Struggling Against A Vulgar Prejudice P

“Struggling against a Vulgar Prejudice”:
Patriotism and the Collecting of British Art

at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century
Holger Hoock
T he artist Frank Softly, a character in Wilkie Collins’s novel A Rogue’s

Life, first published in 1856, complains that until recently pictures by
a modern British artist had not been admitted to private art collections
“on terms of equality, into the society even of the second-rate Old Masters. His
work was hung in any out-of-the-way corner of the gallery that could be found;
it had been bought under protest; it was admitted by sufferance; its freshness and
brightness damaged it terribly by contrast with the dirtiness and dinginess of its
elderly predecessors.”1 Indeed, for most of the eighteenth century, only the col-
lecting of foreign Old Masters was considered a good strategy if one wanted to
invest in art or advertise one’s social status and cultural refinement. The grandest
European Old Masters were seen as national assets: models for Britain’s artists,
evidence of a connoisseur’s taste, and proof of the country’s high state of civili-
zation. As enthusiasm for art in general grew and Protestant iconophobia de-
creased, from midcentury the promotion of native art was hailed as a patriotic act.
During the Seven Years’ War, comparisons between the military and cultural might
of Britain and that of France helped justify demands for sponsorship of British art.
However, with the important exception of portraits in the grand manner and so-
called subject paintings such as those by Sir Joshua Reynolds, modern British art
in collections remained largely confined to lowly genres and to inferior spaces in
Holger Hoock is associate professor of history and founding director of the interdisciplinary Eigh-
teenth-Century Worlds Centre at the University of Liverpool and a Fellow of the Royal Historical
Society. He has published extensively on British and imperial cultural politics in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in History in 2006, his recent international
honors include a Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress. He is grateful, for their comments on
earlier versions of this essay, to Joshua Civin, Julia E. Hickey, Joanna Innes, Marius Kwint, Peter Mandler,
Mark S. Phillips, Giles Waterfield, and the journal’s editors and anonymous readers. Research for this
essay was generously supported by a Visiting Fellowship from the Yale Center for British Art, a British
Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the Leverhulme Trust.
1
Wilkie Collins, A Rogue’s Life (1856; New York, 1879), 49.
Journal of British Studies 49 (July 2010): 566–591

! 2010 by The North American Conference on British Studies.
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566
PATRIOTISM AND THE COLLECTING OF BRITISH ART " 567
London’s grand mansions and the aristocracy’s country houses—portraiture in

staircases and private apartments, and landscapes, animal paintings, and hunting
scenes in the parlors.2
It was in the 1790s that the first collections of exclusively British art were formed.
At the same time, other collectors added British sections to their collections of
Old Masters, experimented with mixed hangs, or deliberately juxtaposed specific
old paintings and modern paintings. This phenomenon has so far been little ex-
plored, misdated, and poorly understood. In this essay, I therefore propose to
analyze in an integrated manner a wide range of major and more minor collectors
and collections of British art that hitherto have been treated in a fragmentary way
or, in the case of some like Admiral Nelson’s prize agent, Alexander Davison, and
his unique British history gallery, not at all.
Moreover, I aim to contribute to an explanation of a significant moment in the
history of British collecting and culture that has previously been overlooked or
misunderstood. The collecting of grand-manner Old Masters and historical paint-
ing in a recognizably eighteenth-century mode was not simply replaced by the
collecting of sentimental, picturesque, and antiquarian historical subjects in a dis-
tinctly nineteenth-century mode. The innovative cultural practices discussed here
occurred simultaneously with the continuation of earlier practices of cosmopolitan
Old Master collecting. Unlike scholars who have covered the two “ideal” modes
separately, and those who have addressed specifically the moment of the British
Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts and its particular mission for a British
school inspired by the Old Masters, I argue that it is important to appreciate a
moment of cultural change when no one orthodox pattern prevailed or led to
predictable resolutions. Furthermore, the diverse social backgrounds of the col-
lectors surveyed here do not support previously advanced arguments for a straight-
forward shift from aristocratic cosmopolitan taste to bourgeois cultural nationalism.
It is thus important, I shall argue, to acknowledge the complex nature of the
cultural phenomenon under consideration, the diversity of the collectors involved,
and the variety of their motivations, which cannot be reduced to straightforward
class dynamics, economic patterns, or political alignments. However, the collecting
of British art can nevertheless be understood as a coherent phenomenon, namely,
as a novel and significant manifestation of cultural patriotism at the turn of the
nineteenth century. I define “cultural patriotism” as the expression of patriotic
sentiment—a preference for, and an emotional identification with, one’s own coun-
try—through the production, promotion, and consumption of specific cultural
processes, events, and goods.
In the “long” eighteenth century, a patriotic self-consciousness was forged in
Britain through the “Second Hundred Years’ War” with France and fostered by
adherence to widely shared beliefs and values such as Protestantism, liberty, and
property. The invention of a new British identity in the century following the
parliamentary union between England and Scotland in 1707 helped submerge
regional and national differences and loyalties, especially in common opposition
to French “popery” and absolutism. Moreover, the acquisition and experience of
2
Most of the published catalogs and numerous manuscript catalogs of eighteenth-century and early
nineteenth-century collections have been studied for this essay. All references to Old Masters are con-
temporary attributions.
568 " HOOCK
empire was a crucial political and cultural catalyst in the forging of the British
nation. Who the “true patriots” were was often contested: for instance, in the
1730s and 1740s, Walpole or his adversaries? the supporters of the American
Revolution or its opponents? From the 1790s onward, patriotism was more con-
sistently appropriated by administrations and in support of the status quo. The
monarchy under George III, and again especially from the 1790s, was able to an
extent to co-opt these “nationalist” tendencies. Socially and culturally, there was
over the course of the eighteenth century a growing Protestant, nationalist protest
against a cosmopolitan, aristocratic culture that invested in French fashions and
Italian opera; reactions included the promotion of an “English” or “British” school
of art. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, even art societies
such as the Royal Academy of Arts moved from embodying an enlightened, cos-
mopolitan patriotism to adopting a more narrowly nationalist outlook.3
From the 1790s, in a period of heightened Anglo-French competition in the
cultural as much as in the political, military, and imperial realms, collecting British
art was construed as a manifestation of cultural patriotism and helped shape its
languages and practices. Patriotic considerations influenced classificatory schemes,
thus feeding on, and in turn developing, an interest in art history and an increas-
ingly school-oriented interpretation of art.4 Collectors and tendentious catalogers
presented specific private collections as national assets and constructed public pa-
triotic personas. Patriotic collecting was not necessarily pursued to the exclusion
of traditional, cosmopolitan taste; indeed, the precise relationship between Old
Masters and modern British art was often at the heart of the debate, as the former
continued to provide one index of the European seriousness of the English or
3
Key historiography on eighteenth-century patriotism, national consciousness, and Britishness in-
cludes Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1992),
“Whose Nation? Class and National Consciousness in Britain, 1750–1830,” Past and Present, no. 113
(November 1986): 97–117, “The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation,
1760–1820,” Past and Present, no. 102 (February 1984): 94–129, and “Britishness and Otherness:
An Argument,” Journal of British Studies 31, no. 4 (October 1992): 309–29; Kathleen Wilson, The
Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995); Tony
Claydon and Ian McBride, eds., Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–c.
1850 (London, 1998); and Colin Kidd, “North Britishness and the Nature of Eighteenth-Century
British Patriotism,” Historical Journal 39, no. 2 (June 1996): 361–82. For the philosophical sources
and linguistic, literary, and artistic manifestations of patriotism, see also Gerald Newman, The Rise of
English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (London and New York, 1987); and Dustin
Griffin, Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2002). On contestation, see
Hugh Cunningham, “The Language of Patriotism, 1750–1914,” in Patriotism: The Making and Un-
making of British National Identity, ed. Raphael Samuel, 3 vols. (London, 1989), 1:57–89; Miles
Taylor, “John Bull and the Iconography of Public Opinion in England, c. 1712–1929,” Past and
Present, no. 134 (January 1992): 93–128; Robert Harris, A Patriot Press: National Politics and the
London Press in the 1740s (Oxford, 1993); and David Eastwood, “Patriotism and the English State in
the 1790s,” in The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. Mark Philp (Cambridge, 1991),
146–68, and “Robert Southey and the Meanings of Patriotism,” Journal of British Studies 31, no. 3
(July 1992): 265–87. On the continuing appeal of French culture, see Robin Eagles, “Beguiled by
France? The English Aristocracy, 1748–1848,” in A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, c.
1750–c. 1850, ed. Laurence Brockliss and David Eastwood (Manchester, 1997), 60–77.
4
Giles Waterfield, “The Origins of the Early Picture Gallery Catalogue in Europe, and Its Manifes-
tation in Victorian Britain,” in Art in Museums, ed. Susan M. Pearce (London, 1995), 42–73; Ian
Pears, The Discovery of Painting: The Growth of Interest in the Arts in England, 1680–1768 (New Haven,
CT, 1988), 160–61, 169, 171.
British school, and a benchmark of its achievement. It is in this vein that this essay
offers a contribution to the study of cultural patriotism that is grounded in his-
torically specific practices, institutions, and discourses.5
Reconsidering private collectors sheds light on the relationships and porous
boundaries between the public and the private in the art world of this period. The
present argument about private collectors constitutes one strand of a larger re-
interpretation of British cultural politics. It complements the argument that these
same decades, from around 1790 to the 1820s, represent a crucial period of change
in the development of the British cultural state. The state, traditionally rather
reticent in supporting cultural endeavor, encouraged the dovetailing of public and
private interests and invested heavily, for instance, in the development of the
national collections of antiquities at the British Museum.6 Similarly, as around
1800 the impact of the Royal Academy of Arts on the promotion of a British
school appeared to be more limited than had initially been hoped, and as the
short-lived commercial galleries of the 1790s failed to provide credible alternatives,
attention shifted to the need for patronage either by the state or by private in-
dividuals. Yet, beyond more or less coherent acts of royal patronage—the purchase
of a private collection as the nucleus of the National Gallery in 1824, and the
subsequent decorating of the rebuilt Houses of Parliament with frescoes—the state
did little to sponsor the British school of painting in the early nineteenth century.7
With the exception of Russia, Britain was the last major European country to
establish a national gallery.8 The National Gallery has been explained as a mani-
5
Neil Harris has advocated that historians of collecting pay greater attention to place, local culture,
social connections, and institutional affiliations; see his keynote lecture, “Beyond Biography: Art Col-
lecting as Social Experience,” at the symposium “Turning Points in Old Master Collecting, 1830–1940,”
Center for the History of Collecting in America, Frick Collection, New York, 19 May 2007. On cultural
patriotism and cosmopolitan exchange, see Newman, Rise of English Nationalism; and Holger Hoock,
The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture, 1760–1840 (Oxford,
2003), chap. 4, with further references. For recent discussion of the analysis of historical change in
social, cultural, and postsocial history, see Peter Mandler and respondents in the inaugural issue of
Cultural and Social History 1, no. 1 (2004); Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the
Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley, 1999); Miguel A. Cabrera,
Postsocial History: An Introduction, trans. Marie McMahon (Lanham, MD, and Oxford, 2004); Patrick
Joyce, ed., The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences (London, 2002);
and the essays in the Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (Fall 2003). For an institutionally grounded
study of cultural patriotism in the contemporary art world, see Hoock, The King’s Artists.
6
Holger Hoock, “The British State and the Anglo-French Wars over Antiquities, 1798–1858,”
Historical Journal 50, no. 1 (January 2007): 1–24, and Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and
the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850 (London, 2010).
7
Christopher Lloyd, “George III and His Painters,” in The Wisdom of George the Third, ed. Jonathan
Marsden (London, 2005), 85–99; Dana Arnold, ed., “Squanderous and Lavish Profusion”: George IV,
His Image and Patronage of the Arts (London, 1995); Steven Parissien, George IV: The Grand Enter-
tainment (London, 2001); Jonathan G. W. Conlin, The Nation’s Mantelpiece: A History of the National
Gallery (London, 2006); Emma L. Winter, “German Fresco Painting and the New Houses of Parliament
at Westminster, 1834–1851,” Historical Journal 47, no. 2 (June 2004): 291–329.
8
For the origins of public and national collections across Europe from 1710 to 1820, see Niels von
Holst, Creators, Collectors and Connoisseurs: The Anatomy of Artistic Taste from Antiquity to the Present
Day, introduction by Sir Herbert Read, trans. Brian Battershaw (London, 1967), 204–5; Germain
Bazin, The Museum Age, trans. Jane van Nuis Cahill (Brussels, 1967), 158–60, 215; Frank Herrmann,
The English as Collectors: A Documentary Chrestomathy (London, 1972), 45–46; Nikolaus Pevsner, A
History of Building Types (London, 1976), 117; and Andrew McClellan, “The Politics and Aesthetics
of Display: Museums in Paris, 1750–1800,” Art History 7, no. 4 (December 1987): 438–64.
570 " HOOCK
festation of growing nationalism, delayed by patrician fears of its potential demo-

