Regency Collectors

 

 

Peter Humfrey

Regency Collectors

Ad Ilissum/ Paul Holberton, 2025

pp232, 145 bw & col, £40 ISBN 9781915401175

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Caroline Dakers

 

 

 

 

In Regency Collectors, Peter Humfrey has brought together seven previously published essays to form a scholarly, beautifully illustrated publication. Each essay has the addition of an appendix listing the paintings acquired by the collectors under scrutiny. With financial support from the Marc Fitch Fund, the Colnaghi Foundation, the Orbis Pictus Foundation and the Mathiesen Foundation we can enjoy some of these paintings, in full colour and generously sized. It is difficult for authors to afford the fees demanded by many public and private collections; the donors are to be congratulated.

The seven collectors are a mixed bunch: four aristocrats, one of whom is a woman, a merchant, a poet and a banker (the merchant and the poet also derived part of their wealth from banking). Of these, three showed off their collections in their London houses. The 2nd Earl Grosvenor (1767–1845) extended Grosvenor House on Park Lane twice, first with a picture gallery designed by William Porden, then the ‘Rubens Room’ designed by Thomas Cundy the Younger. Amabel, Countess de Grey (1751–1833), and the poet Samuel Rogers (1763–1855) made do hanging their considerable collections throughout their houses in St James’s Square and St James’s Place, Mayfair. Philip John Miles (1774–1845) and Peter Leopold, 5th Earl Cowper (1778–1837) commissioned brand-new country houses with picture galleries. John, 4th Earl Darnley (1767–1831) and Sir Richard Colt Hoare, Bart (1758–1838), extended their country houses at Cobham Hall near Rochester and at Stourhead in Wiltshire. All were chiefly interested in Old Masters, primarily Italian and French, rather than the Dutch painters preferred by the Prince Regent. Although Humfrey’s focus is on acquisition and display, some biographical details emerge in the essays.

Charles Leslie’s delightful painting of the musical soirée enjoyed by three generations of Grosvenors in the picture gallery at Grosvenor House provides a striking front cover. The painting presents a powerful and wealthy dynasty. It celebrates the elevation of the Earl in 1831 to 1st Marquess of Westminster and includes both his eldest son, Richard, who became the 2nd Marquess,and his grandson Hugh Lupus, created 1st Duke of Westminster in 1874. Of the seven case studies, only the Grosvenor descendants still own the bulk of their ‘Regency’ collection, including much of the ready-made collection of Welbore Ellis Agar which Earl Grosvenor bought in 1805 for an astonishing 30,000 guineas.

Amabel, Countess de Grey, was widowed after only nine years of marriage to Lord Polwarth, left childless but free for another 50 years to pursue many intellectual interests including writing two books on revolutionary France, published anonymously, and studying landscape drawing and etching with Alexander Cozens and James Bretherton. She was frustrated at her exclusion from national politics and described beating her wings ‘against the wires of my large gilded cage in St James’s Square’. Diagrams from about 1820 record the room-by-room and wall-by-wall hang in her house, and her diary of 37 volumes provides information about her acquisitions. She is surely worthy of a longer biography; her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography makes no mention of her collecting.

Samuel Rogers’s wealth derived from the family bank in which he served a brief apprenticeship. Fortunately for him his younger brother Henry proved a competent head of the bank, allowing Rogers to pursue a bachelor life as poet, collector, antiquarian and socialite. His ‘breakfasts’ in 22 St James’s Place were legendary. Humfrey is particularly interesting in introducing the similar collections formed by Henry Rogers and their sister Sarah, who held her own breakfast parties at her house in Hanover Terrace, Regent’s Park. She is another woman collector worth further research.

The 4th Earl of Darnley engaged James Wyatt to adapt the Long Gallery of his Elizabeth mansion at Cobham as a modern Picture Gallery. Humfrey notes the Earl’s taste for violent, even gruesome, subjects from Roman history coupled with the acquisition of large paintings ‘with conspicuous displays of naked female flesh’. By the time Henry Cole visited, the 4th Earl was dead and his daughter-in-law had moved the most sensual paintings to a room that was not open to the public. Scenes of violence and cruelty, however, were still on display in the Gallery.

