Appendix of Collectors’ Biographies

Nicholas Penny

Sir Claude Phillips

Claude Phillips (1846–1924) was an influential member of the group of connoisseurs and critics who helped to establish the history of art as a discipline in Britain several decades before it enjoyed any serious standing in the universities. He was appointed Keeper of the Wallace Collection on the strength of his writing and, together with Sidney Colvin (1845–1927) and Lionel Cust (1859–1929) before him, and, somewhat later, Campbell Dodgson (1867–1948) and Charles Bell (1867–1948), he made curatorship a scholarly profession. Although industrious and prolific as an author, writing for a wide range of newspapers as well as journals, it is not likely that he had needed to support himself by this means.

Phillips was born in London in 1846, the second son of Robert Abraham Phillips, a successful jeweller with a reputation for imitating Renaissance and more ancient styles after the example of the Castellani family.¹ His mother, born Helen Levy, sister of Joseph Moses Levy, founder of the Daily Telegraph, was related to some of the wealthiest Jewish financiers in the City of London. Phillips received a cosmopolitan education – in France and Germany – and his command of European languages was exceptional.

On 31 December 1869 he signed the first of over forty articles for the Daily Telegraph that provided, around the start of every new year, a highly detailed and exceptionally astute critical account of the annual winter exhibition of old masters held at the Royal Academy.² He also contributed art criticism to the Manchester Guardian. Between September 1884 and 1891 he was the London correspondent of the Gazette des Beaux‐Arts, a position more or less coinciding with the commencement of his professional life in the Law (he was called to the Inner Temple of 1883). His contritutions to the Gazette provide the best‐informed chronicle of the London art world in those years, recording new displays and acquisitions in all the major museums as well as temporary exhibitions and major sales.³

The extent of his legal practice is not clear but he was said to have accepted work on some important lawsuits because they entailed travel to Italy.⁴ He was frequently in Paris, as is clear from the reports he provided on exhibitions and events there for the Magazine of Art. These included, in 1888, the first major article on Rodin in an English publication.⁵ (It was followed 12 years later by very well expressed doubt concerning the self‐indulgent direction that Rodin’s genius had taken with the encouragement of fawning admirers.)⁶

In 1894 Phillips published a short introductory book on Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was then undergoing serious reappraisal, and on Fredrick Walker (1840–1875), the short‐lived but highly accomplished illustrator and painter in both watercolours and oils, who has now been largely forgotten but whose Vagrants (a scene of travellers making a bonfire on Clapham Common) was then one of the most admired modern British paintings in the National Gallery.⁷ In 1895 he published a similar monograph on Watteau and in 1896 one on the picture collection of Charles I. In 1897 and 1898 the two volumes of his monograph on Titian were published.⁸ In the latter year he was also appointed as the first Keeper of the Wallace Collection, helping the Trustees to organise the display in Hertford House in preparation for public opening.⁹

In the following years, while fully engaged with the Wallace Collection, he was writing for the Art Journal, the Fortnightly Review and the Nineteenth Century as well as the Daily Telegraph. Hertford House opened to the public in 1900. Phillips had prepared a ‘provisional catalogue’ of all the paintings ¹⁰ and in doing so had made a major discovery. Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda, one of the artist’s Ovidian mythologies made for King Philip II of Spain, celebrated for three centuries but neglected during the previous one and downgraded as a workshop painting, had been found ‘hanging in the bathroom on the first floor [of Hertford House] … injured by the damp atmosphere of the room and darkened … by superimposed layers of discoloured varnish’.¹¹ Phillips published this discovery in the May 1900 edition of the Nineteenth Century.