cratic implications: Would it not undermine the principle of private property? And
would free and universal access not give rise to demands for wider political rights?9
Princely collections from Dresden to Vienna had been made freely available to the
general public by monarchs trying to absorb criticism prior to the French Revo-
lution; elsewhere, conquest or revolution had prompted central collections. At the
Louvre, from 1793 every citoyen could view collections that had formerly been in
royal, ecclesiastical, or private possession.10 Surviving monarchies, including Prus-
sia’s, attempted to renew their waning prestige by opening their galleries after
1815.11 This international background ensured that British debates on a national
gallery were rarely entirely free of political anxiety.12
The cultural history of collecting that I advocate is a history of the practices
and discourses of collecting that pays attention to the social, political, and cultural
milieu of collectors; to their personal taste, protocols of patronage, and display of
their collections; as well as to representations of those collections in the wider
public sphere. Collecting is often pursued in order to represent, sustain, or enhance
the owner’s social status; to signify economic achievement or to make an invest-
ment; to demonstrate the collector’s cultural acuity, including to dignify the sources
of recently acquired wealth; or for sheer love of art, the need for solace, or other
subliminal motivations.13 Standard explanatory patterns of class alignments cannot
adequately account for the notable increase of interest in collecting British art
around 1800. Underlying most earlier literature, from John Steegman’s classic
1930s histories to Dianne Sachko Macleod’s recent and important Art and the
Victorian Middle Class, is the assumption that landed-elite cosmopolitan collecting
9
Carol Duncan, “From the Princely Gallery to the Public Art Museum: The Louvre Museum and
the National Gallery,” in Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London and New York, 1995),
21–47, esp. 34–47; Colley, Britons, 174–77; Peter Fullerton, “Patronage and Pedagogy: The British
Institution in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Art History 5, no. 1 (March 1982): 59–72, esp. 60; cf.
Ingeborg Cleve, “Kunst in Paris um 1800: Der Wandel der Kunstöffentlichkeit und die Popularisierung
der Kunst seit der Französischen Revolution,” Francia 22, no. 2 (1995): 101–33.
10
Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in
Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge and New York, 1994); Duncan, “From the Princely Gallery,”
21–33.
11
For the Altes Museum in Berlin, see Steven Moyano, “Quality vs. History: Schinkel’s Altes Museum
and Prussian Arts Policy,” Art Bulletin 72, no. 4 (December 1990): 585–608.
12
Ann Pullan, “Public Goods or Private Interests? The British Institution in the Early Nineteenth
Century,” in Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790–1850, ed. Andrew Hemingway and William Vaughan (Cam-
bridge and New York, 1998), 27–44, esp. 28–29. Colley subscribes only to the latter part of this
argument with respect to the British Institution (see Britons, 175–76).
13
For the concept of collections as extensions of their owners’ identities, see Werner Muensterberger,
Collecting: An Unruly Passion (Princeton, NJ, 1994); and Susan Pearce, Museums, Objects, and Col-
lections: A Cultural Study (Leicester and London, 1992), 55–63. For collecting and self-fashioning in
imperial context, see Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East, 1750–1850
(London, 2005), 154–86, and “Collectors of Empire: Objects, Conquests and Imperial Self-Fash-
ioning,” Past and Present, no. 184 (February 2004): 109–35. Helpful conceptual pointers are provided
by the literature on collections as semiotics, yet it often lacks in historical specificity; see Mieke Bal,
“Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective on Collecting,” 97–115; and Jean Baudrillard, “The System
of Collecting,” 7–24; both in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cam-
bridge, MA, 1994). For other sociocultural frameworks, see Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of
Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986); and Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A
Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London and Cambridge, MA, 1984).
in the “age of taste” was replaced in the nineteenth century by mercantile and
industrial elite collecting of mostly sentimental, picturesque, and antiquarian his-
tory paintings. Collecting is seen as a corollary of political democratization and
popular education. With a few well-known exceptions, the pioneering patrons and
collectors of British art are usually considered to have been Victorian self-made
middle-class men such as the horse dealer Robert Vernon, the Yorkshire woolen
manufacturer John Sheepshanks, and the pharmacist Jacob Bell.
Macleod has rightly demolished the stereotype of Victorian middle-class urban
collectors performing a parvenu mimicry of aristocrats. By patronizing specific,
new forms of art such as early Victorian narrative paintings and the works of the
Pre-Raphaelites, these new urban elites instead created a social and cultural identity
for themselves that was clearly distinct from the landed elite and their Old Master
collecting. Macleod focuses on the period when middle-class collectors perma-
nently altered the nature and structure of art patronage. Yet this still leaves the
period around the turn of the nineteenth century, when men of various back-
grounds experimented with investing in British collections, underconceptualized
and unexplained.14 As different forms of collecting coexisted, there was no clear
alignment between the collectors’ social class and the contents of their collections
(other than many aristocrats collecting Old Masters). The forming of exclusively
British collections, the conspicuous adding of important British sections to existing
Old Master collections, and the growing attention being paid to the national school
in the diverse collections of men of varying social (and political) backgrounds did
not constitute middle-class emulation of traditional aristocratic standards. Neither
was it an example of the affirmation of a distinctive middle-class identity, separate
from the leisured existence of the aristocracy and gentry and their peculiar forms
of connoisseurship and collecting. Aristocratic cosmopolitanism was not straight-
forwardly replaced by bourgeois nationalism.
Nor was financial investment a determining motive for the collecting of British
art. Old Masters were still better objects of investment than contemporary art. By
the early nineteenth century, the prices fetched by some eighteenth-century pain-
ters and paintings—including Reynolds, Wilson, and certain Hogarths—had risen
significantly above their original sales value. But many sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century Dutch, Flemish, Italian, and French masters still appeared safer objects of
14
John Steegman, The Rule of Taste from George I to George IV (London, 1936), and Victorian
Taste: A Study of the Arts and Architecture from 1830 to 1870, foreword by Nikolaus Pevsner (London,
1970). Dianne Sachko Macleod acknowledges the importance of Sir John Fleming Leicester, Samuel
Whitbread II, and Alexander Davison; see her Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the
Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge, 1996), 26–28, 46–47. See also Dianne Sachko Macleod,
“Homosociality and Middle-Class Identity in Early Victorian Patronage of the Arts,” in Gender, Civic
Culture and Consumerism: Middle-Class Identity in Britain, 1840–1940, ed. Alan Kidd and David
Nichols (Manchester, 1999), 65–80. Kathryn Moore Heleniak refers to the exceptions of a “few brave
aristocrats,” Sir George Beaumont’s and Sir Robert Peel’s mixed collections, and Sir John E. Swinburne’s
and Leicester’s British art; see her “Victorian Collections and British Nationalism: Vernon, Sheepshanks
and the National Gallery of British Art,” Journal of the History of Collections 12, no. 1 (2000): 91–107.
The patronage of British art by Josiah Wedgwood, Samuel Whitbread II, and John Julius Angerstein
have been instanced as bourgeois, parvenu patriotism in Colley, “Whose Nation?” 110–111; and in
Stephen Deuchar, Paintings, Politics, and Porter: Samuel Whitbread II and British Art (London, 1984);
see also, more generally, Pears, The Discovery of Painting, chaps. 5–6.
572 " HOOCK
investment, above all because they had stood the test of time.15 Anna Jameson
declared that the “pictures of a living artist can never be what so many seek in
pictures, an investment for money.”16 Only from the 1820s did the risk of pur-
chasing fake Old Masters (exposed by the Art Union) begin to act as a financial
as much as a cultural incentive for collecting native art fresh off the easel.17 Yet
for the earliest systematic collectors of modern British art, theirs was not primarily
an economic investment.
Ultimately, the commodity status and the exchange value of a work of art hinge
on its meanings, related to the aesthetic and symbolic dimensions of “value,” and
on the representation of an interest superior to that of mundane commerce. Within
James Clifford’s square of the politics of value (adapted from Algirdas Greimas’s
semiotic square), modern British art would be located in the zone of authentic
masterpieces (on the axes authentic/nonauthentic, and masterpiece/artifact). Yet
within that quarter—of those objects commanding the highest admiration and
prices—British art would be marginal, its economic value lower, and its aesthetic
and cultural appreciation less assured than that of Old Masters.18
Instead of class dynamics or economics, the interpretative framework that best
helps explain the changing meanings and status of British art as collectibles around
1800 is the construction of “collecting British” (as I shall call it for brevity) as a
form of conspicuous cultural patriotism. Art collecting was legitimized as a patriotic
cultural service that individuals as much as institutions performed for the nation.
To invest in (one’s liking of ) British art meant to exercise patronage in a peda-
gogical and patriotic manner. For many collectors it was part of strategies to
construct a patriotic persona. The perceived patriotic value of patronizing British
art helped to legitimize collecting British as a means of personal advancement as
well as to overcome earlier prejudice against British art. As collectors’ private taste
was presented as a national asset, collecting British art became a form of virtuous
citizenship. The practice was often linked to collectors’ philanthropic activities, con-
cern with the armed forces, and contributions to diverse art societies. Some went
as far as to suggest that it might help lift the confidence of a nation fighting for
survival in a total war with France. Indeed, William Paulet Carey (1759–1839)—
an Irish artist, fine-arts editor of the Literary Gazette, and propagandist in chief for
modern British art—linked the health of British art with the “undaunted bravery”
of Britain’s fleets and armies and compared the art patron Sir John Fleming Leicester
with the Duke of Wellington.19 However tenuous the connection between art
15
Gerald Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste, vol. 1, The Rise and Fall of Picture Prices, 1760–1960
(London, 1961), 3–56, 73, 78–79, 113–18, 282–83, 340, 497.
16
Anna Jameson, Companion to the most celebrated private galleries of London (London, 1844), xxxvi.
17
Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, 28.
18
James Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century
Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1988), 215–51, esp. 223–25; cf.
Susan Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (London,
1998), 290–93.
19
William Paulet Carey, A descriptive catalogue of a collection of paintings by British artists in the
possession of Sir John Fleming Leicester (London, 1819), xii.
collecting and active national service, the rhetoric of cultural patriotism could be
a powerful (if sometimes ambiguous) tool.20
The men featuring in this essay often straddled the notional divide between the
patron and the collector: the latter acquired art primarily for his own gratification,
be it aesthetic, financial, or other, while the patron “not only exercised a more
direct relationship with contemporary artists” but also acquired art “partly for
their benefit (and even for that of the arts as a whole) or . . . lent support to
artistic enterprises without expectation of material reward.”21 Many of those sys-
tematically collecting modern British art saw themselves as patriotic patrons in this
wider sense, thus eliding private and public agendas.
In the next section, I will briefly situate “collecting British” within the context
of the ambiguous contemporary relationship between Old Masters and the emerg-
ing national school of art. I will then consider different, but related, aspects of
the phenomenon of collecting British, looking in turn at pioneers of exclusive but
diverse British collections; then a unique collection of specially commissioned
British history paintings and a collection of watercolors as a distinctly British genre;
and mixed collections, mixed hangs, and specific juxtapositions of Old Masters
and modern British art. By way of a conclusion, I will briefly review the social,
political, and aesthetic parameters of collecting British at the turn of the nineteenth
century and its significance for cultural histories of collecting.
I. OLD MASTERS AND BRITISH ART