Sir Richard Colt Hoare is notable for his patronage of Turner, who was able to study the Italianate Old Masters at Stourhead while working on 17 views of Salisbury. Indeed, Hoare was keen to support living British artists, many of whom produced the sentimental paintings he collected alongside what he referred to as ‘ancient Art’. Abraham Cooper’s charming painting of Scrub, an old shooting pony, is an example.

Philip Miles’s fortune was based on his owning more than 2000 enslaved men, women and children on his West Indian estates (his commercial interests in Bristol included the refinement of sugar). He also married the daughter of another slave-owning and banking family in Bristol. To establish his credentials as a landed gentleman, in 1814 he commissioned a country house from Thomas Hopper. In 1816, before Leigh Court was even complete, he acquired paintings to hang in the six reception rooms of Leigh Court. As Humfrey explains, ‘once the rooms were furnished, Miles showed no further interest in buying pictures’. Among his Old Masters were the two famous ‘Altieri’ Claudes which had belonged to another slaver, William Beckford. The entire collection was dispersed by Miles’s descendants by the end of the 19th century.

The 5th Earl Cowper is distinguished by Humfrey not for his collecting but as the ‘organizer of his inherited collections’ to be displayed at Panshanger in Hertfordshire, his brand-new country house designed in the Tudor-Gothic style by Samuel Wyatt and completed by William Atkinson. Regarded by his contemporaries as dull, he was content to allow his young flirtatious wife to shine at the receptions and balls she held at Panshanger against the backdrop of his picture collection.

This is essentially a book for museum curators and dealers. The paintings – their attributions, their provenance – are at the centre. Humfrey makes use of contemporary plans of displays and catalogues to explain how collections were hung, the use of hinges and chains and the colour of walls. Earl Grosvenor, for example, preferred red walls at Grosvenor House, broken up by paintings and their gilded frames, ‘a mass of damask, velvet, gilding, statues and pictures and magnificence of all sorts’.

There is no conclusion but the transitory nature of all the collections shines through. Collections are created, then dispersed to form new collections. Houses are extended, grand picture galleries are added, but the houses are later reduced in size or demolished.

Samuel Rogers’s London house was bombed but Amabel de Grey’s house survives as the home of the In and Out (Naval and Military Club). Grosvenor House was demolished in 1927 and Panshanger in 1953. Cobham Hall is a day and boarding school and Leigh Park a wedding venue and film location. Stourhead is the exception as it still contains many paintings collected by the Hoares, and as it is owned by the National Trust it is open to the public.

. Each essay has the addition of an appendix listing the paintings acquired by the collectors under scrutiny. With financial support from the Marc Fitch Fund, the Colnaghi Foundation, the Orbis Pictus Foundation and the Mathiesen Foundation we can enjoy some of these paintings, in full colour and generously sized. It is difficult for authors to afford the fees demanded by many public and private collections; the donors are to be congratulated.

The seven collectors are a mixed bunch: four aristocrats, one of whom is a woman, a merchant, a poet and a banker (the merchant and the poet also derived part of their wealth from banking). Of these, three showed off their collections in their London houses. The 2nd Earl Grosvenor (1767–1845) extended Grosvenor House on Park Lane twice, first with a picture gallery designed by William Porden, then the ‘Rubens Room’ designed by Thomas Cundy the Younger. Amabel, Countess de Grey (1751–1833), and the poet Samuel Rogers (1763–1855) made do hanging their considerable collections throughout their houses in St James’s Square and St James’s Place, Mayfair. Philip John Miles (1774–1845) and Peter Leopold, 5th Earl Cowper (1778–1837) commissioned brand-new country houses with picture galleries. John, 4th Earl Darnley (1767–1831) and Sir Richard Colt Hoare, Bart (1758–1838), extended their country houses at Cobham Hall near Rochester and at Stourhead in Wiltshire. All were chiefly interested in Old Masters, primarily Italian and French, rather than the Dutch painters preferred by the Prince Regent. Although Humfrey’s focus is on acquisition and display, some biographical details emerge in the essays.

Charles Leslie’s delightful painting of the musical soirée enjoyed by three generations of Grosvenors in the picture gallery at Grosvenor House provides a striking front cover. The painting presents a powerful and wealthy dynasty. It celebrates the elevation of the Earl in 1831 to 1st Marquess of Westminster and includes both his eldest son, Richard, who became the 2nd Marquess,and his grandson Hugh Lupus, created 1st Duke of Westminster in 1874. Of the seven case studies, only the Grosvenor descendants still own the bulk of their ‘Regency’ collection, including much of the ready-made collection of Welbore Ellis Agar which Earl Grosvenor bought in 1805 for an astonishing 30,000 guineas.

