The Sir George Scharf Sketchbooks 2
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The Sir George Scharf Sketchbooks 2. Introduction to SSB 43 (14 June–20 October 1856) by Philip Cottrell, University College Dublin NB. All page references are to SSB 43 and catalogue numbers refer to items from the Art Treasures Exhibition’s Gallery of Ancient Masters unless otherwise specified. Scharf Sketchbook 43 covers the period from mid-June to late October 1856. Around forty Art Treasures items are represented, in addition to dozens of other miscellaneous works of art. As with most of the sketchbooks, Scharf assembled its content in a reasonably regular and chronological manner, although some pages have been removed, a couple have been left blank (pp. 134-135), and there are a few gaps in its compilation. These include an unusually long seven-week hiatus which lasted from early August to the end of September which coincided with a convulsive turn of events in Scharf’s personal and professional life. Not least of these was his appointment, at the age of thirty-five, as Art Secretary to the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition on 8 August. The first two thirds of SSB 43, up to page 86, predate this crucial moment, and are largely devoted to a visit to Cambridge between Saturday 28 June and Wednesday 2 July followed by a two-week tour of Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders which began on 21 July.1 The sketchbook then picks up again in late September, at which point Scharf’s new duties had entailed his removal from London to lodgings in Manchester, and thus began the first of Scharf’s several lengthy stints in the city, often of several weeks’ duration. His countrywide survey of around hundred-and-fifty prominent art collections began on Monday 29 September. Curiously, however, his very first lender visit, to George Warren, 2nd Lord de Tabley, of Tabley Hall, Cheshire, is not recorded in SSB 43. Warren was already an avid supporter of the exhibition and perhaps his loans were a settled matter. Instead, the sketchbook’s record of Scharf’s survey commences later that day with his second appointment, involving pictures belonging to James Hugh Smith Barry at Marbury Hall, near Northwich. Six more visits are recorded before SSB 43 draws to a close on 20 October. 1 Among the entries in Scharf’s diary for the intervening period is one for the 14 June which has the note, “Dined at ‘our club’…I tasted Strychnine” - NPG7/3/1/12. 1 The following review of SSB 43 places its content within the context of events in Scharf’s professional and private life. It is also helpful to summarise the state of Scharf’s career during the first half of 1856, the period leading up to the point at which SSB 43 begins. This acts as a guide to the varied range of Scharf’s activities and institutional and professional affiliations prior to his appointment as Art Secretary to the Art Treasures Exhibition. 2.i. The state of Scharf’s career in the first half of 1856 Scharf had a busy start to the year, preparing and delivering a course of twenty fine art lectures at the ‘studio’ he kept in his family home at Torrington Square, Bloomsbury. He lived here with his father, the German émigré printmaker George Johann Scharf (1788- 1860), mother, Elizabeth (1785-1869), and spinster aunt (his mother’s sister), Mary Hicks; 1774-1864) (Scharf’s younger brother, Henry, had emigrated to America by 1853 where he pursued a struggling career as an actor).2 In his journal, Scharf’s father records that the lectures were delivered “to ladies only, three times a week from 7th February to Thursday 20th March”, and supplied further details of a curriculum that reveals the impressive range of his son’s expertise: “ancient art and its monuments: sculpture, painting, architecture, coins, vases and palaeography, anatomy, drapery and the art of design, from the earliest period to the 17thc…it is to be regretted that they were not well attended.”3 Despite this, Scharf was much occupied with two other far more successful projects. By coincidence, these debuted in London on the same day, Monday 28 April. The first concerned the start of the eighteen-day sale of the extensive art collection of the late poet and connoisseur, Samuel Rogers (1763-1855), at Christie’s, for which Scharf had arranged the catalogue. The second involved the opening night of Charles Kean’s (1811-1868) elaborately-staged production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale at the Princess’s Theatre, Oxford Street. Scharf had assisted Kean in the design of sets and costumes which sought to render the play’s classical setting with unprecedented, archaeological accuracy. The staging included a painstaking recreation of the Temple of Minerva at Syracuse, and in this and other aspects of the production Scharf’s background in illustrating and recording ancient monuments proved invaluable. His involvement with the costumes even drew the attention 2 Henry Scharf (1822-1887). 