by Horatio Rodd… (London, Horatio Rodd, 1842). 101 Rodd (1842); no price was given for the pulpit in the catalogue. 102 Loudon (1833), p. 1039. 103 E.B. Lamb, ‘Brief Hints for the Preservation of the Architectural Remains of the Middle Ages’, The Architectural Magazine and Journal, vol.5, (London, Longman, 1838), pp. 159–62, p. 159. 104 E.B. Lamb (1838), p. 159. 105 Anon. ‘M’, ‘On the Establishment of a Society for the Restoration of Ancient Buildings’, The Architectural Magazine and Journal, vol.,5 (London, Longman, 1838). p. 162–4. 106 Lamb (1838), p. 161. 107 Lamb (1838), p. 162. 108 William Twopeny, Some Remarks on the Taste and Effects of Collecting Fragments of Ancient Architecture (London, Privately Printed, 1832), p. 3. 109 Twopeny (1832), p. 3. 110 Twopeny (1832), p. 7. 111 Twopeny (1832), p. 8. 112 Pomian, pp. 219–22; Wainwright (1989), p. 46. See also Westgarth (2009), pp. 1–2. 113 Esmond S. De Beer (Ed.), The Diary of John Evelyn, 6 vols. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), vol. II, pp. 367–8, entry dated 20th February 1645. 114 Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass., and London, Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 13. 115 De Beer (2000), vol. I, p. 65, entry dated 3rd February 1644. 116 Wainwright (1989), p. 46. 117 For an excellent overview of these collecting practices see Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (Eds.), The Origin of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1985). 118 W.H. Quarrell and Margaret Mare (Eds.), London in 1710; from the Travels of Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach (London, Faber, 1934). Also quoted in Wainwright (1989), p. 33. Altick (1978), pp. 13–14, also draws attention to von Uffenbach’s visit to Campe. 119 For information of these specifc relationships see Timothy Clayton, The English Print 1688–1802 (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 3–12. 120 Wainwright (1989), p. 34. 121 See, Brinsley Ford, ‘Thomas Jenkins, Banker, Dealer and Unoffcial Agent,’ Apollo, vol. XCIX, (June 1974), pp. 416–25; Brinsley Ford, ‘James Byers, Principal Antiquarian for the English visitors in Rome’, Apollo, vol.XCIX, (June 1974), pp. 446–61; see also Ilaria Bignamini and Clare Hornsby, Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth century Rome (2 vols.) (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2010). 122 See Westgarth (2011), p. 27. 123 Nicholas Green, ‘Circuits of Production, Circuits of Consumption: The Case of MidNineteenth-Century French Art Dealing’, Art Journal, vol.48, no.1 (Spring 1989), pp. 29–34. 124 Patricia Allerston, ‘The Second-Hand Trade in the Arts in Early Modern Italy’, in Marcello Fantoni, Louisa C. Matthews and Sara F. Matthews-Grieco (Eds.), The Art Market in Italy (15th–17th Centuries) (Modena, Franco Cosimo Panini, 2003), pp. 300–12. Art dealing was similarly combined with related trades, such as frame-making and gilding, in the seventeenth-century; see Christopher Marshall, ‘“Senza il minimo scrupolo”, Artists as Dealers in Seventeenth-Century Naples’, Journal of the History of Collections, vol.12, no.1, (2000), pp. 15–34. 125 Allerston (2003), p. 307. 126 Guildhall archives, MS11936/471. 127 Shankey, 43 Houndsditch, London, Pigot’s Directory (1839). See also Westgarth (2009). 128 See Watts (1992); Nanette Thrush, ‘Samuel Luke Pratt, 1805–1878’, Victorian Review, vol.37, no.1, (Spring 2011), pp. 13–16. 129 Dantziger, 29 Wardour Street, London, Robson’s Directory (1839). See also Westgarth (2009).

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130 See Altick (1978), p. 397; Wainwright (1989), p. 60. W.G. Rogers (1792–1875) was also the pre-eminent woodcarver of the nineteenth century; his work was exhibited at the Great Exhibition (1851). 131 Loudon (1833), p. 1039. See also Westgarth (2009). 132 Hanson, 16 John Street, London, Post Offce Directory (1836); Manser, 27 Wardour Street, London, Pigot’s Directory (1840); Hadnutt, 17 Wardour Street, Robson’s Directory (1839). See also Westgarth (2009). 133 Loudon (1833), p. 1039 and p. 1101. 134 Isaac records a payment to a Mr Fowler for ‘repairing and varnishing a carved wardrobe’ in January 1836 and he also regularly used the furniture makers ‘Jackson and Tom’ to repair and refashion antique and ancient furniture. Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467, ‘waste book’, passim. 135 See Wainwright (1989), p. 43 and p. 47. 136 Farrer sold several paintings to the National Gallery, London, and acted as dealer and agent to many of the most important picture collectors of the nineteenth century, including Lord Northwick; see Oliver Bradbury and Nicholas Penny, ‘The Picture collecting of Lord Northwick: part II’, Burlington Magazine, vol.144, (October 2002), pp. 606–17. 137 William Powell Frith, Further Reminiscences (London, Richard Bentley, 1888), pp. 339–40. 138 Gustav Waagen, Treasures of Art in Great Britain… (3 vols.) (London, John Murray, 1854), vol. 3, p. 338. 139 See Westgarth (2009). 140 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467, passim. 141 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467, entry dated ‘30th July 1829’. 142 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.12, letter dated ‘7th March 1833’. 143 Welch (2003). 144 Jon Stobart and Ilja Van Damme on Early Modern and eighteenth-century second-hand markets in Bruno Blondé, Natacha Coquery, Jon Stobart and Ilja van Damme (Eds.), Fashioning Old and New, Changing Consumer Patterns in Western Europe (1650–1900) (Turnhout, Brepols, 2009); Jon Stobart and Ilja Van Damme (Eds.), Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade: European Consumption Cultures and Practices, 1700–1900 (Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan, 2010). 145 See, for example, Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe, Second-Hand Cultures (Oxford, Berg, 2003). 146 Beverly Lemire, ‘Consumerism in Preindustrial and Early Industrial England: The Trade in Second-Hand Clothes’, Journal of British Studies, vol.27 (1988), pp. 1–24; Beverly Lemire, ‘Shifting Currency: The Culture and Economy of the Second-Hand Trade in England, c.1600–1850’, in A. Palmer and H. Clarke (Eds.), Old Clothes, New Looks: Second-Hand Fashion (Oxford, Berg, 2005), pp. 29–48. 147 See Levy and Moss (2002). 148 Grierson (1934), Entry, 30th March 1828. 149 Ref t18350202-611. www.oldbaileyonline.org. 150 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467, entry dated ‘August 28th 1832’. 151 See Wainwright (1989), pp. 33–5. 152 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language… (London, 1807). 153 H.J.C. Grierson (ed.), The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, 1821–23 (London, Constable, 1932– 1937, volume 3, 1934), letter dated 10th November 1822, quoted in Wainwright (1989), p. 33. 154 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.12, letter dated ‘7th March 1833’. 155 I am very grateful to Patricia Allerston for drawing my attention to this information. 156 Horatio Rodd, A Catalogue of Authentic Portraits … Carvings in Wood … for Sale at the Prices Affxed (1824). The only known copy of this catalogue and the catalogue issued by Rodd in 1842 are located at the Art Library, The Victoria & Albert Museum, London. See also Wainwright (1989), p. 55, p. 58. 157 See Joy (1962), p. 242. 158 See Westgarth (2009). 159 See Wainwright (1989), p. 230. 160 La Chambre Syndicale des Négociants en Objets D’Art, Tableaux, et Curiosités (SNA) was established in Paris in 1901 (current membership c.420); The Belgian Royal Chamber of

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161 162 163

164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172

173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181

182

Emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer Antiques and Art Dealers (CRAB) was established in 1919 (current membership c.110); The British Antique Dealers Association (BADA) was established in 1918, ostensibly in response to the new Labour Government’s proposed introduction of a new luxury tax. The BADA has strict criteria for membership (currently c.300), based on a peer assessment of the specialist knowledge and economic trading status of the prospective member. Recommendation for membership must come from within the current membership. The establishment of the London and Provincial Antique Dealers Association (LAPADA), formed in 1974, provided the modern antiques trade with a less exclusive professional body (current membership c.450). An international body for traders in antiques and works of art was also founded in 1935, the Confédération Internationale des Négociants en Oeuvres d’Art (CINOA), which is based in Brussels (current membership c.4000). See, for example, Terence J. Johnson, Professions and Power (Abingdon and New York, Routledge, 1972). For a comprehensive summary of these argument see Johnson (1972). Sampson Low Jr., The Charities of London: Comprehending the Benevolent, Educational and Religious Institutions (London, Sampson Low, 1850), p. 273; see also Michael Snodin (Ed.), Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2009), p. 272. Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.468. Quoted in Snodin (2009), p. 272. Thomas Dale, Metropolitan Charities (vol. 4) (London, Sampson Low, 1844), p. 82. See for example, Mark Girouard, ‘Insatiable and discerning: curiosity hunting with the Rothschilds’, Apollo, vol.139, no.386 (April 1994), pp. 14–18, p. 15; Muthesius (1988), p. 243. Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory (1977) (New York, Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 25. Thomas Frederick Hunt, Exemplars of Tudor Architecture, Adapted to Modern Habitations … and Observations on the Furniture of the Tudor Period (London, Longmans, 1830), p. vii. Rodd (1824). My emphasis in italics. George Weare Braikenridge MS Papers, Bristol City Record Offce, 14182(HB)/C/38-46; see also Westgarth (2009), p. 7. A Catalogue of the Magnifcent and Costly Furniture of the Princely Mansion, Wanstead House…Sold by Mr Robins…Monday 10th June 1822 and 31 days following. My emphasis in italics. Lot 13 were part of a suite of the famous so-called ‘Wolsey Chairs’ which were amongst the most sought-after ‘antique’ chairs of the period; see Clive Wainwright, ‘Only the True Black Blood’, Furniture History, vol.XX, (1984), pp. 250–5. Winn Archive, WYL1352/A1/8/26/12, ‘Almanack 1834’, invoice dated 11th March 1834; my emphasis in italics. Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.155, letter dated ‘11th September 1839’; underlining in original. Madeline House and Graham Storey (Eds.), The Letters of Charles Dickens, volume 2 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 8; my emphasis in italics. www.oldbaileyonline.org – reference t18540612-797; my emphasis in italics. Rosenstein (2009); Rosenstein is a Professor of Philosophy; he was also an antique dealer in the mid-1980s. Rosenstein (2009), p. 14. HM Customs & Excise (2001), VAT Notice 702, appendix C. United States Tariff Act 1930 (legislation 17th June 1930). See for example, Jane E. Norton, Guide to the National and Provincial Directories of England and Wales Excluding London, Published before 1856 (London, Royal Historical Society, 1950), esp. pp. 16–24; J. E. Norton, ‘The Post Offce London Directory’, The Library, vol.XXI, no.4 (1966), pp. 293–9; P. J. Atkins, The Trade Directories of London 1677–1977 (London and New York, Mansell, 1990). See also my introductory discussion on trade directories in Westgarth (2009), pp. 57–60. ‘Robert Fogg, China Warehouse & Curiosity Shop’; ‘John Latham, Curiosity Shop’; ‘William Green, Well’s Curiosity Shop’. See Holden’s Triennial Directory for 1805. I thank the late John Bedford for drawing my attention to these references.

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183 ‘Thomas Gwenapp, Dealer in Curiosities, 44 New Bond Street’, Post Offce Directory, 1808. 184 William Holl was listed as ‘Antique Furniture Dealer’, Hanway Street, London, from as early as 1816; Edmund Terry, ‘Ancient Furniture Dealer’, Wardour Street was one of large number of dealers described as such by the 1830s. 185 Jane Clarke also opened branches in Liverpool and Manchester in the 1850s; see Jean Hemingway ‘Millinery and Old Lace: Miss Jane Clarke of Regent Street’, Textile History, vol.43, no.2, (November 2012), pp. 200–22. 186 Johnstone’s London and Commercial Guide for 1818 (London, Johnstone, 1818), preface. 187 See Geoffrey Wills, ‘On Nicknackitarianism’, Apollo, vol.CVIII, no.201 (1978), pp. 327–31. 188 It is frst recorded as appearing in 1682; see Wills (1978), p. 327. 189 The objects were, even in the nineteenth century, of great historical and cultural signifcance and economic value; see Michael Hall, ‘Bric-a-Brac, A Rothschild’s Memoir of Collecting’, Apollo, (July and August), 2007, pp. 50–77, p. 53. 190 Frederic Vors, Bibelots and Curios (London, D. Appleton, 1879).

Part Four

The spaces of consumption – shops, auctions, exhibitions

The consistent appearance of historical objects in public venues that were explicitly dedicated to commercial exchange refects the extent to which historical objects had become intimately woven into the contemporary consumer culture by the opening decades of the nineteenth century. In this sense the expanding consumption of historical objects in the period can also be considered as part of the broader commercialisation of culture in early nineteenth-century Britain.1 The discussions that follow draw further attention to the critical role that the antique and curiosity trade played in these new patterns of consumption and provide further evidence of the signifcance of the increasing presence of the antique and curiosity dealer within the contemporary culture. The antique and curiosity shop was at the centre of the new patterns of consumption, but historical objects were also consistently registered in other key spaces of consumption, in the auction rooms and in the expanding exhibitionary culture of nineteenth-century Britain.2 Indeed, whilst ‘shops’, ‘auctions’ and ‘exhibitions’ appear in discrete and separate spaces, each governed by different concerns and objectives, the ways in which historical objects were classifed, displayed and valorised in these three spaces draw attention to their mutual involvement in the construction of value. It was during the opening decades of the nineteenth century that objects such as ‘antique furniture’ were beginning to be put into familiar patterns of circulation, appearing and reappearing in ‘shops’, ‘auctions’ and ‘exhibitions’ which began to embed and amplify their role in a familiar symbiotic value-system.3

Spaces of consumption I: The antique and curiosity shop The antique and curiosity shop played a critical role in the expanding markets for historical objects in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, as both a pragmatic facilitator in the wider distribution of historical objects and a discrete cultural site. Antique and curiosity dealing emerged as a distinctive trade at the same time as the shop itself took on specifc and characteristic social and cultural meaning and was emerging as an important locus of social and cultural activity. The emergence of the antique and curiosity shop also marks the formalisation of new and discrete sets of relations between established antiquarian collecting activities and the rapidly expanding interest in historical objects. Prior to what we now consider modern retail practice most consumers would have encountered the goods they wished to purchase at local markets and periodic fairs, or from itinerant peddlers, but by the end of the seventeenth century the retail shop, as a discrete site of consumer activity, had been

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established. During the last decades of the eighteenth century the shop had begun to take on more specifc meaning as the more prosperous traders of London began to take houses for their families towards the periphery of the city and travel into their shops every day rather than occupying living accommodation over their commercial premises.5 The historian Susan Mountfeld has suggested that one of the consequences of these changes was that by the end of the eighteenth century the shop began to be seen as a separate social space dedicated exclusively to commercial transactions.6 To take this line of argument further we can draw on another body of theoretical writings, the analysis of architectural space produced in the 1980s by Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson, published as The Social Logic of Space.7 In this work Hillier and Hanson draw attention to the relationships between architectural space and social and cultural activity; they write that buildings 4

order space into relational systems embodying social purposes [and that] the ordering of space in buildings is really about the ordering of relations between people. Because this is so, society enters into the very nature and form of buildings. They are social objects through their very form as objects.8 Hillier and Hanson do not suggest that the spaces of buildings create a domain where already established relations are embodied or enacted; rather, such spaces offer the opportunity of a heightened sense of space which creates a more highly controlled domain where social relationships can be recreated.9 In this sense, in the context of commercial exchange, social interaction that once occurred outside in the public space of the market or the fair, where such transactions were enacted within the rhythm and fow of the crowd, becomes codifed and intensifed within the interior space of the shop. We can see then that by the opening decade of the nineteenth century the shop had become a discrete site of social and cultural activity, one that had become more explicitly and more exclusively associated with notions of consumption and one that crystallised and amplifed the notion of commercial exchange. The signifcance of the antique and curiosity shop, as a distinctive social space, is drawn more sharply into focus if we consider the central importance of the notion of exchange within the process of social valuation. In the opening chapter of The Philosophy of Money (1900), the frst systematic account of the defning characteristics of economic value, the writer Georg Simmel (1858–1918) highlighted the signifcance of exchange in the wider structures of value.10 Drawing from the notions of commodity outlined by Marx, Simmel suggested that rather than being an objective property of objects, value is constructed in the immediate dialogue between the two parties involved in the process of exchange, a process that involves sacrifce on the one hand and gain on the other.11 Gianfranco Poggi, in his analysis of Simmel’s work on Money, writes that ‘the value of an object is not solely bestowed upon the object by the subject, but is a response to the claim of an impersonal, self-standing realm of value’.12 Arjun Appadurai puts this more succinctly in his summary of these ideas in his own discussions of the complex nature of the notion of Commodity; he writes: ‘exchange is not the by-product of the mutual valuation of objects, but its source’.13 This insight directs further attention to the structural position of the antique and curiosity shop within this process of mutual valuation. The process of mutual valuation was formalized and concretized through economic exchange in the antique and curiosity shop, a process that was further amplifed as the antique and curiosity shop emerged as a

118 The spaces of consumption primary location in the evolving markets for historical objects in the opening decades of the nineteenth century.

The antique and curiosity shop: Locations A short, anonymous article, titled ‘Ancient Domestic Furniture’, which was published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in January 1842, illustrates the extent to which the antique and curiosity shop had become such an integral part of the cultural landscape by the second quarter of the nineteenth century: The prevalence at the present period, of a taste for Antique Furniture is most decidedly manifested, not by the examples which every one may happen to know of either ancient mansions, or modern houses in the ‘Elizabethan’ style, flled with collections of this description, but by the multitude of warehouses which now display their attractive stores … in almost every quarter of the metropolis.14 Indeed, during the period 1810–1845 the numbers of antique and curiosity shops in London had multiplied more than twentyfold, rising from less than 10 shops listed in the trade directories in 1810 to at least 200 listed shops by the early 1840s.15 The importance of the increasing presence of antique dealers across the whole of Britain in the opening decades of the nineteenth century is worthy of note, but it is no surprise that London remained the key location and the main catalyst for the rapid expansion of the antique and curiosity trade in this period. Indeed, whilst there was considerable economic growth in manufacturing production in Britain during the period, for example in northern cities such as Sheffeld for metalwork and Manchester for textile manufacturing, London remained the primary locus where the activities of consumption were played out, and several scholars and historians have drawn attention to the importance of an expansion of consumer activity in the development of London in the early nineteenth century.16 And whilst the present book concentrates mainly on the emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer in Britain, the expansion of the trade in Britain during the frst half of the nineteenth century was mirrored on the continent of Europe, in major cities in France, Germany, Belgium and Italy, where the British trade acquired much of its stock of objects. Clive Wainwright briefy sketched out the various locations of antique and curiosity shops in the commercial spaces in and around the City and the West End of London during the early nineteenth century.17 Wainwright’s investigations were ground-breaking, but preliminary, and he did not consider the wider signifcance of the diverse locations of the antique and curiosity shop in the Capital. Nor did he address the signifcance of the wider geographical spread of the trade in Britain in the early nineteenth century. In an essay published in 1986, Clive Wainwright focused on the growth of art and antique dealers in Bond Street, tracing their migration from liminal spaces of the city in the 1820s to the sophisticated consumer spaces of Bond Street by the 1850s and concluded that it was not until after the 1850s that Bond Street became a key location for the trade.18 However, whilst Wainwright appears to be generally correct in his assertion that the ‘antiques trade as we understand it’ began to emerge during the 1850s, his assessment that the ‘brokers had become antique dealers and their curiosity shops, art galleries’ presents a rather too smooth and progressive account of the transition and development of the trade and consumption of antiques and curiosities over

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the period. Indeed, several high-profle antique and curiosity dealers had already populated Bond Street during the opening decade of the nineteenth century. Thomas Gwenapp (d.1851), the most important dealer in ancient armour in the period, had opened a shop at 44 New Bond Street by 1806, and certainly appears to have been the earliest curiosity dealer to choose this important location. Bond Street was one of the primary sites for fashionable trades during the opening decades of the nineteenth century, attracting a wide range of wealthy consumers.20 And as one might expect, members of the early nineteenth-century picture trade also began to settle in New Bond Street in the same period; the leading picture dealer John Smith (1781–1855) was located at 137 New Bond by 1828.21 The curiosity dealer John Jarman was also trading at 130 New Bond Street by the late 1820s; Jarman counted many high-profle and well-connected collectors amongst his customers, including the Earl of Lonsdale and Lord Derby. The curiosity dealer Charles Askew, who was a regular trader with Abraham Davies, John Coleman Isaac’s brother-in-law, in the early 1820s, was also located at 126 New Bond Street by 1826.22 Bond Street was also the location of the shop of two of the most famous antique and curiosity dealers of the nineteenth century: the antique furniture dealer and cabinetmaker John Webb, who occupied premises at 8 Old Bond Street from 1825 until 1851, and the dealers in ancient armour, Samuel and Henry Pratt, who were trading from New Bond Street by the mid-1820s.23 Whilst Bond Street may have been a key location for the antique and curiosity trade earlier than has been generally thought, one of the distinctive features of the early nineteenth-century trade in historical objects was the general expansion beyond the original locations in the City of London and into the West End as the audience for antiques and curiosities began to broaden considerably. The expanding trade began to draw in many more participants, and the various locations within the West End of London also refected the wide range of overlapping commercial opportunities for those involved in the trade in antiques and curiosities. Several dealers chose to draw from consumer locations long associated with furniture making and retailing, such as Tottenham Court Road, which attracted Moore & Co. ‘Dealers in Foreign China, Ancient Furniture and Curiosities’.24 Other dealers chose to locate their shops in streets that were being developed as part of the modernizing projects of early nineteenthcentury London. William Forrest (1798–1854), for example, a dealer described as ‘the best informed dealer of his day’ by the writer George Redford in 1888 and well known amongst nineteenth-century collectors, including A. W. Franks of the British Museum, was located at 54 Strand by 1835, the western end of which had been developed by the architect John Nash (1752–1835) in the early 1830s.25 The appearance of the trade in historical objects in the new spaces of modernity in the capital also highlights the intimate relationships between the modernizing projects of the early nineteenth-century metropolis and the consumption of the past. After all, as Marshall Berman has suggested, the early nineteenth century was a key moment in the history of ‘modernity’.26 Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, in his study of the redevelopment of Regent Street in the 1820s, has also directed attention to this unfolding of the past into the modernity of early nineteenth-century London. As Liscombe suggests, ‘the materials produced by antiquarianism, both antique objects and visual reproductions of them, were appropriated to solicit trade in proftable goods and services’.27 Indeed, despite its obvious association with objects from the past the early nineteenth century antique and curiosity shop can be considered a thoroughly ‘modern’ thing. In this sense the antique and curiosity shop presented the early nineteenth-century modern public with historical 19

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material from their past, indeed, as we have seen at times with historical material from a much more recent past, through the modern consumer spaces of the shop. The modernising projects such as the development of Regent Street and the rise in the social status of the shop during the early nineteenth century resulted in attempts to include shops as part of regular architectural compositions in the metropolitan improvements in the Capital. The 1810s saw the frst ‘shopping arcades’ with the opening of the Royal Opera Arcade off Pall Mall, designed by the architect John Nash (1752–1835) during the period 1816–1818. Burlington Arcade, designed for Lord George Cavendish by the architect Samuel Ware (1781–1860), was opened in 1819; Ware was, incidentally, also a noted collector of curiosities and a client of John Coleman Isaac.28 These arcades were the frst of a new type of covered shopping development in London based on the format that had been popularized in Paris, where a range of shops had been opened in the late 1780s along the Palais Royale. Such arcades are indicative of the evolving consumer culture of early nineteenth century London into which the antique and curiosity dealer emerged. Regent Street, which as Dana Arnold has discussed, was amongst the most striking examples of these modernising projects, and was also the preferred site for several dealers.29 According to John Tallis’s London guidebook, published in the 1830s, Regent Street was a ‘noble street with Palace-like shops’.30 This may be the reason why Samuel Isaacs, who was one of the most well-connected dealers in the period, chose 131 Regent Street as the preferred location for his shop (see Figure 4.1).31 This important street also attracted a number of other antique and curiosity dealers such as Giovanni (John) Noseda and the dealers Abraham Hertz and John Bentley.32 Both Hertz and Bentley had particularly close commercial relationships with the dealer John Coleman Isaac.33 John Coleman Isaac himself briefy took a shop in the Quadrant, Regent Street, in 1826 prior to moving to the spiritual heart of the antique and curiosity trade, Wardour Street, in 1829.34 The appearance of so many of these new antique and curiosity dealers in the new spaces of commerce in the metropolis draws further attention to the complex evolving patterns of consumption of antiques and curiosities in the period. As Chris

Figure 4.1 The shop of Samuel Isaacs, 131 Regent Street (c.1838–1840). Detail from Peter Jackson (intro.), John Tallis’s London Street Views 1838–40. Private collection.

