Introduction to SSB 44 (13 October 1856–13 January 1857) by Philip Cottrell

NB. All page references are to SSB 44 and catalogue numbers refer to items from the Art Treasures Exhibition’s Gallery of Ancient Masters unless otherwise specified.

At the very start of SSB 44 there are a few isolated notes on a lunar eclipse that Scharf observed at a quarter-to-midnight on Monday 13 October on exiting Euston Station, London (p. 1; other entries scattered across Scharf’s sketchbooks and diaries reveal that stargazing was something of a minor hobby). He had returned briefly from Manchester to visit his mother and aunt at the new house they now shared at Eastcott Place, Camden Town, before embarking for ’s collection at Althorp on the following Wednesday (and then on to a series of other collectors – see the introduction to SSB 43). Apart from these initial notes, SSB 44 is almost wholly devoted to Scharf’s survey of British art collections, encompassing twenty-five further appointments across twenty-two lenders over a three- month period between 26 October 1856 to 13 January 1857. Disregarding numerous works which were not selected by Scharf, around one-hundred-and-seventy Art Treasures items are represented, of which one-hundred-and-twenty-seven were Ancient Masters. There is a major chronological overlap with regard to the subsequent sketchbook, SSB 45, which Scharf began using intermittently from early November, and then regularly from mid- January to mid-February 1857.

3.i. October-November 1856: lenders in London and the Midlands

Most of the material in the opening pages of SSB 44 covers Scharf’s two-day visit to Knowsley Hall, near Liverpool, the seat of Edward Geoffrey Smith-Stanley, 14th (1799-1869), which began on Sunday 26 October (pp. 1-6).1 Among the works sketched by Scharf, surprisingly short shrift is given to Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast (p. 3; cat. 695) now in the National Gallery, London. While this anticipates the poor critical attention it received at Manchester, all the Knowsley sketches seem somewhat half-hearted and unusually brisk. It is as if Scharf was working at undue speed, was distracted or, as on other occasions, the lighting was poor and the pictures hard to view (see for example, his visit to

1 This visit is also covered in LB I, pp. 58-62.

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Newnham Paddox on 3 November).2 It is perhaps unsurprising then, that ten days after leaving Knowsley, Scharf wrote to the Earl to say that a return visit might be necessary, “for the purpose of making rough sketches to scale of the pictures we have selected”.3 Scharf’s pressing schedule, however, forced him to abandon this plan in a letter of 20 February 1857.4 In other respects, Scharf got on well at Knowsley and seven years later, in 1864, the Earl commissioned him to produce a catalogue of its pictures.5 A couple of further works sketched on page 6 are from the collection of a Dr Babington at an unidentified location - a crossed-out note in the first of Scharf’s ‘long books’, may suggest that this visit took place around or on Tuesday 28 October.6 Scharf possibly returned to his Manchester lodgings at Windsor Terrace, Old Trafford, on the evening of Monday 27 October, but then travelled to London for a few days. The pretext was an audience with the Art Treasures’ royal patron, Prince Albert, at Windsor Castle on Wednesday 29 October for which a special train was laid on for him.7 Scharf’s appointment with the Prince was to discuss the Exhibition’s progress and how it would benefit from a substantial number of loans from the royal palaces and the Prince’s own personal collection.

At this point, Scharf’s plan was to survey dozens of other lenders living in and around the capital, alongside making further excursions to owners in the Midlands and Southwest of England. As a result, he could now take up residence again, albeit intermittently, at Eastcott Place, alongside his mother, Elizabeth and her sister, Scharf’s doting spinster aunt, Mary Hicks (1774-1864). The three of them enjoyed a close, mutually supportive relationship (in contrast to Scharf’s fractious attitude to his father, who was now living separately at a nearby address – see the introductions to SSB 43 & 46), and the prospect of a temporary return to London must have been an attractive one. Ever industrious, even before his interview with the Prince, Scharf had squeezed in another lender’s visit, to the philanthropist Angela Burdett Coutts at 65 Lowndes Square, Belgravia, on the day of his

2 See the commentary to SSB 44, pp. 3-4. 3 5 November 1856 - MCL M6/2/6/1/92. 4 MCL M6/2/6/1/251-252. 5 See the commentary to SSB 44, pp. 1-2. 6 LB I, p. 62. 7 Scharf’s diary for the day records, “To Windsor, interview with Prince Albert. Special train” - NPG7/3/1/12.