By the 1790s, certain patterns of discussing art and particular institutional frame-
works of patronage and collecting were already in place, providing some of the
interpretative context for the phenomenon of collecting British. Within these
frameworks, individual collectors exercised personal preferences of taste and had
different visions for the national school. Throughout the eighteenth century, art-
ists, connoisseurs, and authors had discussed how an English or British school
might overcome the country’s alleged artistic backwardness—with the help of
private and public patronage and through the better education of artists and of
the country’s social and cultural elite.
When Napoleon was systematically looting European Old Masters and trans-
ferring them to the Louvre as models for French artists, support for British art
was construed as a national priority. A rhetoric of patriotic concern for the cultural
heritage of the nation promoted commercial galleries’ swelling with paintings by
British artists of scenes taken from Shakespeare, Milton, and national history.
Moreover, galleries on paper—that is, series of engravings after privately held Old
Masters of the foreign and English schools—were published in lavish formats and
with explicitly patriotic commentary.
The notion now became firmly established that the origins of an English or
British school of painting centered around the first president of the Royal Academy,
Sir Joshua Reynolds (his subject pictures and allegorical portraits elevated to the
20
For the British Institution’s using national rhetoric but being seen by many as “a self-serving group
of collectors who had come together to keep Old Master prices high,” see Conlin, The Nation’s
Mantelpiece, 45.
21
Deuchar, Paintings, Politics, and Porter, 11.
574 " HOOCK
status of history painting), and around his associates and fellow Royal Academi-
cians. This idea was enshrined in dictionaries and histories of art and propagated
in Royal Academy lectures and parts of the national press. By 1810, the canon of
native art was redefined and broadened to include Hogarth and Wilkie, and land-
scape and watercolor; it was now characterized by notions of Protestantism and
naturalism.22
When, from around 1800, artists and others campaigned for a national gallery
of art, the relationship between the art historical canon and modern British art
came to the fore. Old Masters were recognized objects of conspicuous consump-
tion and display in town house and country house galleries. Reynolds advocated
the role of Old Masters as models for British artists. But many living artists felt
ambivalent about the juxtaposition of old and modern. The British Institution,
launched by noble and genteel connoisseurs in 1805, staged competitions for artists
to create companion pieces to the Old Masters in its exhibition. It also held
retrospectives of Reynolds, Hogarth, Wilson, Gainsborough, and Zoffany.23 In
Britain’s first public galleries, the Dulwich Picture Gallery (1814) and the National
Gallery (1824), Old Masters were central too.24 Yet, again, artists worried that
their juxtaposition with modern art might prompt “the invidious to make dis-
advantageous comparisons.”25
A wide variety and quality of paintings were readily available for view and pur-
chase at artists’ studios and the annual exhibitions of a growing number of art
societies, which had in turn given rise to a flourishing culture of art criticism.26
By the 1790s, a number of middle-class men and aristocrats had been energetically
commissioning and collecting modern British art.27 In 1807, Prince Hoare ran a
series, Galleries of English Art, in his magazine, the Artist, to raise the profile,
and encourage emulation, of the “principal collections lately formed from the
works of living painters” with “the noble purpose of encouraging contemporary
22
Before 1800, sources overwhelmingly refer to an “English” school of art; “British school” came
into use as an alternative from the 1790s, but usage remained inconsistent. Foreign artists practicing
in Britain could be counted among the English/British school.
23
Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition
(New Haven, CT, and London, 2000); Fullerton, “Patronage and Pedagogy: the British Institution
in the Early Nineteenth Century.”
24
See my article, to which the present piece is a companion, “Old Masters and the English School:
The Royal Academy of Arts and the Notion of a National Gallery at the Turn of the Nineteenth
Century,” Journal of the History of Collections 16, no. 1 (2004): 1–18.
25
The Diary of Joseph Farington, ed. K. Garlick, A. Macintyre, and K. Cave, 16 vols. (London and
New Haven, CT, 1978–84), 7:2592; cf. 4:1127–28 (hereafter cited as DJF). And see The Diary of
Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. W. B. Pope, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1960–63), 4:3, 21, 64; and Conlin,
The Nation’s Mantelpiece, 43–44.
26
David Solkin, Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780–1836 (New
Haven, CT, and London, 2001); Hoock, The King’s Artists.
27
A dozen such collections are documented; see Deuchar, Paintings, Politics, and Porter, 9, 16,
24–25; Johann David Passavant, Tour of a German Artist in England, 2 vols. (London, 1836), 1:
187–90, 277–85; DJF, 10:3675–76, 12:4279; Kathryn Moore Heleniak, William Mulready (New
Haven, CT, and London, 1980), 161–62; Gustav F. Waagen, Works of Art and Artists in England,
trans. H. E. Lloyd, 3 vols. ([London], 1838), 3:45–46, 338–56; and Francis Haskell, “The British as
Collectors,” in The Treasure Houses of Britain: Five Hundred Years of Private Patronage and Art
Collecting, ed. Gervase Jackson-Stops (New Haven, CT, and London, 1985), 50–59, esp. 54.
merit.”28 Sales catalogs for the period circa 1790–1830 paint a similar picture of
the rise of collecting British as a legitimate, well-publicized practice.29 British art
thus became a respectable object of collecting at the very moment when sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century European Old Masters of unprecedented quantity and
quality were pouring onto the London market in the wake of the French Revo-
lution. French aristocrats brought paintings as easily movable assets into exile;
British dealers “were at hand with their guineas” whenever the French conquered
another country.30 Perhaps this influx fueled pro-British fervor; alternatively, with-
out such riches of high-quality foreign art, collecting British might have taken
hold even more quickly and more widely than it did.31
In brief, a politico-cultural discourse on the British school of art informed various
private and commercial practices as well as aspirations for public collecting. The
notion that it was a patriotic duty to patronize native art permeated catalogs,
reviews, and wider discussion. It was in these contexts that several collectors as-
sembled the first exclusively British collections during the French wars at the turn
of the century.
II. THE PIONEERS

