Books do furnish a room; overfurnish it too
Now that I am in my 81st year I have been wondering what to do about my art library, which has more or less taken over my country house in Over Stowey and occupies all the available space there. I originally began collecting it seriously 30 years ago, to help me write a general history of art. That has long been completed and published. But the books, most of them huge, remain, and make the white-painted, floor-to-ceiling shelves, all made by a local carpenter, groan in patient submission. Books are such heavy things, especially art books printed on glazed paper. My house is full now, so I have scaled down my purchases, buying chiefly the big catalogues of important exhibitions held in London, Paris or New York. But there are exceptions. I have just got, via the internet, a long-sought copy of Grego’s twovolume Rowlandson the Caricaturist, published as long ago as 1880, but still the most complete survey of his engraved work. And I am missing some key sets, such as Otto Benesch’s six volumes of The Drawings of Rembrandt (London 1954-57), which I want in E. Benesch’s revised edition of 1973. Not easy to get, and expensive. Nor have I got a complementary volume by J. Giltaij, published by the Boymans Museum of Rotterdam in 1988, The Drawings by Rembrandt and his School. I see from my Rembrandt shelf that I have 17 books about him, some multi-volume, which include most of the important studies published in the last quarter century. But I have just been looking at the fine bibliography of works on Rembrandt published in Volume 26 in the Grove Dictionary of Art, and I see there are half a dozen indispensable studies of the master, which ought to be in my library if it is to carry any serious weight. Alas, alas.
It is typical of my lack of grit as an art historian that I have never made a catalogue of my library, and I am often surprised both by what it contains and its lacunae. I do not even know how many volumes it consists of, to the nearest thousand. But some time ago I made a desultory survey of the most popular artists to see who came top in numbers. Easily the winner was J.M.W. Turner, on whom I have 62 books or catalogues. Of course his output was immense, up to 1,000 oils, mostly big ones, and 20,000 drawings and watercolours. I think that, one way or another, I have a reproduction, usually in colour, of all of his paintings. But the watercolours are another matter: many gaps, and some I believe have never been catalogued. My own Turner watercolour, a fairly detailed study for his ‘The Royal Yacht Squadron Returning to Cowes at Sunset’, the oil painting now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, is not listed in any of my books on him. Maybe it is not genuine. I have always been a bit doubtful about it, though the skill employed is stupendous. I revel in my Turner books. I have written a long essay on him, comparing him to his Japanese contemporary Hokusai, and he occupies an important place in my huge 1,000-page book, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830, but it is nice to think that if I wanted to write a fulllength study of him, I have all the materials to hand, including my manuscript notes on hundreds of his works.
By comparison, I have only 14 books on Constable, but these include the splendid four-volume catalogue raisonné published by that greatest of modern art publishers, Yale University Press. So I have probably got a reproduction of everything known to be by him. I love Constable but am not tempted to write much about him: his works speak so eloquently for themselves, and there are no mysteries, no secrets, no tricks to be disentangled. I have eight books on Reynolds and 12 on Gainsborough: no mysteries there either, and no desire to write about them. But I would like to have a go at Romney, an odd, subtle, gifted but wrong-headed figure. I have got only five books on him but I own a beautiful drawing of a girl, full of wide-eyed astonished innocence, which he must have dashed off at a sitting. He was capable of a stylish elegance, at times, which made by comparison even Gainsborough seem a little plodding. I have a drawing by him, too, of a ploughman I think — you can almost smell the mud on his boots.
Of the great Italian masters I have a dozen books on Michelangelo, 14 on Leonardo, 16 on Raphael. I have huge tomes on the Sistine Chapel, every inch of it both before and after it was ‘restored’. What an error! My largest collection after Turner, 20-odd books, deals with Rubens, and this is right, for not only was his output prodigious, but he was, all things considered, the most accomplished artist who ever lived (and also among the nicest, being a good and gener ous man, and kind to both his wives). My favourite old master is Donatello, and I have 14 books on him, but I still find him elusive. My pride and joy, in my London garden, is a life-size replica, made of crushed marble in Florence c.1800, of his bronze masterpiece, ‘David’, in the Bargello. I bought it 20 years ago, and I forget how much I paid for it. But it was not cheap, and it took five strong workmen to manoeuvre it into position. It has since developed a magical mossy patina, and confirms my view that Donny was the greatest artist of all time.
My library is strong in books about American artists, about whom far too little is known in Britain or Europe. I have 18 books on Whistler and nearly as many on Sargent. I often debate with myself which of the two was finer. Whistler was certainly more original, and the Yale University Press catalogue raisonné of his drawings and watercolours certainly underlines his versatility. But Sargent was more honest, and the majestic American project to publish all of his works, now nearing completion, makes a formidable case for him being the greatest world artist of the 20th century, even though so much of his best work was done in the 19th. I love Edwin Church, too, and have a dozen volumes of him, and Thomas Eakins and Childe Hassan, both well represented in my library. But I have no book at all about one of my favourite American painters, Thomas Dewing (18511938) because none has been written so far as I know. His beautifully sensitive oils and pastels of aristocratic ladies, wandering in a reverie through gardens and fields, are a feature of the marvellous Freer Gallery in Washington D.C., a splendid monument to American taste at its best, where are also to be found fine Whistlers and his Liverpool decorative extravaganza, the Peacock Room. After the first world war, Dewing was so revolted by what was going on in the world of art he almost gave up painting and enveloped himself in a rural fastness in New Hampshire. I rather sympathise with him, and were I a young man I would make a long, learned and admiring study of his works, and call it — what? — The American Vermeer, perhaps.
But I am not a young man, thank God, and unlikely to engage in another major art project. Just at present I am completing an essay on Toulouse-Lautrec and about to embark on another on Rowlandson, both to go into a forthcoming volume of biographical essays, Humorists. Not many people know that Rowlandson, a good fellow and a superb artist, is buried in St Paul’s, Covent Garden. I must inspect his memorial tablet there.
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