2 return to London, Tuesday 28 October, although the results of this visit are not recorded in SSB 44.8 The latter does reveal, however, that a day later, on Wednesday 29 October, Scharf visited Emily Frances Smith, Duchess of Beaufort (1800-1899) (pp. 9-12) – presumably at her London residence at 22 Arlington Street, near to the house kept by one of the Art Treasures’ most important lenders, Lord Yarborough (see also below). The following day, Thursday 30 October, Scharf found himself at 2 Eaton Square, the home of G. E. H. Vernon (pp. 1-2 & 7– 14) which housed a creditable collection of central-Italian works. The previous week, Vernon had written to advise that:

My little house in Eaton Square…is in a very packed up condition and…the pictures are in paper. But I shall be most happy to allow Mr Scharf to examine them. And I also particularly beg that he will not scruple for an instant to make the housemaid remove the paper from any frame where it may interfere with the picture. I am happy for Mr Scharf’s sake to say that probably ¾ of an hour will be ample time for him to exercise his judgement as to the merit of the pictures. 9

Although Scharf was the best judge of his own time, such advice may well have been useful; one of the grumbles repeatedly expressed in his letters to lenders was that he could never be sure how long each visit would take him, and this sometimes frustrated attempts to build up a clear itinerary.10 Among the sketches related to this visit, which are somewhat haphazardly intermingled with works from other collections, is a Granacci Holy Family (p. 7; cat. 75) the composition of which disqualifies it from being an item in the Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii, as previously thought.

Now Scharf had himself been vetted and inspected by Prince Albert, he was at last granted access to Buckingham Palace on Friday 31 October in order to make extensive sketches of works in the Royal Collection, the majority of them from the Dutch and Flemish schools. Sketches of these consume most of pages 11-23 of SSB 44. On Saturday 1 November, Scharf then left the capital for the day to visit the collection of John Stuart Bligh, 6th (1827-1896), at Cobham Hall, Kent (pp. 25-32). This yielded loans of some of the most celebrated pictures of the Venetian school to appear at Manchester, including Titian’s Man

8 See LB I, p. 63 9 MCL M6/2/11/406. 10 See for example his letter to Mrs L. Dawson of 17 February 1857 - MCL M6/2/6/2/223, and also the letter he wrote to his mother on Friday 13 February discussed in the introduction to SSB 45.

3 with a Blue Sleeve (p. 26; cat. 257) and several others which are also now in the National Gallery in London and which had previously come from the Orleans collection. Also among these were Tintoretto’s Origins of the Milky Way (p. 31; cat. 580) and Veronese’s four Allegories of Love (pp. 30 & 32; cats. 285-8; although Scharf omitted to sketch the third picture in the cycle, Scorn). To this group may be added one of Titian’s superlative poesie for Philip II of Spain, The Rape of Europa (p. 29; cat. 259) now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The quality and provenance of these items must have proved extremely gratifying given that, as Scharf declared in a letter to Darnley of 12 January 1857, he was “particularly anxious to reassemble as many of the Orleans pictures as possible in the same gallery”. In the same letter he thanked the Earl for the extent of his generosity which had been such that he felt it “would be impossible to ask for one picture more”. Nevertheless, Scharf then supplies a list of artists whose works he wished he could still obtain from Darnley: Annibale Carracci, Francesco Albani and Salvator Rosa among others. If one counts the Toilet of Venus sketched on page 26, which was then given to Annibale, all the artists named are represented in the run of sketches arising from his earlier visit to Cobham. Of the last artist on his wish list Scharf writes, “we are still very poor in really authentic and good specimens of Salvator Rosa. Examples with his name are numerous in England; but they are at the same time, neither genuine nor characteristic. We have not yet secured Lord Northwick’s Salvator the vanity of Human life [L’ Umana Fragilita - now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge]”.11 Nor did they (see below), and nor it seems was Darnley predisposed to exceed his generosity.

A brief respite on Sunday 2 November allowed Scharf some time off to visit Willis’s Assembly Rooms on King Street with his aunt and mother, and this was followed by an evening spent at the Athenaeum Club.12 But on the next day, Monday 3 November, Scharf caught a train from Euston bound for Staffordshire and his next potential lender, Edward John Littleton, 1st Baron Hatherton of Teddesley Park (see below). However, he encountered an unexpected delay at Rugby where he retired to the George Hotel. Deciding to make the most of this stop-over, Scharf at once dispatched a note to William Fielding, 7th (1796-1865) at nearby Newnham Paddox, Monks Kirby, requesting an impromptu

11 MCL M6/2/6/1/185-186. 12 He was elected a member in 1855 – see Heath, 2018, p. 15.

4 appointment to survey his paintings.13 Some confusion ensued; Scharf was labouring under the misapprehension that the Executive Committee had already recruited Lord Denbigh to their cause. While an invitation had been drafted by the exhibition’s somewhat wayward General Commissioner, John C. Dean, it had not actually been sent. Such is clear from a letter which an embarrassed Scharf hurriedly dispatched to Newnham Paddox as soon as he returned to Manchester on Wednesday 5 November.14 Scharf was still able to carry out a preliminary survey of the pictures he required, even if he had to work in poor light (pp. 32- 34): regarding his efforts to assess the quality of Barent Fabritius’s Hagar and Ishmael Taking Leave of Abraham (p. 32; cat. 838) now in the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Scharf noted in the second of his ‘long books’ that “the day is so miserably dark that it is unsafe to pronounce”.15 He took the risk and selected it for Manchester anyway. To prove there were no hard feelings on the Earl’s part, Scharf was invited back by Denbigh as a dinner guest on 7 February. This was an invitation which, despite an extremely hectic schedule, Scharf felt bound to accept (see the introduction to SSB 45).

