Caroline Dakers, ed, Millionaire Shopping. The Collections of Alfred Morrison, 1821–1897
UCL Press, London 2025, pp 589, ill 190, open access pdf. Purchase pb £60hb, hb, £80
DOI https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800089013 PDF ISBN 9781800089013
EPUB ISBN 9781800089020 pb ISBN 9781800089006 hb ISBN 9781800088993
Thomas Tuohy
James Morrison (1789–1857), a self-made man, was considered the richest commoner in Britain when he died. He has been of interest to art historians primarily because of his picture collection, which was formed with the advice of the influential Scottish dealer William Buchanan and was described three times in the 1850s in Gustave Waagen’s Art Treasures of Art in Great Britain. In Caroline Dakers’ A Genius for Money: Business, Art and the Morrisons, published in 2011, other aspects of his life and patronage were revealed in some detail. The final chapter was dedicated to Alfred Morrison (1821–1897) ‘Victorian Maecenas’, and this new book, edited by Dakers, deals with unfinished business from the earlier book.
Dakers is a cultural historian and here, apart from the Introduction and a chapter describing the dispersal of the collections, contributions are made by a group of 16 specialists, mostly art historians. The rather frivolous title Millionaire Shopping is a little misleading, in that it tends to devalue the achievement of someone who demands to be taken seriously in the history of collecting. Alfred Morrison amassed and catalogued, for one thing, quantities of prints and autograph letters of major significance, but he was also an important patron of living artists and craftsmen. Most of the essays provide new information which, collectively, confirm the stature of this largely unknown collector. This ample coverage is also complemented by plenty of illustrations, many of them in colour.
James Morrison invested in properties that passed to his offspring. In 1830 he bought Fonthill Park, over 1000 acres and including The Pavilion, the surviving wing of Alderman Beckford’s Palladian Fonthill Splendens (William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey, the tower of which collapsed in 1825 ,was part of the estate and belonged to Richard Grosvenor, Marquess of Westminster). Basildon Park, near Reading, was acquired in 1838, a fine Palladian house built around 1780 by Carr of York but with unfinished interiors, which were decorated by John Buonarotti Papworth, Morrison’s favoured architect for many years.
Morrison’s picture collection was largely divided between Basildon and 57 Upper Harley Street in London. In 1852 Morrison bought the Malham estate of 10,400 acres in Yorkshire from Lord Ribblesdale, and in 1853 the Hebridean island of Islay. Morrison’s eldest son, Charles Morrison (1817–1909), a reclusive bachelor who made an even larger fortune than his father, inherited Basildon and Islay. Walter Morrison (1836–1921), another bachelor, inherited Malham. He was MP for Skipton and funded the Palestine Exploration Fund which produced Ordnance Survey maps of the Holy Land. James Morrison’s second son Alfred (1821–1897) inherited Fonthill. He was not inclined to business and was too shy to be a politician, but he spent a lot of his considerable income on amassing a variety of collections, not exclusively artistic. His son Hugh (1868–1931) inherited Fonthill and Islay, and his son, John Granville Morrison, was created Baron Margadale of Islay in 1965. Alfred’s second son Archie (1873–1934) inherited Malham and Basildon with contents, which passed to his daughter Mary, who married Major John Dent Brocklehurst of Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire, where some pictures remain, although the best, including Poussin’s Triumph of Pan (National Gallery) have been sold. Alastair Morrison, since 2003, 3rd Baron Margadale, grandson of Hugh Morrison, now has Islay as well as Fonthill and has given access to the Morrison Fonthill archives which have been used extensively in both of these books. Dakers’s book of 2011 has a family tree, but this only goes as far as James Morrison’s grandchildren. An up-to-date family tree would have been a useful addition to this new book, which also lacks a general bibliography.
James Morrison had 11 children, but only three of them had issue. Alfred Morrison was an addictive and inclusive collector with an interest in interior decoration, and Dakers suggests that he married a young wife in order to provide heirs to the family fortune. There is something of Whistler’s Mother in the introverted portrait painted by Ignacio Zuloaga, on the book cover. Alfred studied at the university in Edinburgh, where he admired David Wilkie’s Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch (Apsley House), and he had a year at Trinity College, Cambridge. He grew up with his father’s collection of paintings, at Fonthill and London (Susanna Avery-Quash sets the context), but developed no serious interest in Old Master paintings himself. Emily Burns writes about his modest selection. There were three paintings from Milan of about 1500, probably reflecting Alfred’s interest in Leonardo, but his only acquisition of consequence was Bronzino’s Cosimo de’ Medici (Sydney) bought on account of the subject. Alfred bought numerous images of famous historical figures, mostly as prints and coins, and he had two Houdon busts of Voltaire. He lived in North America 1842–45,where, working with the Morrison bank in New York, he realised that life in a counting house was not for him. His brother Charles who was also there concurred. Alfred spent some months in Italy in 1847–8, when the sculptor William Theed was carving marble busts of Alfred and his father in Rome.