He next turned his attention to compiling, with Sir Guy Laking, a provisional catalogue of the Wallace Collection’s furniture, sculpture and decorative arts (published in 1902). Two years later, as his first article for the newly founded Burlington Magazine in 1904, he proposed that the elegant French adaptation of the antique dancing maidens, a bronze relief embedded high up in the entrance hall in the Wallace Collection, was the work of the great Paduan sculptor Riccio. He was mistaken, but he was right to draw attention to the quality of the sculpture.¹²

Phillips remained Keeper of the Wallace Collection until a few days before his 65th birthday in 1911 and was knighted in that year. The last of his long and remarkable reviews of the annual old master exhibitions at the Royal Academy appeared in the Daily Telegraph in 1912.¹³ He was unmarried and had lived with one of his three sisters, Eugénie, at 40 Ashburn Place in Kensington. He was much affected by her death in 1906 and he presented in her memory Frederick Walker’s startling poster design of 1871 for the dramatised version of The Woman in White to the National Gallery, Millbank (soon to be known as the Tate Gallery),¹⁴ and, in 1910, Benedetto Diana’s Salvator Mundi (NG 2725) to the National Gallery.¹⁵

Phillips was often the first critic to hail a new acquisition by the National Gallery, as he did for example with Titian’s portrait of a man with a quilted sleeve from Cobham Hall (now known as [page 485]the Portrait of Gerolamo(?) Barbarigo, NG 1944).¹⁶ He also wrote about several works eventually acquired by the Gallery. In 1906 he published two paintings from the story of Moses (NG 4904–5) as works by Filippino Lippi, an indication that they were likely to be offered to the Gallery. In 1937 they were bequeathed by Sir Henry Bernhard Samuelson Bart.¹⁷ In 1914 Phillips published Bronzino’s Virgin and Child (NG 5280), having recommended his wealthy cousin, Sir Lionel Faudel‐Phillips, to buy it.¹⁸ Sir Lionel later bequeathed it to the Gallery, as Phillips undoubtedly hoped that he would. In the same year Phillips contributed an article to the Daily Telegraph that did much to increase popular awareness of the Wilton Diptych, arguing cogently for the English origin of this supremely beautiful work.¹⁹ The painting was at that very period placed on the ‘paramount list’ of works for which the Treasury secretly pledged special support in the event that its owner (the Earl of Pembroke) ever determined to sell it – which he did in 1927.²⁰

During Edward Poynter’s and Charles Holroyd’s directorships the National Gallery was rightly considered to be under threat in a way that greatly concerned many in Phillips’s circle. The dominant Trustees treated the Director as a functionary whose concern at the departure of great masterpieces from the United Kingdom could be ignored.²¹ Their attitude did much to provoke the foundation of the National Art‐Collections Fund (much later renamed The Art Fund) by Christiana Herringham together with Dugald Sutherland MacColl, Roger Fry and Phillips.²² The idea had originated with an article published by MacColl in the Saturday Review for December 1900 that argued for the formation of a ‘Society of Friends of the National Gallery’, a provisional title still used by Phillips when he invited Lord Balcarres to be president of the new organisation on 20 June 1903.²³ The dual aim of the founders was to ensure that there was a better policy for the acquisition of modern and contemporary painting for public collections and to help secure major paintings that might otherwise be sold abroad. These ‘Friends’ were therefore explicitly opposed to the Treasury, which had drastically reduced the purchase grants of national institutions, and to the Royal Academy, which administered the Chantrey Bequest, held to be responsible for failing to purchase the best contemporary art. They were also liable to be perceived as critical of the Trustees of the National Gallery, who had been content with or at least compliant in the arrangements for both the National Gallery, Millbank, as the Tate was then known, as well as for the old masters in Trafalgar Square. Care was taken not to allow this to become too explicit. One of the Gallery’s Trustees, John Postle Heseltine, was in fact a major supporter of the Fund, and by engaging Balcarres the founders were securing the support of someone with social standing and political influence equal to that of the much older Trustees Lord Lansdowne and Alfred de Rothschild, who tyrannised the Directors of the National Gallery.²⁴ (Balcarres would himself, as the 27th Earl of Crawford, be appointed Chairman of the Trustees.) Phillips was related to rich financiers and dined with the aristocracy but he was bullied by his Trustees at the Wallace Collection and was most comfortable in the company of artists, musicians, critics and scholars. For him it was essential to keep the new organisation free from ‘official influences’.²⁵