The day after his unexpected appointment at Newnham Paddox, Scharf surveyed the pictures belonging to Edward John Littleton, 1st Baron Hatherton (1791-1863), at Teddesley Park, Staffordshire (pp. 35-42). Scharf found lots to interest him here, and numerous important items from the Dutch and Flemish schools were lent as a result of the visit – standout works include Hobbema’s Wooded Landscape (p. 38; cat. 722), now in the National Gallery of Ireland, and Rubens’s Nymph with Javelin (p. 40; cat. 568). He was also particularly fascinated by an otherwise unidentified Dutch genre scene in the style of Maes or De Hooghe (p. 41).16 As part of a slew of letters completed in Manchester on Thursday 6 November, Scharf now signalled his intention to extend his campaign further southwards. As he wrote to his friend, the Oxford scholar and antiquarian, Henry Wellesley (1794-1866), “I shall be in Oxford on Saturday morning beginning a tour to the south west…I am indeed anxious to obtain your advice on several points relating to our desired glorification of the

13 See LB II, pp. 9-17. 14 “I beg most sincerely to apologise for having unceremoniously intruded at Newnham Paddox” - MCL M6/2/6/1/90-91. 15 LB II, p. 14. 16 The visit is also covered in LB II, pp. 18-20.

5 great artists”.17 Scharf now found himself almost continually occupied on visits to collectors for the next six weeks, with London serving as an intermittent base of operations. He would not return to Manchester until the evening of his thirty-sixth birthday, Tuesday 16 December.

3.ii. November–December 1856: an overlap between SSB 44 & 45; Bath, Cheltenham and London

For reasons that are unclear, Scharf spent the evening of Friday 7 November at the Queen’s Hotel, Birmingham, reaching Oxford early the next day where he lodged at the Star Hotel for two nights. It is at this point that SSB 44 as well as his current long book, LB II, and 1856 appointment diary lose track of him for a few days. His diary keeping had become increasingly sporadic, with his sketchbooks and long books now fulfilling the role of a journal. But for some reason he now began using the November and December folios of a recently purchased 1857 smaller Letts’s Diary to record his movements, with the dates and days adjusted by hand to render them relevant to 1856.18 It is also strange that he recorded his visit to Oxford and subsequent travels in Worcestershire between 8-10 November over pages 3-10 of his next sketchbook, SSB 45, returning only to the upkeep of SSB 44 and LB II on Monday 10 November. Even though he kept recording appointments with the eccentrically modified folios of the 1857 diary until the end of the year, following his Oxford trip his compilation of SSB 44 and LB II now resumed in a reasonably orderly manner, as did (confusingly) his usual 1856 Letts’s Diary.19

In order to explain this uncharacteristically chaotic blip in Scharf’s usually careful record keeping, it is possible that he had become accidentally separated from SSB 44, LB II, and his 1856 diary for the duration of his time in Oxford and only recovered them late on Sunday 9 November possibly as a result of a brief overnight return to either Birmingham or Manchester. Whatever the circumstances, once reunited with SSB 44 and LB II, Monday 10 November found Scharf destined for the art collection of a Mr J. Bayley at Cheltenham (pp.