The Fonthill estate was transferred to Alfred in 1850, and he was well suited to life as an agriculturalist and sportsman. Alfred was a good landlord, with an interest in the wellbeing of the tenantry, animal husbandry and shooting. He commissioned George Devey, a pioneer architect of the vernacular revival, for work on estate buildings at Fonthill. He bred Hampshire Down sheep and formed a collection of animal paintings, with works by Henry William Banks Davis (1833–1914) including The Panic, an enormous stampede of cattle, now in Beverley Art Gallery in the East Riding, and paintings of his horses by George Bouverie Goddard (1832–86). It should not be forgotten that the Scottish portraitist and animal painter Francis Grant (1803–1878) was elected President of the Royal Academy after the most famous animal painter Edwin Landseer declined the position in 1866, and Alison E Wright’s essay Stampeding Cattle provides a sympathetic appraisal of this currently unfashionable genre. Alfred’s taste for animals is also reflected in his sculptures – he had six sculptures by the greatest French animalier, Antoine-Louis Barye, that included the large bronze Theseus and the Centaur which was positioned on the lawn outside Fonthill. The bronze Trotting Bull by Davis had a prominent position in his London house. An essay by Alexander Kader provides a reconstruction of Alfred’s sculpture collection.
Alfred really only came into his own after the death of his father in 1857. By the 1870s his annual income was around £120,000, and between 1860 and 1870 he laid the foundations of several sizeable collections: engraved portraits, Chinese porcelain, autograph letters, coins and medals. He was a founder member of the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1866, and went on to lend to the club’s exhibitions. Having lived in St James’s for many years he decided on a grand town house 16 Carlton House Terrace (it is in the eastern section) built by Samuel Morton Peto and completed in 1864, with the exterior in the same style as John Nash’s earlier terrace circa 1830. Alfred had little interest in the exterior of buildings but he employed Owen Jones to work on interiors and furnishings. Jones is now best known for his book The Grammar of Ornament, as the three major interiors he created in central London had all been demolished by 1930. He was also known as ‘Alhambra’ Jones after another book he wrote. For Alfred he designed Moorish ceilings using exotic woods, and designed furniture and silk fabrics for the walls (Neil Burton writes about architecture). The company of Jackson and Graham executed his designs with exotic hardwoods, inlays and marquetry (described by Clive Edwards). From 1934 Crockfords club occupied the building and some of the original interiors survive.
On the staircase at Fonthill, Owen Jones adapted his bold chromatism to ‘the delicate tones of colour in the finest eggshell pottery’ – a reference to the collection plundered from the Summer Palace, built in a hybrid baroque style influenced by Jesuit missionaries, outside Peking. These had been removed and packaged with great care, as ‘restitution’ for the treatment dealt by the Chinese on Henry Brougham Loch, private secretary to Lord Elgin at the end of the Second Opium War in 1860. Alfred formed a large collection of 18th-century Chinese Imperial porcelain and cloisonné enamel objects from this source, supplemented by further acquisitions from the dealer Henry Durlacher (essays by Katrina Hill and Stacey Pierson). The mass effect of the collection is preserved in photographs of top-lit galleries from the late 1880s at Fonthill. From the London International Exhibition in 1862 onwards, Alfred bought and later lent and commissioned work from these displays of contemporary crafts. Martin P Levy writes about the significance of international exhibitions, and Dror Elkvity writes about the distinctive Spanish damascened work of Plácido Zuloaga (1834–1910).
Before Alfred married, he acquired in Paris enamels of naked women by Charles Lepec and became his principal patron – of more chaste items. The wife Alfred chose to marry in 1866 was 26 years younger than he. Mabel Chermside (1847–1933) was the daughter of the rector of Wilton, which is not far from Fonthill, the Revd Seymour Conway Chermside, who was named after the family names of the 4th Marquess of Hertford (1800–70), a friend of his father Sir Robert Chermside, physician to the British Embassy in Paris. Mabel spent part of her childhood in Paris and would have known of the famous Hertford art collection, which was in Paris until 1871 when it was brought to England by Lord Hertford’s heir, Richard Wallace, and is now in Manchester Square. Mabel bore five children and suffered from ill health as a result, but she lived a long life. She was a collector of antique lace, which formed part of the display at 16 Carlton House Terrace. She also encouraged lace-making in Ireland, principally at Youghal, Co Cork, and her life is described in some detail by Molly-Claire Gillet. Exotic textiles, framed or draped around paintings, formed part of the decorative effect of the Morrisons’ interiors.