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Breward and Jane Rendell have demonstrated, during the early nineteenth century these locations became associated with leisure, consumption and cultured patronage.35 Locations such as Bond Street, Strand and Regent Street allowed the dealers to draw on the caché as well as the clientele of trades associated with the social elites, such as fashionable tailoring and other high-class purveyors. It was in part through these new consumer spaces in the metropolis that ‘curiosities’, which had conventionally been associated with uncertain, or indeed problematic, cultural value, were assigned increasing levels of social and cultural signifcance as they were presented for sale in these distinctive locations. In many of these new consumer spaces, dealers displayed obscure antiquarian objects, such as ancient carvings and ‘curiosities’, alongside objects that were emblematic of the developing contemporary fashion for ‘antiques’, such ‘Old French Bronzes’, ‘Old French furniture’, ‘Old Sévres’, ‘Old Dresden’ and ‘Old Chelsea’.36 These emerging retailing practices allowed the cultured gloss of luxury goods to lend cultural capital to the objects of antiquarian consumption. John Claudius Loudon’s Encyclopaedia (1833) drew specifc attention to this evolving taste for historical objects and these dual patterns of consumption. There were, wrote Loudon, two kinds of taste: one that would please ‘the antiquary’ and one that would please ‘the man of cultivated mind’.37 An anonymous writer in Gentleman’s Magazine reiterated Loudon’s comments, writing that such objects would ‘gratify the antiquary, who regards them for their associations’, and ‘the virtuoso, who furnishes his mansion à la mode antique’.38 Newspaper advertisements in the period draw further attention to the strategic role of the dealer in these complex overlapping markets. For example, ‘Davies & Isaac’ advertised the sale of ‘Ancient Armour’ together with ‘a variety of other items of elegance and antiquity’.39 Other dealers had ‘splendid assemblages of Rare specimens of Dresden china’ alongside ‘curious carvings in old wood’: ‘Valuable antique cabinets and superior articles in bronze and ormolu’ alongside ‘ancient armour’. However, a letter in the Isaac archive illustrates the potential commercial tensions of mixing the ‘old’ with the ‘new’ in these fuid markets. In a letter dated 2nd April 1844 sent to his wife Sarah, Isaac complained that the collector Ralph Bernal had been patronizing the curiosity dealer William Forrest of the Strand, apparently buying ‘modern clocks and furniture’ rather than the curiosities that Isaac had been supplying; he writes: I think please God I will show Mr Bernal that I can do some business yet, and perhaps revive his taste for really fne things, although he praised the taste of Mr Forrest for buying modern china, Buhl clocks and tables and other useful saleable furniture, articles as merchandise.40 In another letter, sent later the same month, Isaac wrote pointedly: ‘You can tell Mr Bernal that the reason I did not write to him, was because I have not bought anything like what he admired in Forrest’s shop, and I thought very early and fne things did not interest him anymore’.41 However, alongside the sight of the antique and curiosity shops in the new consumer spaces of the Capital the trade also continued to exist in less prestigious locations, in and amongst less high-status traders. The ‘importer of ancient furniture’ Joseph Jacobs, the ‘curiosity dealer’ Moses Moses, the ‘dealer in foreign curiosities’ Marcus Samuels and the ‘curiosity dealer’ George Nightingale all continued to trade from locations in and around the City of London, the conventional locus of the curiosity

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trade since the eighteenth century.42 Indeed, such was the demand for historical objects in the period that even in these well-established locations the antique and curiosity trade was expanding rapidly. In Seven Dials, for example, an area to the north-west of Covent Garden which was a notorious slum by the second quarter of the nineteenth century, there was a rapid expansion of the number of antique and curiosity dealers in the 1840s. The writer and commentator on London, Charles Knight (1791–1873), described the area around Monmouth Street, off Seven Dials, in 1843, where he noted that ‘old Furniture, or curiosity shops, such as we fnd Wardour Street, are a new species, and amongst the most interesting’.43 Seven Dials was an area of London where many second-hand goods were exchanged and sold by the lowest classes of merchants, and in some of the most marginal of commercial spaces of the city. Lynda Nead, in her study of Victorian London, has drawn attention to the signifcance of these marginal spaces, highlighting the problematic status of related spaces such as Holywell Street in the nineteenth century.44 And the negative associations of antiquarian taste and the perceived dubious cultural and economic value of the objects on sale in the antique and curiosity shops continued to give rise to critique in the period. In the forwardthinking rhetoric that directed the constant changes to the fabric of London during the nineteenth century under the rubric of ‘metropolitan improvements’, the spaces of the city most associated with the antique and curiosity trade, spaces such as Wardour Street and Hanway Street, were often cast as locations that impeded commercial and social progress. They were also locations that signifed some of the more problematic notions that coalesced around the trade, especially that of fakes, forgeries and objects of dubious social and cultural value. In 1858, the writer J.D. Burn in his panegyric to industry and commerce, Commercial Enterprise and Social Progress, directed his attention to the area around Hanway Street, long associated with ‘the display of manufacturers of antique furniture and curiosity shops’.45 Burn continued: It is a fact worthy of notice, that old furniture can be manufactured in this locality of any age and all manner of styles, from clumsy Dutch of the 15th century to the elaborate workmanship and beautiful design of the reign of Louis the 14th … many have added to their archaeological stores from this antiquarian warehouse of articles that have been manufactured with the stamp of hoary age.46 One of the consistent features in this study of the emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer is that despite the gravitation of the trade to discrete consumer locations such as Regent Street and New Bond Street, for many people the antique and curiosity trade continued to be associated with objects of limited cultural value, and the trade consistently struggled to shed some of the more problematic aspects of its image. The increasing numbers of antique and curiosity shops were concentrated to a large extent in London, but the numbers involved in the trade in antiques and curiosities and the expansion in the numbers of shops in the Capital were also supplemented by a considerable number of provincial dealers in many of the developing urban centres across the country. By the early 1840s there was a growing number of antique and curiosity shops in the industrial cities of Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester.47 In Leeds, the activities of the dealers Thomas Fenteman & Sons, who were trading in the town by the early 1830s, have been noted by James Lomax.48 There is also clear evidence in the Isaac archive that the relationship between dealers in London and these rapidly evolving northern industrial cities was crucial to the development of the

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antique and curiosity trade. The Isaac ‘waste book’ for example, records numerous transactions with the dealer Isaac Abrahams, trading from Liverpool during the period from the 1820s to the 1840s.49 Isaac was also selling regular amounts of antiques and curiosities to a dealer named Brett in Oxford Road in Manchester in the 1830s.50 The appearance of antique and curiosity dealers in major industrial cities was also supplemented by the emergence of dealers in many provincial towns such as Portsmouth, Gloucester, Hertford and Northampton, and is indicative of the geographical spread and rapid expansion of the trade during the 1830s and 1840s.51 The Isaac archive refects the geographical spread of antique and curiosity dealers in the period, recording transactions with dealers in Edinburgh in the north during the 1830s and with the dealer Leopold Goetz in Southampton in the south in the 1840s.52 We can also note a cluster of curiosity dealers in Ryde on the Isle of Wight in the period, suggesting that the association between tourism and shopping for antiques and curiosities, shells and fossils, was already well established by the middle decades of the nineteenth century.53 Notwithstanding the importance of London in the development of the antique and curiosity trade, there were also some very well-connected dealers operating outside the Capital. Charles Redfern (c.1798–1868), for example, trading from Jury Street in Warwick, was amongst the most well-known dealers in the 1840s and 1850s.54 Redfern acted as the agent for a signifcant number of collectors, including the 4th Marquess of Hertford (1880–1870), for whom he made several purchases at the Stowe auction sale in 1848.55 Redfern was a consistent presence in the London salerooms, and his name appears in the purchase lists of several other high-profle auction dispersals, perhaps most signifcantly at the Strawberry Hill auction sale in 1842, when Redfern purchased, amongst other things, the famous ‘Walpole Cabinet’.56 In White’s Directory of Warwick (1850) Redfern’s shop had a fulsome description by ‘Miss Sinclair’: we found one of the best and most expensive curiosity shops I ever encountered, full of antiques and ancient Bijouterie, fossil remains of old fashions, long since extinct, which might puzzle a modern philosopher to invent uses for; though their multitude and variety could not be exceeded in any collection in London. Mr Redfern goes to the continent every year for a relay of old china, carved oak, original pictures, ivory fgures, ancient missals … . though his shop was crowded with visitors, not one of whom the owner seemed to recognise by name, he allowed every stranger to ramble at large over the whole extent of his shop.57 Redfern was elected Mayor of Warwick during the 1850s and took an active role in the saving of Aston Hall, which in 1864 became the frst historic house museum in Britain to be opened to the public by a municipal authority.58 He had become well known enough by the 1850s and 1860s to be satirized by Sidney Whiting as ‘the wellknown dealer Mr Blackleaf, of Warwick’, alongside ‘Mr. Gossamer of Bond Street’ (the dealer John Webb) and ‘Mr Steelstyle’ (the ‘antique furniture dealer’ Thomas Woodgate) in a sardonic essay titled ‘Bric-a-Brac’ published in Once a Week in April 1862.59 Redfern was also noteworthy enough to be mentioned by the American writers Bayard Taylor (1825–1878) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) in the 1850s and 1860s.60 Taylor wrote: Few Americans, I presume, have heard of Charles Redfern, yet there are not many of the English nobility to whom his name and person are not familiar … If any

124 The spaces of consumption sale of rare and curious furniture, old heirlooms, jewelry, or other objects of virtu, takes place anywhere between the Alps and John o’Groats house, Redfern is sure to be there.61 Hawthorne provided a novelist’s eye description of Redfern’s ‘Old Curiosity Shop’ which gives a sense of the sheer profusion of objects on display, but also rehearses the common literary trope of the antique and curiosity shop as a problematic space. Hawthorne writes: Immediately on entering we fnd ourselves among a confusion of old rubbish and valuable, ancient armor, [sic] historic portraits, ebony cabinets inlaid with pearl, tall ghostly clocks, hideous old china, dim looking-glasses in frames of tarnished magnifcence, – a thousand objects of strange aspect, and others that almost frighten you by their likeness in unlikeness to things now in use.62 Hawthorne continued, reinforcing the enduring notion that the dealer’s shop was full of spurious objects with dubious and imaginary provenances: It would be easier to spend a hundred pounds in Mr. Redfern’s shop than to keep the money in one’s pocket; but for my part, I contented myself buying a little old spoon of silver-gilt, and fantastically shaped, and got it at all the more reasonable rate because there happened to be no legend attached to it. I could easily supply any defciency of that kind at much less expense than regilding the spoon!63 Dealers such as Redfern may have been exceptional outside London, but the diverse locations of antique and curiosity shops across Britain are indicative of the wide geographical spread and the interconnected networks of the antique and curiosity trade even by the second quarter of the nineteenth century. We can see then that the antique and curiosity shop was beginning to appear in a diverse set of locations across Britain during the opening decades of the nineteenth century and was becoming a highly visible part of the urban fabric of London. And as the appearance of the antique shop intensifed in scale it became increasingly embedded in the contemporary cultural consciousness. But it is worth focusing a little more on one of the dominant locations in the history of the antique and curiosity trade to further explore the signifcance of these developments.

Wardour Street Within the specifc patterns of commercial zoning in London in the frst half of the nineteenth century, Wardour Street was invested with distinct social and cultural connotations.64 Wardour Street appears consistently in the contemporary accounts of the antique and curiosity shop; fgures in trade literature and in descriptive reports from visitors to the Metropolis; and is a constant presence in letters and other exchanges between dealers, collectors, architects and designers. Whilst we can say that the emergence of the scores of antique and curiosity dealers throughout Britain during the frst half of the nineteenth century was a development of considerable signifcance, Wardour Street completely overshadows the myriad of other individual locations in the biography of the antique and curiosity trade. Since it became the primary locus of

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the antique and curiosity trade in the 1820s Wardour Street has both attracted and repelled collectors, designers and writers and commentators. It was also a location that, during the second half of the nineteenth century, became a dominant signifer for a range of problematic associations that centred on the antique and curiosity trade. Wardour Street was named after Edward Wardour, the owner of the land on which a small development of houses was built in 1680–1681.65 These seventeenth-century houses were rebuilt during the period 1735–1743, under leases granted by the Duchess of Portland. It would have been in these eighteenth-century houses, remodelled at some time later in the century as retail premises, that dealers such as John Coleman Isaac occupied as new antique and curiosity shop owners during the opening decades of the nineteenth century.66 Isaac began trading from No. 12 Wardour Street on 1st April 1829, relocating the business that had been started by his father-in-law Gabriel Davies and brother-in-law Henry Abraham Davies at 41 Craven Street.67 Isaac smartened up his shop in September 1832 and put his name over the front in gilded wooden letters, paying ‘Mr Nott’ £4.1s.6d for painting the outside, repairing the windows and supplying and gilding the ‘wooden letters’.68 His shop, with the smart new frontage, is depicted two doors down from that occupied by fellow curiosity dealer Henry Farrer at number 14, in John Tallis’s London Street Views, of 1838–184069 (see Figure 4.2). Wardour Street was to become the most famous location for antiques and curiosities in London during Isaac’s period of occupation, and Isaac’s business was amongst the longest standing of the antique and curiosity dealers in Wardour Street, remaining at number 12 for a period of thirty-eight years until his retirement in 1867.70 Indeed, by

Figure 4.2 Detail of Wardour Street c.1838–1840, showing the shop of John Coleman Isaac, 12 Wardour Street and the shop of Henry Farrer, 14 Wardour Street. Detail from Peter Jackson (intro.), John Tallis’s London Street Views 1838–40. Private collection.

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the mid-1840s Wardour Street had the largest concentration of antique and curiosity dealers in Britain and continued to be a centre of the antique trade until well into the 1870s. The various shops occupied by the antique and curiosity trade in Wardour Street indicates that as many as 75 premises out of total retail premises of about 124 were at one stage or another occupied by individuals who participated in the antique and curiosity trade during the period 1820–1870 (see Figures 4.3a,b and c).71 The shop that Isaac had occupied no longer exists; it was demolished in the early twentieth century during a major redevelopment of a block of eight shops on the east side of Wardour Street. The redevelopment of Wardour Street in the twentieth century also led to the demolition of the former shops of several other prominent dealers, including Henry Farrer, Edmund Terry (numbers 15 & 122), James Hadnutt (numbers 17 & 40), William Manser (number 27), Edward and George Hull (number 109) and Thomas Hawksley (number 14). Many of these antique and curiosity shops were replaced by a large building erected for the publishing company Novello & Co., designed by Frank Loughborough Pearson, the son of the famous nineteenth-century gothic revival architect, which was completed in 1906.72 By the time Isaac had decided to move his business to Wardour Street in the late 1820s the street was already synonymous with the antique and curiosity trade; his shop had previously been occupied by the curiosity dealer William Rimmell, who had traded from number 12 Wardour Street during the early 1820s.73 As far as collectors, furnishers and designers were concerned a visit to Wardour Street was essential for the acquisition of antiques and curiosities. It was the primary location where the historical objects that had been gathered by dealers from all over the Continent were frst delivered to the market. Sir Samuel Meyrick was just one of many collectors who relied on the dealers in Wardour Street for the supply of historical objects. Meyrick’s main residence was Goodrich Court in Herefordshire, which he had engaged the architect Edward Blore (1787–1879) to build during the period 1828–1831.74 Goodrich was the main location of his extensive collections after he removed them from his London address in Upper Cadogan Place in the late 1820s.75 Meyrick spent much of his time gathering historical objects for his displays at Goodrich Court and was constantly anxious to be informed about what was happening in the antique and curiosity markets in London. A letter from Meyrick to Isaac sent in June 1831 illustrates the signifcance of Wardour Street as the centre of activity in the wider consumption of the past; Meyrick wrote: ‘I am extremely obliged to you for your letter because removed as I am from that world of curiosities, Wardour Street, it is only in this way that I can learn what fresh comes into the market’.76 Many more letters in the Isaac archive demonstrate the importance that collectors assigned to the activities taking place in Wardour Street in the period. The collector Ralph Bernal, for example, regularly wrote to Isaac to ensure that he was well informed about the markets: ‘let me know about all the curious matters when they arrive in Wardour Street … don’t fail to write to me, and give the descriptions’.77 Beyond the Isaac archive the importance of Wardour Street is also consistently highlighted. The painter E.W. Cooke (1811–1880), for example, recorded many trips to Wardour Street in his diary, including one trip which resulted in the acquisition of an antique chair from the dealer’s Edward and George Hull and which he portrayed in his painting ‘The Antiquary’s Cell’ (1835).78 Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823–1901), the daughter of William Crawley Yonge (1795– 1854), who supervised the building of Otterburne Church, Hampshire, during the late 1830s for the landowner Sir William Heathcote, also directed attention to the

Figure 4.3a Part I of composed image of Wardour Street, c.1840 highlighting all known shops of antique and curiosity dealers in the period 1820– 1870; from John Tallis London Street Views 1838–40. © The author.

Figure 4.3b Part II of composed image of Wardour Street, c.1840 highlighting all known shops of antique and curiosity dealers in the period 1820–1870; from John Tallis London Street Views 1838–40. © The author.

Figure 4.3c Part III of composed image of Wardour Street, c.1840 highlighting all known shops of antique and curiosity dealers in the period 1820– 1870; from John Tallis London Street Views 1838–40. © The author.

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signifcance of Wardour Street as the primary location for historical material. In her accounts of the Oxford Movement and Gothic Revival church building activities in the period, Charlotte recorded that ‘Mr. Yonge [her father] sought diligently for old patterns and for ancient carvings in oak, and in Wardour Street he succeeded in obtaining fve panels, representing the Blessed Virgin and the four Latin fathers, which are worked into the pulpit’.79 Many other collectors, architects, furnishers and artists cited Wardour Street in their exchanges of letters and diary accounts of collecting activities in the period. The fame of Wardour Street even spread as far afeld as Scotland. The artist Thomas Duncan (1807–1845), for example, writing to his fellow artist Daniel MacNee (1806–1882) in 1831, in response to an enquiry regarding where to buy historical objects suggested: ‘The place to fnd these things is Wardour Street where there are a number of shops that deal in antiquities etc’.80 Such was the contemporary fame of this location that Wardour Street regularly appeared in the press reports on the curiosity market, and the street was also noted in several high-profle publications in the period. As early as 1816 Wardour Street was alluded to in Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Antiquary (1816), where Scott had the venerable ‘House of Wardour’ teetering on the edge of fnancial ruin and hereditary displacement – perhaps an oblique reference to the often precarious business of buying and selling curiosities but also an ironic comment on the fabricated nature of much of the hereditary trappings of the newly constructed ‘new/old’ manor houses at the time.81 In one of the most famous antiquarian publications of the 1840s, the description of ‘Cotehele, the ancient seat of the Earl of Mount Edgcumbe’ in Cornwall, the author of the text, the antiquary Rev. F.V.J. Arundell, could not resist a reference to Wardour Street in his descriptive accounts of ancient interiors.82 Drawing attention to the collections, Arundell described the Drawing Room, which had twelve beautiful ebony chairs and sofa, that immediately attract the eye, as they would the heart of many a curiosity dealer in Wardour Street, where now and then an ebony chair of much inferior workmanship may be seen at the prohibitory price of from ffteen to twenty pounds.83 By the 1850s Wardour Street’s associations with the antique and curiosity trade had become a recurring theme in popular culture. In a chapter in George Reynolds Mysteries of the Court of London (1856), a seminal work in the ‘urban mysteries’ genre of the period, the fctional activities of Mr Limber and Mr Bealby are played out against the visit to a ‘purveyor of curiosities’ in ‘one of the old shops in Wardour Street’, where Mr Bealby ‘disposed of all [his] curiosities’.84 However, despite, or perhaps more accurately because of the attention that Wardour Street attracted as the primary representative of the ‘world of curiosities’, this location also became a convenient shorthand for a host of problematic responses to the antique and curiosity trade. The criticism directed towards Wardour Street began to emerge toward the end of the frst half of the nineteenth century and consolidated during the second half of the nineteenth century, continuing well into the twentieth century. From the late 1840s criticisms levelled at Wardour Street were framed through some distinctive, but interrelated notions. Explanations for these criticisms appear to involve a complex cluster of evolving ideas. Shifting tastes and fashion inevitably played their part, and there was also the lingering perception by many people that ‘curiosities’ were of limited aesthetic and historical value. For those who placed considerable social and cultural value on such objects there remained the problem of the commercial mode

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of acquisition, and the problematic associations that arise from this was a consistent theme. The jumbled displays of objects in Wardour Street shops were also symbolic of unproductive, retentive knowledge. For example, a satirical sketch from the weekly magazine of humour and satire, Punch: Or the London Charivari in 1849, gave ‘A Wardour-street curiosity shop’ as a key example of ‘confusion’.85 Wardour Street was also cited as a catalyst for the ‘degeneration’ of English fctional literature, as the phrase ‘Wardour Street English’ implies.86 As the anonymous writer of an article published in the press in 1847 put it: If it be true that up to the close of the eighteenth century writers of fction converted circulating libraries into hideous charnelhouses with their eternal ministering spirits and returning ghosts, it is not less certain that since the appearance of Scott the shelves of the same harmless establishments have groaned beneath the weight of historical properties brought with a ruthless hand from Wardour-street and collected together with an undisguised contempt for dates, characters, possibilities, probabilities and events.87 But perhaps more signifcantly, given the evolving historicism of the period, Wardour Street and the commercial practices of the trade in historical objects were complicit in subverting the legitimate enterprises of the historian. For example, Wardour Street was negatively invoked in an article published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1848, criticizing Brougham Hall, which was designed in a fashionable Gothic style in the 1830s by the architect Lewis Cottingham (1787–1847) for Lord Brougham.88 The anonymous writers, describing themselves as ‘Old Subscribers’, were responding to a descriptive account of Brougham Hall penned by the architect and collector and purveyor of ‘ancient furniture’ George Shaw (1810–1876) that had been published the previous month in the same journal and which had suggested that the Hall was of considerable antiquity.89 It is perhaps no surprise, given Shaw’s reputation for fabricating ‘ancient furniture’ that his description was considered, ‘a tissue of falsehoods’, by the ‘Old Subscribers’, who added, ‘as regards the antiquity of Brougham Hall, the thing is a perfect hoax from beginning to end’.90 The writers described various ‘additions’ to the ‘historic’ fabric of the building and then directed their invective towards the collections of arms and armour in the ‘Armour Hall’ at Brougham Hall: As to the knickknackery displayed on the inside walls of the house, such as suits of armour, match-lock guns, military accoutrements, spears, pennoncels, banners & “objects of interest from their family associations” (hearst thou, Mars!) have all been bought from various curiosity shops in Wardour Street … since 1830; and the same may be said of nearly every like article in the house.91 The comments of the ‘Old Subscribers’ suggest, perhaps inevitably in the context of increased social mobility in the period, a criticism of the potential social transgression that Lord Brougham had made in ftting up his ‘New, Old’ house. Henry Brougham (1778–1868) not only played a leading role in the Great Reform Act (1832) but had also only recently been elected to a peerage himself.92 In ftting out Brougham Hall with ‘objects of interest from their family associations’, Brougham had added false prestige, a false ‘patina’, to his house and collections, suggesting a family hereditary lineage that did not exist.93 According to the ‘Old Subscribers’, Lord Brougham was engaged in an act of status misrepresentation. The diarist Thomas Raikes also drew

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attention to the problem of destabilising established social hierarchies that the recirculation of historical objects brought in its train during the 1830s. Raikes writes, Everything now tends to old recollections old names, old furniture, old chateaux, old forms and ceremonies, old tapestry, old china, old plate, are now the rage even with the nouveaux riches.94 As Raikes suggests, the desire for the past extended well beyond an interest in historical objects themselves, ‘old furniture, old tapestry, old china, old plate,’ but was evident in a wide range of social and cultural practices and historical revivals, ‘old recollections, old names, old ceremonies’. It is clear though that historical objects, which were an important signifer of those with inherited wealth, were now becoming more widely consumed and that these new patterns of ownership and display were problematizing one of the primary indicators of social class, allowing the ‘nouveaux riches’ to transgress accepted social boundaries. But there is also a more serious indictment, one that appears to be indicative of the shifting parameters of historical knowledge that had been framed through the evolving notion of early nineteenth-century historicism. The ‘Old Subscribers’ criticised the displays at Brougham Hall because they disrupted the notion of historical accuracy and their concluding remarks draw attention to what lay at the centre of their criticism; they were ‘grieved on account of the violence done to archaeological science’.95 ‘Wardour Street’ and the activities of the antique and curiosity trade were at the centre of this presentation of spurious history. Indeed, much of the criticism of ‘Wardour Street’ in the middle decades of the nineteenth century centred on the ‘authenticity’ of the historical objects and the ‘ancient furniture’ which was sold by the dealers in Wardour Street. It had been a common practice during the opening decades of the nineteenth century to construct ‘ancient furniture’ using fragments of ancient woodwork, but by the 1850s, as the notion of what constituted the ‘authentic antique’ was beginning to shift, such objects, and the practices that they signifed, had become problematic.96 The writer and historian Henry Noel Humphries (1810–1879), writing in 1852, illustrates the standard response to such reconstructed ‘ancient’ furniture by mid-century and cites Wardour Street as the principal source of these problematic objects: a variety of interesting publications have called public attention to the rich productions of medieval skill during the last twelve or ffteen years…but in most cases those styles have been imperfectly comprehended and a vast Wardour-Street commerce has been erected on the sure foundation of that ignorance…these wretched patchwork combinations consisting of every incongruous mixture, stuck together so as to form some article of furniture in common use have hitherto found ready sale, though without any pervading design.97 In Hints on Household Taste, Charles Locke Eastlake’s didactic text on design published in 1868, Eastlake also directed his audience to avoid what he considered to be the inauthentic ‘ancient furniture’ that was still a central part of the collecting and furnishing markets in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Again, Wardour Street was at the centre of these critiques. Eastlake wrote: I would especially caution my readers against the contemptible specimens of that would be Gothic joinery which is manufactured in the backstreets of Soho.