17 MCL M6/2/6/1/96 18 NPG7/3/1/13. 19 NPG7/3/1/12.

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43-44).20 Also on this day, Scharf made a sketch of nearby Thornbury Castle and Church (pp. 42 & 44). He probably stayed in Cheltenham, at the Queen’s Hotel, that night. From Tuesday 11–Thursday 13 November Scharf enjoyed one of his lengthiest and most productive visits to an Art Treasures lender, as a guest of John Rushout, 2nd Baron Northwick (1770-1859), at Thirlestaine House, near Cheltenham (pp. 44-64).21 Scharf’s host was an enthusiastic collector of continental art with a particular fondness for paintings of the Italian renaissance school. Having bought and extended Thirlestaine as a means of housing his vast art collection, opening it also to the public, Northwick was sympathetic to the ethos of the Art Treasures Exhibition and became one of its most important lenders. The appearance, however, of one particular item, sketched on page 53, Bartolomeo Vivarini’s Death of the Virgin (cat. 66) now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, caused critical controversy due to its obviously unsound attribution to Giotto (something, however, which Scharf also addressed in the Art Treasures catalogue). Clearly gratified by Scharf’s interest in his collection, and keen to afford him the time and opportunity to examine it, the elderly Northwick proved to be a generous and talkative host, and a good raconteur.22 Scharf sketched a rare likeness of him on page 57 (fig. 3.i). Northwick’s contribution took the form of eleven items from the earlier Italian renaissance, although some important works from other periods and schools eluded Scharf’s grasp. Prominent among them was Salvator Rosa’s L’ Umana Fragilita (p. 45) previously discussed with reference to Scharf’s letter to Earl Darnley on 12 January 1857. Nevertheless, Scharf clearly enjoyed his stay at Thirlestaine, established a good rapport with its owner and relatives, and considered a return visit on his way back from Bath on Saturday 14 February. He eventually returned as a guest on 1-2 September 1857 (see the introductions to SSB 45 & 47).

20See also LB II, p. 21. 21 See also LB II, pp. 25-38. 22 See the commentary to SSB 44, pp. 57-58.

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Fig. 3.i. George Scharf, Sketches of John Rushout, 2nd Baron Northwick at Thirlestaine House, 12 November 1856. Detail of page 57 of Scharf Sketchbook 44. Heinz Archive, National Portrait Gallery, London.

Scharf left Thirlestaine on Thursday 13 November in order to visit the collection of a Mr Hyde Clarke near Cheltenham (pp. 63-64). He slept at Bath that evening then returned to London the next day. Page 65 of SSB 44 confirms a visit to Dr Edward Craven Hawtrey (1789- 1862), Provost of Eton, on Saturday 15 November (Scharf visited again on Thursday 5 February – see the introduction to SSB 45). His diary records various expenses related to his trip to Eton, including the purchase of a stereoscope for three shillings. A popular novelty of the period,which had also featured at the Great Exhibition, the stereoscope fitted the wearer like a pair of spectacles, allowing them to view a stereographic photograph of a scene in ‘3-D’. The Art Treasures Committee would license a suitable stereoscopic plate of the interior of the Art Treasures Palace from the photographer Philip Delamotte (1821- 1889) - perhaps Scharf had wind of this and was keen to try out the effect.23

Apart from calling on his friend and collaborator in the recently mounted production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, the actor-manager Charles Kean (1811-1868), Art Treasures correspondence took up most of Scharf’s time on the next day, Sunday 16 November. Scharf then allowed himself a brief twenty-four hour respite from his survey before devoting the next eleven pages of SSB 44 (pp. 66-73) to sketches of ’s pictures at Hampton Court on Tuesday 18 November.24 He also inspected potential loans belonging to a tennant at Hampton Court, Lady Catherine Hartland (p. 72). It is unclear why Scharf then again abandoned SSB 44 for the next three days during which time he continued to record a series of survey appointments in the second of his long books. One of these included a visit to Lord Yarborough’s town residence at 17 Arlington Street on 21 November

23 The expenses referred to appear in the folio of his 1857 Letts’s Diary that he modified to November 1856 - NPG7/3/1/13. The plate is illustrated and discussed in Pergam, 2011, p. 55. 24 see also LB II, pp. 43-47.

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– see below for Scharf’s visit to Yarborough’s country seat at Park, , on 31 December. 25 On Wednesday 19 November, as a sign of his continued intention to stay away from Manchester for the time being, Scharf wrote to his landlady, Mrs Bushell, at Windsor Terrace, Old Trafford, instructing her to make available his “sitting room” to other guests.26

A few days later, on Saturday 22 November, Scharf reopened SSB 44 as part of the first of a number of visits to the eminent collection of Richard Seymour-Conway, 4th Marquess of Hertford (pp. 74-79), at Manchester House, the present home of the Wallace Collection.27 The process of negotiating loans had proved tricky due to the difficult and neurotic character of the 4th Marquess: “You know that the Marquis of Hertford is a quite incalculable person”, Waagen had warned the exhibition’s Executive Committee on 21 October, before going on to promise that in order “to try my best in so important a matter for your exhibition I have nevertheless written to him about the matter”.28 Waagen’s intervention proved crucial, but the forty-two old master paintings that the Marquess agreed to surrender were lent on the proviso that they would be exhibited together as a group, distinct from other items in the Gallery of Ancient Masters - the only instance such an exception was made. As an indication of the delicacy surrounding Scharf’s visit to Manchester House and in order to prepare for it, on 22 November Scharf had breakfast with Thomas Fairbairn prior to his appointment there later that same day.29 He would also return to survey the Marquess’s pictures on Thursday 4 December, including those at another of his residences at 13 Berkley Square (see below). One might speculate as to the degree to which Scharf was eager to benefit from Waagen’s intervention on the matter. As grateful as he was for the Hertford paintings, the conditions applied to their loan certainly complicated his task when it came to insisting that all other lenders should not expect likewise