The exclusively British collection of art was pioneered around 1790 by three men:
the philanthropist Sir Thomas Bernard (1750–1818), the land-owning brewer and
MP Samuel Whitbread II (1764–1815), and Sir John Fleming Leicester, Bart.
(1762–1827). They were all medium-weight players in the British art world. Ber-
nard helped found the British Institution and the magazine the Director, which
was initially devoted to promoting British art. Whitbread supported the British
Institution as well as the Artists’ Benevolent Fund and was a key figure in the
campaign, in 1797–98, for the first sculpture copyright act (1798).32 Leicester was
a cofounder of the British Institution, treasurer of the short-lived Calcographic
Society of engravers, and an honorary member of the Royal Irish Institution, to
which he donated two paintings in 1823 in the hope of encouraging the estab-
lishment of a national gallery in Ireland.
It was Bernard who appears to have formed the very first exclusively British
picture collection.33 Bernard was treasurer and vice president of the Foundling
28
[Prince Hoare], “No. V: Patrons of Living Painters” (11 April 1807), in The Artist; A Collection
of Essays, Relative to Painting, Poetry, Sculpture, Architecture, the Drama, Discoveries of Science, and
Various Other Subjects, ed. Prince Hoare (London, 1807), 15.
29
See Sales Catalogues, nos. 87–96, Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection, Yale Center for British
Art, New Haven, CT.
30
Waagen, Works of Art, 1:50.
31
This alternative has been suggested by Giles Waterfield, “Art Galleries and the Public: A Survey
of Three Centuries,” in Art Treasures of England: The Regional Collections, ed. Michael Foster (London,
1998), 13–77, esp. 20 (this volume was published in connection with an exhibition at the Royal Academy
of Arts, London, January 22–April 13, 1998). For the context, see Guido Guerzoni, “The British
Painting Market, 1789–1914,” in Economic History and the Arts, ed. Michael North (Cologne, 1996),
97–131.
32
Hoock, The King’s Artists, 248–51.
33
R. D. Sheldon, “Bernard, Sir Thomas, second baronet (1750–1818),” in Oxford Dictionary of Na-
tional Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford 2004), http://www.oxford
dnb.com/view/article/2251 (accessed 31 December 2009).
576 " HOOCK
Hospital and a cofounder of the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor.
He supported educational and medical charities, friendly societies, and allotments.
The link between philanthropy and cultural projects was established by the Artist:
“This gentleman, to whom the admirers of the Arts are every way indebted, and
whose zeal for the promotion of liberal refinements is the proper accompaniment
of his humane exertions in the case of the Orphan and the Poor, possesses a very
considerable number of the works of our native artists, with little or no mixture
of those of any other school.”34 Started around 1797, Bernard’s collection was
based on first- and second-generation Academicians, with an emphasis on landscape
and allegorical, literary, and theatrical subjects. Landscapes and literary subjects,
from the late eighteenth century, and genre subjects, from the early nineteenth,
began to be recognized as specifically British; at the same time, Bernard seemed
to deliberately exclude the least prestigious categories of painting.
A much better-known (and better-documented) early British collection was
formed around the same time by Samuel Whitbread II, the son of the Noncon-
formist, self-made millionaire founder of the Whitbread brewery and MP for Bed-
ford. Whitbread’s art patronage and collecting are best understood in the context
of his roles as a brewer and a landlord, politician, and philanthropist.35 Educated
at Eton, at St John’s College, Cambridge, and on the grand tour, Whitbread
inherited his father’s 12,300 acres in 1796 but continued to work at the brewery
and to hold shares. A Whig MP for Bedford from 1790 on, Whitbread supported
abolition, religious toleration, and parliamentary and economic reform. He en-
countered social snobbery when contemporaries “deliberately looked for signs of
inelegance in a tradesman” and noticed “ungrammatical vulgarisms” in his par-
liamentary rhetoric.36 His inferiority complex has been blamed for his failure to
assert himself among political allies; he parted company with the Whigs in 1812.
Whitbread suffered from mental disturbance, possibly due to Cushing’s syndrome,
a disease of the endocrine glands, and cut his own throat in 1815.
Throughout his life, Whitbread was concerned with his “reputation with the
country” and sought to make his personal actions, public pronouncements, and
moral status look consistent. He was a lenient local magistrate and a benevolent
landlord. Philanthropy was a means both of maintaining his reputation and of
trying to foster the laboring classes’ respect, industry, and loyalty. Art patronage
was a practical form of patriotism, as a thriving national school of art was seen to
benefit the decorative arts, national prosperity, and Britain’s international prestige.
Art patronage for Whitbread was philanthropy in an immediate sense, too, es-
pecially with respect to “little-known young men with sparks of genius and capacity
for hard work,” such as George Garrard and S. W. Reynolds. Whitbread concerned
34
[Hoare], “Essay XXI: Galleries of English Paintings” (1 August 1807), in Hoare, The Artist, 3–14,
quotation at 3–4.
35
This section of my essay is much indebted to Stephen Deuchar’s Paintings, Politics, and Porter. See
also Dean Rapp, Samuel Whitbread: A Social and Political Study (New York and London, 1987), and
“Social Mobility in the Eighteenth Century: The Whitbreads of Bedfordshire, 1720–1815,” Economic
History Review, 2nd ser., 27, no. 3 (August 1974): 380–94; Roger T. B. Fulford, Samuel Whitbread: A
Study in Opposition (London, 1967); and D. R. Fisher, “Whitbread, Samuel (1764–1815),” in Matthew
and Harrison, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/
29231 (accessed 31 December 2009).
36
Deuchar, Paintings, Politics, and Porter, 13; DJF, 7:2744.
himself with the personal and financial well being of “his” resident artists and their
families; they, in turn, helped with Whitbread’s electoral interest and artistic af-
fairs.37 When Whitbread inherited, he reportedly resolved “to make a collection
of the works of English Artists.”38 He owned at least seventy-two contemporary
paintings—primarily landscapes, portraits, and animal pictures—most of which he
had bought or commissioned directly from artists. Whitbread also commissioned
busts from Joseph Nollekens and John Bacon.
In brief, Whitbread’s patronage and collecting were shaped by his personal
background, his politico-moral thinking, and his personal aspirations. His col-
lecting was meant to help him maintain a good reputation and realize “his related
political goal of an orderly and industrious stratified society.” The motivations for
his conspicuous patronage of artists and his collecting included a desire to over-
come the perceived stigma of his origins. Art patronage also seemed to be for him
one means of reconciling the tensions between the “attitudes of an aristocrat and
the ideals of a democrat.” In his own estimation, Whitbread mostly failed.39
The man behind the single most important early collection of modern British
art was Sir John Fleming Leicester. It was displayed at Tabley House, his attractive
country seat in Cheshire, and especially at his London mansion at 24 Hill Street,
in the fashionable Berkeley Square, Mayfair.40 Educated at Cambridge and taught
drawing by Royal Academician Paul Sandby, Leicester decided to collect British
art after his grand tour in 1784–86, against the prevailing “Anti-British Prejudice”
that doing so was still proof of “bad taste and ignorant profusion.”41 His collection
comprised mainly first- and second-generation Academicians; the subjects ranged
from the occasional modern history painting, through portraits, to horse and dog
paintings, views of Tabley House, and dramatic depictions of a fancifully dressed
Leicester reviewing his own regiment, the King’s Cheshire Yeomanry.
Leicester’s persistent practice over three decades helped bring about change in
the tone and terms of the debate on art collecting. In 1806, Leicester announced
the completion of his top-lit Hill Street gallery with a commissioned drawing by
John Buckler, exhibited at the Royal Academy.42 The Artist called Leicester “the
first patron, who, in a country abounding in artists and teeming with excellence,
has dared to set the example of an English Gallery, formed on a costly and extensive
37
Deuchar, Paintings, Politics, and Porter, 16, 22.
38
DJF, 2:588.
39
Deuchar, Paintings, Politics, and Porter, 27.
40
Dongho Chun, “Public Display, Private Glory: Sir John Fleming Leicester’s Gallery of British Art
in Early Nineteenth-Century England,” Journal of the History of Collections 13, no. 2 (2001): 175–89,
esp. 177. See also Douglas Hall, “The Tabley House Papers,” Walpole Society 38 (1960–62): 59–122;
Peter Cannon-Brookes, ed., Paintings from Tabley: An Exhibition of Paintings from Tabley House
(London, 1989); Selby Whittingham, “A Most Liberal Patron: Sir John Fleming Leicester, Bart., 1st
Baron de Tabley, 1762–1827,” Turner Studies 6, no. 2 (Winter 1986): 24–36; Albert Nicholson, rev.
Selby Whittingham, “Leicester, John Fleming, first Baron de Tabley (1762–1827),” in Matthew and
Harrison, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16369
(accessed 31 December 2009).
41
William Paulet Carey, Some memoirs of the patronage and progress of the fine arts in England and
Ireland during the reigns of George the Second, George the Third, and His present Majesty; with anecdotes
of Lord de Tabley (London, 1826), 107.
42
The title of John Buckler’s drawing is Sir J. F. Leicester’s Picture Gallery, Hill Street, London,
executed in pencil and wash in 1806–7. It is at present a holding of the Tabley House Collection,
University of Manchester.
578 " HOOCK
plan hitherto considered due to the works of foreign schools only.” Listing the
early collection, the editorial continued, “the collected labours of our own artists,
like the admired works of former times and distant countries, can add splendour
to the splendid.”43
From 1818, Leicester granted a select public—the noble, genteel, and otherwise
polite or fashionable—access to his gallery on one or two days a week in the period
between the exhibitions of the British Institution and the Royal Academy. This
made national news for the splendor of the well-lit neoclassical space, its fashionable
audience, and the display of “the genius of British Art to the highest advantage.”44
In his preface to the catalog, Leicester’s agent, William Paulet Carey, appealed to
notions of national purpose and public welfare. The nation was to be educated in
the excellence of native artists; gallery visitors, allegedly transcending class, wealth,
and power, found their identity as citizens of a new Athens or Florence.45 Detailed
catalogs had a real impact on public perceptions of individual collections, as Con-
tinental experience had shown. In Leicester’s case, the catalog would “prove a
triumph to the English School and a powerful blow against Prejudice.”46 Carey
later claimed that no Old Masters exhibition in Britain “ever occasioned so deep
or general a sensation.”47
With the opening of the gallery, Leicester’s priorities changed. Although the
core of his collection remained landscapes and literary and fancy subjects, Leicester
also bought major history paintings, traditionally the highest genre, by Benjamin
West, Henry Fuseli, and William Hilton. When first approached to contribute a
picture, West, who was at that time the president of the Royal Academy, praised
Leicester’s “friendship . . . for the Pencil of British Artists.”48 Leicester also bought
Richard Wilson’s View on the Arno and commissioned William Collins’s Landscape,
English Scenery as a pendant: by juxtaposing modern and contemporary art, Leices-
ter suggested that the national school was sufficiently well established to sustain
a variation on the Old Masters/modern model. J. W. M. Turner’s central position
within this increasingly formal British art gallery was consolidated with the pur-
chase, for 350 guineas, of Sun Rising through Vapour in 1818. At the Tabley sale
of 1827, Turner bought the painting back, and he included it in his 1831 will as
one of two works bequeathed to the National Gallery to hang next to paintings
by Claude.49
The Repository of Arts in 1819 lauded Leicester’s “obviously patriotic motive
43
[Prince Hoare], “No. XII: Gallery of English Painting Belonging to Sir John Leicester, Bart.,” in
Hoare, The Artist, 17–18, quotation at 17; cf. Annals of the Fine Arts 2 (1818): 104–10.
44
Morning Herald, 12 May 1818.
45
See Carey, preface to A descriptive catalogue; Literary Gazette (24 April 1819): 265; cf. William
T. Whitley, Art in England, 1800–1820 (Cambridge, 1928), 296; and DJF, 15:5199, 5210, 5345,
5363, 5366; 16:5313–14, 5663.
46
William Carey to Sir Richard Colt Hoare, 11 March 1818, quoted in Hall, “Tabley House Papers,”
103, no. 236; cf. Carey, Descriptive catalogue, vii–xi, 18–19, 113; and John Young, Catalogue of the
pictures by British Artists, in the possession of Sir J. F. Leicester (London, 1819).
47
Carey, Some memoirs, 139–40.
48
Benjamin West to Sir John Leicester, 25 March 1808, quoted in Hall, “Tabley House Papers,”
100, no. 217.
49
In 1818, Leicester claimed to have bought paintings from British artists for 1,600 guineas. See
Cannon-Brookes, Paintings from Tabley, 18–19; Hall, “Tabley House Papers,” 67–68; and DJF, 15:
5313–14.
. . . in forming this fine collection, and throwing open . . . his gallery to the
lovers of art.”50 Yet, in some respects, Leicester’s patriotism was, as the Examiner
asserted, “at once a satire on government, and its example.” The radical paper
condemned the government in terms that associated Leicester’s cultural practice
with the idiom of oppositional patriotism: “that government which unconsciously
creates sinecures of thousands a year for lazy worthless courtiers and constitution-
killers, but never expends a guinea in furtherance of British genius in painting.”51
Others were concerned with modes of patronage. Royal Academician James
Northcote praised Leicester’s “truly British Catalogue” and the collector himself
for being “the first person of consequence and Taste, who saw the merits of British
Art and forwarded the endeavours of the professors when they were struggling
against a vulgar prejudice. The Committee in Pall Mall [i.e., the British Institution]
can only be considered as followers of your example but with this great difference
that you patronised the Artists with your own private fortune. They do it with
the money which they gain by the public Exhibitions they so frequently make.
You act like a Nobleman, they act like merchants.”52 The references to the noble
Leicester and mercantile connoisseurs were not social descriptors but, instead,
contrasting modes of patronage. The Royal Academy hoped that, finally, liberal
patronage was overcoming traditional prejudice and that “so truly patriotic [an]
example will excite emulation in others & lead to the establishment of ‘the British
School.’”53
As with Whitbread, collecting was part of Leicester’s wider strategies of self-
fashioning. In 1823, Leicester offered to sell his collection “consisting solely of
the finest specimens of our Native Artists” to the nation to create a “National
Gallery of British art.” Prime Minister Lord Liverpool declined, ostensibly because
of economic constraints and parliamentary reluctance, but more likely because
most politicians and connoisseurs still thought of a national gallery primarily in
terms of canonical Old Masters. Snubbed by government, Leicester commissioned
a painting to record his Hill Street gallery, which appeared at the Royal Academy
show: W. F. Witherington’s A Gallery Hung with British Pictures, also known as
A Modern Picture Gallery (1824).54 In that same year, an engraving after Thomas
Wageman’s Portrait of Four Major Collectors was published as the frontispiece to
C. M. Westmacott’s British Galleries of Painting and Sculpture. The grouping of
King George IV, the Marquis of Stafford, Lord Grosvenor, and Sir John Leicester
implies that collecting British was as worthy as collecting Old Masters. Also in
50
Repository of Arts 7 (1819): 230. See also J. Boyd to Sir John Leicester, n.d., 85.AA.26/54–55,
National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and Richard Dagley, dedication to A
compendium of the theory and practice of drawing and painting (London, 1818).
51
Examiner (26 April 1819); Carey, Descriptive catalogue, x; cf. Philip Harling, “Leigh Hunt’s
Examiner and the Language of Patriotism,” English Historical Review 111, no. 444 (November 1996):
1159–81.
52
James Northcote to Sir John Leicester, 17 February 1817, quoted in Hall, “Tabley House Papers,”
86, no.131.
53
Royal Academy Council Minutes, VI, 62–64, 1819, Royal Academy of Arts Archives, Burlington
House, London.
54
W. F. Witherington, A Gallery Hung with British Pictures, 1824, oil on canvas (69.4 x 90.4 cm.),
the Bambridge Collection, Wimpole Hall, Wimpole Estate (The National Trust), Arrington, Royston,
Cambridgeshire. Lord Liverpool had personally expressed his preference for a mixed collection of Old
Masters with some select British paintings.
580 " HOOCK
1824, the king commissioned the president of the Royal Academy, Sir Thomas
Lawrence, to make a copy of his portrait of George IV to hang in “the gallery of
that English Macenas, amidst the works of the British School.”55
In 1826, Leicester’s long-standing quest for a peerage was successful: created the
Baron de Tabley, he invited the jocular titulation “Baron de Tableaux.” Some public
commentary explained Leicester’s peerage as the reward not least for his “love for,
and encouragement of, the Fine Arts.” His “patriotic munificence . . . , in raising
our Native School, has made his own elevation a theme of general triumph to artists
who have felt it as a compliment paid to them through their most liberal and constant
patron.”56 By the 1820s, therefore, the discursive power of collecting British art as
a patriotic act was so established to the point that it could be used to justify royal
and government action.
Only a year later, the Gentleman’s Magazine mourned the death of “the greatest
patron of the native school of painting that our Island ever possessed.”57 When
the Hill Street collection was auctioned off, for nearly £7,500, the Morning Post
considered the sale “one of the greatest triumphs to English art, which has occurred
since Sir Joshua’s. The prejudice against English genius is now for ever dissipated
. . . the English Nobility seem at last to be convinced, that a fine picture by a
living Artist of the originality of which there can be no doubt, is more valuable
than a trumped up, stippled up, doctored up LEONARDO or TITIAN!”58 In brief,
between them, the pioneers Bernard, Whitbread, and Leicester had established
the claims of the modern British school as collectible art and its promotion as a
manifestation of cultural patriotism. A generation after his death, Leicester’s “pa-
triotic . . . efforts” were still lauded for “having made memorable in the arts the
years 1818 and 1819, in which the overthrow of anti-national and unjust prejudice
was, in a degree, so happily effected.”59
III. A BRITISH HISTORY GALLERY AND A NATIONAL GENRE
Alongside these early collections of diverse British paintings, several collectors

