PAINTINGS FROM VENICE FOR SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND: SOME RECORDS OF A FORGOTTEN TRANSACTION

Abstract

The historian of painting who is concerned with any larger problem than defining the limits of a particular artistic personality must take account of the history of collecting. To-day one country is made familiar with the art of another by international exhibitions, and a diffusion of styles between one nation and another can be accounted for in that way. But until the 1820'S, when Constable and Lawrence exhibited in the Paris Salon with such remarkable effect, it was through the works imported by the private patron that the artist who could not afford to travel became familiar with foreign work, and it was only about the same date. (the 1820'S) that the creation of a National Gallery in London and the beginning of Old Master exhibitions made any other channel of knowledge possible. Before the emergence of the professional ‘art historian,’ when the field was held by the curioso, collecting was considered as interesting a branch of study as art itself. In France, during the nineteenth century, a fairly rich literature on collecting appeared, of which the monuments were perhaps Charles Blanc's Le Trésor de la Curiosité (1857) and a number of works by Edmond Bonaffé, culminating in his Dictionnaire des Amateurs français au XVIIe siècle (1884). But for England there has been nothing of the kind and we are still very sparsely informed about the collecting of Italian pictures in England during the seventeenth century. Yet our principal native painter, William Dobson, who is not known to have been abroad, is so deeply tinctured with the style of the Venetian school that some explanation is clearly needed. And an explanation has been ready to hand. Francis Cleyn, who was in charge of the Mortlake tapestry works, and Van Dyck had both studied in Venice and some particulars at least of the great collections of Charles I, the Earl of Arundel and the Duke of Buckingham, are familiar to all. It has been endlessly repeated that these three men, in their emulation of the foreign habit of collecting, were altogether exceptional for the first half of the century. The Commonwealth, we are told, dispersed all the treasures of the collection of Charles I and thus our great national heritage of Italian painting of the Renaissance evaporated—except of course for the Raphael and Mantegna cartoons and what little could be reassembled after the Restoration. But this is not the whole story. Remarkably little investigation has been made of early inventories and the Historical Manuscripts Commission, in their exclusive zeal for political documents, paid at first little attention to such inventories if they happened to come under their notice.