25 The visits to the following collectors are recorded in LB II: [Robert?] Van Sittart (19 November, p. 47); Sir John Boileau (20 November, pp. 72-75); Frederick Perkins at Chipstead Place, Sevenoaks in Kent (20 November, pp. 50-65) and Lord Yarborough at 22 Arlington Street (pp. 66-87). 26 See the folio of Scharf’s 1857 Letts’s Diary that he modified to November 1856 - NPG7/3/1/13. 27 See also LB II, pp. 69-73 28 MCL M6/2/11/210. The letter is also discussed in Pergam, 2011, p. 35. 29 See Scharf’s 1856 diary for this day - NPG7/3/1/12.

9 treatment. Had he conceded to other lenders’ wishes to have their pictures exhibited as a discrete group, the chronological and geographical organisation of Scharf’s hang would have been severely disturbed. An owner-directed approach to the hang would also potentially jeopardise Scharf’s determination to avoid the whiff of the saleroom which customarily hung around public exhibitions – on this point, and Scharf’s reliance on dealers, see also the introduction to SSB 45.

As was now his custom on Sundays (supposedly his only day-off in the week), 23 November was taken up with letters to an exhausting list of correspondents, including the recalcitrant (see the introduction to the database as to the controversy surrounding his decision not to lend). But as these were not copied into the Art Secretary’s Out-Letter Book we do not know the details.30 This industrious burst of letter writing then extended into the whole of the following week, with Scharf having time for only sporadic visits to lenders, although none of the latter were recorded in the pages of SSB 44. One has to turn to the November folio of his 1857 monthly Letts’s Diary that he adapted to 1856 entries (see above) for records of a few appointments with lenders carried out this week, including one with Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman (1802-1865) on Thursday 27 November.31 The following Saturday, 29 November, saw Scharf return to SSB 44 to record important visits to Holland House, the residence of Henry Fox, 4th Baron Holland (1802-1859), and to the home of his brother, Lt General Charles Richard Fox (1796-1873) of Addison Rd (pp. 80 & 82). The latter had already tersely written to Scharf ten days earlier on Tuesday 18 November: “I have been expecting to hear from or received from one who would have directions to take my pictures for your Exhibition but no one has yet been and I am therefore induced to trouble you with this saying to know whether you send them or whether I have to send them and if so how & when”.32 Earlier that morning Scharf also paid a visit to the dealer John Hodgson at Cumberland Terrace, where he saw pictures belonging to a Mr Gibson (p. 80) – the most notable of which was an unidentified copy/ variant after Caravaggio’s John the Baptist/ Youth with a Ram in the Pinacoteca Capitoline, Rome.

30 The letters referred to are listed in the folio of his 1857 Letts’s Diary that he modified to November 1856 - NPG7/3/1/13. 31 NPG7/3/1/13. 32 NPG 7/2/2/1.

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Scharf’s careful study of the item is noteworthy given his usual neglect of works by Caravaggio and his school in British collections (see also the introduction to SSB 43 for Scharf’s attitude to works by Gerrit van Honthorst “in his historic style” as part of his survey of James Hugh Smith Barry’s pictures on 29 September).33

Two collector visits are recorded on Monday 1 December, firstly to Francis Wemyss- Charteris, 9th Earl of Wemyss, 5th , aka Lord Elcho (1796-1883), who Scharf visited in the morning at St James’s Place (pp. 85 & 87-90) before going on to Thomas de Grey, 2nd Earl de Grey (1781-1859), at No. 4 St James’s Square (pp. 85-85). Scharf had arranged these appointments in letters written on the previous Friday, 28 November. Alongside works in sculpture, the paintings that drew his attention on the latter visit largely consisted of works by Van Dyck intended for the British Portrait Gallery – a particularly notable study is his sketch of de Grey’s Portrait of the Countess of Southampton by Van Dyck (p. 86; BPG, cat. 119) now in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Scharf then took up with SSB 44 two days later as part of a return visit to the Marquess of Hertford’s pictures on Thursday 4 December (pp. 81 & 93-96, and see also some notes of relevant expenses inserted in SSB 45, pp. 1-2) first at Manchester House (previously visited on Saturday 22 November) and then on to the Marquess’s other residence at 13 Berkley Square.