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No doubt good examples of mediaeval furniture and cabinetwork are occasionally to be met in the curiosity shops of Wardour Street; but as a rule the ‘Glastonbury’ chairs and ‘antique’ bookcases which are sold in that venerable thoroughfare will prove on examination to be nothing but gross libels on the style of art which they are supposed to represent.98 The use of ‘Wardour Street’ as a shorthand for ‘inauthentic’ antique furniture appears to have lost none of its potency even by the early twentieth century. In the 1920s furniture history established itself more concretely through a series of scholarly and canonical publications, culminating in the Dictionary of English Furniture by the collector historians Percy MacQuoid and Ralph Edwards.99 At the same time the antique dealer and furniture historian Herbert Cescinsky, famous for some of the most important studies in furniture history, published in the 1920s and 1930s, was just one of several writers who rehearsed the problematic trope of ‘Wardour Street’ in assessments of the authenticity of antique furniture. Writing in Burlington Magazine in 1928 on a comparison of English furniture collecting in his own day with that of the previous generation, Cescinsky commented: Those were the days when all Antique English Furniture was described as being in the ‘Wardour Street Style’, and popular admiration and esteem was reserved for those atrocious productions which today, with an equal but far more deserved contempt, are known as ‘Debased Great Exhibition Period’.100 Beyond the specifc interests of furniture collectors, general criticism of Wardour Street also expanded considerably during the second half of the nineteenth century. As early as the 1850s Wardour Street was emerging as a convenient signifer for reactive taste and was invoked in a criticism of the famous temporary exhibition of ‘Ornamental Art’ at Marlborough House in 1853. An anonymous writer calling himself ‘Argus’, after the mythical monster with multiple eyes, produced several pamphlets in response to the exhibitions at the ‘Museum of Ornamental Art’. According to ‘Argus’, the exhibits were a waste of tax payers’ money: ‘Why, in short, did you purchase all the other elaborately ornamented articles which make a Wardour Street Curiosity-shop of your museum?’, wrote ‘Argus’.101 And an anonymous writer, in an essay published in the Daily News in 1869, exemplifes the consolidation of the unfavourable responses to the antique and curiosity shops of Wardour Street by the second-half of the nineteenth century: Wardour Street is chiefy and mainly old’ the writer states, ‘it is the warehouses full of ancient things which give the whole place tone … The England of the Tudors, Venice, Rome, historic Paris, Antwerp, and the Flemish towns, all seem to have paid special tribute to Wardour Street, the very stones of which re-echo sermons upon time, and change and vanity.102 The writer continued, moving from nostalgic musings to more critical judgment of the objects for sale in Wardour Street: Dirt and dust are objects of attraction, dullness is at a premium and dimness is a beauty. A confused vista of Chinese monsters, medallion portraits, gilt clocks, crazy cabinets and gim-crack chairs, long low rooms with furniture and ornaments

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The spaces of consumption piled up in heavy masses as if to meet the equally ponderous freight suspended from the ceiling and walls ... a theatric-air of unreality hovers over much of the furniture.103

By the early twentieth century the problematic legacy of ‘Wardour Street’ lingered on, and it was still invoked as a potent signifer for critical responses and censorious judgements on art. The painter, critic and art historian R. H. Wilenksi (1887–1975) reinforced the negative stereotype of Wardour Street in his book English Painting (1933) whilst writing a commentary on Edward Burne-Jones’ King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (1884). Wilenski suggested that the painting was ‘the silliest possible still-life record of two models posing in fancy dress on a heap of Wardour Street bric-a-brac’.104 Even as late as the 1960s ‘Wardour Street’ could still be used as an implicit criticism of ‘taste’. When reviewing an exhibition of ‘Adam Style’ furniture at Kenwood House, near London in 1964, the furniture historian Ralph Edwards could not resist rehearsing this enduring trope. ‘The original contents [of Kenwood] were dispersed’, wrote Edwards, ‘before the house was bought by the late Lord Iveagh, and since that disaster until quite recently there has been a lamentable contrast between the splendour of the pictures in the Iveagh Bequest and the Wardour Street character of the furnishings’.105 More recently, the historian Charles Tracey, in his analysis of some of the furnishings at Scarisbrick Hall (supplied by the dealers Edward and George Hull in the 1830s), suggested that ‘it was hard to disentangle’ the original components of the furniture from their ‘Wardour Street embellishments’.106 Well-known historians such as Simon Jervis and John Harris have also continued what is now a long tradition of invoking the convention of Wardour Street as a signifer for dubious objects in their recent publications; Jervis was unconvinced by the purported antiquity of some supposedly ‘ancient’ furniture illustrated in William Scott Bell’s Antiquarian Gleanings in the North of England (1851), adding that they had a ‘distinctly Wardour Street character’.107 In John Harris’ study of the trade in architectural salvages he isolated the contaminating trope of ‘Wardour Street’ from all of his other chapters, where it is implicitly the location of problematic practices and where the dealers in Wardour Street ‘rejoiced in inventing royal provenances’.108 Whilst it is obviously important to draw attention to the role that Wardour Street played as a signifer for these problematic notions, it is also important to emphasise the critical role that Wardour Street played in the wider consumption of historical objects in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. We should perhaps not let the signifcance of Wardour Street in this earlier period be diminished by the problematic narratives that emerged to tarnish its image.

Spaces of consumption II: Auctions The antique and curiosity shop may have been at the nexus of supply and demand for historical objects in the nineteenth century, but there were other key spaces of commercial exchange through which these objects were drawn further into distinctive patterns of consumption. Auction sales of historical objects, either through the periodic sale of individual collections or trading stock of dealers through the ubiquitous ‘importation sales’ in the early nineteenth century, were also an important catalyst and a key structuring element in the evolving markets for antiques and curiosities in the period. The trade relied heavily on well-established channels such as auction sales

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to quickly redistribute large quantities of imported stock acquired on the Continent, but the public auction was also essential to manage the ebb and fow of the domestic market. Isaac regularly used auctions for both buying and selling antiques and curiosities, favouring auction rooms close to his shop in Wardour Street such as Deacon’s in Berner’s Street and Mr Oxenham’s in Oxford Street.109 The Davies family were only one of a number of dealers specialising in ancient armour in London in the period and regularly used auctions to dispose of extensive collections of ancient arms and armour, including one auction held by the famous collector, showman and merchant William Bullock at his ‘Egyptian Hall’ in March 1821.110 Early in 1822 Gabriel Davies wrote a letter to Sarah, his daughter (composed in his usual fractured English), illustrating the importance of specialist single category auctions: We now got, with that two I got by me, 18 complete armoury beside those without faces that we can make a capital sale – out the spring with armours. I got two very handsome plated, I have been drawing of it in this letter you shall see it, and the other is with brass-nails complete with legs.111 The drawing that Gabriel mentioned was included within the letter (see Figure 4.4) and a ‘capital sale’ of ancient armour belonging to ‘H.A. (Henry Abraham) Davis’, [sic], took place on 6th June 1822 at which were sold ‘the futed suits of the Dukes of Leinengen & Lacklen’.112 Such specialised auction sales instilled a concentrated consumer attention onto single object types, allowing more discrete patterns of difference and quality to be highlighted and layered such objects into ever more discrete patterns of consumption.

Figure 4.4 Letter from Gabriel Davies to Sarah Davies with drawing of a suit of armour, dated December 10th 1821. AJ53-430, Hartley Library, University of Southampton. © Hartley Library, University of Southampton.

136 The spaces of consumption Moreover, just as the antique and curiosity shop focused specifc attention on the exchange value of historical objects and prioritized specifc forms of consumer relationships, so the consistent appearance of historical objects at public auction sales reinforced the economic value of objects in the public domain. Indeed, the auction is a place where the economic value of objects is publicly highlighted and where the fuctuations in the economic values of objects are detected much more acutely than they would be in the more intimate spaces of the antique and curiosity shop.113 The public auction is a ‘highly visible theatre of competing desires’, as Andrew Miller suggests, one where ‘the meanings of goods are developed and reinforced as their purely monetary value is recreated and calculated anew’.114 But auctions are, as the social anthropologist Charles Smith reminds us, ‘not exclusively or even primarily exchange processes. They are rather processes for managing the ambiguity and uncertainty of value by establishing social meanings and consensus’.115 ‘Auctions do many things’, Smith writes, ‘they establish value, identity, and ownership of items; they entertain; they shape social identity...and tell us a great deal about economic life and social behaviour’.116 The cultural critic Jean Baudrillard has also drawn attention to the distinctive nature of the public art auction as a discrete site of consumer activity. Baudrillard writes: Contrary to commercial operations, which institute a relation of economic rivalry between individuals on the footing of formal equality, with each one guiding his own calculation of individual appropriation, the auction, like the fête or the game, institutes a concrete community of exchange among peers…the essential function of the auction is the institution of a community of the privileged who defne themselves as such by agnostic speculation upon a restricted corpus of signs.117 The ideological signifcance of public auction that Baudrillard highlights is also emphasised by Arjun Appadurai, who describes the public auction as a ‘Tournament of Value’.118 For Appadurai the auction is a periodic ‘event’ where participation can be seen as a ‘privilege of those in power and an instrument of status contests between participants’.119 As all of these writers suggest, auctions are locations where social prestige and economic power can be reinforced and where the relationships between economic value, cultural value, and social status are formulated and made concrete. In contrast to the social space of the antique and curiosity shop, which is more intimate and more private, it is the social space of the auction, a public, collaborative and competitive event, that is a key determinant in its role in the emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer. One of the distinctive features of the early nineteenth-century markets is the increasing, consistent and high-profle presence of the antique and curiosity dealers at auction sales of antiques and curiosities. Dealers were such a constant presence at auction that collectors such as Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick automatically assumed that when new competition arose it must have emerged from within the trade itself. Meyrick wrote to Isaac in July 1833 in response to a new buyer whose active participation at auctions of ‘ancient armour’ was attracting attention: ‘I am rather curious to know who is this new admirer of armour, if he is not a dealer?’120 The presence of dealers at auction was also constantly registered in journal and newspaper reports on the auction sales of major collections in the period, illustrating the extent to which the trade were the dominant buyers at auctions. The Gentleman’s Magazine, for example, regularly

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reported the activities of the dealers at auction sales in the frst half of the nineteenth century.121 And in every major auction sale reported in the newspapers throughout the nineteenth century the majority of auction lots were recorded as being sold to members of the antique and curiosity trade. At some of the most high-profle auction sales in the period, publications that listed the purchasers of objects were produced, highlighting again the infuential presence of dealers at these public events. Following the auction sale of the collections of Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill in April 1842, for example, H.D. Burn published Aedes Strawberrianae, providing a roll call of dealers, immediately recognisable through the conjunction of name and commercial location: ‘Farrer, Wardour-street’; ‘Pratt, New Bond-street’; ‘Hertz, Marlborough-street’; ‘Forrest, Strand’; ‘Hull, Wardour-street’.122 At the Strawberry Hill auction the dominating presence of curiosity dealers as principal buyers was evident in Burn’s publication; James Money and Henry Cureton are each recorded buying over 100 lots, and many other dealers also made large numbers of purchases at the auction (Robert Owen, 79 lots; William Forster, 65 lots; Horatio Rodd, 48 lots; Town & Emanuel, 47 lots; Godfrey Zimmerman, 37 lots; William Till, 35 lots), with scores of other well-known dealers recorded as buyers of dozens of objects at the auction. The writer Henry Rumsey Forster provided a similar list of buyers for the auction sale at Stowe in 1848 which followed the spectacular bankruptcy of the Duke of Buckingham & Chandos.123 The commentary by Forster on the result of just one lot at the auction sale at Stowe in 1848 is worth quoting in full as it reinforces the consistent presence of the dealer in the evolving market; Forster writes of Lot 256: A small table of marqueterie, the borders and legs inlaid with white metal ... £59.0.0 to Redfern [a dealer] … . This table was formerly in the possession of the Le Despener family, and came to the hammer when the contents of Mereworth castle were disposed of, about 17 years ago. Mr Swaby [a dealer], of Muswell Hill, on that occasion discovered its true value, though at that time it was in very bad condition. He was opposed for its possession by a dealer named Levy, [a dealer] of Maidstone, who ultimately secured it for £35. Mr Levy kept the table for some months, and at length offered it to Mr Swaby [a dealer], who at once purchased it. On the retirement of that gentleman from active business, Mr Webb [a dealer] of Old Bond Street, took it at valuation, and shortly afterwards sold it to Mr Bevan of Hamilton Place. From Mr Bevan it returned to Mr Webb [a dealer], who sold it to the present Duke of Buckingham. The table is now in the possession of Lord Ward, Mr Redfern [a dealer] having sold it to that gentleman at Stowe.124 Following the auction sale of the collections of Ralph Bernal in 1855, and which was one of the most important auctions of antiques and curiosities to be sold in the nineteenth century, Henry Bohn also published a list of the buyers.125 In the Bernal auction, the dominance of trade buyers is even more explicit, with high-profle dealers such as Samuel Pratt, David Falcke, William Chaffers, Henry Durlacher and John Webb each recorded as buying hundreds of objects. The constant registering of the active participation of the dealers at such important public events draws further attention to the central role that the antique and curiosity trade played at these ‘tournaments of value’. Whilst the dealers were buying historical objects at auction for their shops, many dealers also bought at auction on behalf of collectors, and the important role that dealers played in the markets for antiques and curiosities in the period is further highlighted

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through their roles as commission agents. The practice of acting as a commission agent at auction sales was not new of course, from at least the sixteenth century, dealers of various kinds, including art dealers, had acted on behalf of customers who were unable or did not wish to bid for articles themselves.126 In the nineteenth century the practice of dealers bidding at auction for clients naturally accelerated as the market for antiques and curiosities expanded. The Isaac archive consistently records the role of the dealer acting as bidding agent at auction; for example, Isaac regularly acted as a commission agent for John Campbell (1796–1862), 2nd Marquis of Breadalbane, who was remodelling Taymouth Castle, the family seat at Perth in Scotland, following the death of his father in 1834.127 The archive also records a series of detailed negotiations between Isaac and the collector Henry Williams Brown of Leeds for potential commissions at the Strawberry Hill auction in 1842.128 In a letter dated 15th April 1842, Brown requested to have the opinion of Isaac on both the quality of the objects coming up for sale at the auction and on their potential commercial value: I wish you would tell me if you have been to view the articles entrusted for sale at Strawberry Hill and what you think of them generally, and if you are of the opinion they will be sold at remarkable prices … . I should also wish to know if you will undertake accompanying me to purchase such things as I may see in the Catalogue, and what could you charge for such.129 In a letter from Brown dated a few days later in reply to Isaac’s response, Brown wrote: from the experience I have had of your judgement upon articles like those at Strawberry Hill, I am disposed to place more faith than in my own … . I shall very willingly pay the charge you mention, say 5–6% depending entirely on you … and the price you may recommend me to give for them.130 Brown was particularly interested in Isaac’s assessment of ‘Anne Bolyens [sic] clock’,131 but the outcome of the discussions was not entirely to Brown’s satisfaction, for it seems that Isaac rescinded on any agreement to bid on behalf of Brown and took another commission, leaving Brown to write, ‘I do feel unfairly treated’.132 These brief discussions in the Isaac archive supply insights into the relationships between dealers and collectors in the period, but also highlight the increasing importance of the discrete expertise of dealers, grounded in the market value (prices) of antiques and curiosities. In his analysis of collecting practices in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the historian Kryzsztof Pomian also directed attention to the signifcance of an emerging expertise of ‘prices’ in the evolving art markets of eighteenth-century Paris.133 Pomian suggests that as the consumption of art was commercialised in the eighteenth century the relationships between art collectors and art dealers became less personal and more distanced, and there was a rising demand for information on prices by an increasingly diverse consumer body.134 One of the consequences of these developments was a profound shift in the relationships between art collectors (art connoisseurs) and art dealers as a discourse grounded in connoisseurship and an emphasis on erudite descriptions of paintings (what Pomian describes as early ‘art criticism’) shifted to one grounded in the signifcance of the ‘prices’ for artworks. One further consequence of these developments, Pomian writes, was that ‘in the 1760s the dealers began to steal not only their [the connoisseurs] dominant position but also their very title … .

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nothing was ever the same again’. This shift began to place more emphasis on the knowledge of prices and market value of artworks: 135

on show in the saleroom [a] painting becomes a piece of merchandise whose worth is measured less in words than in the price someone is prepared to pay in order to secure its possession. In these circumstances it is inevitable that the attitude of art lovers towards such works should be infuenced by their market value and in particular, by the fuctuations of this value.136 Of course, such developments also remind one of the critique of the ‘Art Trade’ by the Marxist historian and writer Arnold Hauser in his commentary of the autonomy of art; such a development is, writes Hauser, ‘the worst example of the objectivization’, and an example of ‘the business of the art dealer and his [sic] manipulation of the public’.137 However, the development of an increasing focus on the signifcance of the prices of artworks in the eighteenth century that Pomian identifes and Hauser’s observations on the role of the art trade in terms of the processes of commodifcation are a useful frame through which to further consider the signifcance of the emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer in the early nineteenth century. As outlined in the opening sections of the current study, it was during the opening decades of the nineteenth century that specifc publications devoted to the prices of paintings realised at auction began to emerge with increasing regularity. By the 1840s, the scope of these publications began to widen and include prices of antiques and curiosities. H.D. Burn’s Aedes Strawberrianne (1842), Henry Rumsey Forster’s The Stowe Catalogued, Priced and Annotated (1848) and Henry Bohn’s Illustrated Catalogue of the Bernal Collection of Works of Art, with the Prices at Which They Were Sold by Auction (1857) are just three high-profle examples of auctions in which the prices of objects were circulated and disseminated as a form of a public knowledge. Auction sales such as those at Strawberry Hill, Stowe and Bernal were widely reported of course, with daily reports in the London newspapers and syndicated reports in the regional press.138 Alongside these individual and specifc reports there was also the constant rhythm of the publication of prices achieved for antiques and curiosities at many other auctions reported in newspapers and journals from the opening decades of the nineteenth century onwards.139 These developments illustrate the extent to which the narrative theme of prices came to dominate the market for antiques and curiosities in early nineteenth-century culture. It is perhaps no coincidence that as the discourse of prices was extended to the increasingly diverse range of antique and curiosities that entered the market in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, the antique and curiosity dealer also emerged to take on distinctive social and cultural identity. The dealer’s knowledge of prices gave them a key structural position in the evolving consumption of historical objects. The increasing dominance of dealers at auctions in the nineteenth century also illustrates the extent to which they had become a central node in the market for antiques and curiosities. Charles Smith has directed attention to what he called ‘dealer-dominated auctions’, where, he states, ‘collective judgements are the most important factors in determining value’.140 These judgements, Smith writes, must be the result of a consensus amongst peers, and whilst individual dealers will have their own opinions on the value of the objects sold these are normally dependent on the collective view.141 In this sense, the dominance of the dealers at auction in the period both stabilises the

140 The spaces of consumption value of objects circulating on the market and offers opportunities for dealers to control participation. For example, at the auction sale of the contents of Stowe in 1848, Henry Foster stressed the presence of dealers at auction, suggesting that this not only had become pervasive, but was also becoming a problem: During the sale scarcely any respectable persons could enter the mansion without being imported to entrust their commission to persons of this class [dealers]: you were told that the applicant belonged to the ‘London Society of Brokers’ … that it was no use to offer personal biddings as the brokers attended for the purpose of buying and would outbid any private individual.142 Foster added, disapprovingly, ‘the villainy of the system will be judged when we add that four or fve of these men generally work together’.143 Forster highlights an important practice undertaken by the antique and curiosity dealers in the period, that of the dealer’s ‘ring’ or the ‘knockout’. The ‘ring’ or ‘knockout’ had been well known since the eighteenth century, particularly in the Parisian art markets where it was known as the ‘revision’, but the practice became much more common within the antique and curiosity markets of the nineteenth century. The practice of the ‘ring’ (also known in the nineteenth century, as the ‘Combination’) involves a group of dealers agreeing not to bid in competition with each other for an object or number of objects, at a given auction sale.144 One dealer is designated by all dealers participating in the ‘ring’ to bid for the object, which is purchased for a price without competition from the participating dealers. The object is then re-auctioned in the ‘knockout’ by the dealers in a private auction in an agreed location, often outside of the auction room after the end of the public auction. The resulting price difference between the object sold at the public auction (say £50) and the price eventually realised during the private auction by the dealers (say £150) is then distributed, often on a sliding scale depending on the point at which a dealer involved in the ‘knockout’ drops out of the bidding. The calculations involved in this practice are based on individual assessments of the possible proft to be gained by the future sale of the object if the dealer is successful in acquiring it in the private auction, and on the immediate sum of money to be obtained by dropping out of the bidding and receiving a share of the increase in price. The practice of the ‘ring’ was legal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the legitimacy of the practice of the ‘ring’ began to be more formally and legally questioned during the 1920s following the reports of a series of high-profle auction ‘rings’ in the period, and as a result it was made a criminal offence in 1927 (Auctions (Bidding Agreements Act) 1927). The criminal sanctions on the practice of the ‘ring’ were further extended following an additional series of revelations in The Times and Sunday Times in the 1964 and 1968, leading to the Auctions (Bidding Agreement Act) 1969.145 John Coleman Isaac makes several references to his participation in the ‘knockout’ during the 1830s and 1840s. During a visit to Fürth in Germany in 1833, for example, Isaac wrote to his wife Sarah that he had recently been involved in a ‘knockout’ with a number of dealers.146 The waste book also records that Isaac received a share of the money from a ‘nockout’ [sic] at one of the auctions of the armour dealer Thomas Gwennapp’s stock in 1833.147 Isaac also had to pay out money after a ‘knockout’ at an auction at Christie’s in February 1840.148 Other archive sources, such as that of the collector Charles Scarisbrick (d.1860), also record payments for the ‘knockout’; Scarisbrick recorded paying ‘clearance money and knockout £8.0.0’. via the curiosity dealer Edward Hull for an auction sale in 1846.149