Newly appointed Trustees at the National Gallery, although more concerned than their predecessors to promote the Gallery’s interests, were prepared to consider some very dangerous and drastic solutions to its inadequate government funding, seeking parliamentary authority in 1917 to sell bequeathed works under certain conditions²⁶ – a bill which Phillips vigorously opposed.²⁷ And in addition there was the prospect during the First World War of damage to the National Gallery by enemy action. Phillips was active in finding solutions, above all the use of Aldwych underground station as a store.²⁸

Phillips died on 9 August 1924. His extensive collection of paintings and other works of art was bequeathed to nine public collections and to numerous friends. In addition to allocating 15 paintings to the National Gallery, he gave the Trustees of the Gallery the right to select any other of his paintings not otherwise assigned or accepted, bequeathed £200 to be divided among the attendants and police at the Gallery, and ‘half of the residual and remainder’ of his estate for the purchase of paintings ²⁹ – this eventually amounted to the significant sum of around £19,000.³⁰ It seems unlikely that Phillips had discussed his intentions with the Director of the Gallery, Charles Holmes – even though Holmes was a friend and himself a beneficiary of the will.³¹ He would certainly not have discussed anything with Lord Curzon, ‘by far the most mischievous and intolerable Trustee the N.G. has ever had’.³²

When re‐hanging the collection at the end of the First World War, Holmes had made one of his most important innovations as Director and indeed one of the most important changes in the history of the display in Trafalgar Square. He segregated the paintings of secondary quality from the display on the main floor, thus creating a ‘reference collection’ on the ground floor that could be visited on request. He recognised that the effect of seeing great paintings was much diminished by showing them in the company of works of lesser merit and, although he hung paintings very closely together, and would double‐hang small ones, he allowed only one main line of paintings. A broad band of paint created a sort of frieze in the upper portion of each gallery wall where lesser works had formerly been ‘skied’.³³ This change had been well received. Phillips must have known of it but he clearly felt that the paintings he had in mind for the National Gallery were of a class that would be welcomed into the company upstairs. In this he was completely mistaken. Only one of them hangs on the main floor today – Dosso Dossi’s Lamentation (NG 4032) catalogued here (pp. 114–17) – and only a couple of others (including perhaps the female saint, NG 4031, also in this catalogue, pp. 146–9) might ever make a brief appearance there. (They are listed below.)

At their meeting on 14 October 1924, chaired by Lord Curzon, the Board of Trustees decided that the paintings offered were not of sufficient merit and declared themselves ‘unable to accept this part of the bequest’.³⁴ Holmes wrote on the following day to Phillips’s executor Alec Martin with as much tact as he could muster: the Trustees wished ‘to do every honour’ to so great a benefactor, but exhibiting the group of pictures as a whole ‘however discreetly managed would be liable to misunderstanding’. For the paintings, ‘while most interesting as the diversions of a scholar’s leisure … could not in many cases stand the ordeal of juxtaposition to the famous and picked masterpieces of the National Gallery, and thereby Phillips’s immense and well‐deserved reputation would suffer considerably and permanently in the eyes of the world.’³⁵

This cannot have pleased the executors, and the Trustees, fearing that they might not benefit from the will in other ways, agreed at their meeting on 11 November to ‘reconsider’ the merits of the 15 pictures and accepted them on the understanding that only a few would be exhibited on the main floor and the remainder consigned to the recently created ‘reference collection’. Those in the former category were the portrait of a boy attributed to David (NG 4034) and a Byzantine Dormition of the Virgin (formerly NG 4040 – transferred in 1994 to the British Museum). The Dosso (NG 4032) and two Pordenone Saints (NG 4038–9) would perhaps also be hung upstairs. This compromise had been agreed by Holmes together with another executor, Sir Robert Witt, and Alec Martin.³⁶ Martin’s fellow executor (Griffin of Griffin, Smith, Wade and Ridley) remained anxious that the will might be contested but eventually agreed.³⁷

The task of the executors was not proving easy. Dulwich Art Gallery and Brighton Art Gallery both declined to accept the works bequeathed to them (the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, and the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery accepted works instead). The National Gallery obligingly expressed itself prepared to accept a Portrait of a Young Man in a Fawn Coat by Tilly Kettle ³⁸ and a portrait of a woman (NG 3963) believed by Phillips to be by Hanneman.³⁹