Scharf then left London, journeying to Oxford where he made sketches in SSB 45 on Friday 5 December of works at Worcester, Christ Church and New Colleges. Before returning to London on Saturday 6 December, Scharf paid a visit to George, 4th Baron Lyttelton at Hagley Hall, Worcestershire (for a discussion of the material compiled over this weekend see the introduction to SSB 45). True to form, on his return from Oxford, Scharf spent Sunday 7 December, catching up with correspondence. In addition to surveying a handful of works belonging to the lender John Howard Galton (1794-1862) exhibited at the Athenaeum Club on Monday 8 December (p. 95), Scharf also paid a visit that day to the dealer and restorer Anthony’s where he inspected more works belonging to Lord Elcho and Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford (see pp. 97-102). Scharf spent much of the next three days at home at Eastcott Place, probably catching up once more with Art Treasures business. SSB 44

33 On the under-representation of Caravaggio’s pictures in the Art Treasures Exhibition in the introduction to SSB 47. It was at this point that Scharf also moved on to the compilation of the third of his ‘long books’, LB III.

11 reveals, however, that he also visited the British Museum on Friday 12 December, where he made a painstaking sketch of Daniel Hopfer’s etching of The Last Judgement (fig. 3.ii). Scharf’s diaries then record various appointments in London, before he took up his survey again on Monday 15 December when he set off for Kimbolton Castle, . He awoke here the following day, his thirty-sixth birthday, as the guest of William Montagu, 7th (1823-1890). But once again Scharf recorded this visit in his subsequent sketchbook and it is discussed in the introduction to SSB 45. Perhaps it was now his intention to make some sort of division between collections surveyed in London, which he would continue to compile in SSB 44, and those outside the capital, which would be recorded in SSB 45. If this was his plan, however, he did not keep to it.

Fig. 3.ii. George Scharf, Sketch of Daniel Hopfer’s etching of ‘The Last Judgement’ at the British Museum, 12 December 1856. Page 104 of Scharf Sketchbook 44. Heinz Archive, National Portrait Gallery, London.

3.iii. Christmas 1856: Scharf overworked and ill; New Year trips to Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Greater Manchester

From Kimbolton Scharf returned to Manchester on the evening of Tuesday 16 December where he based himself, with brief overnight excursions to lenders, for the next six weeks over Christmas and New Year. His Art Treasures duties kept him exceptionally busy and he would not see his mother and aunt again until his return to London on the evening of

12

Wednesday 21 January. During this period, Scharf was again occupied with dozens of letters to colleagues and potential lenders. “I have been absent from Manchester almost two months in a series of foraging inspecting and collecting expeditions”, he wrote to Theodore Rathbone of the Liverpool Royal Institution on 23 December, “and am now only beginning to resume my sedentary occupations”.34 No less than fifty letters survive from the Art Secretary’s Out-Letters Book datable to the first fortnight of Scharf’s return to Manchester, from 17 to 30 December. This is despite the fact that Scharf suffered a severe bout of illness during this period and this kept him wretched and bedbound at his Manchester lodgings at Windsor Terrace throughout Christmas Day (see below). From these letters, we learn that Scharf was starting to get somewhat overwhelmed by the countrywide scale of his survey. He now had to contemplate deferring visits to the more outlying regions of the country, as is clear from his letter to the lender Rev Thomas Staniforth (1807-1887) of Storrs Hall, on the banks of Lake Windermere, on 17 December:

It has hitherto been impossible for me to make any northern expeditions and I must again forego the pleasures of meeting you at Storrs. Time is now passing so rapidly that we cannot delay doing all in our power to complete the Exhibition arrangements and I am desired by the chairman to propose that Mr. Waring the director of the medieval department, shall call upon you at Storrs on the 29th instant as he will be in the neighbourhood. I regret very sincerely that I cannot come myself. My Scottish tour must stand over till I have paid some visits in Norfolk…35

However, by 7 January, Scharf had abandoned this planned visit to East Anglia, as he confirmed in a letter to the Norfolk lender John P. Boileau - once again, he suggested that his Art Treasures colleague, J. B. Waring, could act as a roving emissary.36 At this stage, Scharf still harboured plans to visit Scotland and the North East of England in February, as is clear from a letter to the Newcastle-based collector Matthew Anderson dispatched on 16 January (see below).37

As Christmas approached, the pressure and pace of work was beginning to take its toll on Scharf’s health. The item “medicine” is ominously inserted among a list of personal