invested in highly particular collections, which reflected more specific art historical
and aesthetic sensibilities. The most unusual collection was created by the wealthy,
if shadowy, financier Alexander Davison. His example shows how the new trend
of collecting British art converged with the rage for visualized national history at a
time when antiquarianism and historicism informed the arts, literature, and, indeed,
the sciences more widely. From around 1800, popular, Romantic, nationalistic, nar-
rative, and often illustrated English history was increasingly widely distributed in the
form of historical novels, such as those by Sir Walter Scott and William Harrison
Ainsworth; history paintings, and engravings made from them; and other visual,
55
Somerset House Gazette 1 (1824): 370. And see C. M Westmacott, British Galleries of Painting
and Sculpture (London, 1824).
56
Unidentified press-cutting, in Sir John Fleming Leicester’s scrapbook, 1826–27, Tabley Archive,
R163363, John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester.
57
“Obituary: Lord de Tabley,” Gentleman’s Magazine 97 (1827): ii, 273.
58
Morning Post, 11 July 1827.
59
W. B. Sarsfield Taylor, The origin, progress, and present condition of the Fine Arts in Great Britain
and Ireland, 2 vols. (London, 1841), 2:245–50, quotation at 248.
material, and performative culture.60 In history painting, George III had led the way
with several series commissioned from Benjamin West: neoclassical paintings of bat-
tlefield heroism and magnanimity in victory for the Warm Room in Buckingham
House, as well as a copy of his Death of Wolfe; and, at Windsor Castle, medieval
history paintings illustrating the life of Edward III and thirty-five paintings from
the Old and New Testaments for a prospective new Chapel of Revealed Religion.61
Like other history painters, West worked much from David Hume’s History of
England. In 1792, Robert Bowyer published a prospectus for an illustrated edition
of Hume with sixty large pictures.62 Bowyer bought or commissioned from leading
history painters, who represented English history not in the antiquarian tradition
that prioritized verisimilitude of setting or dress but, instead, in sentimental terms;
this shift echoed a slightly earlier change in historiographical writing from “mas-
culine dignity” to “affective immediacy.” Sentimental narratives were intended to
elicit sympathy rather than prompt emulation.63 By 1806, Bowyer had published
five parts in four folio volumes, and the commissioned paintings had been exhibit-
ing at his house in Pall Mall. Yet economic difficulties related to the Napoleonic
wars forced the sale of his gallery in 1807.
As Bowyer was selling, a unique collection of British historical paintings was
built circa 1806–8 by Alexander Davison (1750–1829), Admiral Nelson’s prize
agent and executor.64 Davison had prospered as a ship owner and merchant in the
Canada trade during the American Revolutionary War. He was later a government
contractor, supplying the army with uniforms and weapons, and new barracks with
general supplies and coal. During the 1803 invasion crisis, Davison raised, at a
cost of nearly £3,000, the Loyal Britons volunteer corps. In 1804, however, he
was imprisoned for electoral malpractice when campaigning for Parliament. After
60
Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London,
2004); Peter Cannon-Brookes, ed., The Painted Word: British History Painting, 1750–1830 (Wood-
bridge, Suffolk, and Rochester, NY, 1991); Mark S. Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical
Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, NJ, 2000); Samuel Smiles, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient
Britain and the Romantic Imagination (New Haven, CT, and London, 1994); Michael Bentley, “The
Evolution and Dissemination of Historical Knowledge,” in The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian
Britain, ed. Martin J. Daunton (London, 2005), 173–98. For the impact of popular history on the
construction of the Victorian vision of the national past in illustrations, fiction, and nonfiction, see
Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image, 1830–1870 (Oxford, 2000).
61
The Knaptons had earlier commissioned a series of prints of national history from Francis Hayman
and Nicholas Blakey, and a small number were produced; my thanks to Mark S. Phillips for this
information. The Society of Artists awarded premiums for history paintings from the 1760s onward.
For the royal collections, see Lloyd, “George III and His Painters,” 85–92; and David Watkin, The
Architect King: George III and the Culture of the Enlightenment (London, 2004), 125–34.
62
Bowyer’s Historic Gallery was located at No. 68, Berner’s Street, London; see The Times, 4 January
1792, 1. See also Luisa Calè, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: “Turning Readers into Spectators” (Oxford, 2006),
34–42; T. S. R. Boase, “Macklin and Bowyer,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 26
(1963): 148–77; Richard W. Hutton, “Robert Bowyer and the Historic Gallery: A Study of the Creation
of a Magnificent Work to Promote the Arts in England” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1992).
For Arthur Pond’s illustration of Paul de Rapin’s History of England, see Louise Lippincott, Selling
Art in Georgian London: The Rise of Arthur Pond (New Haven, CT, and London, 1983), 149–53.
63
I am grateful for discussions with Mark S. Phillips on his new book, provisionally entitled “To
Make the Distant Near”: Distance and Historical Representation (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, forthcoming). See also his Society and Sentiment.
64
H. T. Dickinson, “Davison, Alexander (1750–1829),” in Matthew and Harrison, Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7298 (accessed 31 December 2009).
582 " HOOCK
his release, he faced accusations in 1805-6 of misusing public subscriptions for a

Nelson monument.
Having been challenged on patriotic grounds—of abusing the political process
and a patriotic subscription—Davison sought to repair his scandalous reputation
and commissioned British art in an ostentatious act of cultural patriotism. The
project, consisting “wholly of a series of Pictures of Historical Subjects, taken from
the annals of our own country,” was unprecedented in Britain.65 Davison intended
to encourage “talents of our Native Artists, and to bring them fairly in contrast
with those of the Foreign Schools, by employing a select part of them on some
interesting Historical Subjects.”66 He commissioned scenes from English or British
history from eight native artists, who were to include in the scene they chose to
depict their own self-portrait; Davison topped up whatever price they named with
fifty guineas.
Some, like the president of the Royal Academy, Benjamin West, saw the gallery
as revolving around John Singleton Copley’s Collapse of the Earl of Chatham in the
House of Lords, 7 July 1778 (1779–80; often referred to as the Death of Chatham),
which Davison had recently won in a lottery. Only such patronage of living painters,
not of Old Masters, was proof of patriotic ardor and could sustain a national repu-
tation for cherishing the arts. Davison’s initiative, like Leicester’s collecting, elided
personal self-fashioning, public service, and national prestige.
Copley had exhibited the Death of Chatham to critical and popular acclaim in
1781. It cast William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham, as a great orator, statesman, and
patriotic martyr dying in the act of defending the empire he had helped build.
Chatham had collapsed, felled by a stroke, during a speech in the House of Lords
just after reciting England’s proud history of self-defense against invasion.67 Printed
not long after the French invasion threats of 1803–5, Davison’s catalog introduced
the Death of Chatham by linking its exemplary role as a British work of art on a
subject of national importance with an appeal to “patriotism and the liberality of
the affluent” to promote similar efforts:
The luminous talents and exalted character of the great Statesman whose death is
recorded in this distinguished example of British art; the singular coincidence of time
and place, in which the world was deprived of its brightest ornament of intellectual
excellence; added to the elevated dignity and eminent abilities of the other noble
personages represented [are] circumstances that cannot but have their full force on
the minds of Englishmen, in this and in ages to come, whenever they shall contemplate
this performance. The powers of the pencil thus transmitting the august glories of
that period to futurity, whilst they have evinced the present high state of national
talent in this first walk of the graphic Muse, call most imperiously and most persuasively
also on the patriotism and the liberality of the affluent, to enrich their country and
65
[Prince Hoare], “No. XXI: Galleries of English Paintings” (1 August 1807), in Hoare, The Artist,
3–14, quotation at 5.
66
Alexander Davison, Descriptive Catalogue of the Series of Pictures formed on Subjects selected from
the History of England, painted by British artists for Alexander Davison, Esquire, MDCCCVI. In the
order in which they are arranged, at his house in St James’-Square, London (London, 1807), n.p. (hereafter
cited as Davison Catalogue). Davison had had an earlier catalogue printed privately; see Alexander
Davison, A descriptive catalogue of paintings by British Artists, executed for Alexander Davison, Esq., of
scenes selected from the history of England, as arranged in his house in St James’s Square (1806).
67
For the painting, and further references, see Emily Ballew Neff, John Singleton Copley in England
(London, 1996), 36–38.
posterity with similar examples of excellence in art, on subjects of great national

