Imagine a world that is very different from today.
A world where there are no public galleries
full of colourful paintings.
Where the Old Masters like Leonardo da Vinci
and Michelangelo are hardly known.
Where art is considered purely decorative,
and the artist a mere craftsman.
It's astonishing, yet this was Britain 400 years ago.
Since then, great works of art have flooded onto British shores
and our appreciation of art and artists has been transformed.
This is the story of the private collectors
who brought a wealth of treasures from overseas,
whose patronage encouraged British-born artists,
and whose personal passion for art and individual taste
helped create this cultural revolution
and shaped the artistic direction of our nation.
In this programme, I'm going to look at how the role of collectors
changed radically throughout the 19th century,
kick-started by events that happened not in England
but across the Channel in revolutionary France.
Revolution and war always unlocks collections.
The market becomes very fluid.
How Britain's first canal-builder the Duke of Bridgewater,
turned from inland navigation to speculation in the art market,
landing one of the greatest hauls of paintings ever on British shores.
How, as Britain embraced democracy, collectors began to donate art
on an unprecedented scale to build our national collection.
They are hoping like crazy that all these patriotic fellow-countrymen
will bequeath or give paintings, and that's exactly what happened.
And how we moved into an era of eclecticism and variety
as newly-moneyed industrialists and bankers expressed their powerful
personalities and individuality in their bold purchases.
With pharmaceuticals magnate Thomas Holloway backing
what he considered the best of British,
while two Welsh heiresses brought Impressionism to Britain.
As collectors at the time they were revolutionary.
And extraordinary that it was two women who did this.
GUNFIRE/PEOPLE SHOUTING
1789 - the French Revolution was in full swing.
Aristocratic lives were in peril,
so too were their magnificent art collections.
Including that of the Duke of Orleans.
His art collection was virtually unrivalled in the whole of Europe
and had been the envy of connoisseurs around the world.
It boasted Raphaels...
..Tintorettos...
..Titians...
..paintings by all the great Old Masters.
These tumultuous times would cost the Duke his head...
..and the collection its home.
Old Masters like these had been the most coveted prizes
sought after by the English collectors for the past 200 years.
Now, this amazing cachet of paintings
would go to the highest bidder,
and a group of British aristocrats conceived an ingenious plan
of forming a syndicate to be sure of outbidding their rivals.
These canny Lords were the Duke of Bridgewater,
the Earl Gower and the Earl of Carlisle.
For the three men, the sale of the Orleans collection
was a chance to purchase the greatest single group
of masterpieces to come on the market for 200 years.
With much of the rest of Europe in tatters after years of war
and revolution, Britain was by contrast well-placed
to become the home for this collection.
The British were rich,
and British aristocrats had a huge appetite for art.
This is Castle Howard in Yorkshire
and was home to the fifth Earl of Carlisle,
one of the partners in the syndicate.
Carlisle and Gower were both already enthusiastic collectors.
Carlisle had been on a grand tour.
He took his dog with him
and came back with a fine collection of Italian art.
Gower had served as ambassador in Paris
and so would have been well aware of the Orleans collection.
Bridgewater's enormous wealth came from his development
of a canal system, and he was by all accounts less erudite.
On his grand tour, it was said he was more interested
in the Languedoc Canal in France than in the art on display.
Nevertheless, he could spot the opportunity to turn a profit,
whether in industry or paint.
Archivist Chris Ridgeway has some documents that tell
the tantalising story of the Orleans sale.
It's called the Bridgewater syndicate because it's named after
the principle stakeholder who was the Duke of Bridgewater.
I mean the very rich canal-builder,
famous from the second half of the 18th century.
But the Duke of Bridgewater is only one of the three men,
so Francis Duke of Bridgewater, Frederick Earl of Carlisle
here of Castle Howard
and Bridgewater's nephew George Earl Gower.
Those are the three men who formed the syndicate.
And this document here is their agreement, is it?
It's a hand-written memorandum of agreement
outlining all, as it were, the participants,
crucially the stakes that they put in,
the sum, so Bridgewater puts in £27,000,
Carlisle puts in £10,000
and Gower puts in £5,000.
And there's a bit of preamble and then crucially,
you've got the signatures and their seals.
So this is a legal document as well as a memorandum of understanding.
And this is a really new step, isn't it, in our collecting,
because this sort of thing hadn't really happened in Britain before?
Doesn't seemed to have happened in Britain before in relation to art.
As I say, in the commercial world this is probably, you know,
going on everyday of the week,
but this seems to be one of the earliest instances
where they are doing it with a bulk of paintings rather than,
say, commodities or tea or something like that.
What they did with the paintings was quite novel, wasn't it?
They actually exhibited some of them, didn't they?
Well, that's the key to them being able to sell them
and get their money back.
So they had to go on sale in London.
This is the schedule of all the paintings.