The disappointing character of Phillips’s collection requires explanation. After all, Holmes, in a book on art collecting, had named Phillips as the best guide that a young collector could find – better than Berenson, for example.⁴⁰ MacColl, writing in the Dictionary of National Biography, conceded that his friend’s perception of quality ‘was not as strong’ as his ‘retentive memory’, his ‘fervently emotional’ response and his ‘anxiously wide‐minded’ attitude.⁴¹ Phillips was perhaps something of an erudite bargain hunter, happiest searching in the auction houses for works neglected because of their condition or lack of attribution or false identity. Having detected – or merely suspected – some higher possibility in such works, he could not then allow them to be of limited interest and value. It is not likely that he ever paid much and, as has been noted, when larger sums may have been required he recommended pictures to his wealthy cousin. He was also drawn towards the unfashionable area of the Bolognese school, buying paintings by Agostino Carracci, Guido Reni and Guercino.⁴² Recognition that such painters were underestimated was not confined to Phillips – indeed, the Trustees had welcomed Annibale Carracci’s Three Marys (NG 2923) into the National Collection from Castle Howard in 1913 and Holmes had acquired Guercino’s Incredulity of Saint Thomas (NG 3216).⁴³ Despite this, it must have been true that long neglect had blunted discrimination and what Phillips supposed to be by Luca Giordano or Solimena among the paintings he bequeathed to public collections are not now difficult to detect as unworthy of those names.

It should not be supposed that Phillips owned no really good paintings. Those in his dining room, bequeathed to his close friend Alec Martin of Christie’s (together with the sum of £2,000), included Heraclitus carrying the Cross from Elsheimer’s great polyptych altarpiece now in the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, and two other copper panels by this artist, as well as one good copy.⁴⁴ Quite exceptionally, he also bequeathed one fine and important painting to a foreign institution, Glaucus and Scylla by Salvator Rosa, formerly in the collection of the Earl of Derby, which he had bought at Christie’s.⁴⁵ This was gratefully received by the Musées Royaux des Beaux‐Arts de Belgique in Brussels. The reason for this bequest is not known, but the Trustees of the National Gallery had been informed on 14 November 1918 that Phillips had ‘informally expressed willingness to present’ his Salvator Rosa but was waiting ‘till the space available had been considered’, so it may be that he was hurt that the prospect had not been more enthusiastically embraced.⁴⁶

One remarkable feature of Phillips’s personal collection, despite its mixed quality, is its range both in date and origin. The confidence with which, in his published work, he made decisive and convincing attributions of Renaissance paintings to French, Netherlandish, German and Italian painters was perhaps unparalleled except by Wilhelm von Bode. He was as comfortable writing about Donatello, Rembrandt, Clodion, Manet and Sickert. He seems forever to have been extending his taste as well as his knowledge – something a shade more worthy than is implied by MacColl’s epithet of ‘anxiously wide‐minded’. The circumstances alluded to in the drawing of Phillips by Edmund Dulac () are obscure but it [page 487]acknowledges not only the critic’s Jewish origins (he takes the past here of Joseph in Egypt, servant of Potiphar) but also his celibacy and his incorruptibility, and perhaps his refusal to be tied to any one type of art. The naked lady (in the role of Potiphar’s wife) is not only exotic but, together with her bed, is covered in geometric lines suggestive of Cubism. Phillips wears classical attire. He is watched, wistfully, by a languid damsel of the late Middle Ages (or the 1890s), with flaxen (Anglo‐Saxon) hair.

Phillips never seems to have felt any difficulty assessing modern or contemporary art, concerning which he was frequently both generous and judicious, at least until the exhibitions of Post‐Impressionism mounted at the Grafton Galleries in 1910 and 1912, but even in these he found much to admire and he deplored any premature dismissal. That the most senior and respected art critic in London, then over sixty years of age, should have been so tolerant is inconvenient for the official histories of modernism.⁴⁷ His own collection, however, although very varied, consisted almost entirely of works by old masters.