importance, and worthy of such superior illustration. It is the duty of the present,
possessing the means, to confer that benefit on future times.68
Around Copley’s masterpiece of modern history, Davison commissioned am-

bitious paintings by the leading Academicians, West, Northcote, and Smirke, and
the new star in London’s artistic firmament, the young Scotsman David Wilkie;
Copley, too, painted a picture specifically for the gallery.69 Their subjects ranged
chronologically from King Alfred to the Tudors. In contrast to Bowyer’s com-
missions, sentimental narrative and common emotions were less prominent, sub-
sumed in more traditional political and dynastic subjects.
The two paintings in the gallery depicting the earliest historical events focused
on the theme of virtuous kingship. Wilkie blended history and genre in The Wife
of the Neat-herd Rebuking King Alfred, (who had taken refuge in their Cottage,
disguised as a Peasant) for having suffered her Cakes to burn. For Hume, Alfred
had been a model of wise kingship who combined military leadership with the
dispensation of justice and encouragement of the arts and sciences.70 Henry Tres-
ham’s Lord John Warren, Earl of Surrey, resisting the unconstitutional Attempt to
Question, by a Quo Warranto, the Tenures and Liberties of the Ancient Barons.
Anno, 1275 was a story of traditional rights under threat, their defense by a spirited
earl, and of Edward I’s emergence as England’s Justinian.71 No less than five
paintings put female royalty at the center of scenes of dynastic growth, crisis, or
defeat.72 Among these, Arthur William Devis’s The Conspiracy of Babington against
Queen Elizabeth, detected by her Minister, Sir Francis Walsingham offers a clever
solution to Davison’s stipulation. For in this painting, the artist who is depicted
presenting a painting for the queen’s inspection, a picture of Babington and his
six associates, is a portrait of Devis himself. The queen, seated in the royal library,
points out the conspirator Barnwell’s portrait to Walsingham. Devis appealed to
the antiquarian tradition by working from historical portraits and descriptions as
well as from tombs in Westminster Abbey in order to deliver “authentic” portraits,
68
Davison Catalogue, 24.
69
In 1807, Davison hosted the artists as guests of honor at a sumptuous dinner to celebrate the
gallery’s completion; see DJF, 8:2939, 2944, 2977, 3004.
70
See David Hume, History of England, 6 vols. (London, 1762), 1:53–69. Wilkie vaguely acknowl-
edged Hume’s History of England as the source of his subject. West and Copley referenced Hume too;
Northcote listed Rapin and, like others, a range of antiquarian and specialist works. See also Davison
Catalogue, 37, 5; and Roy Strong, And When Did You Last See Your Father? The Victorian Painter
and British History (London, 1978), 123. The Anglo-Saxon hero was a favorite of modern British
royalty: Prince Frederick in 1740 commissioned Alfred: A Masque (London, 1740), with text by the
Scottish poets James Thomson and David Mallett and Thomas Arne’s musical setting of Thomson’s
poem Rule Britannia; Queen Victoria named her younger son after Alfred.
71
Hume, History of England, 2:61–62; Warren is not mentioned. Tresham included his own portrait
within a group of spectators in the painting.
72
Four of these paintings centering on female royalty are Robert Smirke’s Elizabeth, Queen Dowager
of Edward the Fourth, in the Sanctuary at Westminster, receiving a Deputation from the Council of State,
sent to demand her younger Son the Duke of York; James Northcote’s Henry Percy, fifth Earl of North-
umberland, presenting the Princess Margaret, eldest Daughter of Henry the Seventh, to James the Fourth,
King of Scotland, at Lamerton; John Singleton Copley’s Offer of the Crown to Lady Jane Grey, by the
Dukes of Northumberland and Suffolk, and other Lords, Deputies of the Privy Council; and Richard
Westall’s Mary Queen of Scots, after her defeat at the Battle of Langside, finally quits her own Country,
and embarks in a Fishing Boat for England, with a determination to seek protection of Queen Elizabeth.
584 " HOOCK
costumes, and other attributes. Finally, West depicted a military leader in the mid-
eighteenth century tradition of the compassionate sentimental hero: Sir Philip
Sidney, mortally wounded, rejecting the water offered to him, and ordering it to be
first given to a wounded Soldier. A famous late Tudor statesman, poet, and sometime
soldier, Sidney had died of injuries sustained in a skirmish against Spanish forces
in the Netherlands in 1586. According to Davison’s catalog, Sidney had been
regarded “as the most perfect model of an accomplished gentleman” in terms of
his “virtuous conduct, polite conversation, heroic valour, and elegant erudition.”73
His gallery of scenes of virtuous royal, civic, and military leadership and English
dynastic history earned Davison much praise as “an enlightened patron and true
patriot.”74 Yet, after his strategy of rehabilitation through patriotic patronage had
been partially vindicated, Davison was convicted in 1809 of padding government
contracts and sentenced to nearly £19,000 in damages and twenty-one months’
imprisonment. In fact, Davison had profited more from other fraudulent aspects
of his contracts to supply army barracks.75 To meet his debts to the Treasury,
Davison eventually put up for sale his house in St James’s Square as well as some
foreign paintings and his plate, books, and gems. Only one picture from the
historical gallery—Copley’s Lady Jane Grey—was put in the sale; along with the
house, it was bought back for Davison. The compulsive fraudster had prevailed
over the patriotic patron, but, for the time being, he had managed to keep his
unique British gallery together.
Appreciation of Davison’s unique form of patriotic artistic patronage endured,
even though some commentators were skeptical about its wider impact, given
patrons’ and collectors’ persistent fondness for Old Masters. Davison finally sold
his collection of British paintings by auction in 1823: most pictures fetched be-
tween 75 and 500 guineas. For decades to come, the project would be held up
as an example of desirable patronage, although it was not followed (except for
some plans) in our period.76 Copley’s star piece, the Death of Chatham, went to
the Earl of Liverpool for a very respectable 1,000 guineas. A few years after the
National Gallery had been founded, he gifted it to the nation: the national subject
and a work of perceived national significance had found a national home.
Men of lesser means and with a different aesthetic vision for the British school
invested in other genres. At the start of the nineteenth century, watercolors began
to be defined as a distinctly British genre. Partly in response to poor display
conditions at the Royal Academy, watercolorists founded three exhibition societies
between 1804 and 1831.77 It was also in the early 1800s that the notion of a
73
Davison Catalogue, 28–29, with reference to Hume, History of England, 5:276–77 (Eliz. AD
1586), as well as to Sir Fulke Greville, Life of Sir Philip Sidney [London, 1652], chap. 12, p. 42. See
also Hume, History of England, 1:347–50; and Helmut von Erffa and Allen Staley, The Paintings of
Benjamin West (New Haven, CT, and London, 1986), cat. no. 80 (Sir Philip Sidney, mortally wounded,
Woodmere Art Gallery, Philadelphia [West is the balding figure leaning on a horse in the right fore-
ground of the painting]).
74
Davison Catalogue, 32–33 (West, quoting from his 1799 Royal Academy Discourse); see also 39
(Northcote); cf. 41 (Devis), 43–44 (Tresham), 45 (Westall), and 47 (Copley).
75
Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, 46–47.
76
Annals of the Fine Arts 1 (1817): 242–54; Gentleman’s Magazine 93 (1823): ii, 64–65.
77
See Associated Artists in Water Colours, Catalogue of the First Exhibition (London, 1808), 7;
Review of Publications on Art 2 (June 1808): 173; and John Pye, Patronage of British Art (London,
1845), 304–5.
national school of landscape painting emerged, on account of its subject matter,

accurate observation in a Baconian empirical tradition, and its bravura display of
painting technique. This manifested a peculiarly English response to art, which
was contrasted with contemporary French painting.78
Whereas many collectors possessed watercolors among their holdings of mixed
media and genres, one man made his name in the art world by collecting water-
colors in a concerted fashion. In 1819, a year after Leicester had opened his Hill
Street gallery, Sir Walter Fawkes (1769–1825), a Westminster- and Cambridge-
educated Yorkshire gentleman, agricultural improver, and writer on historical and
political subjects, opened his house in Grosvenor Place. A select public could view
over sixty works by Turner and some forty drawings by other British artists and
a few of Fawkes’s amateur-artist friends. Artists’ gossip had it that disappointment
with a commission from William Hodges had made Fawkes turn from oils toward
watercolors.79 An early patron of Turner since the late 1790s, Fawkes displayed
three of Turner’s marines prominently amid Old Masters in the drawing room at
Farnley Hall by 1818.80 Apart from a love of art and a fascination with landscape,
their friendship was also based on shared interests in reforming politics. During
the 1820s, Fawkes narrowly avoided bankruptcy as his publishing, collecting, and
lifestyle eroded his financial resources; in a rare inversion of patron-artist relations,
Turner lent his friend money.
As Fawkes opened his London gallery to an eager public, the catalog—like other
domestic and foreign commentary at the time—defined watercolor as the quin-
tessentially British genre: “It is among the distinctions of the British School of
Art, that in its bosom painting in Water Colours has arrived at greater excellence,
and has united more of the qualities of painting in oil, with qualities peculiarly its
own, than in any other age or country.”81 In line with other collectors, Fawkes
made a point of presenting a catalog of his collection to the Royal Academy.82 In
unsubtly self-celebratory fashion, the catalog carries extracts from press commen-
tary describing the gallery variously as “a delightful repast both for the Patriot
and the Amateur,” an asset for the artistic profession, a “triumph of Water Col-
ours,” and a glorious display of “the varieties of the great British master’s genius.”83
IV. MIXED COLLECTIONS, NEW JUXTAPOSITIONS
Alongside the formation of exclusively British collections, a number of leading