- Tintoretto continued. - Yeah.
Titian, all these Titians.
- My goodness. - Veronese here.
Velazquez here. I mean, this is a role call of European art,
I mean, the great masterpieces of Europe.
And here they all are in London en masse
available for people to see
and even better, available for people to buy.
When the syndicate put the collection on exhibition,
it was so vast that it needed to be housed in two venues.
The show lasted for seven months, causing huge public excitement.
But for the syndicate,
the point of putting these great Old Masters on show
was not to open up art to the public, but to sell it.
The three men reserved the paintings they wanted to keep
and through the sale of the rest of them pulled off an amazing coup -
they acquired their own pictures at virtually no cost to themselves.
Speculating on art had clearly worked.
And today, Castle Howard is still home to some of the works
that the ingenious and entrepreneurial Carlisle
acquired from the sale.
The Earl's descendent Simon Howard retains a delight in the art
his ancestor bought. Not least this exquisite work by Titian.
Gosh, that's beautiful.
It's called Gaston de Foix and it's rather beautiful, you know,
with the page boy dressing the warrior.
The green velvet is fantastically painted.
This must be one of the favourites in the collection.
It is. It's got a charm about it that I think is wonderful.
When you look at the working of the green velvet in the page boy
and the reflection in the armour and the look on both faces.
They're lovely expressions.
I just love it and it's one I've known all my life
and always been interested in
because of the whole debate about who it's by.
Currently it's attributed to the young Titian.
Yes, it is.
And so it would have been the fifth Earl of Carlisle who bought this.
- Indeed. - And he clearly would've been attracted to it,
as he was to many of the Old Master paintings in that sale.
He was, and he was a great collector and he had a great eye and erm,
what he brought into this house
really was probably some of the most important paintings in the house
- that we have. - So that particular collection, the Orleans sale,
did that really change the collection here?
- Well, put it this way, they named a room after him. - Oh, well, yes...
They hung most of them in one room and called it the Orleans room.
Today, only the Earl's portrait remains in this room,
and now most of the paintings from the Orleans sale
are in the music room.
The Titian isn't the only work where the attribution has changed
over the years.
Today, this painting is thought to be by the Italian painter Bedoli,
but this was not always the case.
At the time of the Orleans sale, this painting was catalogued
as the Duke's Ferrara by Tinteretto,
and one of the really fascinating things about it
is its prodigal journey here.
The Dukes of Ferrara were one of the great collecting dynasties
of 16th century Italy
at a time when Italy was at the epicentre of art and collecting.
By the 18th century, it had arrived in France
and become part of the Orleans collection,
and by the beginning of the 19th century it was here at Castle Howard
as the British moved to the forefront of art collecting.
In many ways, the Orleans sale marked the pinnacle
of the British aristocrat collector.
Up to this point, the landed gentry had been the ones with the money
and appetite to buy such a wonderful collection.
But within the triumph of this sale there were clues
as to how collecting would change
as Britain became a more democratic nation.
For the last few decades, there had been a growing fashion
for the middle classes to visit great country houses
to view their art in situ.
But rather than the people having to seek out the collection,
the Orleans show brought the collection to the people.
In doing so, it whetted the appetite for art
amongst the wider population.
Now, a new kind of collector came through the doors -
men made rich by industry and banking.
These "newly moneyed" collectors saw the value of art
and its power to endorse their cultural credentials.
One of the chief buyers at the Orleans sale
was a John Julius Angerstein, a Russian emigre
who made his fortune as a merchant and Lloyd's underwriter.
And it would be Angerstein's collection,
rather than that of a British aristocrat,
that would make an historic contribution to the story of art
in Britain - because it was his collection that would form the basis
of our National Gallery in 1824.
The idea of a National Gallery had been in the air for a few decades.
In an age that was beginning to embrace democracy,
calling for the rights of all men and women,
there was a growing opinion that perhaps art should be available
to more than just a handful of rich collectors.
The idea had been discussed in parliament but had come to nothing.
Then Angerstein's death in 1823 forced the issue.
This journey from private drawing rooms to public display
is charted in the archives of the National Gallery.
And Susanna Avery-Quash is the curator of private collections.
The Angerstein Collection consisting of 38 pictures
was purchased for £57,000.
Various noblemen and aristocrats were worried
that when Angerstein died his collection would be sold abroad
as other collections had been in the past,
so they pushed and they shoved and they made a loud noise,
and the government, who had luckily been given some money
from a war loan from Austria, used the money to buy the collection.
- So that is the start. - That's the start of the National Gallery.
And from then, obviously, it leads to certain requests.
Yes. And gifts and certain purchases, but also they're hoping,
because they don't really have an annual purchase grant early on,
nothing's very systematic,
so they're hoping like crazy that all these patriotic fellow
countrymen will bequeath or give paintings,
and that's exactly what happened.