The posthumous relationship between Claude Phillips and the National Gallery was not, eventually, an unhappy one. Holmes purchased the superb Portrait of a Man in a Fur Cap by Carel Fabritius (NG 4042) using the bequest in December 1924⁴⁸ and early in 1926 he used it to secure the beautiful Ter Brugghen Jacob reproaching Laban (NG 4164).⁴⁹ The bequest was drawn on more copiously to help buy Titian’s Vendramin Family in 1929⁵⁰ and for Constable’s Sketch for Hadleigh Castle in 1935 (NG, transferred to the Tate in 1956).⁵¹

Works bequeathed by Claude Phillips to public institutions in the United Kingdom

Birmingham City Museums and Art Gallery

• Manner of Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of a Gentleman in Black (1925. P80)
• David Teniers II, after Rubens, The Feast of Herod (1925. P81) (Originally intended for Dulwich Picture Gallery)
• Claude‐Joseph Vernet, Harbour Scene with Man‐of‐war and Figures on a Quay (1925. P84)

Cardiff, National Museum of Wales

• After Pietro da Cortona, The Age of Bronze (A 3884). (Originally intended for Dulwich Picture Gallery)
• Salvator Rosa, Rocky Landscape with Herdsmen and Cattle (A 8)
• Italian, sixteenth century, Saint Jerome (A 4870)

Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland

• Melozzo da Forli, now Style of Piero di Cosimo, Two censing Angels (1633)
• Leonardo Scaletti, now Emilian, fifteenth century, Virgin and Child enthroned between Saints Francis and Jerome (1634)
• Jacopo Bassano, now Studio of Jacopo Bassano, Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John and a Donor (1635)
• Leandro Bassano, now After Jacopo Bassano, Virgin and Child with Saint Francis (1636)
• Claude‐Joseph Vernet, now Follower of Vernet, Seacoast Scene (The Italian Gondola) (1637)
• Italian, eighteenth century, Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman (1638)

Glasgow, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum

• Jacopo Bassano, now manner of Paolo Fiammingo, Annunciation of Joachim (inv. 1591)
• Manner of Girolamo da Carpi, Holy Family with Saints Catherine and the Infant John the Baptist (inv. 1587)
• Imitator of Hieronymous Bosch, Christ driving the Money‐lenders from the Temple (1586)
• After Solimena, A Group of Four Men (1590)
• Attributed to Alessandro Allori (previously Cesare da Sesto), John the Baptist in the Wilderness (1588)
• Netherlandish School, Byblis writing to Caunus (1592)
• Claude‐Joseph Vernet, Seascape with Storm (1589)

London, National Gallery

• French, c.1800, Portrait of a Boy (NG 4034)
• Dosso Dossi, Lamentation (NG 4032)
• Pordenone, Saint Bonaventure (NG 4038)
• Pordenone, Saint Louis of Toulouse (NG 4039)
• Andrea and Raffaello del Brescianino, The Virgin and Child with the Infant Baptist and Saints Paul and Catherine of Siena (NG 4028)
• Attributed to Agostino Tassi, Diana and Callisto (NG 4029)
• After Dosso Dossi, Female Saint (NG 4031)
• Hanneman, now Flemish, seventeenth century, Portrait of an Elderly Woman (NG 3963)
• French, early nineteenth century, An Academie (NG 4061)
• Style of Luca Giordano, The Toilet of Bathsheba (NG 4035)
• North Italian, sixteenth century, Portrait of a Lady in a Plumed Hat (NG 4033)
• Venetian, sixteenth century, The Story of Cimon and Efigenia (NG 4037)
• Perhaps Venetian, sixteenth century, Portrait of a Man (NG 4041)
• Philippe Mercier, Portrait of a Man (NG 4036)
• Hendrick van Steenwyck the Younger, The Interior of a Gothic Church (NG 4040)
• Tilly Kettle, Portrait of a Young Man in a Fawn Coat (Transferred to the Tate Gallery in 1949; N03962)
• Byzantine School, Dormition of the Virgin (Transferred in 1994 to the British Museum; 1994,0501.4)

York City Art Gallery

• William Etty, Six academy studies of the male and female nude (74, 406, 407, 409, 1237, 1239) and one study for John the Baptist (83)

NOTES