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By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, critical reports on the ‘knockout’ were also a consistent presence in reports in London and regional newspapers, illustrating that the ‘knockout’ was becoming highly a contentious, socially disruptive and morally dubious practice. In an anonymous article published in the Glasgow Herald in 1846 under the title ‘Tricks of Furniture Brokers’, the practice of the knockout was described to the readers in a report on a court case heard in Lambeth, London, involving a case of ‘obtaining goods by false pretences’ instituted by a dealer called David Nathan against another dealer called Moss Davis.150 It appears that Davis did not handover the goods in question to Mr Nathan after the ‘knockout’ at the auction. The judge asked that the operation of the ‘knockout’ should be explained; the defendant, Davis duly obliged, but it was reported that Nathan, ‘when asked to explain what was meant by a ‘knockout’ affected a total ignorance of it’.151 By the 1860s public criticism of the practice of the ‘knockout’ was increasing. In an article titled ‘Brokers and Sales by Auction’, published in The Preston Chronicle and Lancashire Advertiser in 1864, the anonymous writer complained about the practice of the ‘knockout’: ‘there is as much roguery in one shape or other at sales by auction as in any commercial transaction one can name’.152 In September 1869 the Daily News included an article titled ‘Combination of Brokers at Auction’ which reported on a court case set against the practice of the ‘knockout’.153 In the court case a dealer had been accused of using insulting and abusive language to members of the public attending an auction room in New Bond Street, London, in order, so it was alleged, ‘to drive persons of respectability from the room, in order that they [the dealers] might monopolize the business’.154 The writer and collector Herbert Byng-Hall, in his book The Bric-a-Brac Hunter (1868), suggested that the ‘knockout’ was expressly designed to sabotage the activities of the collector: ‘there appears to be a combination among dealers’, wrote Byng-Hall, ‘which utterly upsets the hopes and expectations of an amateur’.155 Public auctions inevitably provided a space where the tensions between the objectives of the collector and those of the dealer were played out and provided a convenient frame through which the distinction between the ‘legitimate’ practices of the collector and the ‘problematic’ activities of the dealer could be rehearsed. The consistent presence of the ‘knockout’ at auction also indicates that there was a strong subsidiary market for historical objects operating within the antique and curiosity trade, a micro-economy in which the value of objects could be manipulated and sustained by the members of the antique and curiosity itself. Public auctions were a vital aspect of the evolving markets and played a crucial function in the wider circulation of historical objects. Antique and curiosity dealers such as Isaac occupied a key strategic position in these ‘tournaments of value’. The consistent presence of dealers at auction also inscribed the ‘idea’ of dealer ever further into the public consciousness, and as the market value of antiques and curiosities and knowledge of prices moved to a more dominant position in the conceptual frameworks of the art market, the antique and curiosity dealer played an increasingly important role in the evolving patterns of consumption.

Spaces of consumption III: Exhibitions As writers such as Richard Altick and Greg Smith have already suggested, early nineteenth-century temporary public exhibitions were also intimately connected to the contemporary cultures of leisure and commerce in the period.156 Indeed, the connections between the didactic and utilitarian intentions of exhibitions and the emergence of the historical object as commodity in the early nineteenth century are brought into

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sharper focus when one considers the role and function of antique and curiosity dealers in the evolving nineteenth-century exhibition culture. There are, of course, clear synergies between the public auction of historical objects and their display at temporary public exhibitions in the nineteenth century. It was, for example, and remains, a common practice for auction sales to involve the public display of objects for several days prior to the sale. One specifc development during the opening decades of the nineteenth century was the growing range of high-profle temporary public exhibitions organised by the new kind of antique and curiosity dealers. John C. Hampp, the Norwich glass-painter and dealer in ancient stained glass is well known for staging a series of public exhibitions in London during the opening decades of the nineteenth century and which prefgured the sale of his collections at various auction sales.157 Many other curiosity dealers staged public exhibitions as part of elaborate commercial marketing strategies designed to dispose of large quantities of imported stock. Such initiatives elide the distinctions between the merchandising possibilities and the professed didactic and educational purposes of public exhibitions. For example, the dealer Thomas Gwenapp senior (d.1851) staged several ‘educational’ exhibitions of ‘ancient armour’ in his gallery at 20 Lower Brook Street, known as the Oplotheca (an Anglicisation of the Greek word hoplothêkê, or armoury) in the early nineteenth century.158 One of the most important of Gwenapp’s ancient armour exhibitions was staged in 1816 and had an elaborate catalogue accompanying the displays; it was organized, as the catalogue stated, with ‘very kind assistance from Dr. Meyrick’ the armour collector and ‘curator’ of the Tower Armouries.159 The expressed purpose of the exhibition was the instruction of the public: ‘to illustrate the manners of our ancestors and elucidate many points of history’.160 Gwenapp’s commentary in the catalogue also directed explicit attention to the commercial value of the collections, amounting to ‘some ten thousand pounds’, although he was at pains to stress that the value of the exhibition amounted to more than its ‘intrinsic worth’.161 Gwenapp relocated to new and more spacious premises at the custom-built ‘Gothic Hall’ in the Opera Arcade, Pall Mall, in 1818 and expanded his exhibition programme of ancient armour during the early 1820s.162 He also used his armour exhibitions as the backdrop for elaborate and exclusive social events, attracting the social elite of London. In June 1820, for example, the ‘Gothic Hall’ was the location for a ‘Select Concert ... under the patronage of several Ladies of distinction’.163 The press reported on the event: The Hall was brilliantly illuminated with gas, from three elegant chandeliers, which diffused a fne light upon the magnifcent collection of ancient armour which surrounds this extensive building, that, with the rich Gothic decorations, it produced the most enchanting effect ever beheld.164 Gwenapp retained his collection of armour until 1821, when he sold most of his collection at a series of auction sales conducted by the auctioneer James Christie on the premises at ‘The Gothic Hall’, just a few yards from Christie’s own auction room in Pall Mall. The fnal auction sale of Gwenapp’s famous collection of ancient armour ‘owing to his age, infrmity, and other causes’ was undertaken by the famboyant auctioneer George Robins in an auction at ‘The Shooting Gallery, 7 Haymarket’, on 10th and 11th June 1833.165 John Coleman Isaac was amongst the successful purchasers at the auction sale, buying, in collaboration with fellow dealers John Swaby, John Bentley and ‘Mr. Sack’, the ‘Magnifcent Armour of the Elector Joseph of Bavaria’

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and ‘The Coronation Armour…worn by the King’s champion at the coronation of His Late Majesty George IV’ for over £300.166 Shortly after the auction sale Isaac, Swaby, Bentley and Sack attempted to sell both suits of armour for 500 guineas, but eventually appear to have sold the armour to the collector Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick, who had offered ‘£400, and not sixpence more’.167 Gwenapp’s gallery at 20 Lower Brook Street had also the venue of a similar exhibition of ancient armour organised by the dealer Abraham Davies, John Coleman Isaac’s brother-in-law, who advertised in 1817 in the Morning Post that he would be holding an exhibition of ‘ancient armour at 20 Lower Brook Street....admission one shilling’.168 In contrast to Gwenapp’s exhibitions, which were part of a much larger business strategy for generating income through admission fees, Davies did not regularly stage such exhibitions, and he appears to have used the exhibition as a more direct and explicit marketing strategy for the distribution of large volumes of ancient armour that he imported as part of his business as an antique and curiosity dealer. But such an example only serves to reinforce the hybrid nature of these exhibitions as both didactic projects and commercial enterprises. The dealers Samuel Pratt (d.1849) and his sons Henry Joseph Pratt and Samuel Luke Pratt (1805–1878), who superseded Gwenapp as the most important dealers in ancient armour in the period 1825–1850, were also well known for staging exhibitions of ancient armour.169 The Pratt family were instrumental in the organisation of the infamous Eglinton Tournament staged in 1839, and this important event appears to have been a catalyst for the staging of some of their exhibitions.170 Henry and Samuel Luke Pratt not only supplied suits of armour (mainly hired, rather than sold) for the participants at the Eglington Tournament, but they were also responsible for the production of the tournament paraphernalia and the initial planning, which was held in Pratt’s shop in Bond Street, with ‘Meetings for Practice’ held at the Eyre Arms in St John’s Wood.171 As part of the entrepreneurial activities of the Pratt family their exhibitions of ancient armour were staged in a purpose built gallery annex to their shop in New Bond Street, at 3 Lower Grosvenor Street, called ‘The Gothic Armoury’, which was ftted out and designed by the architect and antiquary Lewis Nockells Cottingham (1787–1847).172 An exhibition staged at The Gothic Armoury in 1838 and for which they charged 1 shilling admission, included armour from the collections of Count Hector Oddi of Padua, which Samuel Luke Pratt had recently acquired whilst on one of his regular buying trips to the Continent (see Figure 4.5). The exhibition was widely reported in the press both in London and in the provinces. The Times recorded the interior displays: ‘at a table in this truly Gothic apartment are seated six grim fgures in full armour, apparently in debate’173 (see Figure 4.6). The Gentleman’s Magazine reported that Pratt’s 1838 exhibition was ‘one of the most brilliant and interesting ever seen in London’.174 Pratt’s exhibitions were accompanied by scholarly catalogues and as with many of these dealer organised exhibitions they were also elaborate marketing exercises with the exhibits auctioned off in high-profle auction sales shortly after the exhibitions closed.175 Whilst ancient armour was perhaps one of the most popular of attractions in the period it was not the only type of historical object that was the focus of dealer exhibitions. The famous woodcarver and dealer in ancient furniture William Gibbs Rogers (1792–1875), well known for his admiration of Grinling Gibbons (1678–1721), staged several exhibitions at his shop in Church Street, Soho, London, during the 1830s, including one that allegedly displayed some carvings by Gibbons. In March

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Figure 4.5 Exhibition poster for Samuel Pratt’s exhibition ‘The Gothic Armoury’, 3 Grosvenor Street, London, 1838. The private collection of Peter Finer. Photograph © Peter Finer.

1830 the Athenaeum reported on one of Rogers’ exhibitions, which had ‘several hundred fgures in boxwood and oak … coffers and stands belonging to the Cenci … and a superb assemblage of the most elaborate carvings of Grenlin [sic] Gibbons’.176 Another of Rogers’ exhibitions was reported in the Morning Post in 1834, which described ‘Roger’s Collection of Ancient Carvings’: One room alone contains materials for inspection and study, which will repay an hour’s indulgence. This contains twelve rich oak panels, of carvings of the fnest description, the work of the celebrated Berge, bearing the date of 1730, which were removed from the Abbey of Parc, near Lovain.177 Most of these dealer exhibitions were staged in London during the period, but by the late 1830s there were a growing number of dealer organised exhibitions in other cities such as Manchester, in tandem with the expansion of the antique and curiosity trade. Thomas Agnew (1794–1871), who opened his frst independent art gallery in Manchester in 1835, appropriately named The Repository of Arts after Rudolph Ackermann’s famous premises at 101 Strand in London and is better known as one of the leading picture dealers in London during the second half of the nineteenth century, also staged a variety of exhibitions in the 1830s. At many of these temporary

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Figure 4.6 S & H Pratt ‘The Gothic Armoury’ exhibition. Douglas Morrison (c.1810–1846/7) lithograph. Published by P & D Colnaghi 1838. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1966. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

provincial dealer exhibitions, ‘curiosities’ were often displayed alongside new and fashionable commercial productions and objects of ‘fne art’ such as paintings and sculpture. In September 1838 in the Manchester Guardian, for example, Agnew advertised an exhibition of paintings alongside ‘the arrival of a very extensive collection of French goods’ and his new exhibition of ‘curious specimens of ancient armour’.178 In the same year the Manchester Guardian advertised an anonymous exhibition lasting ‘a few days’, to be staged at Ladyman’s Hotel in Manchester, where visitors could view ‘fne original paintings, by esteemed masters’ combined with ‘rare and curious specimens of old carved oak furniture’.179 Such dealer exhibitions demonstrate a deliberate strategy to add an appropriate gloss to the range of curiosities on display that were still, for many consumers at least, of arcane, antiquarian interest, by drawing from the cultural capital of ‘fne art’, allowing curiosities to be pulled further into expanded felds of consumption. These exhibitions also illustrate how the practices of antique and curiosity dealers intersected more explicitly with the didactic and commercial exhibitionary culture of nineteenth-century Britain. Whilst exhibitions organised by antique and curiosity dealers were clearly part of the evolving marketing and commercial practices of the trade, the increasing signifcance of the strategic role played by the antique and curiosity dealer in exhibitions

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throughout Britain is further highlighted by their involvement in the series of public exhibitions organised by local and central Government to promote design and manufacturing and to elevate public taste.180 Such exhibitions have a genealogy that has its beginnings in the eighteenth century with the exhibitions of manufactured goods at the Royal Society Arts in 1756–1757, but they are more conventionally seen to arise out of the Select Committee into Arts and Manufactures of 1835, a project that culminated in the Great Exhibition of 1851. However, whilst such projects were explicitly part of a wider project to improve the standard of manufactures, what has been less discussed by historians is the place of these exhibitions in the promotion of the interest in historical objects and their role in the evolving market for antiques and curiosities.181 Such exhibitions, of varying degrees of scale, began to increase rapidly across Britain during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. In Leeds, for example, small but infuential public exhibitions were staged in the late 1830s and early 1840s and were organized by local industrialists and politicians following a pattern established by the Northern Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, whose exhibitions in the early nineteenth century had been staged to promote the work of contemporary artists. An exhibition in 1843 held in the Music Hall in Albion Street in Leeds continued these earlier traditions but expanded the display of contemporary art with a selection of ‘Old Master’ paintings together with displays of natural history and archaeological specimens, contemporary commercial products and examples of modern engineering.182 Alongside these artistic, scientifc and practical exhibits the 1843 Leeds exhibition also contained a ‘Museum of Antiquities’ presenting the public with the opportunity to see a whole range of historical objects including ancient furniture, ancient oak carvings, curiosities and ancient armour. The lenders to this section of the exhibition comprised the usual antiquarian collectors, namely gentlemen of leisure and members of the professions, but amongst the exhibitors there were also members of the new antique and curiosity trade. Thomas Fenteman (1768–1848), who, together with his two sons Thomas and Cooper, traded in antiques and curiosities from Boar Lane in Leeds from the early 1830s until 1869, was a major lender to the Leeds exhibition.183 Fenteman exhibited 43 objects including ‘ancient armour’ and ‘ancient carvings in oak’; also on display was a ‘Carved Oak Gothic Cabinet, a fne specimen, temp. Henry VII’, and an ‘Elaborately carved Armed Chair … a fne specimen of the time of Charles II’.184 Fenteman’s antiques and curiosities, unlike those objects loaned by the collectors, were all for sale, as the catalogue for the exhibition informed the visitor; ‘all articles marked * are on sale – apply to the Superintendent’.185 More signifcant were the series of large-scale national exhibitions staged in London, Manchester and Leeds in the 1850s and 1860s. The exhibition of ‘Antient and Medieval Art’ organized in 1850 and held at the Royal Society of Arts was largely overshadowed by the Great Exhibition of 1851 but was hugely infuential in the promotion of interest in historical objects, and presents us with further evidence of the increasing presence of the antique and curiosity dealer in these signifcant public events. The dealer John Webb, for example, was a prominent member of the exhibition 1850 Committee.186 The exhibition catalogue reinforced the antiquarian interests of the organisers where special attention was given to the ‘products of an age too hastily considered dark and barbarous’; the catalogue celebrated the ‘toil and enthusiasm of the critical antiquary’, highlighting that the collections had been drawn ‘from the cabinets and galleries of the greatest connoisseurs in the Kingdom’.187 Much of the newspaper reportage of the exhibition seemed to be just as much concerned

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with its antiquarian narrative as with its expressed purpose for promoting design and manufactures. The Times, for example, suggested that the Mediaeval exhibition was a place where ‘all those who have a reverence for the past can revive and refresh their impressions’.188 At the Marlborough House Exhibition (the ‘Museum of Practical Art’), which opened on 18th May 1852, and at the exhibition of ‘Specimens of Historic Cabinetwork’ at Gore House in May 1853, the antiquarian narratives were even more pronounced and the role of the antique and curiosity dealer was even more explicit. The Gore House Exhibition catalogue expressly thanked the dealers Samuel Pratt and John Webb for their important organisational roles in the staging of the exhibition.189 The dealer John Webb appears to have been a hugely infuential fgure in the organisation of the Marlborough House exhibition, working alongside the curator John Charles Robinson. The Marlborough House and Gore House exhibitions formed the genesis of what would become the South Kensington Museum and were organized by the Department of Practical Art under the Privy Council for Trade, with an explicit rationale for the improvement and promotion of good design through exposure of the manufacturing classes to ‘frst-rate’ ornamental art.190 But the catalogues to the Gore House and Marlborough House exhibitions directed just as much attention to the antiquarian and historical interest in the objects as they did to their roles as catalysts to promote and improve manufacturing.191 The newspapers and journal articles on the Gore House exhibition also paid special attention to the displays of historical objects; The Times reported: Of the mighty past, it must be confessed that there are few traces more interesting than those which are found in the cabinets, the buffets, the coffers, the Great State chairs, the mirror frames, the tapestry, the secretaries and the clocks, religiously handed down from generation to generation … they form the best memorials of the stately and ceremonious domestic life of our ancestors … such feelings form a large ingredient in the pleasure with which the exhibition of Cabinet-work at Gore House is examined.192 The objects on display at Gore House comprised an array of ‘ancient’ and ‘antique’ furniture dating from the ffteenth century right up to the 1770s; we can already see that by the early 1850s the chronological frame of historical interest was extending even further, drawing objects from the second half of the eighteenth century into the realm of the market for antique furniture. Many of the catalogue descriptions appear to be primarily driven by the discourse of collecting and connoisseurship rather than the promotion of manufacturing and ‘good design’. Indeed, several objects are subjected to what amounted to detailed connoisseurial study and to observations more appropriate to antiquarian interest than any analysis of form and technique that would be appropriate for designers and manufacturers. Often what appeared to be implicitly highlighted were aspects related to the historical authenticity of the objects. For example, the ‘or-moulo [sic] mountings’ on two of the pieces of furniture on display were described as ‘probably modern restorations’.193 The historical authenticity of a ‘Buhl Cabinet’ was brought into question because of the existence of contemporary reproductions, which made it ‘diffcult to determine exactly the epoch of execution’.194 The objects for display at the Gore House exhibition were photographed by Charles Thurston Thompson (1816–1868) and bound in two volumes which remain

148 The spaces of consumption at the Victoria and Albert Museum.195 Many of the donors of the ancient cabinetwork included aristocratic and titled individuals, including Queen Victoria and Earl Amherst, donors that are indicative of the desire of the organisers of such exhibitions to grant their project an important social and political endorsement. Objects belonging to the aristocracy would also, by defnition, provide the signifcant gloss of appropriate hereditary possession onto the range of historical material on display. Evidence of the expanding interest in collecting and furnishing with such objects and the evolving patterns of consumption is also demonstrated by the inclusion of objects belonging to members of the newly enfranchised class of industrial wealth and political power. Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859), for example, loaned a ‘Cabinet or Buffett’, described as ‘Flemish, date about 1530–60’, and Baron Lionel de Rothschild loaned a ‘French, Carved Chestnut-wood Cabinet, Circa 1570–90’.196 However, the key role that the antique and curiosity trade continued to play in the markets for historical objects at mid-century is demonstrated by an examination of the lists of lenders of historical objects to the exhibition. Just as Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836) had highlighted the close relationships between the practices of antiquarian collecting and the commercial trade in historical objects in the 1830s, the Gore House exhibition albums highlight the continued symbiosis between the antique and curiosity trade and the antiquarian and consumer cultures of the 1850s. The albums indicate that at least 40 of the 135 historical objects on display at Gore House were exhibited by members of the antique and curiosity trade. The dealer John Swaby, for example, exhibited ‘an oak table, Italian, c.1600’ and a ‘small oak table possibly English, c.1520–30’ (see Figure 4.7);197 Henry Farrer, the well-known Wardour Street dealer, exhibited a ‘napkin press, Flemish, c.1600;’198 The Bond Street dealer John Webb exhibited a wide range of historical objects including a ‘Venetian Glass Chandelier, 17th century’, a ‘Clock, English or German, c1670–80’ and a ‘Venetian Mirror, c.1700’ (see Figure 4.8).199 The ‘Venetian Mirror’ was possibly sold to Webb by John Coleman Isaac; a letter in the Isaac archive, dated 18th September 1857, whilst Isaac was on a buying trip to Venice, mentioned the purchase of a ‘large engraved looking glass in carved frame (I think fner than the one I sold to John Webb for £100)’.200 Notwithstanding the signifcance of the Gore House and Marlborough House exhibitions, the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 was perhaps one of the most important events of its type in Britain in the nineteenth century.201 Devised as a cultural foil to the Great Exhibition of 1851, the 1857 Art Treasures Exhibition was derived from an idea by Albert, the Prince Consort. Albert had suggested that the theme of the Art Treasures Exhibition should be art rather than industry, a purpose that refected a broader political and social project that was intended to promote interest in, and wider access to, works of art.202 The lenders to the exhibition refected this narrower project, with objects owned by art collectors and art patrons comprising the most signifcant categories of objects. It is perhaps unsurprising that we can also note the signifcant presence of the antique and curiosity trade in both the development and the delivery of the Art Treasures Exhibition. The well-known picture dealers Thomas Agnew (1794–1871) and Dominic Colnaghi (1790–1879) assisted in the organising process, alerting the ‘art secretary’ of the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition, George Scharf (1820–1895), to the current location of specifc works of art as possible loans. The dealers in antiques and curiosities, Henry Durlacher, Isaac and David Falcke and Henry Farrer, together with the Warwick antique and curiosity dealer Charles Redfern,

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Figure 4.7 ‘Oak Table, Italian, c. 1600, possession of J. Swaby esq.’, photograph by C. Thurston Thompson (1816–1868), albumen print 1852. Furniture Exhibited at Gore House, volume 2 (photograph 32.712). Victoria and Albert Museum, Print Room (X.180). © The Art Library, The Victoria and Albert Museum.