What's fascinating to me is that the mood was really changing
- amongst these private collectors, wasn't it... - Yes.
..at the beginning of the 19th century?
They were determined to share things.
They were, and almost a snowball-effect.
Somebody did something by gift or bequest
and then a whole stream of other people followed in succession.
That's really exciting to see number one, National Gallery Number one.
Exactly, and what it tells us also is that
it's a painting by Sebastiano del Piombo
of The Raising Of Lazarus.
Here it is, National Gallery number one -
The Raising of Lazarus by Sebastiano del Piombo.
It came to England via the Orleans sale
and in a way was the very first painting to be saved for the nation.
The National Gallery itself and many of its finest treasures
are here thanks to private collectors both past and present.
But the fact that these individuals felt motivated to share
their collections with the public
signalled a new attitude towards art.
This new sense of philanthropy dominated the attitude
of collectors as the century progressed.
In what became a huge democratisation of art,
treasures like this moved out of private hands
and into the public ownership.
And bequests came from many sources.
For example, that of the Reverend Holwell Carr
who bequeathed 35 paintings
including Titian's Holy Family With A Shepherd
and Tintoretto's Saint George And The Dragon.
So now the Great British public owned world-class paintings
alongside the rich and the aristocrats,
but were they ready for such artworks?
The archives also give an insight as to how some of the public responded
to this new national institution.
It's quite clear that the general public at the time
didn't really have an understanding of an art gallery
almost being like a sacred temple to the muses,
and they should show respect and keep quiet and so on.
In fact, in one of the select committee reports,
the keeper of the day noted that when he challenged
some country bumpkins about why they're opening up a picnic
in the middle of one of the rooms, they offered him a glass of gin.
What a lovely scene.
Yes, and he also commented that sometimes
when he went round the galleries at the end of the day
he would have to clear up little puddles
because of the schoolboys. There were no facilities
for relieving themselves, and so they would just do so
in the corners of the art gallery.
There was a still a long way to go before the National Gallery
became the experience it is today,
but this changing attitude to art reflects the seismic social
and political changes of the 19th century.
In 1832, the great Reform Act was passed.
It extended the franchise and changed constituency boundaries
to reflect the growth of new towns and industrial centres.
But most significantly, it began to question the assumption
that the old aristocracy were born with the right to rule.
If more of the population had a stake in running their country,
then everyone from mill workers and factory workers upwards
had a right and need for education.
And art appreciation was seen as a crucial part of a good education.
Industrial cities were springing up all over the place
and were seen as the symbol of the new age.
Progress was becoming a catch word for Victorian Britain
and nowhere represented progress more than Manchester.
In the late 18th century, it had had a population of just 30,000,
by the mid-19th century it had ballooned
to over ten times that figure.
Manchester's business grandees quickly matched words with wallets
and established a massive £74,000 fund
to host what is arguably the largest art exhibition
ever to have been held in the world.
The extraordinary thing about the Manchester show
was that it was made up almost entirely of loans
from private collections.
Collections that had been built up for the past 200 years
by generations of families and displayed in treasure houses
that dotted the country.
There were 984 lenders to the show
and emerging from their houses were priceless masterpieces
that were being shown together and in public for the first time.
Queen Victoria led the way, loaning 94 works
including two Rembrandts and a Van Dyck.
A Madonna, lent from a private collection,
was reattributed as a Michelangelo during the show,
becoming known as the Manchester Madonna.
And Castle Howard lent generously,
including Carracci's Dead Christ Mourned.
It was believed that such a show would have been impossible
in any other country in the world.
One critic even said it equalled the Louvre.
The show attracted more than 1.3 million visitors
from around the world,
and although there's nothing left of the buildings that housed it,
the Manchester art gallery has some wonderful records
of this extraordinary art event which archivist Ruth Shrigley
has researched in detail.
It was clearly a huge success and it did something
that had never really been done before
which was bring the public in to see art.
In vast numbers.
And it was, at the time, referred to as "The Greatest Show On Earth."
- It's as basic as that. - Yes.
It feels very Victorian to record it all in this scientific way.
It possibly reflects the fact that Manchester businessmen
and bankers were used to using figures in order to make decisions
and to argue for policies,
particularly in relation to social reform.
That's very interesting, and this is a new thing for art, really,
to organise an exhibition according to these kind of factors.
Well, certainly to record those factors
and to be so keen on looking at what influences people to attend,
and they could see, by measuring the attendance,
the type of ticket-holder
who was coming, that they weren't actually getting as many people
from the working classes who they thought would
come on cheaper tickets, than they'd expected.
So they started an experiment part way through the exhibition
of charging half price on Saturday afternoons after two o'clock.
That would be the time when people who were working
in the local mills and warehouses would be available to come along.
And was that successful?
Some of the more enlightened employers
would encourage their workers to visit, and one
organised a day out for the whole of his workforce,
so over 2,000 people came.