3 NPG7/3/7/2/1/14 - 7 February 1856. 2 of the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt (1827-1910) who corresponded with Scharf on the subject that autumn.4 The production was an enormous success (featuring also the debut of the juvenile Ellen Terry), and this time Scharf’s father was able to gush that, “the play had more than a hundred nights run, and deserved it, being splendidly got up, such as I never saw, although I saw some of the finest plays ever acted, in Munich, Paris and London”.5 The production’s donnish purism was, however, memorably lampooned by Punch on 10 May: Mr Punch has it upon authority to state that the Bear at present running in Oxford Street in the Winter’s Tale is an archaeological copy from the original bear of Noah's Ark. Anything more modern would have been at variance with the ancient traditions reproduced in the drama.6 Notwithstanding the meagre attendance at his Torrington Square classes, Scharf found himself in increasing demand as a lecturer in fine art and art history. From 20 May, he began teaching a course of weekly Saturday lectures at Queen’s College London, and these would be repeated the following year (see the introduction to SSB 46). In addition to giving lectures in Leeds and Oxford, he was also invited to speak at the Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (later the Royal Archaeological Institute), of which he was an active and prominent member, on 12 May.7 The Institute helped to subsidise his fortnight-long excursion to Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders between 21 July and 6 August (see below). 2.ii. June-August 1856: tours of Cambridge and Scotland The first seventeen pages of SSB 43 contain notes and sketches largely relevant to Scharf’s visit to Cambridge between Saturday 28 June and Wednesday 2 July 1856. The material here records Scharf’s responses to the stained-glass window at King’s College (pp. 1-5), the Pashley Sarcophagus at the Fitzwilliam Museum (p. 9), and a scholarly publication he consulted on Roman church mosaics (pp. 6-11 & 16-17) in one of the city’s academic libraries.8 Overlapping this material, between pages 12-15 and 18-85, is a lengthier 4 See, for example, the letters from Holman Hunt on 22 November and 2 December 1856 - NPG 7/2/2/1. 5 NPG7/3/7/2/1/14 - general notes relevant to May 1856. 6 Punch, vol. 130, 10 May 1856, p. 90. See also Cottrell, 2021, pp. 79-80. 7 NPG7/3/7/4/1/1 - 12 May 1856. On the range of Scharf’s activities during this period see also the end-of-year summary he wrote at the conclusion of his 1856 appointments diary – discussed in the introduction to SSB 44. 8 Probably Giovanni Giustino Ciampini, Vetera Monimenta, 2 vols., Rome, 1690 – 1699. The exact dates of the trip to Cambridge can be ascertained with recourse to various entries in the diary of Scharf’s aunt - 3 sequence of sketches arising from a two-week tour of Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders which began in late July (but see also pp. 136-137 for preliminary notes on works in Scottish collections compiled on 14 June). This trip was in connection with his membership of the Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Their annual meeting was held in Edinburgh on Tuesday 22 July, and in order to attend it Scharf caught the 8.45pm night train from London on the previous evening.9 He then settled into digs at 118 Princes Street (now a branch of the building society HSBC) which had “a fine view of [Edinburgh Castle] from his window”.10 Sketches in SSB 43 made on 1 and 5 August also attest to its grandstanding location (pp. 64-75). Further drawings reveal that Scharf abandoned the city for extended excursions to Abbotsford, the former home of Sir Walter Scott, Dryburgh and Melrose Abbey on 24 July (pp. 18-25), and to Roslin and the surrounding area between 26-28 July (pp. 26-27 & 30-33). He then returned to Edinburgh where he made memorable studies of Holyrood Palace on 29-30 July (pp. 36-43), George Herriot’s Hospital (pp. 44-51) and the area around Edinburgh Castle on 30 July (pp. 50-59), among other city-centre locales. He also sketched details of various objets d’art in Edinburgh collections, and kept a customary eye out for any curiosities among the apparatus of mid-nineteenth-century urban life – see, for example, his drawing of an external first-floor “hanging cupboard” – presumably a sort of primitive cool box - that he observed from the window of his lodgings on 29 July (p.