were all listed as lenders of objects to the ‘Museum of Ornamental Art’ at Manchester. At the same time, Redfern was also heavily involved in the important but little-known exhibition of art manufacturers and ‘antiques and curiosities’ staged at Aston Hall, near Birmingham in 1858, alongside the ‘antique dealer’ Walter Cooke of Warwick. The Ashton Hall exhibition was opened to the public by Queen Victoria in June 1858 and included ‘period room’ displays of ‘Old Furniture’ and a restoration of the Great Gallery to its original early seventeenth-century appearance. Redfern loaned much of his stock of antiques and curiosities to the Ashton Hall exhibition; as the offcial catalogue for the Aston Hall exhibition records, ‘Mr. Redfern, of Warwick, drew upon his rich stores of antiquarian lore, and lent his aid to the works of restoration’.203 The ‘Museum of Ornamental Art’ at Manchester (1857) was itself organised ‘with the assistance’ of several antique and curiosity dealers, including Redfern, the dealer in ancient armour Samuel Pratt and the curiosity dealer William Chaffers.204 We should note, however, that whilst the role of dealers such as Chaffers was highly signifcant, there was some resistance on the part of the organisers of the exhibition to the involvement of the ‘trade’. Correspondence between the industrialist Sir William Fairburn (1789–1874), one of the patrons of the exhibition, and J.B. Waring, the ‘curator’ of Museum of Ornamental Art at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition 1857,

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Figure 4.8 ‘Venetian Mirror, 1700, from the collection of John Webb’, photograph by C. Thurston Thompson (1816–1868), albumen print 1852. Furniture Exhibited at Gore House, volume 2 (photograph 32.712). Victoria and Albert Museum, Print Room (X.180). © The Art Library, The Victoria and Albert Museum.

reveals the prevailing attitude towards dealers in the period. Writing to Waring on 14th January 1857, Fairburn commented: As regards Mr Chaffers we cannot make any engagement which would appear to place him in a position of an offcer of the Committee. All we can do with dealers is to bribe their knowledge from them and their cooperation by promise of packing, which is a business matter to them and of some proft.205 Publicly, however, the contribution made by members of the trade to the Art Treasures Exhibition 1857 was more explicitly acknowledged. The antiquary and playwright J.R. Planché (1796–1880), who provided the descriptive commentary on the displays of ancient armour which was part of the ‘Museum of Ornamental Art’ at the exhibition, wrote in his preface to the exhibition catalogue: My thanks to Mr. Samuel Pratt of Bond Street, not only for the careful and punctual execution of the work he contracted to do; but also for the energy and loyalty with which he laboured to promote, by every means in his power the success of the exhibition.206

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The other key public national exhibition in which the antique and curiosity trade played a signifcant role and that incorporated extensive loans of historical objects from the trade was the National Exhibition of Works of Art at Leeds in 1868.207 At this exhibition, which deserves much more detailed and sustained study than it has presently attracted, loans from dealers included the Bristol antique ceramics dealer William Edkins and the London dealers Isaac Falcke, Frederick Davis and Henry Durlacher.208 The curiosity dealer William Chaffers also extended his activities from Manchester 1857, playing a much more important organisational role as ‘Superintendent of the Museum of Ornamental Art’ at the Leeds exhibition. The high-profle presence of members of the antique and curiosity trade at these infuential political, social and cultural events in the decades after 1850 indicates the signifcant social status that was achieved by some members of the antique and curiosity trade in the period. These observations also draw attention to the continuing interrelationships between the evolving trade in historical objects, the evolving cultures of collecting, and the design-led commercial, manufacturing and cultural concerns in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. However, what also concerns us here is how the evolving interest in historical objects during the period up to the 1850s was mediated to the wider public. The establishment and expansion of a small number of highly important public museums in Britain in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, for example, Sir John Soane’s museum, which opened in 1837, and the expansion of the British Museum in the 1830s and 1840s ushered in the emergence of the public historical museum proper. However, it was not until the 1850s that publicly funded museums and galleries began to expand beyond the confnes of London. Even then the pace of change was painfully slow. The museums and galleries Acts of 1845 (8 & 9 Vic., c.43) and the Public Libraries Act of 1850 (13 & 14 Vic., c.65) may have adumbrated a system of public museums as part of a national politically motivated project, but even by the 1860s there were no more than four or fve cities that possessed nationally or municipally funded museums and galleries.209 Moreover, it is important to note that, however signifcant these public museums were, they contained very little of the kind of historical material that was extensively displayed in the antique and curiosity shops in the period 1815–50. Sir John Soane’s museum, for example, was primarily a didactic collection of a professional architect and scholar and whilst it did contain a number of casts of Gothic carvings and architectural details it was mainly devoted to Classical architectural material.210 The collection of the architect Lewis Nockells Cottingham, as historians such as John Harris and Janet Myles have demonstrated, was perhaps the most signifcant collection of Mediaeval and later historical material in London in the period prior to 1850.211 Cottingham’s collection, like those of Sir John Soane, was also housed at his own home, at Waterloo Bridge Road in the 1840s, and whilst Cottingham’s collection was well known in the period it had limited public audiences and was primarily visited by antiquaries and artists. Moreover, the refusal of the trustees of the British Museum to purchase Cottingham’s collection, which was sold at auction in 1851, demonstrates that such material was not considered to be appropriate for museological display at Britain’s premier museum at that time. Indeed, the trustees of the British Museum showed little interest in the acquisition of Medieval historical material before the late 1850s.212 In this sense, the majority of early nineteenth-century collections of historical material dating from the ffteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remained in ‘ancient mansions’, which were not that easily accessible, or indeed usually open,

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to the wider general public in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Or such material was the property of municipal literary and philosophical societies or in private antiquarian collections, which were also not readily accessible to a broader public. It is therefore much more likely, in the period up to 1850, that the wider public would encounter such historical material in the commercial sphere, either in the shops of the antique and curiosity dealers, at dealer organised exhibitions, or at other commercial venues such as auctions of such material. We have seen then the continued presence of the dealer as a key actor in the orchestration of National exhibitions such as those in London, Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds, and the critical role that the dealer played in facilitating the assembly of historical objects for presentation to the public. But even in these publicly funded ostensibly didactic exhibitions, the value of the historical object as part of a wider system of commercial exchange was clearly foregrounded. While a new range of historical material was being registered as culturally signifcant in these public venues, their meaning as commodities was reinforced as their economic exchange value was explicitly highlighted. We can perhaps see that the empirical qualities of these objects as bearers of historical knowledge, or as models for the promotion of design and manufactures, diminish in signifcance to their function in the evolving systems of commercial exchange that had underpinned the broadening market for antiques and curiosities in the opening decades of the nineteenth century.

Notes 1 See, for example, Andrew Hemingway and William Vaughan (Eds.), Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790–1850 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), in particular Greg Smith’s essay, ‘The Watercolour as Commodity: The Exhibitions of the Society of Painters in Watercolours, 1805–1812’, pp. 45–61. 2 See Altick (1978); for a comprehensive study of nineteenth-century exhibitions, see Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vista: The Expositions Universalles. Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988). 3 The literary theorist Janell Watson, in her study of the presence of material culture in the nineteenth-century novel, is one of several authors who have drawn attention to the symbiotic relationships between such spaces; see Janell Watson, Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. pp. 21–4; see also Maleurve (1999). 4 See Dorothy Davis, A History of Shopping (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966). Hoh-Cheung Mui and Lorn H. Mui, Shops and Shopping in Eighteenth-Century England (London, Routledge, 1989), a study derived from economic history, provides a detailed, if largely statistical, investigation of the development of shops in eighteenth-century England. 5 Davis (1966), p. 4. 6 Anne Mountfeld, Shops and Shopping (Hove, Wayland, 1976), p. 81. 7 Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson, The Social Logic of Space (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984). 8 Hillier and Hanson (1984), pp. 1–3, p. 2. 9 Hillier and Hanson (1984), pp. 184–5. 10 Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1900) (translated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby) (London, Routledge, 1990). 11 Simmel (1990), p. 67. 12 Gianfranco Poggi, Money and the Modern Mind: Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993), p. 89. 13 Appadurai (1986), p. 4. 14 ‘Ancient Furniture’, Gentleman’s Magazine, vol.XVII, (New Series) (January 1842), pp. 19–23, p. 19. 15 See Westgarth (2009).

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16 See for example, Celina Fox, ‘A Visitors Guide to London, World City, 1800–40’, in Celina Fox (Ed), London: World City 1800–40 (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 11–20; Altick (1978). 17 See Wainwright (1989), pp. 26–53. 18 Clive Wainwright, ‘Curiosities to Fine Art, Bond Street’s First Dealers’, Country Life, (29th May 1986), p. 1528. 19 Wainwright (1986). 20 For a useful summary of the history of Bond Street, see Jean Desebrock, The History of Bond Street, Old and New (London, Tallis Press, 1978). 21 Sebag-Montefore and Armstrong-Totten (2013), p. 17. 22 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53, No.467; Davies sold Askew ‘Dresden china groups’ in April 1821, and ‘24 enamels on copper’ in May 1821. 23 John Webb, 8 Old Bond Street, Pigot’s Directory, 1839. See also Westgarth (2009). 24 Moore & Co., 25 Tottenham Court Road, Pigot’s Directory, 1839. See also Westgarth (2009). 25 See Aileen Dawson, ‘Franks and European Ceramics, Glass and Enamels’, in Caygill and Cherry (Eds.) (1997), pp. 200–19, p. 204; George Redford (1888), vol. 1, p. 148; William Forrest, 54 Strand, Pigot’s Directory, 1839. See also Westgarth (2009). 26 Berman (1982). 27 Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, ‘The Commodifcation of Civic Culture in Early NineteenthCentury London’, London Journal, vol.29, No.2 (2004), pp. 17–32, p. 19. 28 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467, entry dated ‘December 27th 1842’ – ‘Paid Messrs Coutts & Co a check drawn by Samuel Ware Esq, Hendon Hall, Hendon … £21.0.0.’ 29 Dana Arnold, ‘Rationality, Safety and Power, the Street Planning of late Georgian London’, Georgian Group Journal, (1995), pp. 37–50. 30 Peter Jackson, John Tallis’s London Street Views 1838–1840 (London, Nattali & Morris, 1969), introduction. Also quoted in D.J. Olsen, Town Planning in London (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1982), p. 19. 31 Isaacs counted the collector William Beckford and the Lucy family at Charlecote Park, Warwickshire, amongst his clients; see Westgarth (2009). 32 The Noseda family appear to have been a highly successful family of ‘curiosity dealers’ and ‘art dealers’ in the nineteenth century; Antonio Noseda (perhaps a brother of Giovanni) traded as a ‘curiosity dealer’ from Coventry Street, London, in the 1820s and 1830s; Urban Noseda and his mother Jane Noseda were well-known art and print dealers in the second half of the nineteenth century; see Westgarth (2009). 33 Isaac exchanged some ‘curiosities’ with Abraham Hertz in July 1832, including ‘2 small ivory carvings of David and Goliath for 12 ivory fgures and some wood carvings’, and he sold Bentley several objects over a long period of business transactions, including 8 suits of armour and a large amount of other curiosities for ‘£360’, in August 1833. Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467. 34 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467, ‘Paid Mr. Lipscombe £18 for a Quarters Rent for Shop in Quadrant due 29th last month’ entry dated 4th October 1826, the last payment recorded for these premises is on 26th December 1827. See also Levy/Moss (2002), p. 101. 35 Christopher Breward, Fashioning London, Clothing and the Modern Metropolis (Oxford, Berg, 2004); Jane Rendell, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Gender, Space and Architecture in Regency London (London, Athlone, 2002). See also my comments on the cultural geography of the picture trade c.1850, in Helmreich and Fletcher (2011), pp. 49–50. 36 For the fashion for ‘Old French’ furniture in the early nineteenth century, see Turpin in Ostergaard (2002), pp. 177–202, pp. 183–4. 37 Loudon (1833), p. 1099. 38 Gentleman’s Magazine, vol.1 (New Series) (January 1834), p. 87. 39 The Morning Chronicle, (9th February 1826). 40 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.64, letter dated ‘2nd April 1844’. 41 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 Add 1, No.67, letter dated ‘24th April 1844’. 42 Westgarth (2009). 43 Charles Knight (Ed.), London (London, Charles Knight, 1841–44) (vol. V), p. 399. 44 Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 168–78. Nead focuses

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The spaces of consumption on the associations of Holywell Street with ethnic identities, particularly Jewish identity. It is interesting to note, given these associations, that Isaac records that his parents had moved to lodgings in the house of Mr. Levy, 10 Holywell Street, in 1842. Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467, entry dated, ‘October 6th 1842’. J.D. Burn, Commercial Enterprise and Social Progress; or, Gleanings in London (London, Piper, Stephenson and Spence, 1858), p. 12. Burn (1858), p. 12. William Ball, ‘Curiosity Dealer’, Liverpool (Pigot’s Directory, 1828); Joseph Jacobs, ‘Curiosity Dealer’, Birmingham (Robson’s Directory, 1839); Shriener Wolf, ‘Curiosity Dealer’, Manchester (Whellan’s Directory, 1853). See Westgarth (2009). James Lomax, ‘Buying Antiques in Victorian Leeds: The 1843 Exhibition’, Furniture History, vol.XXXIII, (1997), pp. 275–85. For example, Isaac sold considerable quantities of ‘curiosities’ to ‘Isaac Abrahams of Liverpool’ on 18th December 1829 and 30th March 1830 and continued to trade with Abrahams into the 1840s. Isaac recorded, ‘Gave Mr Abrahams for a present … 10/- on April 25th 1843. Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467; Isaac Abrahams, ‘Curiosity Dealer’, Liverpool, is recorded in Gore’s Directory, 1828. See Westgarth (2009). Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467, for example, an entry dated ‘December 5th 1838’, records a quantity of paintings, furniture and other objects sold to Mr Brett. George Elkins ‘Curiosity Dealer’, Portsmouth (Pigot’s Directory, 1844); Leopold Goetz, ‘Curiosity Dealer’, Southampton (Pigot’s Directory, 1830); George Dew, ‘Dealer in Curiosities’, Hertford (Gentleman’s Magazine, April 1830, p. 352; Thomas Walesby, ‘Curiosity Dealer’, Northampton (Pigot’s Directory, 1847). See Westgarth (2009). Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467 and No.366 letters dated ‘13th August 1844’ and No.367 dated ‘14th August 1844’. Deborah Grinham (one of several female curiosity dealers in the period) is recorded trading at the Isle of Wight in the 1840s; other dealers such as George Matthews, Isaac Moses and Samuel Solomon are recorded at the same location in the same period. See Westgarth (2009). Isaac also recorded transactions with Redfern. Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467, entry dated ‘July 11th 1842’, ‘Delv’d to Pickford’s Offce 158 Regent Street, one small case directed to Mr C Redfern, Jury Street, Warwick’; Charles Redfern, ‘Curiosity Dealer’, Warwick is recorded in Pigot’s Directory, 1841; there is a small cache of archive material associated with Redfern at Warwickshire County Record Offce, Warwick (CR1985). See Westgarth (2009). See Ingamells (1981), p. 12 and p. 22. Lot 66 (15th Day), ‘A Splendid Cabinet of Rosewood…’, £126.0.0; Catalogue of the Valuable Contents of Strawberry Hill … Sold by Auction by George Robins … Commencing 25th April 1842… (London, George Robins, 1842). The cabinet remains in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (V&A, W.52.1, 2-1925). Francis White, History, Gazetteer and Directory of Warwickshire (Warwick, Francis White, 1850), p. 459. The description of Redfern’s shop was repeated in Henry Cooke, An Historical and Descriptive Guide to Warwick Castle… (Warwick, T. Cooke, 1851). For the history of the transition of Aston Hall to public ownership see Oliver Fairclough, The Grand Old Mansion: The Holts and Their Successors at Aston Hall 1618–1864 (Birmingham, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, 1984), pp. 107–20. Sydney Whiting, ‘Bric-A-Brac’, Once a Week, (April 1862), pp. 402–7, p. 403; for Woodgate see Westgarth (2009). Bayard Taylor, At Home and Abroad: A Sketch-Book of Life, Scenery, and Men (New York, Putnam, 1860), pp. 64–5; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Our Old Home (2 vols.) (London, Smith, Elder & Co., 1863), vol. I, pp. 140–2. Taylor (1860), p. 64. Hawthorne (1863), p. 140. Hawthorne (1863), p. 140. See also my brief introduction to Wardour Street in Helmreich and Fletcher (2011), pp. 52–3; see also Westgarth (2009), pp. 12–15. For a comprehensive study of the development of Wardour Street see F.H.W. Sheppard (Ed.), The Survey of London, the Parish of St. Anne, Soho, vol. XXXIII (London, Athlone Press, 1966), pp. 113–14, p.221, pp. 240–2, pp. 288–96.

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Sheppard (1966), p. 291. Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467. Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467, entry dated ‘September 21st 1832’. See Jackson (1969), p. 160. Isaac retired to live at 30 Gordon Street, Gordon Square, London, where he died on 16th March 1887, aged 85. See also Levy and Moss (2002), p. 104. Westgarth (2009), p. 14. Sheppard, Survey of London (1966), p. 291–2. Illustrated on p. 37. William Rimmell, ‘curiosity dealer’, is recorded in the Post Offce Directory at 12 Wardour Street in 1824, before moving to 15 Castle Street as ‘antique furniture dealer’ in 1829. See Westgarth (2009). For a full account of Goodrich Court see Rosalind Lowe, Sir Samuel Meyrick and Goodrich Court (Herefordshire, Longaston Press, 2003). The building accounts for Goodrich Court, together with visitor books and other Meyrick ephemera are located at the Royal Armouries, Leeds. See Meyrick MS papers, RAR.85, RAR.87 and RAR.401. Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.178, letter dated ‘18th June 1831’. Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.142, letter dated ‘7th September 1838’. See Wainwright (1989), p. 39; the painting is in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (FA.42[0]). C.M. Yonge, John Keble’s Parishes, a History of Hursley and Otterburn (London, MacMillan & Co. 1898), p. 101. Also quoted in Charles Tracy, Continental Church Furniture in England; a Traffc in Piety (Woodbridge, ACC, 2001), p. 76. Letter from Thomas Duncan ‘1 Darnway Street, Edinburgh’ to Daniel MacNee, dated 28th August 1831’. Royal Scottish Academy archives. I thank Dr Joanna Soden, collections curator, Royal Scottish Academy, for supplying this reference. Sir Walter Scott, The Antiquary (1816) (Edinburgh, Adam & Charles Black, 1871). Nicholas Condy and Rev. F.V.J. Arundell, Cotehele, on the Banks of the Tamar… (London, published by the authors, n.d., c.1840). Condy and Arundell, p. 33. ‘Ebony chairs’ such as those at Cotehele are amongst the most famous objects in the history of ‘ancient furniture’. Historical interest in them begins in the eighteenth century with Horace Walpole and achieved a high point in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. There are several subsequent discussions of their history and signifcance, see for example: Clive Wainwright, ‘Only the True Black Blood’, Furniture History, vol.xx, (1984), pp. 250–5. For a useful, and revisionist, summary of discussions see Amin Jaffer, Furniture from British India and Ceylon (London, Victoria and Albert Museum, 2001). George W.M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of the Court of London, vol. VIII (London, John Dicks, 1856), pp. 160–1. Anon., ‘An H.B. Sketch of Mind (from Punch)’, Hampshire Telegraph and Chronicle, (June 2nd 1849), p. 2. The Oxford English Dictionary defnes ‘Wardour Street English’ as ‘applied to the pseudoarchaic diction affected by some modern writers especially of historical novels’. See also Wainwright (1989), p. 36. Anon., ‘Degeneracy of English “Light Literature”, Preston Chronicle and Lancashire Advertiser, (September 4th 1847), p. 3. Anon. ‘Brougham Hall, A Modern Antique’, Gentleman’s Magazine, vol.xxix, (June 1848), pp. 618–20. George Shaw, ‘A Visit to Brougham Hall’, Gentleman’s Magazine, vol.xxix, (April 1848), pp. 369–76. Gentleman’s Magazine, (June 1848), p. 618. George Shaw lived at St. Chad’s, Uppermill, Saddleworth, Manchester, and was a well-known collector of ancient furniture in the 1840s and 1850s, some of which he appears to have also manufactured and sold on to other notable collectors, including the Duke of Northumberland at Alnwick Castle. For more on George Shaw’s activities see Alan Petford and Mike Buckley, ‘George Shaw and the Duke of Northumberland’, Saddleworth Historical Bulletin, vol.47, no.1 (2017), pp. 6–19, and Jonathan Foyle, ‘George Shaw and His Unwitting Discovery of Henry VII’s Bed’, Saddleworth Historical Bulletin, vol.47, no.1 (2017), pp. 1–6.

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91 Gentleman’s Magazine, (June 1848), p. 619. 92 Henry Brougham (1778–1868) was elected Lord Brougham in 1834. 93 For a further discussion on the symbolic properties of ‘patina’ in terms of hereditary status see McCraken (1998), pp. 31–43. 94 Raikes (1836), vol.1, p. 361. 95 Gentleman’s Magazine, (June 1848), p. 618. 96 See Muthesius (1988). 97 Henry Noel Humphries, Ten Centuries of Art, Its progress in Europe from the 9th to the 19th Century (London, Grant & Griffth, 1852), p. 210. 98 Charles Lock Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and Other Details (London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1868), pp. 57–8. 99 See Percy MacQuoid and Ralph Edwards (Eds.), The Dictionary of English Furniture (3 volumes) (London, Country Life, 1924–1927). 100 Herbert Cescinsky, ‘A Set of George I Furniture’, The Burlington Magazine, (1928), pp. 306–7, and pp. 310–12, p. 311. 101 ‘Argus’ (pseud.), A Mild Remonstrance against the Taste-Censorship at Marlborough House in Reference to Manufacturing, Ornamentation and Decorative Design (London, 1853), part I, p. 25–7. For a further discussion on the Marlborough House exhibition see Suga Yasuko, ‘Designing the Morality of Consumption: “Chamber of Horrors” at the Museum of Ornamental Art, 1852–53’, Design Issues, vol.20, no.4 (Autumn 2004), pp. 43–56; see also Anthony Burton, Vision and Accident: the Story of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, V&A, 1999), pp. 26–39. 102 Anon., ‘Wardour Street’, The Daily News, (1st July 1869), p. 1. 103 Anon., ‘Wardour Street’, The Daily News, (1st July 1869), p. 1. 104 R. H. Wilenksi, English Painting (London, Faber & Faber, 1933), p. 225. 105 Ralph Edwards, ‘Furniture in the Adam Style at Kenwood’ (Forthcoming Exhibitions), The Burlington Magazine, vol.64, no.737, (August 1964), p. 393. 106 Tracey (2001), p. 260. 107 Simon Jervis, ‘Antiquarian Gleanings in the North of England’, The Antiquaries Journal, vol.85 (2005), pp. 293–358, p. 304. 108 Harris (2007), chapter 3, ‘Continental Imports and the Wardour Street Trade’, pp. 37–57, p. 43. 109 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467. 110 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 entry dated ‘6th April 1821’. For a comprehensive overview of the history of William Bullock and the Egyptian Hall see Altick (1978), pp. 235–52. See also Susan Pearce, ‘William Bullock: Collections and Exhibitions at the Egyptian Hall, London, 1816–1825’, Journal of the History of Collections, vol.20, no.1 (2008), pp. 17–35. 111 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.430. The fractured language is in the original manuscript; underling in original. 112 Cripps-Day (1925), p. lxvi. 113 See also my summary of curiosity dealers and auctions in the mid-nineteenth century in Fletcher and Helmriech Helmreich (2011), pp. 41–4. 114 Andrew Miller, Novels Behind Glass, Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 21. 115 Charles Smith, Auctions: The Social Construction of Value (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989) p. 162. 116 Smith (1989), p. 163. 117 Jean Baudrillard, “The Art Auction”, in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (translated by Charles Levin) (St. Louis, Mo., Telos Press, 1981), pp. 112–23, p. 117. 118 Appadurai (1986), p. 21. 119 Appadurai (1986). 120 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.182, letter dated ‘22nd July 1833’. 121 See for example, the reporting of the sales at The Pryor’s Bank in Fulham, the property of the collector and antiquary Thomas Baylis which was sold in May 1841 and the property of the Nottingham collector John Holmes at East Retford which was sold in October 1841, in Gentleman’s Magazine, vol.xvii, (January 1842), p. 23.