Amabel, Countess de Grey, was widowed after only nine years of marriage to Lord Polwarth, left childless but free for another 50 years to pursue many intellectual interests including writing two books on revolutionary France, published anonymously, and studying landscape drawing and etching with Alexander Cozens and James Bretherton. She was frustrated at her exclusion from national politics and described beating her wings ‘against the wires of my large gilded cage in St James’s Square’. Diagrams from about 1820 record the room-by-room and wall-by-wall hang in her house, and her diary of 37 volumes provides information about her acquisitions. She is surely worthy of a longer biography; her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography makes no mention of her collecting.

Samuel Rogers’s wealth derived from the family bank in which he served a brief apprenticeship. Fortunately for him his younger brother Henry proved a competent head of the bank, allowing Rogers to pursue a bachelor life as poet, collector, antiquarian and socialite. His ‘breakfasts’ in 22 St James’s Place were legendary. Humfrey is particularly interesting in introducing the similar collections formed by Henry Rogers and their sister Sarah, who held her own breakfast parties at her house in Hanover Terrace, Regent’s Park. She is another woman collector worth further research.

The 4th Earl of Darnley engaged James Wyatt to adapt the Long Gallery of his Elizabeth mansion at Cobham as a modern Picture Gallery. Humfrey notes the Earl’s taste for violent, even gruesome, subjects from Roman history coupled with the acquisition of large paintings ‘with conspicuous displays of naked female flesh’. By the time Henry Cole visited, the 4th Earl was dead and his daughter-in-law had moved the most sensual paintings to a room that was not open to the public. Scenes of violence and cruelty, however, were still on display in the Gallery.

Sir Richard Colt Hoare is notable for his patronage of Turner, who was able to study the Italianate Old Masters at Stourhead while working on 17 views of Salisbury. Indeed, Hoare was keen to support living British artists, many of whom produced the sentimental paintings he collected alongside what he referred to as ‘ancient Art’. Abraham Cooper’s charming painting of Scrub, an old shooting pony, is an example.

Philip Miles’s fortune was based on his owning more than 2000 enslaved men, women and children on his West Indian estates (his commercial interests in Bristol included the refinement of sugar). He also married the daughter of another slave-owning and banking family in Bristol. To establish his credentials as a landed gentleman, in 1814 he commissioned a country house from Thomas Hopper. In 1816, before Leigh Court was even complete, he acquired paintings to hang in the six reception rooms of Leigh Court. As Humfrey explains, ‘once the rooms were furnished, Miles showed no further interest in buying pictures’. Among his Old Masters were the two famous ‘Altieri’ Claudes which had belonged to another slaver, William Beckford. The entire collection was dispersed by Miles’s descendants by the end of the 19th century.

The 5th Earl Cowper is distinguished by Humfrey not for his collecting but as the ‘organizer of his inherited collections’ to be displayed at Panshanger in Hertfordshire, his brand-new country house designed in the Tudor-Gothic style by Samuel Wyatt and completed by William Atkinson. Regarded by his contemporaries as dull, he was content to allow his young flirtatious wife to shine at the receptions and balls she held at Panshanger against the backdrop of his picture collection.

This is essentially a book for museum curators and dealers. The paintings – their attributions, their provenance – are at the centre. Humfrey makes use of contemporary plans of displays and catalogues to explain how collections were hung, the use of hinges and chains and the colour of walls. Earl Grosvenor, for example, preferred red walls at Grosvenor House, broken up by paintings and their gilded frames, ‘a mass of damask, velvet, gilding, statues and pictures and magnificence of all sorts’.

There is no conclusion but the transitory nature of all the collections shines through. Collections are created, then dispersed to form new collections. Houses are extended, grand picture galleries are added, but the houses are later reduced in size or demolished.

Samuel Rogers’s London house was bombed but Amabel de Grey’s house survives as the home of the In and Out (Naval and Military Club). Grosvenor House was demolished in 1927 and Panshanger in 1953. Cobham Hall is a day and boarding school and Leigh Park a wedding venue and film location. Stourhead is the exception as it still contains many paintings collected by the Hoares, and as it is owned by the National Trust it is open to the public.