34 MCL M6/2/6/1/127-128. 35 MCL M6/2/6/1/98. 36 MCL M6/2/6/1/168-169. 37 MCL M6/2/6/1/199.

13 expenses in a diary entry for Monday 22 December.38 The next day, Scharf wrote to Theodore Rathbone, “you can hardly imagine how very engrossingly my time and energies are being taken up, added to which I am just now a miserable bodily sufferer”.39 The stress- related boils which had tormented him throughout August and much of September (see the introduction to SSB 43) now returned with a vengeance. In her diary for Saturday 27 December, his aunt noted with dismay that she and Scharf’s mother had “received a note from George…saying he had a severe return of his complaint and was confined to his room on Xmas day”.40 Scharf Snr also seems to have been party to the contents of the letter: “George being engaged at the Art Treasures Exhibition at Manchester…had several invitations to Dinner on Christmas day at some of the Gentlemen of the Committee but could not accept of it, being unluckily again troubled with boils on his neck and legs, but getting better, and the landlady being very kind to him”.41 Later, on 3 January, Scharf wrote to Albert Way of the British Archaeological Institute that, “I have only just recovered from a miserable carbuncle on the nape of the neck and hope that the new year may be better for my health. Ever since my visit to Edinburgh I have been sadly disabled…I am very closely worked and do not leave the offices till 11 at night”.42

On Wednesday 31 December he had recovered enough from his “jugular burden” to accept an invitation to the country seat of the major Art Treasures lender Charles Anderson- Pelham, 2nd Earl of Yarborough (1809-1862), at Brocklesby Park, Lincolnshire.43 He had already visited the Earl’s pictures at his London residence at 17 Arlington Street on 21 November and would do so again on Thursday 22 January (see the introduction to SSB 45). In an early letter to the Art Treasures’ General Commissioner, John Connellan Deane, of 27 September 1856, Yarborough had initially indicated his reluctance to lend, citing damage inflicted on paintings and sculptures that he had previously lent to the Great Industrial

38 See the folio of his 1857 Letts’s Diary that he modified to December 1856 - NPG7/3/1/13. 39 MCL M6/2/6/1/127-128. 40 NPG7/3/7/4/1/5. 41 General notes relevant to Christmas 1856 - NPG7/3/7/2/1/14. 42 MCL M6/2/6/1/154-155. 43 Scharf’s description on his illness comes from a letter to Edward Holmes of 3 January - MCL M6/2/6/1/146- 147.

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Exhibition in Dublin in 1853 (this was embarrasing to Dean, who had been one of its organisers). Yarborough also pointed out that many of his works were already accessible to the public.44 Strikingly similar arguments were also advanced by Joseph Paxton on behalf of his patron, the Art Treasures’ most famous ‘non-lender’, William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire, in another letter to the Executive Committee on 7 October (see the introduction to the database).45 Yarborough was ultimately talked round, and eventually became a generous correspondent and host to Scharf. He still refused to lend any sculpture, however. It is telling, therefore, that the first sketch in SSB 45 to represent the visit to Brocklesby was a full-page sketch of a classical sculpted head of Niobe (p. 106) which Scharf had previously mentioned in a letter to Yarborough of 11 October. This expressed Scharf’s deep regret that the item would not find its way to Manchester.46 Scharf then proceeded to fill the next twelve pages of SSB 44 (pp. 107-118) with a thorough survey of potential loans from Brocklesby, although some of the choicer items, such as Titian’s Supper at Emmaus, were then at Arlington Street (see SSB 45, p. 37; cat. 247). No less than thirty-eight items were lent by Yarborough to the Gallery of Ancient Masters, with several works also contributed to the Modern Masters section. While a substantial portion of the Yarborough collection was sold off at Christie’s, London, on 12 July 1929, many of the items featured in Scharf’s sketches and notes remain at Brocklesby, although not all can be securely identified.

Scharf then joined the Chairman of the Art Treasures Executive Committee, Thomas Fairbairn, as part of a New Year’s Day gathering at Clumber Park, Nottinghamshire, where they were the guests of Henry Pelham Fiennes Pelham-Clinton, 5th Duke of Newcastle (1811- 1864). Here, in surveying potential loans, Scharf contributed a further ten pages of sketches to SSB 44 (pp. 119-130). Among the standout items in a collection strong in seventeenth- century Italian and Flemish works were four large, impressive marketplace scenes portraying meat, poultry and fish all attributed to Frans Snyders including two which were destined to become cats. 545 and 572 of the Gallery of Ancient Masters – the four paintings are now divided between the Rubenshuis, Antwerp, the Norton Simon Foundation,

44 MCL M6/2/11/226. 45 MCL M6/2/11/307. 46 MCL M6/2/6/1/66-67.

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Pasadena, York Art Gallery and another, unknown location. Sorting out which are the two that appeared at Manchester is unusually tricky, however, given Scharf’s later and uncharacteristically erratic application of catalogue numbers to these sketches. For further relevant material, including sketches and notes covering Scharf’s later visit to the Duke of Newcastle’s London residence at Portman Square on 28 January, see the introduction to SSB 45.