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122 H.D. Burn, Aedes Strawberrianae, Names of Purchasers and the Prices to the Sale Catalogue of the Choice Collection of Art & Virtue at Strawberry-Hill Villa… (London, H. Burn, n.d.) (1842). 123 Henry Rumsey Forster, The Stowe Catalogue Priced and Annotated (London, David Bogue, 1848). 124 Forster (1848). 125 Henry Bohn, A Guide to the Knowledge of Pottery and Porcelain … Comprising an Illustrated Catalogue of the Bernal Collection … with Prices at Which They Were Sold… (London, H. Bohn, 1857). 126 See, Evelyn Welch, ‘From Retail to Resale: Artistic Value and the Second-Hand Market in Italy (1400–1550)’, in Marcello Fantoni, Louisa C. Matthews and Sara F. MatthewsGrieco (Eds.), The Art Market in Italy, 15th–17th Centuries (Modena, Franco Cosimo Panini, 2003), pp. 282–99. 127 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467, entry dated ‘June 6th (or 8th?)’, ‘Purchased at Mr Oxenham’s sale on Commission … for the Marquis of Breadalbane’. 128 H. W. Brown, who lived at Heaton Hall, Leeds in the 1830s, was the son of William Williams Brown. His father, William, had been a member of the Northern Society for the Encouragement of the Arts in the 1820s. 129 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.318, letter dated ‘15th April 1842’. 130 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.319, letter dated ‘19th April 1842’. 131 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.319. The clock, lot 48 on the 17th day of the sale, it was described in the auction catalogue as ‘the celebrated clock of silver gilt, presented by Henry VIII to his Queen, Anne Boleyn’ was the gift of Lady Elizabeth Germaine to Horace Walpole. It was purchased at the auction by William Sequier (1772–1843), the art dealer and frst Keeper of the National Gallery, London, on behalf of Queen Victoria and remains in the Royal Collections. See Catalogue of the Valuable Contents of Strawberry Hill, Sold by George Robins … April 1842 (London, George Robins, 1842). 132 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.321, letter dated ‘23rd April 1842’. Underlining in original. 133 Pomian (1990), pp. 161–8. 134 Pomian (1990), pp. 161–8. 135 Pomian (1990), p. 168. 136 Pomian (1990), p. 161. 137 Hauser (1982), p. 516. 138 For example, see regular reports on the prices achieved at the Strawberry Hill auction in The Times, Morning Chronicle and The Caledonian Mercury, Edinburgh, in May and June 1842; and extensive reports on the prices achieved at the Stowe auction sale in The Times, The Daily News, The Ipswich Journal, The Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, The Belfast Newsletter and Jackson’s Oxford Journal in August and September 1848. 139 See, for example, the report on the auction sale of ‘Ancient Armoury and Armour’, Morning Chronicle, (27th March 1827); ‘The Effects of the Duke of Sussex’, The Times, (6th June 1843). 140 Smith (1989), p. 166. 141 Smith (1989), p. 166. 142 Forster (1848), p. 102. 143 Forster (1848), p. 102. 144 Technically, the ‘ring’ describes the group of dealers during the practice of collaborating at auction; the ‘knockout’ describes the post-sale auction organised by a group of dealers. 145 The Auctions (Bidding Agreements Act) 1927 was established following the case of Cohen vs Roche (1926) and set out the parameters and sanctions for the offence; anyone guilty of an offence under the act ‘shall be liable on summary conviction to a fne not exceeding one hundred pounds, or a term of imprisonment not exceeding six months. Or both such fne and imprisonment’ (Auctions Bidding Agreements Act) 1927; the 1969 Bidding Agreements Act extended the fne to £400 and the possible term for imprisonment to up to 2 years, following a series of high profle journalist reports in The Times and The Sunday Times during 1964 and 1968; these reports had been in response to a number of auction rings that occurred during the period, most signifcantly the now infamous auction sale

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146 147

148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173

The spaces of consumption of a painting ascribed to ‘Duccio’ which sold for £2,700 to the American art dealer Julius Weitzner at the sale of the contents of Aldwick Court, Somerset, in March 1968 and was subsequently sold to The National Gallery, London, for £151,102 – the painting is now attributed to Ugolino di Nerio (NG6386); see also Hansard, especially 1969, vol.302, cc828-840, and vol.772, cc889-95. For a brief outline of the legal status of this practice see Michael Kay ‘Under the Hammer: Is Joint Account Bidding at Auction Legal?’, in Donald Garstang (Ed.), Art, Commerce, Scholarship: a Window on the Art World, Colnaghi 1760 to 1984 (London, P&D Colnaghi, 1984), pp. 57–9. See also R. Cassidy Jnr. Auctions and Auctioneering (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1967); and Mark Westgarth, ‘The Auction Ring’ in SOLD! The Great British Antiques Story (2019). Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53, Add 1, No.70, letter dated ‘22nd March 1833’. Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53. No.467, entry for ‘10th June 1833’ – ‘Rec’d One Pound Seven Shillings at the…(nock out) [sic] at Gwenapp’s sale’. The auction sale was Gwenapp’s fnal liquidation of his collection of ancient armour and at which Isaac made several purchases; See also Stuart W. Pyhrr, ‘Arms and Armour Dealers and Displays in Early Nineteenth Century London’, London Park Lane Arms Fair Handbook, (2011), pp. 97–114. Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.467, entry dated ‘26th February 1840’ – ‘Paid…£10.9.0. Knockout’. Scarisbrick archive DDSC/78/4/(10). Anon., ‘Tricks of the Furniture Brokers’, Glasgow Herald, (Monday 9th March 1846), p. 2. Glasgow Herald, (1846). Anon., ‘Brokers and Sales by Auction’, The Preston Chronicle and Lancashire Advertiser, (16th January 1864), p. 4. Anon., ‘Combination of Brokers at Auction’, The Daily News, (17th September 1869), p. 6. The Daily News, (17th September 1869). Byng-Hall (1868 edition), p. 197. Altick (1978), pp. 426–30; Smith (1998). Lafond (1964), p. 60. Pyhrr (2011), pp. 97–114; for more detail on Gwenapp see Westgarth (2009). Catalogue of a Most Splendid and Instructive Collection of Ancient Armour, Exhibiting at the OPLOTHECA… (1816); see also Joy (1962), p. ix; Pyhrr (2011), p. 101. OPLOTHECA… (1816), p. iii. OPLOTHECA… (1816), p. x. Pyhrr (2011), p. 102. Anon., ‘Concert at the Gothic Hall’, The Morning Chronicle, (Monday 26th June 1820). The Morning Chronicle, (Monday 26th June 1820). A Catalogue of a Magnifcent and Unique Collection of Ancient Armour … the Choice Specimens Formerly Exhibited at the Gothic Hall, Pall Pall … . Sold by George Robins, Monday 7th June and the following day, 1833, p. 4. Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.181, letter dated ‘15th June 1833’. An annotated copy of the Gwennap auction sale catalogue (private collection) suggests one of the suits of armour, lot 161, made 170 guineas at the sale. Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.181, letter dated ‘15th June 1833’. Edward Joy (1962), p. 242. For further accounts of the exhibitions of Pratt see Altick (1978), p. 391, and K.N. Watts, in Mark Jones (Ed.) (1992), pp. 100–4; Pyhrr (2011), pp. 105–11; Thrush (2011). Anstruther (1986), pp. 128–32. A ‘fxture-card’ for the organisation of the tournament indicating ‘practice’ at the Eyre Arms was reproduced in a short article on the Eglinton Tournament by Michael TrappesLomax, in Country Life, (25th January 1936), p. 96. For an extensive and detailed study of the architect Lewis Cottingham, see Janet Myles, L.N. Cottingham 1787–1847, Architect of the Gothic Revival (London, Lund Humphries, 1996). The Times, (Monday 16th April), 1838, p. 3; see also see also Pyhrr (2011).

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174 See Gentleman’s Magazine, vol.ix (New Series) (May 1838), p. 532. 175 Pratt’s armour collections were auctioned by Messrs. Oxenham & Son in May and June 1840; and in a fnal auction sale by Oxenham’s in April 1841; see also Pyhrr (2011), p. 111. 176 Athenaeum, (6th March 1830), p. 144; also Quoted in Altick (1978), p. 397. 177 The Morning Post, (1834). I am very grateful to Joyce Stephenson of Ontario, Canada, a distant relative of Williams Gibbs Rogers, who supplied this information. 178 Manchester Guardian, (September 22nd 1838). 179 Manchester Guardian, (November 3rd 1838). 180 See for example Lubbock (1995), pp. 248–78. 181 Anthony Burton, ‘The Uses of the South Kensington Art Collections’, Journal of the History of Collections, vol.14, no.1 (2002), pp. 79–95; Burton acknowledges that the exhibitions were also driven to a substantial extent by antiquarian interests; see also MacGregor (1997), esp. pp. 17–19. 182 James Lomax, ‘Buying Antiques in Victorian Leeds: The 1843 Exhibition’, Furniture History, vol.XXXIII (1997), pp. 275–85. 183 Lomax (1997), p. 275. 184 Catalogue of the Second Public Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture, Curiosities … at the Music Hall, Leeds… (1843). 185 Catalogue … Leeds… (1843). 186 See Burton (1999), p. 34. 187 Catalogue of Works of Antient and Mediaeval Art Exhibited at the House of the Society of Arts, London (1850), introduction. 188 The Times, (20th March 1850). 189 Catalogue … Gore House (1853), preface. 190 For a discussion of the Marlborough House and Gore House exhibitions, see Burton (1999), pp. 26–39. 191 See Museum of Ornamental Art – a Handbook for Visitors to Marlborough House (1852); Catalogue of Specimens of Cabinet-Work and Studies from the Schools of Art Exhibited at Gore House, Kensington (1853). 192 The Times, (4th June 1853), p. 8. 193 Catalogue … Gore House (1853). 194 Catalogue … Gore House (1853). 195 Charles Thurston Thompson, Photographs of Furniture Exhibited at Gore House, 1853 (2 vols., 1853) (V&A Print Room, X.180). 196 Thompson (1853). 197 Thompson (1853), photograph 32.720. The table is presently in the collections of Lord de Lisle at Penshurst Place; it was also illustrated in Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836), plate XIX, when it was also in the possession of Swaby. 198 V&A Print Room X.180, Thompson (1853), photograph 32.634. 199 Thompson (1853), photographs 32.674; 32.682; 32.608. 200 Hartley Library, MS139/AJ53 No.86, letter dated ‘18th September 1857’. 201 See Elizabeth A. Pergam, The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857: Entrepreneurs, Connoisseurs and the Public (Farnham, Ashgate, 2011); and Elizabeth Pergam, ‘From Manchester to Manhattan: The Transatlantic Art Trade after 1857’, in Helen Rees Leahy (Ed.), ‘Art, City, Spectacle; The 1857 Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition Revisited’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library of Manchester, vol.87, no.2 (2005), pp. 63–92. 202 See Lubbock (1995), pp. 250–2. 203 Anon., Offcial Guide to Aston Hall and Its Exhibition of Fine Arts and Art Manufactures … June 1858 (Birmingham, M. Billings, 1858), p. 55; see also Fairclough (1984). 204 Catalogue of the Art Treasures of the United Kingdom collected at Manchester in 1857 (London, Bradbury & Evans, 1857). 205 I am very grateful to Elizabeth Pergam for sharing her research into the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition and for drawing my attention to this reference; see Pergam (2011). 206 J.R. Planché, Some Account of the Armour and Weapons, Exhibited amongst the Art Treasure of the United Kingdom at Manchester in 1857 (1857), preface.

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207 Offcial Catalogue of the National Exhibition of Works of Art at Leeds, 1868 (Leeds, Edward Baines, 1868). 208 National Exhibition of Works of Art at Leeds (1868), passim. 209 Altick (1978), p. 471; see also Giles Waterfeld, The People’s Galleries: Art Museums and Exhibitions in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2015). 210 See Peter Thornton and Helen Dorey, A Miscellany of Objects from Sir John Soane’s Museum (London, Laurence King, 1992). 211 See Harris (2007); Myles (1995). 212 See John Cherry, ‘Franks and the Medieval Collections’, in Caygill and Cherry (Eds.) (1997), pp. 184–99.

Epilogue

The main purpose of this book has been to reinsert the nineteenth-century antique and curiosity dealer into the history of art and the history of collecting. It has also sought to draw further attention to the narrative processes by which the dealer has been, until recently, marginalised from the discourse. By placing the history of the dealer into the discursive context of the recent ‘art market turn’ in scholarly literature this study has attempted to reframe antique and curiosity dealers as signifcant historical actors and to move the dealer from a footnote in the historical record to a fulcrum in the discourse of art history and the history of collecting. Indeed, as this study has suggested, far from being a peripheral fgure in the histories of art and the histories of collecting, the early nineteenth-century antique and curiosity dealer was a signifcant agent in the promotion of the desire for historical objects and a primary catalyst in their wider dissemination into the contemporary culture. By focusing on the ‘idea’ of the dealer as a discrete social and cultural identity, this book has directed critical attention to some of the key tropes in the social and cultural biography of the dealer, drawing on the potent characterisations of the dealer in the nineteenth-century novels of Balzac, Gautier and Dickens. The focus of this book has been deliberately wide-ranging, placing the emergence of the dealer in Britain in the opening decades of the nineteenth century into a range of social, political and cultural contexts, not least of which is the notion that the emergence of the trade in historical objects was part of a much deeper shift in early nineteenth-century culture, one that involved the emergence of a distinctive and evolving historical consciousness in the period. The book has also offered a critical reassessment of the signifcance of the various roles, functions and practices of the early nineteenth-century antique and curiosity dealer, drawing from the survival of the extraordinary archive of the dealer John Coleman Isaac (c.1803–1887). Indeed, the Isaac archive remains a rich research resource and there is certainly much more work that could be done with this unique material. The cultural history of the antique trade, which lies at the heart of this project, also remains a limited subject for academic study. This is itself curious, given the signifcance of antique dealing in British cultural life in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-frst centuries. This book has attempted to draw attention to the early stages of the development of the trade in ‘antiques’. It is hoped that it will act as a catalyst for future studies of this subject, and that the antique dealer, as a legitimate subject of critical study, will be brought even further from the margins of the discourse.

Bibliography

Manuscripts Beckford archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford, (MS Beckford). Brougham Papers, University College London, (Williamiana, Box I) and (GB0103). Buccleuch archive, Edinburgh, (GB234). Charles Redfern archive, Warwickshire County Record Offce, (CR1985). Charles Thurston Thompson, Photographs of Furniture Exhibited at Gore House, 1853, (2 Volumes, 1853), Victoria & Albert Museum, Print Room, (X.180). George Weare Braikenridge, MS papers, Bristol City Record Offce, (14182(HB)/C/38-46). Greville of Warwick Castle archive, Warwickshire County Record Offce, (CR1886). Henry Shaw, MS papers, Guildhall Library, London, (MS 33433). John Coleman Isaac, MS papers, Hartley Library, University of Southampton, (MS 139/AJ53). Lowther archive, Cumbria Record Offce, (F.2811). Scarisbrick, MS papers, Lancashire County Record Offce, (DDSC 78/4). Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick, MS papers, Royal Armouries Library, Leeds, (RAR.85, RAR.87 & RAR.401). V&A archive, London, (Bardini nominal fle), (Webb papers) and (Cole Papers, Box XVI). Wharncliffe archive, Sheffeld City archives, (WhM/418). Winn archive, West Yorkshire archives, (WYL1352/A1/8/26/41).

Primary sources Exhibitions and collections catalogues Catalogue of a Most Splendid and Instructive Collection of Antient Armour, Exhibiting at the OPLOTHECA, No.20 Lower Brook Street, Bond Street, (London, Smith & Davy, 1816). Catalogue of Pictures, by the Ancient Masters in the Gallery of the Northern Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts, (Leeds, William Baines, 1824). Catalogue of the Exhibition of Ancient Arms & Armour, No.3 Lower Grosvenor Street, Bond Street, (London, J. Davy, 1838). Catalogue of the Public Exhibition of Paintings, Curiosities, Models, Apparatus and Specimens of Nature and Art at the Music-hall, Leeds, for the Beneft of the Mechanics’ Institution, (Leeds, William Baines, 1839). Catalogue of the Second Public Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture, Curiosities, Models…at the Music Hall, Leeds, for the Beneft of the Mechanic’s Institution, (Leeds, William Baines, 1843). Catalogue of Specimens of Recent British Manufactures and Decorative Art…at the House of the Society of Arts, 19 John Street, Adelphi, (London, The Royal Society of Arts, 1849).

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Catalogue of Works of Ancient and Mediaeval Art Exhibited at the House of the Society of Arts, London, (London, The Royal Society of Arts, 1850). Catalogue of Specimens of Cabinet-Work and of Studies from the Schools of Art Exhibited at Gore House, Kensington, (London, School of Trade, Department of Science & Art, 1853). Catalogue of the Art Treasures of the United Kingdom Collected at Manchester in 1857, (London, Bradbury and Evans, 1857). Catalogue of the Special Exhibition of Works of Art…on Loan at the South Kensington Museum, (London, Eyre & Spottiswood, 1862). Catalogue of the National Exhibition of Works of Art at Leeds, 1868, (Leeds, Edward Baines, 1868). Chaffers, William, Catalogue of the Collection of Glass Formed by Felix Slade, (London, Wertheimer, Lea & Co., 1871). Chaffers, William, Catalogue of the Holburne of Menstrie Museum of Art, Bath, (Bath, 1887). Chaffers, William, Catalogue of the Works of Antiquity and Art Collected by the Late William Henry Foreman, (London, privately printed, 1892). Crofton Croker, T., Catalogue of the Collection of Ancient and Medieval Rings and Personal Ornaments Formed by Lady Londesborough, (London, privately printed, 1853). Davis, Charles, Descriptions of the Works of Art Forming the Collection of Alfred de Rothschild, (2 vols.), (London, Chiswick Press, 1884). Museum of Ornamental Art – A Handbook for Visitors to Marlborough House, (London, H.G. Clarke & Co., 1852). Offcial Guide to Aston Hall and Park and Its Exhibition of Fine Arts and Art Manufactures, (Birmingham, M. Billings, 1858). Robinson, John Charles, Catalogue of the Soulages Collection, (London, Chapman & Hall, 1856). Rodd, Horatio, A Catalogue of Authentic Portraits, Painted in Oil, on Pannel & Canvas, Miniatures, Marble Busts etc…Also a Few Carvings in Wood…for Sale at the Prices Affxed, (London, Horatio Rodd, 1824). Rodd, Horatio, Catalogue of Portraits, Pictures, Drawings, Carvings in Oak, Ivory and Boxwood, Antique Furniture & Plate……for Sale by Horatio Rodd…, (London, Horatio Rodd, 1842). Smith, Charles Roach, Catalogue of the Museum of London Antiquities, (London, privately printed, 1854).

Auction catalogues Catalogue of Old English Pottery, Porcelain and Battersea Enamels Formed by Henry G. Bohn Esq.,…Sold by Christie, Manson & Woods, London…Commencing Monday March 15, 1875…, (London, Christie, Manson & Woods, 1875). Catalogue of the 2nd Portion of the Celebrated Collection Formed by Henry G. Bohn….Sold by Christie, Manson & Woods, London…Commencing Wednesday June 16, 1875…, (London, Christie, Manson & Woods, 1875). Catalogue of the 3rd Portion of the Celebrated Collection Formed by Henry G. Bohn…Sold by Christie, Manson & Woods, London…Commencing Tuesday, March 21, 1876…, (London, Christie, Manson & Woods, 1876). Catalogue of the 4th Part of the Collection of Henry G. Bohn….Sold by Christie, Manson & Wood,…Commencing Monday, May 29, 1876…, (London, Christie, Manson & Woods, 1876). Catalogue of the Celebrated and Well-Known Collection of Antiquities Formed by B. Hertz… on Monday 7th February 1859 and Following Days, (London, S. Leigh, Sotheby & John Wilkinson, 1859).

164 Bibliography Catalogue of the Celebrated Collection or Works of Art…of That Distinguished Collector Ralph Bernal Esq.,…Commencing on Monday, March the 5th 1855, (London, Christie & Manson, 1855). Catalogue of the Celebrated Fountaine Collection of Majolica, Henri II Ware, Palissy Ware, Nevers Ware……Sold by Messrs Christie, Manson & Woods…Monday, June 16th, 1884 and Following Days…, (London, Christie, Manson & Woods, 1884). Catalogue of the Choice Collection of Pictures and Other Works of Art…Signor Stephano Bardini of Florence…May 26th 1902 and Following Days…, (London, Christie, Manson & Woods, 1902). Catalogue of the Collection of Art and Virtu…Henry Farrer, Esq. F.S.A., Deceased….Sold by Christie, Manson & Woods, 8 King Street, London, Commencing Tuesday 12th June 1866…, (London, Christie, Manson & Woods, 1866). Catalogue of the Magnifcent & Extensive Stock of Messrs Town and Emanuel of New Bond Street……Sold by Auction by Messrs Christie & Manson……April 19th, 1849…and May 14th, 1849……, (London, Christie & Manson, 1849). Catalogue of the Magnifcent and Costly Furniture of the Princely Mansion, Wanstead House… Sold by Auction by Mr Robins on Monday 10th June 1822 and 31 Days Following…, (London, George Robins, 1822). Catalogue of the Magnifcent and Unique Collection of Ancient Armour and Implements of War…Formerly Exhibited at the Gothic Hall, Pall Mall…Sold by Auction by Mr. Robins… 10th June 1833, (London, George Robins, 1833). Catalogue of the Magnifcent Collection of Works of Art and Vertu Formed by Mr. David Falcke of New Bond Street, Retiring from Business….on Monday 19th April 1858 and Following Days, (London, Christie, Manson & Woods, 1858). Catalogue of the Magnifcent, Rare and Valuable Library in Fonthill Abbey…Galleries of Art and etc etc…Sold by Auction by Mr. Phillips…Commencing 9th September 1823, (London, Mr. Phillips, 1823). Catalogue of the Museum of Mediaeval Art, Collected by the Late L.N. Cottingham, FSA…Sold by Messrs Foster & Son…Commencing on 3rd November 1851…, (London, Foster & Son, 1851). Catalogue of the Rare and Beautiful Works of Art and Valuable Collection of Pictures of the Late John Swaby Esq….Sold by Mr. Phillips, 73 New Bond Street, Commencing Monday 5th March 1860…, (London, Mr. Phillips, 1860). Catalogue of the Renowned Collection of Objects and Decoration of Mr. E. Joseph of 158 New Bond Street…Tuesday May 6th 1890 and Following Days…, (London, Christie, Manson & Woods, 1890). Catalogue of the Valuable Contents of Strawberry Hill…Sold by Auction by George Robins… Commencing 25th April 1842, (London, George Robins, 1842). Catalogue of the Very Curious and Valuable Assemblage of Miscellaneous Articles of Taste and Virtu…Richard Cosway, Esq. R.A….Sold by Auction by Mr. Stanley…London, Tuesday May 22, 1821, (London, George Stanley, 1821). Forster, Henry Rumsey, The Stowe Catalogue Priced and Annotated, (London, David Bogue, 1848). Illustrated, Priced Catalogue of the Hamilton Palace Collection, 1882, (London, Remington & Co., 1882).

Primary published works Aikman, James, An Account of the Tournament at Eglinton, Revised and Corrected by Several of the Knights, (Edinburgh, Hugh Paton, 1839). Aleph, (pseu. William Harvey), London Scenes and London People, (London, William Collinridge, 1863).

