Bankers' hoard
ART PAUL GRINKE
Bankers are a cagey lot, not usually given to exuberant display, but 200 years ago they were evidently roisterous, boisterous and consider- ably enmeshed in the artistic and political life of the time. Drummonds Bank has mounted a display called 'Treasures and Curiosities,' at the National Portrait Gallery, which is a marvellous rag-bag of ancestor worship, humorous knick-knacks and a number of genuine goodies.
The most impressive thing about the ex- hibition is its presentation, an electrifying experience which has momentarily turned the gallery into a kind of weird scholastic night club. The exhibition hall has been transformed, with murky passages and chambers on several levels and the occasional peephole down which you peer at a complete eighteenth century room, so convincingly re-created that you feel the occupier has just gone round the corner to buy the latest broadsheet or have his sword sharpened. The show's designer is Christopher Firmstone, who evidently has an apt feeling for the eighteenth century as an enormous, rather macabre charade. The entrance itself
is pure grand guignol—you teeter over a dusty midden of bones which may conceivably have been the relics of an early Drummond, but I lacked the courage to entrust my weight to the plate-glass long enough to read the labels.
The exhibits range from the unsolicited artistic testimonials of the great (and one wonders whether a modern bank would grate- fully cherish the gift of a rather sexily high- heeled pair of legs from Allen Jones in the same spirit as Whistler's latest Venetian etch- ings) to the childhood relics and family portraits of the Drummond family and their connections. The closest thing I have ever seen to this collection is that extraordinary hodge- podge of alchemical whimsy formed by the Tradescants in the seventeenth century which became the nucleus of the Ashmolean Museum. The Drummonds cannot boast the tattered san- dal of a fourteenth century hermit but they have pretty well everything else. A Jacobite broadsword, a primitive abacus, battered silver teaspoons with the Drummond crest and the superscription H for Housekeeper jostle for position with some marvellous paintings.
Beau Brummel's meteoric descent from a healthy credit balance to a wretched little over- draft, and his subsequent demise in a mad- house, was the kind of rake's progress that the Drummonds might have appreciated. Several members of the clan seem to have been notorious spendthrifts, but when in funds they lashed out grandly on country mansions by William Chambers and conversation pieces by Zoffany, Reynolds and, of course, their own countryman Sir Henry Raeburn. They made their money mostly from politics and spent it cheerfully on the arts. The strong Jacobite hue of their earlier political affiliations took some living down, but may also have lured a num- ber of prominent artists who had enjoyed the Roman hospitality of. the Stuarts to their counter and consequent patronage. The Adam brothers made a splendid pair of semi-circular tables for George Drummond and both Wedgwood and Angelica Kauffmann were prominent clients of the bank.
To show their continuing connection with the arts, Drummonds have added a modest tailpiece showing a few of the modern paint- ings and sculptures acquired by their Jess impecunious clients. This, it must be admitted, is disappointingly predictable and rather spoils the ambience of the exhibition. It would have been more encouraging to hear of some ex- citing new building, painting or sculpture com- missioned by the bank itself or, failing that, rude letters, and biting caricatures from modern artists, but no doubt they bank elsewhere today.
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