A rich man should not always give his money to the poor
Studying, the other day, Nicholas Hilliard’s exquisite miniature ‘Young Man Among Roses’, I decided that it epitomised everything that was most delicious about Elizabethan England. Who, I wondered, gave it to the Victoria & Albert Museum, where the young man now stands in his briery bower? I discovered it was an Australian collector called George Salting (1835–1909), a dim figure who led an obscure life and then left Britain the biggest single series of art donations in her history, remarkable not just for its quantity but for its superlative quality.
The kind of person who amasses great collections often amazes me, and leads me to conclude that taste in art has nothing to do with either moral fibre or brainpower. After all, our two greatest royal collectors were both boobies: the foolish Charles I, who got us into the Civil War, and the selfish, silly and profligate Prince Regent. Crude men often develop the most discerning eye. Whenever I visit the Frick in New York, my favourite museum, where virtually every painting is a masterpiece, I reflect that it was put together by a largely uneducated man who rose in life by his unique skill in coke-smelting, and whose peculiar pleasure was strike-breaking.
Salting was the son of a Danish emigrant to Australia, who rejoiced in the Christian name of Canute, which he spelt with a ‘K’. This humdrum merchant flourished in Sydney and expanded into sheep stations. When he died in 1865, he left Salting an investment income of £30,000 a year, which the son expanded by shrewd deals. As a boy he had spent a short time at Eton and was at Balliol one term, but was never a scholar. His excitement for art was generated by a fortuitous visit to Rome in 1858, and his knowledge was acquired entirely by the practical business of buying and handling works of art, which occupied his entire life. He never married, had no mistresses, and few if any friends. He had no interests outside collecting and travelled little except to attend sales or see dealers. He seems never to have owned a house, at any rate as a residence, and lived for 40 years in two rooms over the Thatched House Club in St James’s.
Salting began his buying with Chinese porcelain, and eventually created one of the four great collections in the world, rivalling the Louvre, the Royal Dresden and the Pierpont Morgan. Then he moved into Renaissance bronzes. Next came majolica. In all areas his collections became world-class. Then he turned to paintings, specialising in the Low Countries but ranging widely. He acquired, among other masterpieces, Memling’s ‘Young Man at Prayer’, Campin’s ‘Virgin and Child Before a Firescreen’, Vermeer’s ‘Young Woman Seated at a Virginal’, and Cima da Conegliano’s spectacular ‘David and Jonathan’. Salting’s final collections were watercolours, drawings and prints, and again these collections slowly became the most remarkable in the world. They included many Rembrandts, not only etchings and prints of the highest quality but wonderful drawings, among them the little red chalk sketch, done in less than a minute, called ‘Two Women Teaching a Child to Walk’, which to my mind is the finest thing Rembrandt ever created.
During his collecting career of 45 years Salting was learning voraciously and refining his taste. So he constantly rid his collection of inferior items. He called this process ‘marbling’, after the habit boys have of swapping marbles. It took the peculiar form, ideally suited to his temperament, of subjecting the wide circle of dealers whom he patronised to lengthy haggling about ‘swaps’. Salting had all the time in the world, since he did nothing else, to engage in lengthy negotiations, often stretching over weeks, and he simply wore down even the most hard-nosed shopkeepers and art salesmen, who of course needed his custom and knew he was able to spend vast sums if the right object came up. A typical Salting transaction occurred in 1891 when he wanted to buy two Constable pictures, ‘Strand on the Green’ and ‘Brighton Beach’, from the Bond Street firm Dowdeswell. The dealer wanted 475 guineas for the two, and Salting knocked him down to £375. But he would not pay cash. Instead he proposed in exchange a John Crome, a George Morland and a Bonington, which he valued at a total of £425. After much haggling he got the dealer to accept this figure and so, in consequence, Dowdeswell gave Salting a cheque for £50 plus the Constables. As one dealer put it, selling art to Salting was ‘hard work’. On the other hand it was steady work.
The truth, of course, is that Salting, like many collectors, had the temperament of a miser. Indeed he was a miser, and spent as little as possible on himself so as to have more to spend on art. He was mean. He cut margins. He liked to attend sales, and bid in person so as not to be obliged to pay commission to dealers. He often ate at cheap cafés and saved on cab fares by walking (he was tall and thin with a long stride). He hated tipping. A collector friend was in his rooms one day when a porter from Christie’s brought Salting a superb Chinese vase for which he had paid 700 guineas. The man was made to unpack it immediately so Salting could be sure he had not damaged it en route. After that came the question of a tip. Salting looked through his pockets but the least valuable coin that emerged was a half-crown. That was too much. So he went to a drawer and pulled out a paper bag. From that he selected a penny sugar bun: ‘Here, my friend, that is for you.’ Salting bought so much he could not display it properly. He was much too mean to build his own gallery or even to buy a spacious London house. His two rooms were equipped with display cases rather than furniture, so they were far from comfortable, and Salting spent his days, when not browbeating dealers or prowling, among the deep armchairs of the Conservative Club. Even so, his rooms became hopelessly overcrowded with works of art of the highest possible quality, and of all kinds. Masterpieces in oils and Rembrandt etchings in superlative condition were piled against the wall or stacked on cupboards. Many of his larger pieces went straight from the dealers or the saleroom to the Victoria & Albert, where much of his collection was on permanent loan during his life, though prize items were liable to be pulled out at short notice if Salting carried out an exercise in ‘marbling’.
At his death, aged 74, Salting left a will which effectively divided his collection into three: 192 paintings (including all those I have mentioned) went to the National Gallery; all the porcelain, bronzes and other big items went to the V&A; and the prints and drawings, which included 18 Turners as well as the Rembrandts, went to the British Museum. The V&A also got his admirable collection of miniatures, led by the Hilliard. The effect of these enormous bequests was to raise all three of Britain’s national collections several notches in the world league of museums. It is curious that people like Salting who have such permanent effects not on the way art is made (I doubt if he ever bought anything from a living artist) but on the way it is shown to the world — are little known, even to art experts. They often, as in his case, show the sin of avarice put to good use, and pose interesting moral problems. What if he had just given his money to the poor? There would be nothing to show today.
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