collectors conspicuously added British art to their overwhelmingly traditional col-
lections. Some experimented with separate rooms for British art or with a mixed
hang. The men in this group included financiers as well as men of noble and
genteel descent; as collectors, they pursued various aims but especially the self-
78
Kay Dian Kriz, “French Glitter or English Nature? Representing Englishness in Landscape Painting,
c. 1790–1820,” in Hemingway and Vaughan, Art in Bourgeois Society, 63–83.
79
DJF, 1:270.
80
See Anne Lyles, Turner and Natural History: The Farnley Project (London, 1988), 48, cat. 4.
81
Walter Fawkes, A Collection of Water Colour Drawings (London, 1819), 7.
82
See Royal Academy Council Minutes, VI, 90, 1819, Royal Academy of Arts Archives, Burlington
House, London.
83
Fawkes, Collection of Water Colour Drawings, 7–11.
586 " HOOCK
consciously pedagogic and self-professedly patriotic promotion of the national

school.
In some collections, modern British art obtained a distinct presence as part of
a wider aesthetic and art historical vision. Thomas Hope (1769–1831), the scion
of the Amsterdam-London banking dynasty, considered the patronage of the high-
est branches of art a means of improving the national character, manners, and
happiness.84 Hope’s Duchess Street mansion from 1804 admitted a select public
once a week during the social season. For this two-story neo-Greek picture gallery,
which contained mainly popular seventeenth-century Italian paintings, Hope com-
missioned works with themes from Greek mythology and high-minded history
from British artists.85 The French painter Dubost suggested that Hope boost his
reputation by selling all his Old Masters and collecting only “the best Modern
Artists, by which He wd. set a great example.” Yet, it was the juxtaposition of
canonical Old Masters with selective contemporary British art that remained the
hallmark of Hope’s collection.86 A similar approach was taken by the founder of
modern Lloyds, John Julius Angerstein (1732–1823), whose small but choice
mixed collection famously forms the nucleus of the National Gallery. For Anger-
stein, a prominent City broker and marine insurer of obscure Russian origins, both
collecting and philanthropy seemed to serve to enhance his social status.87 The
illustrated catalog for the sale of the collection showcased key works by Michel-
angelo, Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Claude, and Poussin—crucially, “the British
public will see, with just pride and satisfaction, that the pictures of Reynolds,
Hogarth, and Wilkie, worthy of being associated with the greatest works of art,
. . . adorn and complete a Collection formed upon the most scrupulous principles
of selection and taste.”88
Other collectors pursued specific pedagogic aims on behalf of the British school
by mixing old and contemporary art in their collections. Sir George Howland
Beaumont, seventh Baronet (1753–1827), an accomplished amateur artist himself,
was an immensely influential link between the worlds of national politics, con-
noisseurship, and art. An eager disciple of Reynolds’s aesthetics, Beaumont directed
painters and fellow collectors to the example of the Old Masters; by the 1800s
84
David Watkin and Philip Hewat-Jaboor, eds., Thomas Hope: Regency Designer (New Haven, CT,
and London, 2008); David Watkin, Thomas Hope, 1769–1831, and the Neo-Classical Idea (London,
1968).
85
Hope was also an early patron of the leading neoclassical sculptor, John Flaxman; encouraged the
sentimental, picturesque, and moralizing genre painting and the anecdotal revival; and owned water-
colors; see Watkin, Thomas Hope, 43–47, 102–4, 109–10, 122.
86
DJF, 9:3214.
87
D. E. Williams, The Life and Correspondence of Sir Thomas Lawrence, Kt., 2 vols. (London, 1831),
1:129, 353–56. See also Thomas Lawrence to Joseph Farington, 12 March 1805, LAW/1/126, and
J. J. Angerstein to Sir Thomas Lawrence, 21 January 1819, LAW/3/6, Sir Thomas Lawrence Papers,
Royal Academy of Arts Archives, Burlington House, London; and Judy Egerton, National Gallery
Catalogues: The British School (New Haven, CT, and London, 1998), 366.
88
John Young, A catalogue of the celebrated collection of pictures of the late Julius Angerstein (London,
1823), n.p.; Egerton, The British School, 358. Angerstein’s purchases are poorly documented: he bought
Hogarth’s Self-Portrait with Pug (from Christie’s, in 1792) and Marriage a-la-Mode (in 1797, for
1,000 guineas, from the heir of John Lane); no further Hogarths were acquired for the National Gallery
in its first half century. Angerstein also purchased three Fuselis on subjects from Paradise Lost (in 1799),
Reynolds’s Lord Heathfield (purchased or mortgaged from Lawrence after 1809); and Wilkie’s Village
Merry-Making (which Angerstein commissioned in 1811).
this was for some too narrow a vision for the British school, but many artists
benefited from Beaumont’s patronage. At 34 Grosvenor Place, he displayed Pous-
sin, Claude, and Canaletto alongside a didactically conceived selection of works
by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Wilson, and Wilkie.89 In 1821–22, Beaumont lobbied
for a National Gallery, promising sixteen of his own best paintings on condition
that the government buy the Angerstein collection. He released important sev-
enteenth- and eighteenth-century French, Dutch, and Italian paintings alongside
key works of the British school to the National Gallery in 1825.
Equally judicious selections of some of the best modern British art were also
made by leading aristocrats. The second Marquis of Stafford (George Granville
Leveson-Gower, later first Duke of Sutherland [1758-1833]), by 1820 supposedly
the richest man in the country, owned the single most important private collection
of Old Masters. Stafford was recognized as a leading sponsor of modern British
artists, as he displayed Old Masters for their benefit and placed their own works—
from key portraits to allegorical landscapes—“in distinguished situations, to com-
mand respect and attention.”90 Similarly, by 1821 the illustrated catalog of the
143 paintings in the collection of Robert Grosvenor, the second Earl of Grosvenor
(1767–1845), noted as “creditable to his Lordship’s liberality and discrimination,
that he discovered and patronized the rising talent of the English School.” Along-
side a strong collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European art, he
owned iconic works of eighteenth-century British art such as West’s Death of Wolfe,
Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, and Reynolds’s Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse.91
In contrast to Grosvenor’s largely separate displays of Old Masters and modern
British art, other collectors experimented with mixed hangs and specific juxta-
positions of the old and the modern. Even the royal art collections suggested a
sense of aesthetic continuity, whereby painters such as Ramsay, Gainsborough, and
89
William Sotheby, A Poetical Epistle to Sir George Beaumont, Bart. On the encouragement of the
British School of Painting (London, 1801); Felicity Owen and David B. Brown, Collector of Genius: A
Life of Sir George Beaumont (New Haven, CT, and London, 1988), 77, 81, 85. By contrast, Beaumont
always stayed hostile to Turner, was inconsistent in his attitude toward Constable, and neglected wa-
tercolorists; see Owen and Brown, Collecter of Genius, 64–65, 67–68, 74–77, 87–91. For Beaumont’s
patronage, see also Conlin, The Nation’s Mantelpiece, 44–45.
90
[Peter Coxe], Another Word or Two; or, Architectural Hints Continued in Lines to those Royal
Academicians who Are Painters (London, 1807), 66–67. For the Stafford collection, the first aristocratic
gallery in London to open, in 1806, to a select public, see DJF, 7:2787–88, 2796; 8:2805, 2843,
3043–44; 9:3280, 3298, 3305; 10:3664, 3697; 11:3936; and [Prince Hoare], “No. XXI: Galleries of
English Paintings” (1 August 1807), in Hoare, The Artist, 3–14, esp. 8–9. The diarist Joseph Farington
noticed a Turner juxtaposed with a Claude, a Vandevelde, and a Cuyp; see DJF, 5:1773–75, with his
sketch of the gallery layout. See also John Britton, Catalogue Raisonnée of the Pictures belonging to the
. . . Marquis of Stafford, in the Gallery of Cleveland House (London, 1808); and William Young Ottley
[and Petro William Tomkins], Engravings of the . . . Marquis of Stafford’s Collection of Pictures in
London, 4 vols. (London, 1818), esp. vol. 1.
91
John Young, preface to Catalogue of the Pictures at Grosvenor House (London, 1820), n.p. Sir
Joshua Reynolds had initially asked 1,000 guineas for Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse and had sold it
in 1790 through Noel Joseph Desenfans to the vicomte de Calonne for £735. At open auction in
1795, it made only £336.10, but in 1823, Grosvenor bought it for £1,837.10. In 1921, his descendant
sold it to Joseph Duveen, who charged Henry Huntington £73,500; see Reitlinger, Economics of Taste,
73. For the collection and its display, see Young, Catalogue of the Pictures at Grosvenor House; Jameson,
Companion, 225–84, esp. 242; [William Hazlitt], Sketches of the principal picture-galleries in England,
with a criticism on “Marriage a-la-mode” (London, 1824), 107–9; Waagen, Works of Art, 2:301–18;
and Passavant, Tour of a German Artist, 1:147–59.
588 " HOOCK
Zoffany might have been seen by George III to extend the tradition of Van Dyck.92
A number of collectors—from peers such as the first Marquis of Exeter at Burleigh
House, the third Earl of Egremont at Petworth, and the Earl Spencer at Althorpe,
to the genteel historian Sir Richard Colt Hoare at Stourhead and Sir Walter Fawkes
at Farnley Hall, to the London bankers Thomas Hope, Sir Francis Baring, Samuel
Rogers, and Samuel Dobree—experimented with a mixed hang of English and
foreign schools and with the juxtaposition of specific genres or individual paint-
ings.93 In short, in the decades around 1800, a diverse range of collectors from
grandees to financiers had helped refine thinking about the relationships between
modern and contemporary British art and Old Masters, both in conceptual terms
and with respect to their spatial and aesthetic juxtaposition in specific galleries.
Whether they followed traditional protocols of patronage or had more limited
interaction with living artists, most of these collectors were widely recognized for
their pedagogic, patriotic promotion of the national school.
V. CONCLUSIONS
Having surveyed different manifestations of collecting British, we can draw several