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Aleph, (pseu. William Harvey), The Old City, and Its Highways and Byways……Illustrating London Life in Olden Times, (London, William Collinridge, 1864). Bagenal, Philip Henry, The Life of Ralph Bernal Osborne, M.P., (London, Richard Bentley, 1884). Balzac, Honoré de, Cousin Pons, (1847), trans. by Herbert J. Hunt (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968). Balzac, Honoré de, The Wild Ass’s Skin, (1831), trans. by Herbert J. Hunt (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977). Bell, William Scott, Antiquarian Gleanings in the North of England, Being Examples of Antique Furniture, Plate, Church Decorations, Objects of Historical Interest etc, (London, George Bell, n.d.) (1851?). Blackburn, Edward, An Architectural and Historical Account of Crosby Place, London, Compiled from Original and Unpublished Sources, (London, John Williams, 1834). Bohn, H., A Guide to the Knowledge of Pottery, Porcelain and Other Objects of Vertu Comprising an Illustrated Catalogue of the Bernal Collection of Works of Art, with the Prices at Which They Were Sold by Auction………, (London, H. Bohn, 1857). Boone, T.W., Specimen of the Catalogue of the Great Sale at Gooseberry Hall, with Puffatory Remarks, (London, T & W Boone, n.d.) (1842). Brady, John, The Visitors Guide to Knole in the County of Kent, (Sevenoaks, James Payne, 1839). Bridgens, Richard, Furniture with Candelabra and Interior Decoration, (London, William Pickering, 1838). Brongniart, Alexandre, Traité des Arts céramiques ou des poteries considérés dans leur histoire leur practique et leur théorie, (Paris, Leleux, 1844). Burn, H.D., Aedes Strawberrianae, Names of Purchasers and the Prices to the Sale Catalogue of the Choice Collection of Art & Virtue at Strawberry-hill Villa…, (London, H. Burn, n.d.) (1842). Burn, J.D., Commercial Enterprise and Social Progress; or Gleanings in London, (London, Piper, Stephenson & Spence, 1858). Byng-Hall, Major Herbert, The Adventures of a Bric-a-Brac Hunter, (London, Tinsley Brothers, 1868). Chaffers, William, Hallmarks on English Silver, (London, J. Davy, 1863). Chaffers, William, Marks and Monograms on European and Oriental Pottery and Porcelain, (London, J. Davy, 1863). Chaffers, William, The Keramic Gallery of Pottery and Porcelain, (2 vols.), (London, Chapman & Hall, 1872). Chaffers, William, Gilda Aurifabrorum, a History of English Goldsmiths, (London, Reeves & Turner, 1883). Clutterbuck, Robert, The History and Antiquities of the County of Hertford, (3 vols.), (London, Nichols, Son & Bentley, 1815, 1821, 1827). Cole, John, The Antiquarian Trio…, (Scarborough, John Cole, 1826). Cole, John, The Scarborough Collector and Journal of Olden Time, (Scarborough, John Cole, 1828). Cole, John, The Antiquarian Bijou…, (Scarborough, John Cole, 1829). Condy, Nicholas, and Rev. F.V.J. Arundell, Cotehele, on the Banks of the Tamar, the Ancient Seat of the Rt. Hon. The Earl of Mount Edgcumbe, (London, Nicholas Condy & F.V.J. Arundell, n.d., c.1840). Dickens, Charles, The Old Curiosity Shop, (1841), (London, Chapman & Hall). Dollman, Francis T., Examples of Antient Pulpits Existing in England, (London, George Bell, 1849). Eastlake, Charles L., Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and Other Details, (London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1868).

166 Bibliography Fosbrooke, Reverend T.D., The Wye Tour, or Gilpin on the Wye with Historical and Archaeological Additions, (Ross, W. Farror, 1818). Fox Talbot, Henry, The Pencil of Nature, (London, Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1844). Gautier, Theophile, ‘The Mummy’s Foot’, (1840), in Tales and Romances, ed. by Theophile Gautier (London, London Press Co., 1900). Grose, Francis, A Treatise on Ancient Armour and Weapons, (London, S. Hooper, 1786). Guest, Montague J., (ed.), Lady Charlotte Schreiber’s Journals, Confdences of a Collector of Ceramics and Antiques Throughout Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Austria and Germany form the Year 1869 to 1885, (2 vols.), (London, John Lane, 1911). Humphries, Henry Noel, Ten Centuries of Art, Its Progress in Europe from the 9th to the 19th Century, (London, Grant & Griffth, 1852). Hunt, Thomas Frederick, Exemplars of Tudor Architecture, Adapted to Modern Habitations… and Observations on the Furniture of the Tudor Period, (London, Longmans, 1830). Jacquemart, Albert, A History of Furniture, (1876), trans. by Bury Palliser (London, Chapman & Hall, 1878). Kidson, Frank, Thomas Fenteman, Memoir, (Leeds, n.d. (1892?) unpaginated). Knight, Charles, (ed.), London, (6 vols.), (London, Charles Knight, 1841–44). Litchfeld, Frederick, Pottery and Porcelain, A Guide to Collectors, (1879) (London, A. & C. Black, 1971). Litchfeld, Frederick, Illustrated History of Furniture, (London, Truslove & Shirley, 1892). Loudon, John Claudius, An Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm & Villa Architecture and Furniture, (London, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman, 1833). Marryat, Joseph, Collections towards a History of Pottery and Porcelain in the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries: With a Description of the Manufacture, a Glossary, and a List of Monograms, (London, John Murray, 1850). Meyrick, Sir Samuel Rush, A Critical Inquiry into Antient Armour, as It Existed in Europe…, (3 vols.), (London, R. Jennings, 1824). Murray, John, Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy……, (4th Edition), (London, John Murray, 1852). Nash, Joseph, The Mansions of England in the Olden Time, (4 vols., 1838–49), (London, Offces of the ‘Studio’, 1906). Palliser, Mrs. Bury, The China Collector’s Pocket Companion, (1868), (London, Sampson, Low, Marston, Low & Searle, 1875). Palmer, C.J., The History and Illustrations of a House in the Elizabethan Style of Architecture, (London, privately printed, 1838). Parker, Thomas Lister, Description of Browsholme Hall, (London, S. Gosnell, 1815). Parliamentary Report, Report from the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures, (London, House of Commons, 4th September, 1835). Parliamentary Report, Report from the Select Committee on Arts and Principles of Design, (London, House of Commons, 25th February, 1836). Planché, James Robinson, Some Account of the Armour and Weapons Exhibited at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition 1857, (London, privately printed, 1857). Pollen, John Hungerford, Ancient and Modern Furniture and Woodwork, (London, South Kensington Museum Art Handbooks, 1875). Price, William Lake, Interiors and Exteriors in Venice, (London, T. McLean, 1843). Pugin, A.N.W., Gothic Furniture in the End of the 15th Century, (London, Ackermann & Co., 1835). Raikes, Thomas, A Portion of the Journal Kept by Thomas Raikes Esq., from 1831 to 1847, (4 vols.), (London, Longmans, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1856). Richardson, C.J., Studies from Old English Mansions, Their Furniture, Gold & Silver Plate etc., (four parts), (London, T. McLean, 1841, 1842, 1843 & 1844).

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Roscoe, Thomas, Wanderings and Excursions in South Wales: With the Scenery of the River Wye, (London, Tilt & Bogue, Simpkin & Co, & Orr & Co., 1837). Scott, Sir Walter, The Antiquary, (1816), (Edinburgh, Adam & Charles Black, 1871). Shaw, Henry, and Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick, Specimens of Ancient Furniture, (London, William Pickering, 1836). Shaw, Simeon, History of the Staffordshire Potteries; and the Rise and Progress of the Manufacture of Pottery and Porcelain, (Hanley, G. Jackson, 1829). Skelton, Joseph, Engraved Illustrations of Ancient Arms and Armour from the Collection of Llewelyn Meyrick at Goodrich Court, (2 vols.), (London, Schultze, 1830). Sommerard, Alexandre de, and Edmond Sommerard, Les Arts au Moyen Age, (5 vols.), (Paris, Techener, 1838–46). Strutt, Joseph, Horda Angel-cynnan: Or a Complete View of the Manners, Customs, Arms, Habits etc of the Inhabitants of England from the Arrival of the Saxons ‘til the Reign of Henry the 8th, (3 vols.,) (2 vols., London, Benjamin White, 1775) (volume 3, London, Benjamin White, 1776). Strutt, Joseph, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, (1801), (London, Reeves, 1830). Till, William, An Essay on the Roman Denarius, (London, Longman, 1838). Twopeny, William, Some Remarks on the Taste and Effects of Collecting Fragments of Ancient Architecture…, (London, privately printed, 1832). Twopeny, William, Specimens of Ancient Woodwork, (London, Bradbury & Evans, 1859). Von Raumer, Frederick, England in 1835: Being a Series of Letters Written to Friends in Germany, During a Residence in London and Excursions into the Provinces, trans. by Sarah Austin, (3 vols., London, John Murray, 1836). Vors, Frederic, Bibelots and Curios, (London, D. Appleton, 1879). Waagen, Dr. Gustav, Treasures of Art in Great Britain: Being an Account of the Chief Collections of Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture, Illuminated Mss, etc, trans. by Lady Eastlake, (3 vols.), (London, John Murray, 1854). Waagen, Dr. Gustav, Galleries and Cabinets of Art in Great Britain, Forming a Supplement Volume to the Treasures of Art in Great Britain, (London, John Murray, 1857). Walpole, Horace, A Description of the Villa of Mr Horace Walpole, (1774), (London, Strawberry-hill Press, 1784). Warner, Rev. Richard, An History of the Abbey of Glaston; and of the Town of Glastonbury, (Bath, Richard Cruttwell, 1826).

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Index

Abbotsford (Scottish Borders) 39, 62 Ackermann, Rudolph 144 Adamson, Donald 26 Adare Manor (Limerick) 80 Adler, Kathleen 31 Adventures of a Bric-a-Brac Hunter 14, 32, 141; see also Herbert Byng-hall advertising: antique dealers use of 79, 85, 93, 104, 121, 143, 145 age value 61, 105, 106; see also oldness Agnew, Thomas (dealer) 144, 145, 148 Ainsworth, W. Harrison 58 Alexander, N. 23 Alsop, Joseph 22, 61 Altick, Richard 57, 141 Alton Towers (Staffordshire) 92 ancient: defnitions of 50, 63, 102–103, 105 ancient armour: antiquarian illustrations of 63, 66; auctions of 23, 27, 78–79, 85, 121, 135, 136, 140, 142–143, 158n147, 159n175; collecting of 8, 54, 66, 80, 84, 136, 142; dealers in 3, 34, 56, 78–79, 85, 89, 96, 107, 119, 135, 140, 142, 143, 145, 146, 149, 153n33, 158n147, 159n175; dealers opinions of 84, 149; exhibitions of 131, 142–143, 144, 145–146, 149–150; expertise of 54, 56, 58, 84, 85, 142, 149–150; fakes of 34, 56, 96; market for 34, 88, 135; Old Curiosity Shop in 28; theatre and 56 ‘ancient decorative style’ 62, 81, 91 ancient furniture 8, 155n83; authenticity of 61, 131–134; collectors of 130, 131; dealers in 9, 15, 96–97, 103, 107, 115n184, 119, 121, 130, 143–144, 119; exhibitions of 143–144, 146, 147–148; illustrations of 13, 55, 62–72, 134; publications on 8, 13, 54, 55, 57, 61–62, 64–72, 81, 90, 96–97, 104, 118, 132, 148, 149; market for 66, 89–95, 118, 121; see also Specimens of Ancient Furniture

ancient stained glass: dealers in 61, 85–86, 142 ancient woodwork 38, 132; exhibitions of 146; importation of 92–93, 110n50; and manufacturing 90–92; market for 25, 89–95, 97; see also period rooms antiquarianism 4, 11, 13, 50–51, 55–57, 58, 59, 62–72, 81, 88, 89–90, 94, 95, 121, 122, 145, 146–147, 150, 151; and collecting 3, 8, 50, 52, 64, 66, 68–69, 72, 82, 88–90, 95, 107, 116, 146, 148, 152; and costume 55–56; and design and manufacturing 59, 90–92; and fction 130; and illustrations 8, 13, 61–65, 90, 104; methodologies of 57–58, 59, 63–66, 72, 95; publications 1, 61–72, 104, 130, 134 Antiquary’s Cell, The (1835) (E.W. Cooke) 126 antique: defnitions of 102–106 antique dealers 1, 9, 15, 69, 102–103, 106–108; agency of 2, 24, 152; Continental buying activities of 87–89; critiques of 6, 33, 37, 38, 39–40, 94, 122, 130–134, 139, 141; customers of 80–81; distinction of 99–102, 106–108, 116; emergence of 51–52, 53, 61–62, 72, 78, 95–96, 122, 139; and exhibitions 142–150; expansion of 2–3, 58–59, 80, 87, 97, 106–108, 118, 121–122, 144; expertise of 138–139, 148–151; female 32–33, 78–79, 82–84, 107; in fction 5, 26–31; and forgeries 34–35; idea of 5–7, 15, 26–40, 63, 124, 141; identity of 7, 9, 26–40, 72, 139; industrial economy and 91–92; Jewish 31–33, 153n44; marginalisation of 2, 7, 24, 44n49, 161; practices of 61, 78–81, 82, 85–87, 89, 95–96, 100, 140–141; and the ring 140–141; role of 9, 11, 51, 81, 82, 116, 136–137, 141–142, 145–150; social status of 151; specialist 78–79, 107–108; writings on 24–26; see also curiosity dealers; second-hand trade

Index antique dealers, individual Abrahams 123; Askew 119; Bentley 120, 142–143; Brett 123; Burton 25; Campbell 102; Cooke 149; Couvreur 37; Cureton 137; Dantzigger 96; Davis 141, 151; Durlacher 26, 77n123, 137, 148, 151; Duveen 26; Dux 35; Edkins 151; Emanuel 84; Falcke 80, 137, 148, 151; Fenton 28; Fogg; Forster 80, 137; Franchi 25; Goetz 123; Grinham 154n53; Hadnutt 107, 126; Hawksley 126; Hertz 38, 80, 120, 137, 153n33; Heslop 107; Hume 3; Isaacs 97, 120; Jacobs 121; Kasner 107; Lazard 46n77; Levy 32; Lush 102; Mannheim 46n77; Manning 98; Manser 126; Marcy 34; Marks 2; Matthews 154n53; Meneghetti 34; Money 137; Moore 119; Moses 81, 121; Nathan 98, 107, 141; Nightingale 121; Noseda 120, 153n32; Oldman 25; Riatti 84; Rimmel 126; Robinson 100, 107; Sack 26, 142–143; Samuels 121; Solomon 154n53; Spitzer 34, 46n77; Stubbs 102; Sypher 26; Terry 104; Thornton 102; Till 137; Tironi 84; Town & Emanuel 137; Tuck 80; Van Minden 86; Warner 25; Whelan 107; White 25; Wimpfen 97; Zen 84, 110n63; Zimmerman 137; see also Baldock; Bardini; Chaffers; curiosity dealers; Davies; Fenteman; Forrest; Hampp; Hull; Isaac; Jarman; Mawson; Pratt; Redford; Rodd; Rogers; Swaby; Webb antique furniture 38, 85, 103, 105, 116, 126, 147; authenticity of 61, 97, 122, 133; Charles Dickens and 105; collecting of 22, 62, 66, 75n84, 118; dealers in 3, 97, 107, 119, 123, 155n73; publications on 15, 62, 133; trade directories and 9, 15, 18n33, 103, 107 antiques 9, 6, 12–13, 15, 18n35, 22–23, 43n29, 61, 98, 161; importations of 78–79, 82, 84–85, 86, 89, 92, 94, 134–135, 143; import duty on 86–87, 105–106; lace 107; market for 61, 84–89, 92–94; and rubbish 85 antique shop 6, 8, 10, 11, 15, 26, 37, 38, 51, 116–124; in fction 26–27, 28–29, 31–32, 123–124, 130; idea of 37–38, 123–124; locations of 10, 26, 28–30, 33, 35, 38, 72, 81, 84, 95–98, 118–124, 125, 127, 128, 129; see also curiosity shop; Wardour Street antique trade 161; classifcation of 106–108 antiquities 2, 33, 35, 36, 59, 61, 82, 88, 95; dealers in 107 Appadurai, Arjun 117, 136; ‘commodity phase’ 10–11; see also commodifcation

183

Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, The 59 Archer, John Wykeham 99 Arnold, Dana 120 art dealers 20, 21, 23, 24, 33, 96, 97, 119, 148; agency of 24; criticism of 6, 40, 139; and fakes and forgeries 33–34; history of 24; publications by 23; relationships with collectors 138–139; writings on 20–21, 24 art market 12, 20, 36; art market ‘turn’ 5, 21, 161; and big data 23; history of 5, 20–24; interdisciplinary studies of 21–22; and public museums 21; writings on 20–24 Arundell, Rev. F.V. 130 Aston Hall (Birmingham) 123; exhibition at 149 auctions 10, 116, 134–136, 139, 141, 152; Bidding Agreements Act (1927) 140, 157n145; Bidding Agreements Act (1969) 140, 157n145; Deacon’s 134; dealers as commission agents at 138; Oxenham’s 134; presence of dealers at 136–141; publication of prices at 23, 43n39, 137–139; rings at 140–141, 157n144, 157n145; role of 136; specialist 135; as ‘Tournaments of Value’ 136 Audley End (Essex) 33 authenticity 9, 40, 131–134, 147; of antique furniture 61, 133; certifcates of 106; historical 147; and provenance 40; in theatre performance 55–56; see also remodelling Baillie, Joanna 40 Baines, Paul 72 Baldock, Edward Holmes (dealer) 3, 4, 18n33, 33, 38, 46n70, 48n142, 48n144, 80; trade directories and 107; writings on 25 Balzac, Honoré de 5, 26–28, 31, 34, 83; Cousin Pons 27–28; The Wild Asses Skin 26–27 Bann, Stephen: and age value 61; and historical consciousness 8, 52; and historical objects 64–66 Bardini, Stefano (dealer) 37; writings on 25–26 Barstow, Nina: on Freppa (dealer) 35 Barthes, Roland: on the discourse of history 66 Bartlett, W.H. 90, 104 Bastianini, Giovanni 35, 47n120 Bateman, Richard 66 Baudrillard, Jean: on art auctions 136; on collecting 39

184

Index

Baumol, William 23 Baxandall, Michael 20–21; The Period Eye 20 Baylis, Thomas 156n121 Beckett, Samuel 36 Beckford, William 1, 4, 25, 36, 59; judgement on art 36 Bell, William Scott 134 Bellaigue, Geoffrey de 25 Benjamin, Walter: on collecting 39 Berman, Marshall: on modernity 53, 119 Bernal, Ralph 1, 2, 4, 13, 19n63, 36–37, 56, 80, 105; and armour collecting 56, 84; auction of collections of 39, 137, 139; correspondence with John Coleman Isaac 82–84, 89, 121, 126 bibelot 108; see also bric-a-brac Bingley, William 67, 69 Blackett, Sir Edward 81 Blanc, Charles 23 Blore, Edward 126 Bohn, Henry 13, 38; publications by 137, 139 Bourdieu, Pierre: cultural capital 35–36 Bourget, Paul 2 Braikenridge, G.W. 4; archive of 3; collections of 69, 70, 76n114, 90, 104 Braybrooke, Lord 33 Breward, Chris 121 bric-a-brac 32, 123, 134; defnition of 108 Briefel, Aviva 31 Brigstocke, Hugh 21 British Antique Dealers’ Association (BADA): founding of 106, 113n160 British Archaeological Association, The 59 British Museum 56, 119; trustees of 151 Brocas, Bernard 80 Brogniart, Alexandre 58 brokers 38, 40, 95, 97–100, 102, 118; classifcation of 107; defnition of 99; furniture 98, 102, 107; Jewish 31–32, 33; London Society of 140; see also secondhand trade Broker’s Row (London) 95 broking 9, 31–32, 62; classifcation of 99–100; and second-hand trade 97–100 Brooks, Chris 52, 81 Brougham, Henry 131 Brougham Hall (Cumbria) 131, 132 Brown, Henry Williams 138 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom 148 Buchanan, William (dealer) 21, 97 Bullock, William (Egyptian Hall) 135 Burlington Arcade (London) 120 Burlington Magazine 133 Burn, H.D. (Aedes Strawberrianae) 137, 139 Burn, J.D. 122 Byers, James (dealer) 95

Byng, John, 5th Viscount Torrington 67 Byng-hall, Herbert 15, 32, 141; see also bric-a-brac Campbell, Colin 7; and consumer revolution 51 Campbell, John, 2nd Marquis of Breadalbane 4, 80, 138; see also Taymouth Castle Carr, E.H. 66 Carter, John: antiquarian collections of 50, 66 Catholic: patrons 92 Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) 92 Cattermole, George: The Old Curiosity Shop 28, 29, 105 Caylus, Comte de: and material culture 57, 74n50 Cescinsky, Herbert (dealer) 133 Chaffers, William (dealer) 25, 37; Bernal auction purchases 137; and Leeds National Exhibition of Works of Art (1868) 151; and Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition (1857) 149–150; publications by 14, 19nn61, 63 Charpy, Manuel 22 Chelsea (porcelain) 60, 75n73, 85; ‘old’ 60, 121 Chinese ceramics 133; collecting of 14; importation of 14 Clarke, Jane (dealer) 107 classifcation 15, 37, 61, 100; of antique 103; of brokers 99; of ceramics 58–59, 60; of dealers in trade directories 9, 106–108; publications on 22 Cockerell, Charles Robert 91 Cohen, Frank 36 collecting 1, 12, 15, 23, 24, 36, 39, 40, 53, 59, 88, 130, 138, 151; ancient furniture 89–93, 132; antiquarian 8, 50, 52, 66–72, 89–90, 94, 95, 116, 148; antique 22–23, 103; ceramics 13–14, 58, 59, 60; and dealing 37–38, 39; democratisation of 13, 22, 59, 148; fashions in 1, 20–21, 23, 81; furniture 22, 62, 133; historical objects and 15, 50, 52; history of 1–2, 6, 12, 15, 22–23, 24, 26, 75n84, 161; institutional 12, 38; and museums 6; narratives of 24, 35–37, 39, 147; and performance 39; and publications 13–14, 22–23, 32, 42n21, 94, 108; role of dealer in 2, 62; specialisation in 12, 13–14 collectors 1, 2–4, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 23–24, 35, 58, 59, 60, 79, 80, 86, 87, 95, 97, 119, 120, 123, 135, 138; antiquarian 50, 53, 56, 66, 68–69, 72, 82, 88, 89, 90, 95, 99, 105, 146; in fction 27, 28, 34; identity of 36–37, 38, 39–40, 94

Index Collector’s Club, The 12, 37 Colnaghi, Dominic (dealer) 148 combination (the) 140, 141; see also the ring commerce 58, 81, 92, 122; contaminating trope of 6, 27, 37; role of exchange in 117; spaces of 10, 22, 72, 120, 141 commodifcation 10–11, 31, 136, 139; of art 31 commodity 6, 56; ‘commodity phase’ 11; defnitions of 10–11, 117; and ‘gift’ 40; historical objects as 27, 72, 141, 152; works of art as 6 Confédération Internationale des Négociants en Oeuvres d’Art (CINOA) 113n160 Connoisseur, The 2, 6, 7, 34 connoisseurship 36, 61, 146, 147; criticism of 36; and cultural capital 38, 103; in eighteenth century 35–36; shifting role of 138–139 consumer culture: and auctions 136–138; and exhibitions 148; and historical objects 10, 13, 26, 57–58, 116–117, 121; and modernity 9–10, 120; second-hand 98; spaces of 9–10, 22, 118–119, 120–122 consumer psychology 82 consumer revolution 51 consumption: and auctions 134–139; catalysts for 51, 53, 81, 141; in the eighteenth century 51; and exhibitions 141–152; of the past 51–53, 57–58, 62–63, 67–68, 84–85, 87, 93, 97, 119, 121; spaces of 116–126, 130 Corbett, Sir Andrew 38 Cotehele (Cornwall) 130 Cottingham, Lewis Nockells 80, 92, 131, 143, 151 Coutts (bank) 4 Crane, Susan: on collecting 39; historical consciousness 8, 52 Craven Street, (London) 79 Cripps-Day, Francis 23, 34 curiosities: antiquarian 50, 68, 99, 120; critique of 38, 121, 131; defnition of 107–108; market for 84–88, 95–100; and second-hand trade 32, 98–100; shift to ‘antiques’ 9, 13, 15, 18n35, 78, 118–119, 145; and tourism 123; and Wardour Street 125–131; see also antiques curiosity dealers 2, 3, 12, 137, 140, 161, 78; archives of 2–3; in eighteenth century 95; emergence of 8; and exhibitions 141–152; female 32–33, 78–79, 82–84, 107, 154n53; Jewish 33; marginalisation of 2–3; role of 2; and second-hand trade 32, 97–100; in seventeenth century 95; and tourism 123; in trade directories 15, 107–108; and Wardour Street 125–131; writings on 2, 16n6, 25; see also antique dealers

