James Stourton is not only a successful auctioneer and chairman of Sotheby’s but also an accomplished writer, the author of the delightful Art Collectors of Our Time (2007). He has now produced a book about how the English, and subsequently the British, set about acquiring and presenting works of art. He has been helped by Charles Sebag-Montefiore, another successful businessman, who has assembled a magnificent art library on which the research for this volume has been based. It is a hefty tome which has the merit of showing, in most cases, what these private collections looked like in their original shape before their dispersal among public national or American collections.
This is as it should be, for architecture is the basis of all English collecting. English aristocrats and plutocrats built magnificent houses either for their own sake or to display their works of art, and sometimes they deliberately formed collections to fill their houses. The book begins with Henry VIII, the greediest and richest of the Tudors, who combined acquisitiveness with a flexible conscience, seizing Wolsey’s vast Hampton Court and expanding it, and turning Whitehall into the largest palace in Europe. His taste was dubious. His contemporary and rival François I noted: ‘He likes everything to be heavily gilded.’ But Henry had the sense at least to employ Holbein, the finest portrait painter of his day.
And what the English really like, as this book points out, are portraits — above all by van Dyck — as well as landscapes — especially by Claude and Canaletto.
English collections amassed these three artists in prodigious quantities, and built rooms for them — like the Earl of Pembroke’s Double Cube Room, or the Landscape Room at Holkham Hall, or the Duke of Bedford’s Canaletto Room at Woburn Abbey.
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