But one wonders what the quality of experience was like for people
- who didn't know what they were looking at - Yes.
It was such a vast space with so many exhibits crammed into it,
over 16,000 exhibits,
so it must have been a very confusing visual experience,
and even though the organisers had tried to arrange the paintings
in groups, if you didn't know anything about art
you would've found it quite difficult.
So it was really the first stage, they were bringing the art
to the public but they weren't really interpreting it for them.
No, they weren't.
Do we have any records of which were the most popular paintings
- in the exhibition? - Yes, there are some accounts
which suggest that the most popular ones
were the those where you didn't need to have an art historical
- background or knowledge. - I can imagine.
So paintings with a very strong narrative.
Paintings which were very dramatic.
For example, Wallis's Death of Chatterton.
The Hireling Shepherd by Holman Hunt,
both very colourful paintings.
The fact that contemporary narrative works by artists like Wallis
and Hunt, who were part of the new cutting edge
pre-Raphaelite movement, were in the show at all
was itself groundbreaking.
This was the first time that British 19th century painting
was hung side by side with Old Masters
for a public audience.
The message was clear - modern British art was on a par
with the old European Masters.
And it is perhaps not a surprise that paintings
like the pre-Raphealites were so popular in the Manchester show.
In an attempt to demystify art, the Pre-Raphaelites consciously
moved away from the grand manner of the Old Masters like Raphael.
Their references were more accessible
to a less traditionally-learned audience.
They depicted scenes from well-known English legends and history,
Shakespeare or the hugely popular poet Tennyson.
But their real hallmark is in creating this dreamlike intensity
with the use of vivid colours and minute attention to detail
which was very seductive.
The Pre-Raphaelites affronted the classical taste of the aristocracy,
but this contemporary art was just what the new generation
of collectors was looking for.
Freed from shackles of tradition,
they wanted something different.
This new collector had the money and confidence
to buy what he liked, not what he was supposed to like.
He was the self-made millionaire
who had profited from Victorian progress,
and he was looking to give something back to society on his own terms.
Few people epitomise this kind of collector more
than Thomas Holloway, pharmaceutical entrepreneur
and the founder of Royal Holloway College in Surrey.
A master of his universe,
once he decided to do something Thomas Holloway made it happen.
He didn't start buying art until he was 81,
and then he built up the whole collection in just two years.
When the college was first founded, it was for women only.
Today it admits men, as well.
The story of how Holloway created the wealth
to establish his collection is a classic tale of Victorian progress
from rags to riches.
Social historian Jane Hammett is a lecturer at the university
and has researched Holloway's life.
Holloway was from relatively humble origins.
His father had been in the navy and then he had a series of pubs
and I think he ended up as a grocer in Penzance,
so that was really Holloway's background.
He came from a small business sort of merchant family,
which would have encouraged him to be quite enterprising,
but I think there's no clue there to how big he eventually became.
And when do you think he started making his money?
Well, initially he actually wasn't all that successful.
He set up as a merchant in London
and he hit on the idea of marketing pills and ointments.
What he was very keen on was advertising his pills
and ointments, and at first he advertised steadily in The Times
but this didn't work at first, and he got into debt.
In fact, he himself was in debtors' prison for a short spell in the '30s
thanks to his advertising,
but actually he really stuck to it and when he came out again
he went back to it and eventually it paid off in a very major way.
So these are obviously some of the examples of his advertising.
"Free advice."
Yes, here we have a fantastic advert offering to purify the blood
- and for shortness of breath with weakness... - And female complaints.
Hmm, yes. A large and generic category in the 19th century!
Absolutely. So what are these that you've got here?
Well, they're a series of collecting cards
which we think were made for children.
You can see that they've got this beautiful colour illustration
on the front showing different birds and different natural phenomena,
but when we turn them over we can see that we have an explanation
of what the illustration shows,
but also rather a large advert for Holloway's pills and ointments.
- Yes, two thirds advertising. - Yes.
By the early 1870s, he'd acquired a huge amount of money
and he didn't really know what to do with it.
So it's at this point he actually advertises in the Builder
asking what a philanthropist should do with a million pounds.
It's quite an interesting new class of person actually, isn't it,
who's prepared to donate a huge sum of money,
- really, for somebody else's benefit. - Yes.
Yes, it is interesting, and he was a great philanthropist
and what he wanted to do was partly, I think,
to give something back,
but also by founding institutions that bore his name he was,
of course, ensuring that he would be remembered for a long time to come.
The college is a remarkable legacy, but what's fascinating to me
is that at the heart of the college, Thomas Holloway decided
to create a picture gallery.
Education for women was still controversial,
so having an art collection would lend it weight and status.
Holloway bought in bulk and at speed,
and the collection was made up of art as modern and British
as the man himself.
This is Thomas Holloway's picture gallery.