185

curiosity shop 2, 10, 15, 25, 26, 27, 31, 84, 118, 122, 131; critique of 26–28, 35, 37, 38, 133; description of 123, 124; in eighteenth century 95; emergence of 116–117; in fction 26–31, 124; Old Curiosity Shop 25, 28–31, 32, 46n93, 105; in seventeenth century 95; in trade directories 107, 114n182, 133; see also antique shop Damme, Ilja van 98 Davies, Gabriel (dealer) 3, 33, 78, 83, 86, 125; death of 80; letters to Sarah Davies 135 Davies, Henry Abraham (dealer) 3, 4, 5, 78–79, 96, 125, 135, 143; and Jewish identity 32–33; waste book of 3, 17n18 Davies, Sarah (dealer) 3, 17n18, 78–80, 83, 108n7, 110n54, 135; death of 80; and Jewish identity 32–33; letters from John Coleman Isaac to 82–84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 97, 100, 121, 135, 140; marriage of 79 dealers (and collectors) 2–3, 5, 7; identities of 38–39, 40; relationships between 15, 24, 34, 36–37, 82, 84, 136, 137, 138; social boundaries and 37–39, 141 Dealers-in-the-Fine-Arts Provident Institution 101–102 decorative art: as a category 12–13; market for 22 Dickens, Charles 5, 26, 28–30, 105, 161; The Old Curiosity Shop 28–30, 32, 105 Didron, Alphonse 88 discourse 20–26, 52, 138, 139; of art history 5, 20, 26, 161; of authenticity 40; of collecting 22–24, 147; of history 65–66 Douglas, Mary 11 Dresden (porcelain) 58, 85; ‘old’ 121 Duncan, Thomas 130 Dymoke, Sir John 81 East India Company, British 14 Eastlake, Charles Lock: on Wardour Street 132–133 Ecclesiologists, The 92 economic value: antiques and 104–105, 122; and auctions 136; changes to 11; characteristics of 117; and exhibitions 142; and museums 6; narrative of 23–24 Edwards, Ralph 134 Eglinton Tournament, the 143 Elizabethan Revival 81 Endelman, Tom: and Jewish migration 32–33 Engels, Friedrich 11 Enlightenment, the 53 episteme: and historical consciousness 51–52 Erskine, Sir John 81 Evelyn, John 95

186

Index

exchange value: and antique shops 136; and collecting 39; and historical objects 136; and public exhibitions 152 exhibitions 10, 57; ‘Antient and Medieval Art’, London (1850) 146; Aston Hall (1858) 149; auctions and 142; dealer 142–145; dealers lending to public 146, 148, 149, 151; Gore House (1853) 147–148, 149, 150; Great Exhibition, the (1851) 146; Leeds 12, 146; Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition (1857) 148–150; Marlborough House (1852) 147; National Exhibition of Works of Art, Leeds (1868) 151; public 133, 146–152; role of dealers at 142–152; as spaces of consumption 116, 141–142, 143, 145, 152 Fairburn, Sir William: on dealers 149–150 fakes and forgeries 6; dealers association with 17n28, 31, 33–35, 96; Wardour Street and 122, 131–132 Farrer, Henry (dealer) 34, 80, 125; expert on paintings 97, 113n136; and forgeries 35; and Gore House exhibition 148; and Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition 148; and Wardour Street 125, 126, 137 Fenteman, Thomas (dealer) 122, 146 fne art 85, 88; category of 12; cultural capital of 145; history of art market and 22, 61 Fleming, John 20 Fletcher, Hanslip 30 Fletcher, Pamela 24 Foote, Samuel: identity of art dealers in Taste (1752) 34 Forrest, William (dealer) 80, 119, 137; buying ‘modern things’ 121 Foster, Henry Rumsey 137, 139, 140 Foucault, Michel: on authorship 36; on episteme 51–52 Fountaine, Sir Andrew 3, 50, 80 Fox Talbot, Henry: and ‘old china’ 60; on photography 59–60 Franks, Augustus, W. 1, 119; on dealers 40 French Revolution, the 12; and historical consciousness 52 Freppa, Giovanni (dealer): and fakes 35 Frith, William Powell: on Henry Farrer 97 furniture: manufacturing and ‘ancient furniture’ 91–92; T.B. Jordan 91 Gaskell, Ivan 20 Gautier, Theophile 5, 26, 161; on dealers 27–28, 31, 34; The Mummy’s Foot 27–28 Gebhardt, John Adam: description of death of Gabriel Davies 80 Gee, Malcolm 21

Gentleman’s Magazine, The 118, 121, 131, 136, 143 Germany: antique buying in 32, 33, 78, 84, 86, 87, 97, 100, 118, 140; collecting practices in 52; Jewish migration from 32–33 Gibbons, Grinling: and ‘ancient furniture’ exhibitions 143, 144 gift exchange: system of 40, 97 Glastonbury chairs 133 Goff, Jacques le: on ‘antique’ and ‘ancient’ 103 Goncourt, Edmond de: criticism of curiosity shops 38 Goodrich Court: collections at 54–55, 69, 126; period rooms at 57 Gordon Square, (London) 80 Gore House exhibition (1853): dealers and 147–148, 149, 150; historical objects at 147–148 Gothic Revival, the: as catalyst for historical objects 53, 62, 81, 93, 126, 130, 131 Grand Tour, The 95 Graves, Algernon 23 Graw, Isabelle 21 Great Bed of Ware 54, 55, 73n29 Great Exhibition, the (1851) 146 Great Reform Act, the (1832) 81, 131 Green, Nicholas 96 Greenfeld, Briann 23 Greville, George Guy, 4th Earl of Warwick 3 Grose, Francis 66 Grosvenor Gallery, The 24 Grosvenor House Antiques Fair 106 Guerzoni, Guido 23 Guilds: Guild of St. Luke 21; systems of 101–102; in Venice 100 Gwennapp, Thomas (dealer) 69, 158n166; and exhibitions 142, 143; expertise in ancient armour 107; and the ‘Gothic Hall’ 142; and the ‘knockout’ 140, 158n147; locations of shop 119, 142 Hall, Michael 108 Hamilton, Sir William: on being a dealer 35–36 Hampp, John Christopher (dealer) 86 Hanson, Julienne 117 Hanway Street (London) 122 Hardingham, A. (dealer) 6, 17n26 Hardwick Hall 67, 69 Harris, John 24, 151; on Wardour Street trade 134 Haskell, Francis: on history of art market 12, 20–21, 23 Hauser, Arnold: on art dealers 6, 40, 139 Hawthorne, Nathaniel: on Charles Redfern 123–124

Index Heathcote, Andrew, Sir 126 Helmreich, Anne 24 heritage: impact of dealers on 9, 25, 88–89; legislation on 88–89 Hertford, Marquis of 123 Hillier, Bill 117 historical accuracy: and antiquarianism 64–66, 132; and costume 56; and historical consciousness 8–9, 54–57; and Wardour Street 131–132 historical consciousness 7–9, 50–61, 161; and ‘age value’ 61; and historical accuracy 54–57; and historical painting 54; and Specimens of Ancient Furniture 63–66 historical novels: as catalysts for consumption of historical objects 1, 53, 58, 130; as symptoms of historical consciousness 52 historical objects 1–2, 7–10, 12, 14, 50, 53, 55, 78, 80, 88, 95, 130; and auctions 134–136, 141–142; authenticity of 56, 132; commodifcation of 7–8, 10–11; and ‘commodity phase’ 11; desire for 1–2, 52, 53, 56–61, 121; emergence of 7–10, 11, 52, 57, 58–59, 61, 62, 68–69, 72; and exhibitions 116, 141–152; and historical fction 53; illustrations of 62–72; market for 9, 50, 56, 84, 86, 107, 116, 118; and modernity 53; and museums 13, 15; and publications 13, 54, 63–68, 72; trade in 7–10, 39, 51, 68–69, 72, 80, 82, 96, 98, 100, 103, 106–108, 119, 122, 126, 131, 139, 161 historical value 7–8, 61; see also oldness historicism 8, 52, 53–54, 94; and historical accuracy 54, 131, 132 Holmes, John: antiquarian collections of 89–90, 156n121 Holywell Street (London) 122, 153n44 Hone, William 108 Hull, Edward and George (dealer) 3, 69, 71, 80, 126, 137; and Alton Towers 92; The Antiquary’s Cell and 126; and auction ring 140; and Scarisbrick Hall 91, 134 Humphries, Henry Noel 132 Hunt, Thomas 1, 62; on ‘ancient furniture’ 90; on the term ‘ancient’ 103 illustrations: as historical authorities 63–72 Ireland, Samuel 67, 68, 76n112 Isaac, John Coleman (dealer) 4, 5, 32–33, 38–39, 79, 83, 95, 98, 101, 107, 119, 142–143, 148, 161; archive of 2–5, 9, 16n8, 17n18, 83, 138; and auction rings 140, 158n147; Bernal, letters to 56, 82, 83, 121; business of 78–86; last will and testament of 80, 155n70; Meyrick, letters to 136; in Regent Street 120; and

187

Strawberry Hill auction 138; in Wardour Street 125; trade card of 100; writings on 25; see also waste book Isherwood, Baron 11 Jacquemart, Albert 15, 62, 75n84 Jarman, John Boykett (dealer) 119; description of 34 Jenkins, Thomas (dealer) 95 Jervis, Simon 134 Jewish: cultural identity and dealers 31–35; migration 32–33 Joy, Edward 2 Kemble, Charles 55 Kenwood House 134 King Copheuta and the Beggar Maid (Edward Burne-Jones) 134 knick-knack 108, 131; see also bibelot; brica-brac; nicknackatarian Knight, Charles 122 knockout (the) 140–141, 157nn144, 145; newspaper reports on 141; see also auctions Koener, Joseph and Lisbet 6 Kopytoff, Igor: on commodity 10 Lamb, Edward Buckton: on the destruction of historic fabric of London 93–94 Langley, Henry Augustus 81 Leeds: dealers in 122; National Exhibition of Works of Art (1868) at 151; public exhibitions in 146, 152; see also Henry Williams Brown Lemire, Beverley 98 Lenoir, Alexandre de 64 Lever, William Hesketh 1st Lord Leverhulme: buying through dealers 36 Levy, Martin 2 Liscombe, Rhodri Windsor: on ‘modernity’119; on antiquarianism and commerce 119 Litchfeld, Frederick (dealer): publications by 15 Litchfeld, Samuel (dealer) 15 Llangollen, Ladies of 89 Lomax, James 122 London: antique dealers in 33, 38, 72, 78, 80, 81, 82, 87, 95, 96, 98, 100, 102, 107, 119, 120, 121, 135; consumer activity in 57, 118, 119–120; increase in numbers of dealers in 118, 122, 124; market for antiques in 86, 92, 93, 94; shopping arcades in 119; The Old Curiosity Shop in 29–30, 32; see also Wardour Street London and Provincial Antique Dealers Association (LAPADA) 113n160

188

Index

Loudon, John Claudius 1; and ancient woodwork 90–91, 93, 96, 97; on antiquarian taste 121 Lukács, Georg: on the historical novel 52 McCracken, Grant 7; on consumption 51 MacDonald, Sir John 4 MacGregor, Arthur: and history of collecting 22; on role of dealers 24, 36 Macleod, Dianne, S. 22 MacNee, Daniel 130 Magniac, Hollingworth 80 Malchow, Howard: antique dealing (1970s/1980s) 24 Maleurve, Didier: on museums and the art market 6 Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition (1857): and antique dealers 148–150 Manchester Guardian 145 Mandler, Peter 58 Marks, Murray (dealer): biography of 24 Marlborough House Exhibition (1852) 148; criticism of exhibition at 133; and decorative art 12; and historical objects 147 Marryat, Joseph 13 Marx, Karl: on commodity 10–11, 117 material culture: and decorative art 12 Matfen Hall (Northumberland) 81 Mauss, Marcel: on gift exchange 40 Mawson, Samuel (dealer) 80; publications on 25 Mayer, Joseph 38 Metropolitan Improvements (London) 93; antique shops and 122; and modernity 119; Regent Street 120; shopping arcades and 120 Meyrick, Sir Samuel Rush 1, 8, 13, 36, 80, 82; on ‘ancient decorative style’ 81; armour collecting 143; criticism of historical painting 54; on dealers 40; Isaac, letters to 82, 88, 126, 136, 143; Royal Armouries, work at 54, 142; see also Goodrich Court; Specimens of Ancient Furniture Miller, Andrew: on auctions 136 modernity: in early nineteenth century 9–10, 119; phases of 53 money: Simmel on 117 Montias, John Michael: methodologies for art market histories 21 Morgan, Octavius 19n61 Morris, William 94; on dealers 37 Moss, Elaine 2 Mountfeld, Susan 117 museum 22, 64, 66; decorative art and 12; development of public 6, 151; frst historic

house 123; Lewis N. Cottingham’s 92; and the market 6–7, 13, 37 Muthesius, Stefan 2; on antique dealers 102; on antique furniture 22, 61 Myles, Janet 151 NADFAS 12 Napoleonic Wars, the: and art market 12, 86 Narford Hall (Norfolk) 3, 50 Nash, John: and Metropolitan Improvements 119, 120 Nash, Joseph: publications of 1, 62 National Exhibition of Works of Art, Leeds (1868) 151 Nead, Lynda 122 Neate, William (dealer): trade card of 100, 101 New Art History 21 New/Old Bond Street (London): auctions in 141; dealers in 4, 34, 38, 56, 69, 71, 81, 84, 87, 89, 107, 119, 123, 137, 143, 148, 150; and elite consumption 10, 72, 118–119, 121, 122 nicknackatarian 108 Nixon, James & Sons (dealer) 96 Northern Society for the Encouragement of Arts (Leeds) 146; see also exhibitions Nostell Priory: sales of ‘antique furniture to 104–105 Novello & Co (Wardour Street) 126 Obendorffer, J.N. (dealer) 84, 109n38 Old Curiosity Shop 25, 28–31, 32, 46n93, 105; Burton’s 25; John Watkins Chapman 29, 31; Redfern’s 124; see also Charles Dickens oldness, value of 59–60; and ‘age-value’ 61; and antiques 105–106 Oxenhams (auctioneers) 86 Palliser, Mrs Bury: on antique dealer’s shops 38; publications on ceramics by 15 Papworth, John Buonarotti: and Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures (1835) 92 Parker, Thomas Lister 89 Patent Woodcarving Company 91; see also furniture (manufacturing) Pearson, John Loughborough 126 period rooms: at Aston Hall 149; at Goodrich Court 54–55, 57; market for 92–93; writings on 25 Planché, James R: and historical theatre costume 55–56; and Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition (1857) 150 Poggi, Gianfranco: on money 117 Pollen, John Hungerford 62

Index Pomian, Krzystof 22; on art dealers 138–139; on markets for curiosities 95; on prices for artworks 138–139 Post Offce directories: classifcation of dealers in 9, 78, 106; see also trade directories Pratt, Samuel and Henry (dealer) 4, 69, 72, 80, 96, 119, 137, 143; classifcations in trade directories 107; and the Eglinton Tournament 143; exhibitions of 44, 45, 143; and Ralph Bernal 56, 84 Pratt, Samuel Luke (dealer) 3, 137; and Continental buying trips 89; and exhibitions 44, 45, 143, 147, 149, 150; and fake armour 34 Price, William Lake: on Venice 89 prices: narrative of 138–139, 141 professionalism 100 professions 59, 81, 106, 107, 146, 151; antique dealing as a 100–102 provenance 68; and antiques 105; and authenticity 40; fake 34, 124, 134 Pugin, A.W.N. 1, 62, 80, 111n89 Punch, or The London Charivari 130 Quin, William Henry, 2nd Earl of Dunraven 80; see also Adare Manor Quincy, Antione-Chrystome Quatremère de 94 Raikes, Thomas: on historical objects 131–132; market for antiques 59; on Sèvres 59; on Venice 88 Raphaelware 84, 85, 110n41 Redfern, Charles (dealer) 80; and Aston Hall 149; Isaac and 154n54; and Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition 148–149; at Stowe auction 123, 137; at Strawberry Hill auction 123; writings on 123–124 Redford, George: and publication of art auction prices 23; on William Forrest 119 Regent Street (London): dealers in 120; elite consumption and 10, 121–122; and metropolitan improvements 119–120; modernity and 119 Reitlinger, Gerald: on ‘age-value’ 61; art market and 2; on Charles Mannheim 46n77; and history of collecting 22; methodologies of 23–24 remodelling (antiques) 96–97 Rendell, Jane 121 Reynolds, George 130 Rheims, Maurice 22 Richardson, Charles James 8 Rickman, Thomas 81 Riegl, Alois: on ‘age-value’ 61

189

ring (the) 157n145; Byng-hall on 141; description of practice at auction 140–141, 157n144; Isaac and 140; newspaper reports on 141, 157n145; Scarisbrick and 140; see also auctions; knockout Robertson, Iain 21 Robins, George: and auction of collections of Thomas Gwenapp 142–143 Robinson, Henry Crabb 56 Robinson, John Charles: and exhibitions 12, 147; on Giovanni Freppa 35; on John Jarman 34–35; on public museums 13; on William Chaffers 37 Rodd, Horatio (dealer) 3, 80; G.W. Braikenridge and 90, 104; catalogues produced by 93, 100, 103; and Dealers-inthe-Fine-Arts Provident Institution 101; at Strawberry Hill auction 137 Rogers, William Gibbs (dealer) 80; exhibitions by 143–144; Grinling Gibbons, admiration for 96, 143 Romanticism: as catalyst for historical objects 8, 11, 52–54, 61, 62, 89 Roscoe, Thomas 57 Rosenstein, Leon: defnition of antique by 105 Rothschild, Ferdinand de 108 Royal Academy, The 38 Royal Armouries, The 34, 58, 142; rearrangement of displays at 54 Royal Society of Arts 146 Saatchi, Charles 36 Saisselin, Rémy 22 Scharf, George 148 Schofeld, William (dealer) 98–99; see also second-hand trade second-hand trade 9, 10, 32, 97–100, 107, 108, 122 Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures (1835) 146 Sequier, William 157n131 Sèvres (porcelain) 13, 26, 38, 57, 86; market for 59; ‘old’ 46n70, 58, 59, 85, 121; publications on 58–59, 85 Scarisbrick, Charles 4, 91, 92; and the auction ring 140 Scarisbrick Hall (Lancashire) 134 Schreiber, Lady Charlotte 13, 19n59 Scott, Sir Walter 1, 36; and historical objects 39–40, 62; and John Swaby 39, 99; novels of 53, 130, 131 Shaw, George (dealer) 131, 155n90 Shaw, Henry 1, 8, 55, 61–62, 65, 66, 70, 71, 72; see also Specimens of Ancient Furniture Shaw, Simeon: on Chelsea porcelain 75n73; publications by 58, 59

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shops: and architectural space 117, 120; development of 116–117; as social space 117–118 Simmel, Georg: on money 117 Sir John Soane’s Museum 151 Skelton, Joseph 54 Smiles, Sam 64 Smith, Charles 136, 139 Smith, Greg 141 Smith, John 24, 119; publication of prices of artworks 23 Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) 94 Sommerard, Alexandre du 53, 65 South Kensington Museum 12, 34, 38, 62, 147; and the art market 35, 37, 87; see also Victoria and Albert Museum Specimens of Ancient Furniture 1, 8, 13, 54, 81, 104; and antiquarian publications 57, 62–72; and commodifcation of historical objects 72, 148; and discourse of furniture history 67; historical objects in 55, 57, 61–72 Stammers, Tom 8 Stevens, Alfred The Porcelain Collector (1868) 14 Stillinger, Elizabeth 23 Stobert, Jon 98 Stowe (auction at): dealers at 39, 123, 137, 140; publications of prices at 139 Strand (London) 121 Strawberry Hill 66, 68, 69, 71, 77n119; Aedes Strawberrianae 139; ‘Anne Bolyen’s clock’ 138, 157n131; auction at 123, 137, 138, 139 Strutt, Joseph 57, 63–64, 66 Swaby, John (dealer) 4, 69, 72, 80, 85, 97, 99, 107, 142, 143; as a collector 39, 77n123, 159n197; and Gore House Exhibition 148, 149; and Isaac 100; at Stowe auction 137 Talbot, John, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury 92 Tallis, John 120, 125, 127, 128, 129 Taylor, Bayard: on Charles Redfern 123–124 Taymouth Castle (Highlands of Scotland) 138 Terry, Daniel 62, 99 Tessyman, Charles (dealer) 29; see also The Old Curiosity Shop Thompson, Charles Thurston 147, 149, 150 Thompson, Michael: ‘rubbish theory’ 11 Times/Sunday Times, The 140, 143, 147, 157n145 Tower of London, The 66; see also Royal Armouries Tracey, Charles 24, 134

tradecards 100, 101 trade directories 39; classifcations of dealers in 9, 15, 96, 102–103, 106–108; Davies family in 78; increasing number of dealers in 118 Twopeny, William 94 Uffenbach, Zacharias Conrad von (dealer) 95 value 11, 39, 40, 136, 138; art market and 6, 22, 23–24, 40, 61, 138–139, 141; cultural 121, 122, 130, 136; historical 8, 58, 59, 61, 130; social 36, 103, 108; systems of 116, 117, 136, 139–140, 141, 152; ‘use value’ 11; see also age value; economic value; exchange value Vasters, Reinhold 34 Velthuis, Olav 21 Venice: buying antiques in 88–89, 100, 148 Victoria and Albert Museum 12; and the art market 6, 7, 9; ‘British Galleries’ 6–7; fakes and forgeries at 6–7, 17n28 Vors, Frederic 108; see also bric-a-brac Waagen, Gustav 97 Wackernagel, Martin 20 Wainwright, Clive: on dealers 34, 36, 95; on development of antiques trade 2, 24, 44n48, 118; on history of collecting 22 Wallis Henry 37 Walpole, Horace: collections of 50, 66, 68, 71, 137, 157n131 Wanstead House (Essex) 104 Wardour Street 3, 10, 26, 39, 69, 72, 82, 85, 87, 97, 99, 102, 107, 122, 124–134; criticism of 130–134; English 131 Ware, Samuel 120 Waring, J.B. 149–150 Warwick: dealers in 149; see also Charles Redfern waste book 3–5, 17n18, 17n19, 56, 78–81, 85, 87, 98, 109n11, 113n134, 123, 140; see also John Coleman Isaac Watts, Karen 34 Webb, John (dealer) 38, 69, 72, 77n119, 80, 81, 87, 96, 109n21, 110n63, 119, 123, 137; John Webb Trust Fund 38; and public exhibitions 146–148 Webb, Phillip 94 Wedgwood, Josiah 58 Welch, Evelyn 98 White, Harrison and Cynthia 20 White, Hayden: on historical discourse 65–66 Whitton, Thomas 56 Wilenski, R.H: on Wardour Street 134 Winn, Charles 104–105

Index Winter, James (dealer): and The-Dealers-inFine-Arts Provident Institution 102; see also brokers Wood, Enoch 58, 59 Worcester (porcelain) 60

Yonge, Charlotte Mary 126, 130 Yonge, William Crawley 126 Zerner, Henri 61

191