“Great Collectors: Taste, Passion & Patronage”
Haughton International Lecture Series The British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH on Wednesday, 26th June & Thursday, 27th June 2019
We would like to thank B. Michael Andressen for his generous donation for this year's lecture programme in memory of his beloved partner for over 30 years Dr. Alfred Ziffer; author, formerly curator of the Bauml Collection, curator of several important exhibitions and editor of Keramos . He was a dedicated supporter of Haughton International Seminars.
‘A Most Formidable Assembly’: The Katz Collection of English Porcelain at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Thomas Michie, Stearns Senior Curator of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture, Museum of Fine Arts Boston
Between 1954 and 1988, Jessie and Sigmund Katz of Covington, Louisiana, donated first to the Rhode Island School of Design and subsequently to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, a vast collection of early English porcelain that is widely regarded as one the finest ever assembled. Despite the fame of the collection, little is known about the Katzes themselves, their criteria for collecting, or their connections to museums in Providence and Boston. This lecture presents the story of the Katzes and their goal, to form “the most formidable assembly of English porcelain dating 1745-55 extant.”
“This entire lofty endeavour…”: a princely Porcelain Cabinet in the Age of Reason
Sebastian Kuhn, Department Director, Bonhams European Ceramics
Karoline Luise, Margravine of the small principality of Baden-Durlach in southwestern Germany (1723-83), was one of the most cultured princesses and great collectors of her age. Her paintings cabinet and her interest in the natural sciences are well documented, but she also owned a very substantial and today little-known collection of Asian and European ceramics. This paper will discuss the scope of her ceramics collection - with a focus on European porcelain - including the integration of older collections received by inheritance, purchases made by the Margravine herself, and how fashion and the scientific approach of the Enlightenment influenced her perception of the material and the way she chose to display it.
Sixteenth-century Dukes and Duchesses of Urbino: From the credenza to the guardaroba
Professor Timothy Wilson, Honorary Curator, Department of Western Art, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
In the sixteenth century, potteries in the Duchy of Urbino produced some of the most sophisticated and virtuoso of all Renaissance maiolica. The Della Rovere Dukes actively supported the artistic pottery industry in towns of the duchy - Urbino, Castel Durante, Pesaro, and Gubbio - and on occasion used it for diplomatic gifts. Close looking at the evidence shows that the successive Duchesses were actively involved in generating and administering prestigious commissions.
Lady Charlotte's China Mania
Sally Kevill-Davies, MA, independent researcher, author and lecturer
Lady Charlotte Schreiber (1812-1895) came to London aged 21 and befriended Benjamin Disraeli. He introduced her to Sir John Guest, Master of the Dowlais Ironworks in Wales, known as ‘the greatest manufacturer in the world.’ In 1833 she married him and threw herself whole-heartedly into his industrial world. She translated The Mabinogion from Welsh into English, a publication which inspired her friend, Alfred Lord Tennyson, to write his Idylls of the King. She bore her husband 10 children. On Sir John’s death in 1852 she engaged Charles Schreiber as tutor for her children, fell in love and they were shortly married. Around 1867 their joint passion for collecting ceramics took hold. Self-taught, they travelled throughout Europe under highly unsatisfactory conditions, experiencing triumphs and disasters.
Their story was recorded minutely in her journals, and will resonate with every contemporary collector. Charles died in 1884 and their collection of English ceramics, which numbered 1,800 pieces, was given to the Victoria and Albert Museum. The speaker will also discuss some of the most exciting pieces in the collection as well as the background to her collecting.
Inspired by collecting: The Dr Ernst Schneider Collection of Meissen porcelain at Lustheim Castle
Dr. Katharina Hantschmann, Senior Curator, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich
The collector Dr. Ernst Schneider (1900 - 1977) was one of the leading industrialists of the young German Federal Republic. After World War II he moved from Saxony to Düsseldorf, where he was president of the Chamber of Commerce, highly respected by politicians and economists. On several occasions he mentioned that without collecting he would not have been so successful in his work and that he gathered his energy by studying and handling his porcelain. He was co-founder and treasurer of the Society of German Ceramic Friends and its well reputed journal “Keramos”.
In 1968 he donated the greatest part of his porcelain collection with more than 2000 pieces to the Bavarian State. His prerequisite for exhibiting the collection in a Baroque palace was fulfilled by placing the collection in Lustheim Castle which is situated outside Munich. The castle was built by the Bavarian Elector Max Emanuel between 1684 and 1689. This famous collection of early Meissen porcelain ranks second only to the Zwinger in Dresden.
The lecture will discuss highlights and some of the most interesting pieces of the collection, such as several of the most precious items painted with Chinese scenes by Johann Gregorius Höroldt, animal figures by the sculptor Johann Joachim Kaendler and the Indian centrepiece of Count Brühl.
Augustus the Strong (1670-1733) – a King’s passion for porcelain
Ruth Sonja Simonis, Research Associate, Porzellansammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
Augustus the Strong (1670-1733) had great things in mind when he purchased the “Dutch Palace” (later called the “Japanese Palace”) in Dresden in 1717. He aimed to create a “porcelain castle” in which every room was decorated with wares from East Asia and Meissen. Two time frames for the furnishing of the palace are very well documented: The acquisitions that were made around 1717 in Holland, as well as the additions which entered the collection between 1721-1727. The lecture takes a closer look at Augustus’ passion for East Asian porcelain and his special aims and interests regarding collecting objects from the Far East.