Walking through it is like walking through the pages of a book
on Victorian art because there are brilliant examples
of every genre of painting popular with the collectors of the time.
There are history paintings and Bible scenes,
grand Victorian narrative paintings which look almost like stills
from a film.
Social realism like this one,
Frank Holl's Newgate: Committed for Trial.
Maybe it appealed to Holloway because of his own experience
in the debtors' prison.
And these typical Victorian landscapes
depicting the rural idyll of pre-industrial Britain.
There are all sorts of different paintings here,
but for me the unifying factor is that they all appeal directly
to the emotions. Each painting evokes an immediate response,
which is what made them so satisfactory for a man
who wanted value for money in his pictures.
This painting is called Sympathy by Briton Riviere.
It's apparently the most popular in the collection today
and it's really easy to understand why, because it's just so sweet..
The little girl has been sent in disgrace to sit on the step
accompanied by her dog.
We might be tempted to dismiss it
as an overdose of Victorian sentimentality,
but it is actually really well painted.
In fact, the harsh critic John Ruskin
even went as far as to say that
"the carpet looks as if it's been laid by Veronese."
I'm not sure what I think about that,
but it is on the detail and the finish.
I mean, look at the little girl's face.
Her eyes are actually welling up with tears.
And of course detail and finish were highly-prized
by the Victorian collector,
because they were a testament to hard work and effort.
Holloway created this collection through his own hard work
and effort, and as a self-made man
he had immense confidence in his taste.
This rather gruesome painting by Landseer,
which depicts the tragic loss of Sir John Franklin's expedition
to navigate the North West passage was the most expensive
in the collection.
Holloway paid a record auction price of £6,615.
The equivalent of half a million today, and in so doing
raised a few eyebrows in the established art world.
Ironically, for the most expensive painting,
it certainly isn't the most popular today.
This dramatic picture shows the futility of human effort
in the face of the destructive forces of nature.
The two polar bears tear at the remnants of the expedition.
There's no sentimentality here.
In fact, during exam time, however, it's said to bring bad luck,
so the students apparently cover it up with a Union Jack.
Whether the picture brings bad luck or not, for the rest of the year
at least the students here have the benefit
of one individual's commitment to collect art.
Thomas Holloway wasn't the only one collecting in this way.
Other rich individuals were establishing or bequeathing
collections for the public to enjoy, and municipal art galleries
graced most cities in Britain by the end of the 19th century.
But the modernising Britain had an impact on the countryside, too.
As the 19th century progressed, some old English aristocratic families
were beginning to struggle to maintain their estates
and family treasures were put up for sale.
Now some of the newly rich began to take advantage
of British pictures coming onto the market.
Family portraits that had once been personal commissions
intended to reflect the status of Dukes and Lords
were now available to buy.
And one of the beneficiaries of this
was the great European banking dynasty the Rothschilds.
In the 1870s, the Duke of Marlborough sold off some of his land
here in Buckinghamshire,
and it was bought by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild,
who then set about building himself a veritable palace to art.
From the outside, Waddesdon looks like a fabulous chateaux
in the Loire Valley rather than a traditional English country house.
It also has a very different story to tell.
Unlike the grand houses of the 17th and 18th centuries,
the lifetime's work of successive generations,
this fabulous house, with its equally extraordinary collection,
was created by Ferdinand Rothschild from nothing in just seven years.
The outside is impressive,
but inside, the feeling of opulence is heightened.
The Prime Minister Gladstone's daughter wrote when she visited
the house that she felt "oppressed with the extreme
"gorgeousness and luxury."
The Rothschilds were one of the richest
and most powerful families in Europe in 19th century,
and made their fortune as bankers to monarchs and governments.
Ferdinand himself was born in Paris, raised in Frankfurt and Vienna
and then settled in England in 1859.
Collecting was in his family DNA.
When Ferdinand wrote his reminiscences, he dedicated a chapter
to his art collecting which he called Bric-a-Brac,
and in it there's a wonderfully evocative description
of his early motivation for collecting.
As a child, he was allowed to help his father
pack up their art collection when they went to their summer house.
And he writes, "It was my privilege on these occasions
"to place some of the smaller articles in their old leather cases,"
"and then again in the winter to assist in unpacking them
"and rearranging them in their places.
"Merely to touch them sent a thrill of delight through my small frame."
Between them, the five branches of the Rothschild dynasty
owned 40 great treasure houses spread across Europe,
including seven in Buckinghamshire itself,
making them the greatest collectors of the 19th century.
But what is important about the Rosthchilds
is not just the fact that they amassed so much,
but that they established a distinct individual taste.
Different from the conventional classical taste
of the British aristocracy, and from that for contemporary art
shared by many British industrialists.
150 years later, Ferdinand's collection is still intact
and the current Lord Rothschild is the custodian
of this extraordinary collection.
