Passionate collector
Matthew Dennison
Masterpiece Watercolours and Drawings Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, until 9 November
Even passion has its limits. The first Lord Leverhulme — that ‘Soapy Billy’ who founded Lever Brothers — was a man of many passions. Uxoriousness, philanthropy and, of course, hygiene swayed this confident, capable Victorian magnate. So, too, did art. Leverhulme devoted his final decade to the creation of the Lady Lever Art Gallery in his model village of Port Sunlight. A memorial to his adored wife, it is also a pantechnicon of the vast collection of artworks he amassed lifelong, but particularly during the 12 years of his widowerhood. Leverhulme had an omnivorous passion for art. Within that passion, inevitably, were blindspots and lacunae of indifference.
The Lady Lever’s latest exhibition, Masterpiece Watercolours and Drawings, is a selection of 35 works on paper from the gallery’s collection — 30 acquired by Leverhulme, five by the gallery’s trustees after his death to round out perceived gaps. An examination of the provenance of these works exposes the half-heartedness of Leverhulme’s partiality. Almost all were acquired late in life, many in the period after his wife’s death when he slaked his devastation with an orgy of arts consumerism. It is significant that among Leverhulme’s few earlier watercolour purchases is ‘Old Cottage, Pinner’ by Helen Allingham, a standard, pretty but simpering exercise in bucolic nostalgia, complete with blossom and attendant ducks.
Leverhulme bought the painting from Agnew’s in 1896. Two years earlier he had begun buying Chinese porcelain from the Bond Street dealers. On one occasion he paid Agnew’s more for a pair of Chinese vases than for a portrait by Reynolds. Allingham’s watercolour was less expensive. Perhaps it was an impulse buy. With its assured draughtsmanship, high degree of finish and safely romantic narrative content, it satisfies conventional Victorian requirements of a painting, a credo with which, up to a point, Leverhulme kept faith.
The present show includes some choice offerings without suggesting that Leverhulme was either an inspired or especially committed collector of works on paper. Overwhelmingly these acquisitions reinforced his more enthusiastic collection of large-scale paintings in oils. It comes as no surprise that the man who collected major Pre-Raphaelite works by Rossetti and Burne-Jones also owned works on paper by these artists. In the case of Rossetti’s ‘Pandora’ of 1878, the sfumato effect of the lighter medium maximises the impression of eerily seductive otherworldliness. Never have such oddly coloured limbs appeared so alluring. Burne-Jones’s peculiar ‘through a glass darkly’ drawing ‘Girls Dancing’ goes some way to explaining why Ruskin implored him to ‘put the black out of [your] box, and the browns, and the indigo blue’. The Pre-Raphaelite treat of this exhibition is Ford Madox Brown’s ‘Cordelia’s Portion’, illustrating the opening scene of King Lear — as stagey as a tableau vivant and jewel-bright as a tube of Smarties. Leverhulme bought it the year before his death. Possibly his eyes were dimming.
A section of the exhibition is devoted to the influence on Leverhulme of the serially cash-strapped watercolourist and arts polemicist James Orrock. On three occasions Leverhulme bought Orrock’s collection in its entirety. His acquisitions from this source include two works by David Cox — including the justly celebrated ‘Peace and War’ — which complement Leverhulme’s purchase of four watercolours by Turner. Giants of the 1840s, Turner and Cox cast long shadows over the Victorian watercolour. Through Orrock, Leverhulme also acquired Thomas Girtin’s ‘Landscape with a Windmill’, a drawing by Constable and two paintings by ‘Bird’s Nest’ Hunt, a decorative early exponent of the use of bodycolour.
The exhibition closes with a small selection of paintings acquired mostly in the Forties and Fifties by The Lady Lever’s trustees. These include works by Francis Towne and his pupil John White Abbott, and Simeon Solomon’s vision of an enrapt cleric, ‘Mystery of Faith’. Perhaps in its purchase the trustees were mindful of Leverhulme’s fondness for the paintings of Holman Hunt. It seems unlikely that a figure of such conventional Victorian moral rectitude as Leverhulme would otherwise have welcomed into his temple of art the work of this much-ostracised Jewish homosexual, with its repeated emphasis on teasingly ‘depraved’ eroticism. Hardly the bedfellow His Lordship cultivated for the memory of his revered late wife.
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