The Stafford Gallery: The greatest art collection of Regency London

Abstract

Early in his new book, The Stafford Gallery, Peter Humfrey writes that the aristocratic collection and art gallery of the title formed not only ‘the most important collection of Old Masters in the Regency period’ but marked ‘a climax in the long history of aristocratic collecting’. Indeed, so significant (and unusually well documented) is the collection described in this book that in recent years a number of scholars – the writer of this review included – have elaborated various aspects of the collection’s formation and the history of its display in a series of different spaces, galleries and public museums from its formation in the 1790s to the present. Humfrey’s book is a welcome addition to this body of research. Over the course of four long chapters, generously illustrated with colour reproductions, he chronicles the development of the Bridgewater / Stafford / Sutherland collection during a period of more than a century. The collection was built by three successive generations, beginning with Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the duke transformed the immense fortune he had gained in building canals in the West Midlands into the cultural prestige represented by collecting Old Masters. It was towards the end of the duke’s life that he and two of his nephews collaborated to acquire a large group of highly sought-after Italian and French pictures from the Orléans collection, a prestigious collection that had been formed by the ducs d’Orléans and displayed in their Parisian residence, the Palais-Royal, for much of the eighteenth century. At his death in 1803, Bridgewater left his collection to one of these nephews, the Marquess of Stafford (later created Duke of Sutherland), who augmented and refined his uncle’s collection and enlarged the duke’s gallery at Cleveland House, London, for its display. And, finally, the Staffords’ two sons, the 2nd Duke of Sutherland and the Earl of Ellesmere, each inherited a portion of the collection, developing and displaying it in ways that again departed from those of the previous generations. Humfrey’s work consolidates and extends the deep and wide-ranging research that has been undertaken over many years by scholars (Nicholas Penny and Julia Armstrong-Totten are two who deserve special note for having laid important groundwork for this study) into the labyrinthine series of transactions that attended the Orléans acquisitions, making clear that the formation of a collection as large, prestigious and influential as the Bridgewater / Stafford / Sutherland collection was a messy process, dependent on a range of contingencies from the personal to the political.