It's really clear from the whole house that Baron Ferdinand
was passionate about collecting,
but do you think it was a lifelong passion for him?
What had happened to him,
sadly, was that his wife had died in childbirth,
and the child died, as well.
So Ferdinand was left on his own
and eccentrically to console himself
he built this enormous house
as a kind of vehicle within which he could collect,
and that's what he spent the rest of his life doing.
He clearly had a very defined taste,
- which has come to be known as Le Gout Rothschild. - Yes.
Well, I think what happened was that the Rothschild family
made money in the first half of the 19th century,
and then the second half they started to spend it.
They were all very close with one another
and very often, if there was a collection that came up for sale,
they would kind of hunt as a pack
and divide it up or buy it together.
Gradually, there emerged, therefore, a kind of Gout Rothschild.
This combination was a bit odd.
French 18th-century furniture with English portraits,
but then if you think about it, it's perhaps not so surprising
because they were I think anxious to assimilate themselves
into the English countryside.
They built these seven big houses in Buckinghamshire
and to show that they were kind of part and parcel of English life,
they collected English 18th-century portraits like Reynolds,
like Gainsborough, and wanted to show those in conjunction
with their roots, which were all continental.
This is the Red Drawing Room. It's the central room in the house
and it's the first that would have been visited by guests,
so it's like a showpiece room and epitomises the taste
for which the Rothschilds became famous. That striking combination
of 18th-century English pictures
set against 18th-century French furniture and decoration.
Here we've got portraits by Gainsborough and Reynolds,
but they are hung in a room full of French furniture and textiles,
all the best of their kind.
This carpet was commissioned by Louis XIV himself
for the Louvre Palace, and the furniture was made
for the French royal family.
Waddesdon also benefitted from the sales
of the Great British aristocratic collections.
One of Ferdinand's purchases from the Duke of Hamilton's sale
was this beautiful Gainsborough portrait
of the tenth duke - a famous collector himself.
But it's another Gainsborough which was a particular favourite
of Ferdinand's.
This Gainsborough is known as the Pink Boy,
and it really sums up what I think would have appealed to Ferdinand.
With this painting he was buying into a long tradition
of English portraiture.
Gainsborough was noted for often painting his sitters
in van Dyck costume,
and there's a really strong similarity between the costume
worn by this boy and the costume worn by Charles II
when he was painted as a boy by van Dyck.
But the charming thing about this portrait is the informality.
This is not some great heir to an aristocratic family
standing in front of some grand building.
This boy looks as if he's just paused for breath
while playing in that wild Gainsborough landscape behind.
It might have been a bit sensitive
hanging someone else's family portraits on your wall,
but with this more anonymous Pink Boy,
Ferdinand was able to enjoy all the charm and fluidity
of Gainsborough's best portraits purely as a painting.
Ferdinand himself died childless,
but clearly Waddesdon was a passion, which not only dominated his life
but which he hoped would be a lasting legacy.
He kept a record of the building and contents of the house
in a beautifully bound red book.
There's a rather interesting end on page 11
about what he felt about the future of the house.
Oh, that's fascinating.
In a sense it spurs on the present generation
because what he says is, "A future generation may reap
"the chief benefit of a work which for me has been labour of love.
"I fear that Waddesdon will share the fate of most properties
"whose owners have no descendants.
"May the day be et distant where weeds will spread over
"the gardens, the terraces crumble into dust,
"the pictures and cabinets cross the Channel or the Atlantic
"and the melancholy cry of the night-jar sound
"from the deserted towers."
So he was very concerned that it should be kept together.
And so presumably, then, it's very important to you
to keep the collection together and in the house.
Yeah, I mean, sentimentally, it's important.
You know, I was left responsibility to keep it going
which I happen to enjoy very much.
And what I've tried to do is not just to make it
the collection that it was, but also to add pieces
to the collection which compliment it and indeed add to it.
Waddesdon is above all an ensemble
and the whole is much more than the sum of its parts.
You may find similar objects and paintings in museums,
but there's something extraordinary about seeing them all together
in the building for which they were bought.
In many ways, Waddesdon is unique, but that's part of its importance.
By the end of the 19th century, it was the freedom of individual taste
that was shaping art collecting in Britain.
The 18th century fashion for Grand Tour taste had given way
to a new eclecticism, which was bringing art and styles
to this country which would never have come here without them.
And often, to be slightly outside the traditional establishment, helped.
The coal valleys and industrial ports of Wales
feel a long way from an art museum in London.
But it was wealth from these places that allowed two Welsh sisters
Gwendoline and Margaret Davies to go against the prevailing taste
of the day and become the advocates for a branch of avant-garde
French art - Impressionism.
Monet's Water Lilies are now so widely loved and admired
it's difficult to imagine that when the Davies sisters were buying these,
most other British collectors were dismissing them
as pointless blobs of colour.
