How a lonely recluse surrounded himself with beauties
The display of pictures from the Winthrop Collection at the National Gallery is the most delightful treat to be enjoyed in London this summer. It takes us to the heart of American history. Grenville Winthrop (1864-1943), who formed it, was the ninth generation, by direct male descent, of the family founded by John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts and the earliest Great American. Old Winthrop, as I call him — he was actually born in Armada year, 1588, and must have been a child once, but always appears stern, authoritarian, patriarchal and unsmiling — did not go to America on the Mayflower in 1620. He led a second great wave, 1,000 strong in 17 ships, which crossed the Atlantic in 1630. He founded the town of Boston and held the governorship of the colony for a total of 15 years, being several times defeated in contested elections, the first on American soil. You could say he laid the foundations not only of Massachusetts and New England culture but also of American politics.
Indeed, he did more. He established the idea of American world leadership. He thought Old Europe rotten and finished; Young America was the place where the Providential Nation, 'God's Englishmen', would establish His rule on earth. In a sermon which he probably preached in mid-Atlantic on board his flagship, he outlined this idea and pronounced a magic phrase which has passed into American national ideolog: 'We must consider that we shall be as a City on a Hill — the eyes of all people are upon us.' It is President Bush's favourite quote and is astonishingly relevant today.
Winthrop was tall, thin and sombre, with a long straight nose, piercing eyes and an air of absolute authority. He was a puritanical theocrat, a man capable, as chief magistrate, of burning down the house of a fellow settler for 'setting up a maypole and revelling'. (Those anxious to learn more about this dour man may read a new biography by Francis Bremer about to be published here by OUP.) How come, then, that his direct descendant formed a major art collection? In fact. Grenville Winthrop resembled his ancestor in many ways. He was sombre, secretive, silent, shy and reclusive, a solitary whose wife (probably) committed suicide, and who amassed and tended his collection like a family. As a rule the only sound in his house was the ticking and striking of his 48 clocks. He prowled around often late into the night, tending to the needs of his artistic children.
When he died during the second world war, he bequeathed more than 4,000 items to his old university, Harvard, where they disappeared into the rich anonymity of the Fogg. I have visited the Fogg several times without ever being aware of the distinctive Winthrop element. Now they are shown together, we can see that Winthrop developed a fine, distinctive eye, especially for draughtsmanship. He also formed his own ideas about the framing and hanging of his collection which, as it happens, correspond closely to my own. First, as we can see from 1943 photos of his townhouse in New York's Fifth Avenue, taken just after he died, he had no hesitation in hanging watercolours and drawings next to oil paintings. Second, he would cover an entire wall with pictures, doubleand triple-banking them. He displayed as many as the wall would take, if he felt like it. That is exactly what I do. Third, he mounted watercolours and drawings so that you could see the whole of the sheet — often a vital point — with a line-and-wash mount and a plain, thin, gold frame: exactly my method. Fourth, he did not scruple to scrap old Victorian frames and replace them with with plain modem ones. That is what I used to do when I was a young collector in the 1950s, but have since learnt better. I am not saying Winthrop was wrong in every case; but one of Burne-Jones's finest works, the six-piece 'Days of Creation', was placed in a vast display-frame which formed a massive piece of gilt furniture. It was designed by the artist himself, who insisted the frame was part of the work. Winthrop not only ignored this plea when he bought the ensemble in 1934, but apparently destroyed the old frame. It looks like vandalism now, but in the Thirties — even in the Forties or early Fifties — most people would have sided with him.
Winthrop's skill in acquiring first-class drawings was his strongest point. He amassed the finest collection of Ingres outside the Louvre at a time when this great master was out of fashion. In particular, he bought the full-length portrait drawings in pencil which Ingres made of tourists visiting Rome. when he was a struggling artist there. These exquisite works are the finest things of their kind in the whole of art history — what would 1 give to own even one of them! Winthrop acquired a roomful, including the most ambitious of all — Lucien Bonaparte's family. It involved drawing nine heads from life grouped round the imperious wife Alexandria. plus drawings of two busts: Lucien himself and Madame Mere. To get these superb likenesses all on one sheet of paper measuring 16L by 21 inches required sublime audacity and minute skill of which only Ingres was capable. I would rate this among the top dozen drawings in the world. Ingres, being a perfectionist, was a worried, tortured man, as emerges strongly in his self-portrait, existing in at least three versions, one of which Winthrop acquired. It was done from a photograph and doubts exist about its authenticity. What no one seems to have noticed is that the point of vision was changed during the painting, so that the artist's hair appears parted at the wrong angle. He would never have allowed this canvas to see the world.
The collection includes perhaps the finest drawing Degas ever produced, 'Horse with Saddle and Bridle'. It is even better than his 'Sheet of five horse studies', which mysteriously disappeared and may turn up at auction some day. Gericaulfs watercolour 'Groom Exercising Two Horses' is almost in the same class, but his 'Studies of a Cat', which Winthrop also acquired, though arresting, is plainly done from a dead, stuffed animal. Winthrop got prize works from most of France's best 19thcentury draughtsmen. There is a superb Millet of a peasant woman at her hearth, the magnificent `Butcher Hanging up a Carcass' by Millet's friend Daumier, and one of two almost identical drawings Seurat made of a café concert (the other is in the Rhode Island School of Design). Seurat may well have been mad anyway: certainly so to copy out exactly this fantastically elaborate and riveting conte work. Well, dotty.
Winthrop also collected another magnificent but then underrated artist, Prud'hon. This strange man drew the male nude better than anyone — even Raphael and Michelangelo — but was best known in his day for designing the Paris decorations for Bonaparte's second wedding to Marie-Louise of Austria. Mainly of cardboard, Bonaparte's favourite material, they have disappeared, but what remains is the elaborate cradle that Prud'hon designed for the sole child of this bizarre union, the King of Rome as he was called. Winthrop did not get this but, much better, he bought Lawrence's enchanting portrait of the child aged eight, whose golden features bear the faint shadow of Napoleonic horror and grandeur. The youth died of TB. aged 21, before he could do any harm. The collection contains one big laugh: Prud'hon's 'Virtue Struggling with Vice', a brilliantly shocking drawing in itself, has an uncanny resemblance to the photo of Jeffrey Archer kissing the Fragrant One on his release from jail last week.
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