It was Scharf’s custom to compile a brief review of the year at the end of his appointments diary, and 1856 was no exception:

Sitting up alone with Mr Fairbairn in his bedroom at the Duke of Newcastle’s Clumber I have just seen the old year out, an eventful one it has been to me. Few years have contained so many varieties for me as 1856, anxieties support & losses characterise it. My excellent friends C. H. [Tewman?] and J. Kenyon are gone. My lectures at home brought many friends round me. Mrs Fraser & daughter. Oxford lectures & at Leeds also in Passion week. Charles Kean’s seeking my aid for the Winter’s Tale, Roger’s Sale, sketching his house. My financial embarrassments, kind help from Franks and Enfield. Loans & presents from friends. Leaving Torrington Square. Expenses of moving & repairs. Honourable expedition to Edinburgh at expense of the Arch[aeological] Inst[itute]. My illness. Great incidental expenses. Manchester exhibition. Kind friends. New life numerous introductions & good prospects for future. Mother and Aunt well as ever, especially the latter thank God. Note from Henry [Scharf’s brother] of apology, reconciliation, etc. I sent him a present of books and prints. Mr Kenyon’s legacy of 500£ and other helps from him, from Miss Bayley, Crab Robinson, Enfield & Lord Overstone have combined to maintain my position & feel on a secure basis.47

Having compiled this summary, Scharf then returned to Manchester and spent the first three weeks of 1857, up until Wednesday 21 January, once again attending to general Art Treasures correspondence, after which he returned to London. Over seventy letters to a wide variety of lenders and colleagues are recorded during this period in the Art Secretary’s Out-Letters Book. Among them is a letter that Scharf wrote to the metalworker J. R. Pinches on 9 January with regard to an allegorical design for an official medallion commemorative of the Art Treasures Exhibition. This was to show a female personification of Manchester sitting on a bale of cotton on one side, with a view of the exterior of the Art Treasures Palace on the other.48 Scharf submitted his detailed proposal for the composition, which

47 NPG7/3/1/12. In places I have relied on, but have also corrected, the transcription in Michie and Warhol, 2015, pp. 77-78. 48 MCL M6/2/6/1/174.

16 was largely adhered to, on the next day, 10 January.49 Scharf’s aunt received one of the medals struck as a birthday present from her nephew on 4 August.50

Among Scharf’s more pressing concerns over the Christmas/ New Year period was the need to anticipate the arrangement of the hang of the Gallery of Ancient Masters at Old Trafford. This was reliant on having fuller information on the dimensions of each picture solicited, and the amount of space that would be available to him. To this end, in a letter to Angela Burdett Coutts on 20 December, he mentions that a “model plan of the arrangement of pictures is now being prepared under my direction and it is most important that exact spaces be duly reserved for such chefs d’oeuvre as the committee hope under your favour to display”.51 For more on this model see the introduction to SSB 49. Scharf was especially anxious as to the dimensions of those items which he might be unable to examine before their arrival in Manchester in March/ April. Some of these, from collections in outlying areas of the country, had been secured on the basis of Waagen’s endorsement alone. For example, Scharf wrote to the Newcastle collector Matthew Anderson on 16 January:

I beg to inform you that our application was made on the recommendation of Dr Waagen after he had seen your pictures. We are not in possession of their size and can only specify them as the pictures you showed to him. I hope to be able to, on my way from Scotland, to visit Newcastle and would ask your leave to call and see the pictures in about a month’s time. If, however, the pictures can be sufficiently identified, the committee would be greatly obliged by a further reply to their application as they are already commencing difficult arrangements for wall space and the disposition of the pictures.52

As mentioned previously, Scharf was, however, forced to downscale his ambitious countrywide survey, and he would soon abandon these planned visits to Scotland and the North East. Amidst the constant correspondence with colleagues and lenders, only two further visits are recorded during this period in SSB 44. The first was to Samuel Barton of Broughton, near Manchester (pp. 130-132). The date of this visit is unrecorded, but from supportive sketches and notes compiled in the third of Scharf’s ‘long books’ it seems likely

49 MCL M6/2/6/1/182-183. See also the discussion in Pergam, 2011, pp. 5 & 11 n. 21. 50 According to an entry in Scharf’s aunt’s diary for this day - NPG7/3/7/4/1/6. 51 MCL M6/2/6/1/93. 52 MCL M6/2/6/1/199.

17 that it took place between the 6–13 January.53 Scharf then brought SSB 44 to a close with a series of drawings and some unusually detailed notes related to the collection of Sir Humphrey de Trafford (1808-1886) of Trafford Park, Manchester (pp.133-138), made on Tuesday 13 January. In June of the previous year, it was Sir Humphrey who had engineered the “liberal terms” by which Old Trafford Cricket Club surrendered their recently acquired lease of that portion of his land upon which the Art Treasures Pavilion was situated.54

53 LB III, pp. 42-45. On the Manchester Cricket Club’s lease see Hunt and Whitfield, 2007, p. 16. 54 Pergam, 2011, p. 82 n. 10.

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