Gwendoline and Margaret were so ahead of their time
in appreciating the beauty of these paintings,
and recognising the value of this extraordinary new artistic movement.
They collected paintings by Renoirs, Van Goghs...
..Cezannes - all the great names of Impressionism.
How was it that two sisters in Wales
at the beginning of the 20th century were amongst just a handful
of people buying Impressionist work in Britain?
The two sisters were the daughters of a wealthy industrialist
Welsh family.
Like Thomas Holloway, they came from "new money."
Their grandfather had started life as a carpenter
but eventually formed a company, which transported coal from pits
in the Rhondda Valley to ports around the world.
Gwendoline and Margaret's father inherited the business,
but he died aged only 45 and left his considerable fortune
to be divided up equally between his son and two daughters.
The girls grew up here in Plas Dinam,
a large country house in mid Wales.
Gwendoline and Margaret were very aware of their Welsh heritage
and came from a deeply-patriotic family.
It was a non-conformist religious household,
strictly tee-total, and the girls were instilled with a strong sense
of duty to use their wealth for the benefit of others.
But it would be misleading to imagine
that they had a totally sheltered rural Welsh life.
They were privileged children.
They briefly went to boarding school in London,
and at home in Wales they would play tennis and ride horses.
They had a governess Jane Blaker who accompanied them on trips
round the London museums and galleries,
and later went with them on their travels in Europe.
In 1907, Gwendoline came into her inheritance,
and Margaret two years later.
They were said to the wealthiest unmarried women in Britain.
And almost as soon as they inherited,
they indulged in their passion for art.
They made a point of travelling through Italy
seeking out the Old Masters,
but they never really looked to acquire any.
With quiet self-confidence, they kept an open mind
to develop their own taste.
This is Margaret's diary from her trip to Italy in 1909.
And clearly, like many other British travellers before her,
she was completed seduced by Venice.
She writes really beautifully with a very artistic eye.
"Here the water quite calm seems to be made up
"of several different colours.
"Here it is blue, there again green, further on
"it seems a shade of mauve."
It could be a description of a Monet painting,
and in fact just a year before Margaret's trip
Monet himself had been to Venice.
It's perhaps not surprising that some of the Davies sisters'
earliest Impressionist acquisitions were Monet's views of Venice.
Curator Beth McIntyre has charted the sister's development
as collectors.
So did the sisters start off collecting Impressionist
straight away, or did they have to break themselves in gently?
They really start buying in earnest in about 1908,
but they don't acquire Impressionists at that stage.
They're looking at other artists, artists who were pretty well
established, artists who are known in Britain such as Turner, you know,
the big names, and here's one of the Turner receipts that we have.
- Nice big price tag. - Well, Turner's very expensive.
In fact, they spent more on works by Turner than any other artist.
So when do you think they really started collecting
Impressionist painting?
Well, we know quite specifically
when they turned towards buying Impressionism.
We have this letter here which is from Hugh Blaker.
Hugh Blaker was one of their advisors.
He was actually the brother of their governess Jane Blaker,
but was himself an art historian, and he advises the sisters
and he also acts on their behalf.
In this letter, which is dated August 11th 1912, we can read,
"I will certainly keep my eyes open in Paris for anything good,
"and am delighted that you think of getting some examples
"of the Impressionists of 1870.
"Very few English collectors except Hugh Lane
"have bought them at all."
That's wonderful to have that letter.
Yeah, so this really marks quite a change in their collecting
and a new direction.
From that time on, from 1912, we see them spending a lot of money
particularly on the French works, on the Impressionist works.
They're looking out for other artists such as Sisley,
Pissarro, Renoir...
So we think that the sisters wrote with a list of artists
that they wanted to acquire and he's suggesting some others.
So that's incredibly forward-looking, isn't it?
It is, it's very forward-looking
and it's very forward-looking within England or within Britain,
but within Wales I would think it would be unique.
Absolutely.
So within the next few years after 1912
they buy eight Monets I think,
and works by Renoir, works by Rodin,
Manet, you know, a lot of artists,
but it's very interesting for us that we have the receipts
that we can compare prices.
Cos obviously some of the Impressionists at this stage
were still not demanding the top dollar figures
that they do nowadays.
So here we have the receipt for the Monets,
the three Water Lilies that they purchased in one acquisition
in 1913.
And all of those three purchases you can see for £3,370.
So this is incredible.
I think that's what's so fascinating about these sisters
- cos they were really sure of their own taste. - They were.
They went about putting a collection together very much
with their own taste in mind.
As collectors at the time they were revolutionary.
They championed a whole new movement.
They were going in a new direction,
and one that was yet to be fully accepted within Britain.
And extraordinary that it was two women who did this.
Yes, and that's very important as well, I think
for the history of female collectors.
This striking painting, Renoir's La Parisienne,
really stands out in this collection.