conclusions about the phenomenon’s social, political, aesthetic, and broader cul-
tural parameters and its significance for cultural histories of collecting. Between
approximately 1790 and 1830, British pictures had made significant headway as
collectibles. A range of private collectors from bankers to noblemen invested in
the cultural cachet and patriotic prestige that came with sponsoring British artists
and showcasing national art. In the case of men such as Bernard, Davison, Whit-
bread, and Angerstein, commitment to British art was part of self-conscious at-
tempts at self-fashioning, which also included conspicuous philanthropy. Many
enjoyed a loose association with the Royal Academy, either via individual painters,
by presenting catalogs of their collections, or through being invited to the pres-
tigious annual dinner at Somerset House—as did Leicester, Rogers, Fawkes, Bar-
ing, Angerstein, Whitbread, and Hoare. There were key figures in the foundation
92
Lloyd, “George III and His Painters,” 93–97.
93
[Thomas Blore], A Guide to Burleigh House, Northamptonshire, The Seat of the Marquis of Exeter;
Containing A Catalogue of all the Paintings, Antiquities, &c. (Stamford, 1815), 51–54, 67–72, 153–66;
Christopher Rowell, Ian Warrell and David Blayney Brown, Turner at Petworth (London, 2002), 19;
Martin Butlin, Mollie Luther, and Ian Warrell, Turner at Petworth: Painter and Patron (London,
1989); George Jones, Sir Francis Chantrey: Recollections of his life, practice and opinions (London,
1849), 197; John Constable’s Correspondence, ed. R. B. Beckett, 6 vols. (Ipswich, 1962–78), 4:105;
The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. William Bissell Pope, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1960–63),
3:167; Charles R. Leslie, Autobiographical Recollections, 2 vols. (London, 1860), 1:105; Thomas F.
Dibdin, Aedes Althorpianae, 2 vols. (London, 1822), 1:268; A Description of the House and Gardens
at Stourhead (Salisbury, 1800), 10–11, 19; Catalogue of the Hoare Library at Stourhead co. Wilts. To
which are added an Account of the Museum of British Antiquities, a Catalogue of the Prints and Drawings,
and a Description of the Mansion (London, 1840), 733–54, 749; Lyles, Turner and Natural History,
48, cat. 4; P. W. Clayden, Rogers and His Contemporaries, 2 vols. (London, 1889), 1:56–57; Waagen,
Works of Art, 2:133–34, and Treasures of Art in Great Britain: Being an account of the Chief Collections
of Paintings, Drawings, Sculptures, Illuminated Mss., &c, 3 vols. (London, 1854), 2:73–82; Macleod,
Art and the Victorian Middle Class, 409, 468; Jameson, Companion, 384–85; Reitlinger, Economics of
Taste, 77; R. Ellis Roberts, Samuel Rogers and His Circle (London, 1910), 99; Gentleman’s Magazine
80 (1810): i, 610; ii, 293.
and early history of various art societies, including the British Institution, such as
Bernard, Whitbread, Beaumont, and Stafford. Several helped run the British Mu-
seum, or took an active interest in copyright for sculpture or other professional
issues requiring legislation, or were among the National Gallery’s early supporters.
Indeed, most of these men thus reached across the porous boundaries between
private, semipublic, and official art worlds in their efforts to shape British cultural
politics. They were invested both in traditional forms of patronage and in new
ways of making their private collections accessible to select publics. Between 1804
and 1819, Hope, Stafford, Grosvenor, Rogers, Leicester, and Fawkes opened their
galleries to artists and wider publics. Several men adhered to traditional protocols
of patronage—the landed Leicester, Beaumont, and Whitbread but also middle-
class men such as Davison, Hope, and Rogers. They commissioned paintings di-
rectly from artists; influenced the creative process; occasionally had drawing mas-
ters, painters, or sculptors in residence; and tried to bridge social and economic
gaps for artists. As the nineteenth century progressed, this type of patron was
gradually replaced by middle-class collectors who purchased rather than commis-
sioned art and who, if they did commission, respected the autonomy of the artists
as fellow professionals.
As for class dynamics, contrary to what has previously been suggested, in the
period before circa 1830 there was no very close correlation between class, artistic
taste, and collecting. Davison was perhaps the only genuine parvenu; the second-
generation brewer Whitbread and the financiers we have examined were already
pretty well established, although their art patronage generally and their collecting
of British art in particular were arguably part of the ongoing fortifying of their
reputations. Aristocrats such as Grosvenor and Stafford, meanwhile, might have
experimented with collecting British in part in the attempt to show national cultural
leadership at a time when their class was under pressure to justify its privileged
existence.94 Not all men of trade or new wealth preferred modern art (witness
Angerstein), nor did the landed elite consistently collect foreign Old Masters, as
the efforts of Egremont, Stafford, and Grosvenor, as well as Leicester’s pioneering
patronage of contemporary British art, show.
The move toward new forms of collecting was more inclusive in social terms than
has been previously assumed, as it extended from cultured financiers and businessmen
to men of genteel descent and noble lineage. At both ends of that social spectrum,
patriotic patterns of collecting could potentially serve social strategies. The occasional
nouveau riche may have sought to ennoble his wealth by collecting national art.
And some aristocrats—perceiving their class to be under pressure to reinvent itself
during and after the French Revolution—expanded the British sections of their art
collections in an ostensibly patriotic manner. Yet other collectors of British art seemed
not to be pursuing a particular social agenda at all.
As for politics, collecting British not infrequently seems to have accompanied
a reforming political outlook: Whitbread, Fawkes, Rogers, Egremont (and after
Pitt’s death, Grosvenor and Stafford, too) fall into this category. Visitors to Southill
can still guess Whitbread’s politics by looking at the portraits of prominent Whig
figures as well as at Romney’s Milton Dictating to His Daughters. On the other
94
Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991); Colley,
Britons.
590 " HOOCK
hand, there were Whigs and radicals who preferred old art (Charles James Fox,
even Rogers to an extent), while some political conservatives such as Beaumont
systematically encouraged the modern along with the old.
With collecting practices not following straightforward political patterns, and
with patronage of contemporary art overwhelmingly construed as patriotic, what
precisely “patriotic” meant could vary. Most collectors made a nationalistic claim
to be sponsoring the nation’s culture, economic interest, and prestige. Yet for
Whitbread, collecting British art expressed moral virtue in the vein of oppositional
patriotism. Whether it was an entirely correct representation of his intentions or
not, Leicester’s gallery was used by the Examiner to satirize the government’s
alleged corruption and its failure to sponsor national culture. More broadly speak-
ing, investment in British art could be linked to its potential to improve the human
condition—to reform both the individual and the community.
These collectors had varying aesthetic preferences and visions for the British
school. The specific composition of British collections did matter. Yet what was
emphasized most strongly was the fact that a collector was collecting modern and
contemporary British art at all. Collecting British in this early phase was more
eclectic in terms of genres and painters than were Victorian practices, which ex-
pressed more specific aesthetic sensibilities. In pursuing their various collecting
strategies, these earlier patrons assembled a core canon of painters, to which most
added further artists according to their individual taste. As has become evident,
in the mixed and exclusively British collections surveyed here, the native school
encompassed Reynolds, West, Gainsborough, and Wilson as founding fathers, and
also their pupils, colleagues, and successors in the Academy. Important collectors
such as Angerstein added Hogarth, before the architect and Royal Academy pro-
fessor Sir John Soane led an early nineteenth-century Hogarth revival; Soane
owned, most famously, both the Rake’s Progress series and the Election.95 Similarly,
Fawkes presented watercolors as a specifically British genre. But looking at the sample
of some three dozen collections surveyed for this study in comparison with dic-
tionaries and published histories of art, we see that private collections displayed a
wider selection of genres and subject matter: in addition to history painting as the
most prestigious genre, then in process of being reconceptualized in a modern and
national manner, portraits, landscapes and seascapes, allegories, and literary subjects
were all prominently represented, as were conversation and animal paintings. As
individual patrons followed both the broad parameters of an aesthetic and art his-
torical debate about a solidifying canon of British art and highly personal preferences
while shaping their collections, they may have both furthered and constrained the
capacity of collecting British to be recognized as a legitimate practice.96
The motivations of individual collectors will always be difficult to ascertain; what
we can study, as this essay has sought to exemplify, are patterns of practice, dis-
course, and legitimization. Collecting British as a patriotic practice could legitimize
private agendas, serve to explain official endorsement of private collectors (such
95
Helen Dorey, “Soane as a Collector,” in A Miscellany of Objects from Sir John Soane’s Museum,
by Peter Thornton and Helen Dorey (London, 1992), 122–26, esp. 126. The Rake’s Progress series
had been exhibited at the British Institution retrospective in 1814.
96
For general reflections in addition to the literature on collecting referenced above, see Krzysztof
Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Portier (Cam-
bridge, 1987).
as Leicester’s knighthood), and boost certain forms of national art. Genuine ap-
preciation for modern British art, on the one hand, and strategic investment in
recognized patriotic practices and personal advancement, on the other hand, were
not necessarily mutually exclusive. Anglo-French cultural competition, as a more
or less explicit leitmotif of this period, played a more limited role in practices of
private collecting than it did with respect to the discourse and practices of public
galleries and museums. Comparisons, however, might be instructive: unlike in
Britain, in France several collections of contemporary paintings were formed by
bankers, such as Pourtales, Laffitte, and Perrier, who pursued both social status
and a form of daringly speculative investment. However, from the middle of the
eighteenth century, collecting of French art and developing le goût patriotique
were also construed as forms of virtuous citizenship.97 It would be worthwhile to
undertake comparative European studies of the collecting of modern art in a period
characterized by the dialectic of canonical Old Masters and emergent national
schools of painting.
In the generation following the ones considered in this essay, Victorian indus-
trialists collected Pre-Raphaelites specifically in order to distinguish themselves
from the traditional landed elite and their cosmopolitan patterns of Old Masters
collecting. Whereas in the earlier period there was no close correlation between
the gradual tilt in the balance of socioeconomic power and the social status of
collectors, by the early to mid-Victorian period the prosopography of collectors
was changing. Between the collectors we have encountered here and patrons of
the Pre-Raphaelites stood men such as Robert Vernon, a London horse dealer on
a grand scale, who from the 1820s started collecting British art and amassed a
systematic historical survey collection of the British school from Reynolds onward.
Vernon focused on art in a serious vein—Reynolds, Wilson, and Turner—as did
the collectors surveyed here, as well as attending to the next generation of
painters—for example, Hilton, Etty, and Eastlake—along with some genre and
narrative art that was “compatible with the low-toned palette and pensive mood”
of the core collection.98 A socially ambitious sponsor of the British Institution,
listed in Boyle’s Court Guide as “Robert Vernon, Esq.” in the 1820s, and from
the 1830s resident in Pall Mall, Vernon was collecting with a view to presenting
his art to the nation. On the eve of the public opening of his gallery, in May 1843,
Vernon hosted a dinner for the nation’s leading artists. As an art journal reported,
“Here a right notion may be formed of the capabilities of British Art; and to this
glorious gallery every foreigner should be especially directed. . . . All honour to
so veritable a patron—so true a patriot!”99 After several generations of patriotic
patrons collecting British, no longer were British artists “struggling against a vulgar
prejudice.”
97
Colin B. Bailey, Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris (New Haven,
CT, and London, 2002).
98
Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, 53.
99
Quoted in Robin Hamlyn, Robert Vernon’s Gift (London, 1993), 18.

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“Struggling against a Vulgar Prejudice”:

Patriotism and the Collecting of British Art

T he artist Frank Softly, a character in Wilkie Collins’s novel A Rogue’s

Journal of British Studies 49 (July 2010): 566–591

London’s grand mansions and the aristocracy’s country houses—portraiture in

festation of growing nationalism, delayed by patrician fears of its potential demo-

I. OLD MASTERS AND BRITISH ART

II. THE PIONEERS

III. A BRITISH HISTORY GALLERY AND A NATIONAL GENRE

Alongside these early collections of diverse British paintings, several collectors

his release, he faced accusations in 1805-6 of misusing public subscriptions for a

posterity with similar examples of excellence in art, on subjects of great national

Around Copley’s masterpiece of modern history, Davison commissioned am-

national school of landscape painting emerged, on account of its subject matter,

IV. MIXED COLLECTIONS, NEW JUXTAPOSITIONS

Alongside the formation of exclusively British collections, a number of leading

consciously pedagogic and self-professedly patriotic promotion of the national

Having surveyed different manifestations of collecting British, we can draw several

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