Alfred published catalogues of two of his collections: prints and autograph letters. David Alexander details the formation of the prints, of which there were several thousand marked with his ‘AM’ collector’s mark. Many of the prints came through Holloway and Son, print-sellers in Covent Garden, who also catalogued the collection in 1868, and in 1872 some prints were displayed at the Guildhall Library, but Lugt thought the collector’s focus had turned to autograph and historical documents by 1878. Philip S Palmer and Daria Rose Foner describe their study as ‘the first attempt to account for the development, cataloguing, sale and dispersal of Morrison’s collection, one of the most significant groups of manuscripts ever formed’. A catalogue was prepared by a French dealer, Alphonse Thibadeau, who was Alfred’s principal agent. There was a group of letters relating to Fonthill, where Nelson and Sir William and Lady Hamilton had visited Beckford in 1800, bought by Alfred from the Hamilton Palace sale in 1882; and there was also a letter from Mary, Queen of Scots, written on the night before her execution (now National Library of Scotland). Another significant group, including autographs by Amerigo Vespucci, Leonardo da Vinci and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, is now at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. Alfred’s coins and medals are discussed by Richard Falkiner, who was in charge of numismatic sales at Christie’s in 1965 and 1967 when the first Lord Margadale sold them. Most of the items were Continental, but there was a Coronation medal of Edward VI of 1547, now in the Ashmolean.
Dakers refers to Alfred’s taste for paintings in the detailed Pre-Raphaelite mould by the likes of John Brett and John William Inchbold; and Nicholas Tromans writes on Richard Dadd – Alfred’s collection included two major works The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, given by Alfred’s daughter Katharine Morrison Gatty to Siegfried Sassoon, who was married to her daughter Hester Gatty. Sassoon gave it to the Tate. Contradiction, Oberon and Titania was acquired by Andrew Lloyd-Webber in 1992. Alfred’s acquisition of Summer Moon, a significant Leighton of 1872, which pre-figures the famous Flaming June of 1895, is a rare example of sensual beauty in this collection (the dimensions, described in this book as unknown, are 100.3 x 128.3 cm). It hung in the Library in the town house, where it was described by Mrs Haweis in Beautiful Houses 1882 as Leighton’s loveliest work and was greatly admired by Sickert when it was on loan to the Royal Jubilee Exhibition in Manchester in 1887. It was sold in 1920, when it was bought by the Maharaja of Nawanagar – the famous cricketer Ranjitsinhji – and is presumed still to be in India (Pl 1).
1 Summer Moon by Alfred, Lord Leighton (1830–1896), 1872. Oil on canvas, 100.3 x 128.3 cm. Whereabouts unknown
Alfred’s acquisitions sometimes suggest doubtful aesthetic judgement, and he was more interested in display, historical association and craftmanship. An article describing the town house in The Magazine of Art, in 1879 praised the ‘precision’ and ‘excruciation’ of the ’metalwork, glass works, pottery, pictures or woodwork’, but only mentions a single painting – by Richard Dadd. In her book Lares and Penates of 1881 Florence Caddy (who also mentions Leighton’s Summer Moon) has a chapter devoted to Alfred’s house, which is entitled ‘The Millionaire’s Town House’, and she refers to it as ‘the “Porphyry House” on Carlton House Terrace’, in reference to a pair of antique porphyry busts in the entrance hall, of Vitellius and Pompey, that had been in William Beckford’s collection. Like his father, who acquired a pietra dura table from that source, Alfred was attracted by items with Fonthill provenance, and in 1892 bought the ‘Rubens Vase’, which is an agate Byzantine vase named after one of its former owners that is now in Baltimore. Dakers also writes about the dispersal of the collections and there is an appendix listing the sales. Mabel moved out of the town house immediately upon her husband’s death, and sold the lease. To pay Estate Duty she began selling in 1898 and, at a time of exorbitant taxation, Lord Margadale sent many lots to auction in sales between 1965 and 1975. Many items from Morrison collections have appeared in the market over the years, and this book illuminates the context of their provenance.