It shows a sophisticated lady elegantly dressed in blue
and she holds the viewer directly in her gaze.
The mark of a truly independent woman.
I love to think of this appealing to these two pioneer women collectors.
And it's rather fitting that they should have bought on the eve
of the outbreak of the first world war which was to have such an impact
on the lives of women in general,
and in particular on those of the Davies sisters.
Frustrated at observing the suffering of the war
from a distance, in 1916 Gwendoline volunteered
at the London Committee of the Red Cross.
She was sent to Troyes,
just outside Paris where she managed a "cantine des dames anglaises."
The idea was to provide coffee, snacks and cigarettes
to the French troops.
The women who joined had to fund themselves so were all middle class.
Some even took maids with them, and most had probably barely made
a cup of coffee before, let alone survived on the front line of a war.
Margaret joined Gwendoline in France in 1917
and threw herself into the work with her sister.
It wasn't easy and the front line gradually edged closer towards them.
Despite all the difficulties of the war, the sisters
retained their passion for art. A more liberated attitude
towards women was developing and Gwendoline seized the opportunity
to travel alone to Paris. There she browsed the galleries
and continued to buy paintings,
including two wonderful landscapes by Cezanne.
While the war ushered in a more modern progressive attitude
towards women, the London art establishment
was not still not ready for the modern art
that Gwendoline brought home.
The sisters had always been very generous loaning their works
to everyone from the local WI to national museums.
But when Gwendoline offered to loan this Cezanne landscape,
The Francois Zola Dam, to the Tate, she was turned down.
There are some colourful documents that record the reaction.
At that stage, there were no Cezanne paintings on display
in the national collections.
Through Hugh Blaker, they offered to lend two paintings to them.
And here we can see the reply that the Tate
or the National Gallery Board had met and expressed their thanks,
but unfortunately decided not to accept the loan
of the works by Cezanne.
So.... They turned them down.
- They turned them down. - Yes. - My goodness.
And, erm, Blaker, who's acting for the sisters here,
then writes to Gwendoline Davies,
And we have, "The enclosed from Aitken.
"I'm absolutely disgusted.
"The excuse of no space is not justifiable.
"They could easily haul down a Mancini or something
"and hang these two pictures in its place.
"So this country is still unique in having no examples of Cezanne
"in its national collections.
- "Hopeless!" - Hopeless!
Despite the purchases of the Cezannes after the war,
the sisters' collecting slowed down.
Although many women in Britain had lost loved ones,
few had seen the destruction and horror the war caused first-hand.
Increasingly, Gwendoline especially found it hard to reconcile
the indulgence of collecting with the social deprivation
and need in the 1920s.
After the war, the sisters' focus changed from collecting art
to setting up a centre for the promotion of art in Wales.
And they did here at Gregynog Hall.
They bought this house in 1920, and although it became their home
and housed the collection, its main purpose was to be a cultural centre
to promote art, music and social change in Wales.
Imagine this house deep in rural Wales
full of Impressionist paintings.
That's how it would've been when the Davies sisters lived here.
These were two remarkable women.
Not only did they build a revolutionary collection,
but they also made a place here at Gregynog where artists, writers,
politicians and musicians could come and discuss ideas and be inspired.
The sisters didn't completely abandon collecting,
but by 1924 the majority of their buying of Impressionist painting
was done.
Gwendoline died in 1951, but Margaret lived on until 1963.
It was entirely in keeping with Gwendoline and Margaret's life
that on their deaths they left their collections as a whole
to the National Museum of Wales.
Gwendoline once said the great love of collecting is doing it yourself,
with expert opinion granted, but one does like to choose
for one's self, and to me that's what's so wonderful
about this collection.
It still has a really personal flavour.
Gwendoline and Margaret Davies are great examples
of how private collectors have shaped the history of art
of a nation.
As private buyers, they can afford to take risks
and follow their own paths.
And it's thanks to great collectors like these
that Britain is home to such a unique and extensive range
of art collections.
Over 400 years, British private collectors
have helped to move the history of art in this country.
From pioneer collectors in the 17th century
whose travels overseas brought back Italian Old Masters
and introduced the light of the renaissance
to Britain's dark shores...
..to the Golden Age of collecting in the 18th century
when stately homes dedicated to art spread across the countryside.
And the aristocracy imported the finest continental art
in unprecedented quantity.
As well as patronising new emerging British artists.
Finally, it was thanks to private collectors
that in the 19th century, art moved from being enjoyed
in the exclusive drawing rooms of the aristocracy
to being shared in public galleries.
Private collectors have profoundly influenced the taste of a nation,
and their connoisseurship,
passion and commitment to collecting has hugely contributed
to the rich and diverse art heritage that Britain boasts today.
Many of the paintings collected and commissioned by Great British
collectors are now in public ownership.
To find out more, visit...
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