A Chosen Collection: Harry John Hyams, Connoisseur Collector and his remarkable collection at Ramsbury Manor
Paul Crane FSA, Ceramic Historian & Author
Harry John Hyams was one of the most enigmatic and energetic collectors of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Shrouded in secrecy his modus operandi was to collect the very best of many disciplines across the Art World that was to include one of the finest collections of Decorative Arts ever assembled. The collection is displayed within his Country Home at Ramsbury Manor, now administered through his beneficial gift by the Capricorn Foundation. The collection displayed at Ramsbury reveals insights into his own unique character and is a tribute to his astonishingly high calibre of knowledge and his indefatigable eye as a great Connoisseur Art Collector. The lecture will concentrate on his vast English and Continental Porcelain collections which he began to collect when he was in his early 20’s and finished the day before he died in December 2015.
Face to Face: The Lord Rothschild O.M. in conversation with Dame Rosalind Savill
Professor Dame Rosalind Savill DBE, FBA, FSA and The Lord Rothschild O.M.
For thirty years Jacob Rothschild has devoted his superlative eye, and his passion for artistic change and challenge, to enhancing his family estate of Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire. His discernment in acquiring and commissioning historic and contemporary works of art, from tiny Sèvres porcelain figures to startling new buildings, is inspirational. This conversation will explore his extraordinary collections, and how they have brought a new magic and vibrancy to this fairy-tale palace, and confirmed him as the veritable wizard of Waddesdon.
William Beckford, patron of Goldsmiths
Timothy Schroder, curator, lecturer and writer
William Beckford of Fonthill Abbey (1760-1844) was one of the greatest art collectors of all time. He was also an obsessive collector of new silver and goldsmiths’ work. This was invariably of astonishingly high quality and often made to his own eccentric designs. Collectively, these works evoke the world of the princely patrons of the Renaissance and baroque. Not only that, but the lecture shows that Beckford’s fascinating silver is as much a window into his personality as Fonthill Abbey itself. But the silver survives; the abbey does not.
Fabergé: from the Romanovs to Royalty. Assembling the British Royal Collection of a Russian Master Goldsmith
Caroline de Guitaut, Senior Curator of Decorative Art at Royal Collection Trust
The British Royal Collection contains the pre-eminent group of works by the Russian goldsmith and jeweller Peter Carl Fabergé (1846-1920). Collected over five generations from Queen Victoria to Her Majesty The Queen, through gift, purchase and commission the collection documents the diverse range of works created by the Fabergé firm. This lecture reveals the shared patronage of the last two Emperors of Russia with their British relations and the individual taste of successive royal collectors.
Countess Wilhelmina von Hallwyl and her Chinese Treasures
Rose Kerr, Honorary Associate of the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge
The little-known Hallwyl collection is housed in a Swedish National Museum in Stockholm, and comprises a cornucopia of paintings, furniture, silver and ceramics. Among the ceramics are more than 1,000 Chinese and Japanese pieces, collected between 1879 and 1930 by a discerning and wealthy woman. Countess Wilhelmina von Hallwyl patronised the auction houses and dealers of Europe and became a member of the “Karlbeck syndicate”. In the 1920s, this pan-European group of collectors engaged Swedish engineer Orvar Karlbeck to purchase objects in China. Thus the Hallwyl Collection encompasses both fine porcelain from old European collections, and archaeological ceramics from China.
Porcelain, Politics and Prestige in the 18th Century: Three Russian Empresses - Anna, Elizabeth and Catherine the Great
Lydia Liackhova, Senior Research Curator in the Department of Western European Decorative Art at the State Hermitage Museum
It was only relatively late, early in the eighteenth century, that Russia began to look upon itself as a European state. Collecting works of art became one means of asserting an understanding of the Western mindset and porcelain was to occupy a special place in the collecting sphere, serving as an indicator of the Russian elite's European preferences. For Russia the eighteenth century was the age of female rule: Anna, Elizabeth and Catherine held the throne for most of the period between 1730 and 1796. Each saw porcelain in her own way. For Anna it was a symbol of her attachment to European aesthetic ideals (and of course of her own prestige), and the empress thus prioritised the demonstration of elegant pieces in her state rooms. Under Elizabeth porcelain appeared on the table: as the daughter of Peter I she made a conscious and purposeful attempt to change the archaic nature of the norms of Russian life. Catherine II perceived the receipt of gifts of porcelain, and the commissioning of it, as a form of 'fragile diplomacy', one which she put to good use for her own political purposes. It was under Catherine that porcelain became the object of deliberate collecting and that the core of the imperial collections took shape.
“May be a little too enthusiastic about pictures”: Henry Clay Frick as a Collector
Ian Wardropper, Director and CEO of The Frick Collection
An 1870 Mellon Bank report on Henry Clay Frick’s coking operation in Connelsville, Pennsylvania described him as “may be a little too enthusiastic about pictures, but not enough to hurt.” By the time his Manhattan mansion opened in 1914 this early enthusiasm became a disciplined passion, as he assembled one of the finest collections of Old Master paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts in the world. This lecture traces his trajectory as a collector and the legacy of the institution he established.
Sir Richard Wallace: The Collector
Dr Xavier Bray, Director of the Wallace Collection
One of my first endeavours as Director was to find out as much as possible about Sir Richard Wallace. Who was this British born and French educated man, said to be the illegitimate son of 4th Marquess of Hertford? What was his role in the formation of the collection and why is The Wallace Collection named after him and not after the 4th Marquess of Hertford? In this lecture I will set out to reveal what I have since discovered and why he has informed many of my ambitions for the future of The Wallace Collection.