THE SPORT OF COLLECTING.* SIR MA.BTIN CONWAY is a fortunate
man. He began his collecting at a time when there were still possibilities of finding real old masters in back-streets of Italian towns. In the "eighties" every obscure early painter had not been hunted down and ruthlessly written about by critics. Sir Martin began his operations at Milan under two incomparably good conditions. One was the high spirit of the enthusiast who saw in every back-street the chance of running to earth a masterpiece; the other was the friendship of both Morelli and Frizzoni, who were on the spot to give advice. It was indeed Morelli who started Sir Martin on the hunt, and this is how the chase began:— " One day, when I was in his [Morelli's] apartment and he was discoursing upon painting, illustrating his remarks by reference to his own colleotion of pictures, now the property of the city of Bergamo, he suddenly broke off to say : "rhe only way really to got a thorough knowledge of the old painters is to collect pictures. You ought to begin at once.' Collect pictures,' I said, ' that's very easy to recommend ; but how am I going to pay for them?' • That's not difficult,' he replied ; 'they are cheap enough, if you know how to look for them and where to find them. If you wore to find a previously unknown Raphael, the chances are you could buy it for a hundred frames. Anyhow, you must begin collecting at once," And, please, where and how. am I to begin?' Well,' he answered, 'I will tell you how to begin. You have been study- ing the Milanese school very closely during the last few weeks, and by now you know the paintings and style of most of the artists. There is Vincenzio Foppa, for instance. Very few pictures by him are known, and yet he must have painted plenty, and probably several exist which have not yet been identified. Begin by going to all the small dealers shops in Milan and see if you can't find a forgotten Popp, in some dark corner ; and by way of stimulus, I will bet you 20 francs that you don't find one, though I think it quite possible that you may:" So the ball was set rolling. But Milan revealed no Foppas; the net was cast wider, and Brescia was searched. The Lunt began with the auspicious finding of one Luigi, who was accustomed to conduct collectors, and who had been the means of revealing that curious series of decorative portraits now scattered over the world, nine of which are at South Kensington. Luigi declared that he could take the stranger to visit a certain Nobile Angelo Mignaui, an artist who bought old pictures. Nobile Angelo lived in a house crammed with old things. The pictures he restored himself, and Sir Martin pronounces him to be the worst • Tits Long Ret.rsat, and other Dosioerdi. By Arnold F. (intro. London t John * Tho Snort of Collacting. By Eir Martin Conway. London: T. Fisher restorer that ever lived. Downstairs were the rejuve- nated works gaudily repainted, on upper stories those awaiting destruotion. At last, on the top floor, amid an incredible mass of bad pictures, "there at the far end, leaning against the wall, with a number of smaller predella panels against it, I beheld the top half of a small Madonna picture, and the face of the Virgin was the face of a Foppa and no other." So the triumphant collector issued from the house with Luigi carrying the spoil wrapped in an old newspaper. The critics at Milan were satisfied, and the picture was ordered to be cleaned, for nothing but the Virgin's face had escaped the band of the restorer. Now arose the question what would be found under the successive coats of modern paint. Would a hopelessly damaged panel emerge P Here was a further excitement of the sport when Professor Cavenaghi, the greatest living restorer, began his work. Golden curls came off a child's head, disclosing a red cap beneath. The most extraordinary [thing] was the landscape. Four successive landscapes there were, one on the top of another. Three came off without resistance, and disclosed the original beneath in perfect preservation. . . . Foppa's own paint was as hard as enamel." Finally, the picture emerged intact, except for one or two small injuries in unimportant places no larger than threepenny-bits. Against this success in the removal of repaints must be cited the case of the Madonna which was bought in the hopes that below much daubing would be found a masterpiece. But this was not the case, for the original work was much worse than the restoration. The dealer from whom the picture had been bought took it back again, saying that a very small sum would suffice to restore it Several more successes are recorded from North Italy— among them another Foppa, a very remarkable one; and, to judge by the photograph in the book, an exquisite little picture by Lotto. This Venetian had a most sensitive and poetic temperament, but an incomplete technical equipment. So beautiful is this picture that at first sight Morelli thought it might be a Giorgione. The charin of the work is in the landscape, a low light on the horizon seen through trees.
If the successes were many, there were also chases which ended in disaster, and some of these Sir Martin records with great spirit and humour. There was, for instance, a breath- less run over the hills of the Brianza, the region between the two arms of the lake of Como. Here a statue, as old as the statues on Milan Cathedral, report said, and as fine as any of them, was hunted backwards and forwards, and finally run to earth in the church tower at Bellagio "Next day I was early on hand in a regular fever of impatience, which I did my best to hide. The sacristan was forthcoming, and the key. We entered the tower and mounted what seemed. inter- minable steps. The old fellow was very garrulous and full of praise of his treasure, but I paid little attention to him, as in a moment I should be able to sea for myself. We came to the door of the boll-chamber, and the look would not open. The key was tried one way and another. Much kicking and banging followed. They were just going to send for a locksmith when the door gave way, and we entered a pitch-dark place. I could dimly discern something standing upright in the far corner. As I was snaking my way towards it the shutters opened, and a burst of sunlight illumined the vast moustache of another figure of Victor Emmanuel," Sir Martin's great find must be told in his own words, He was delayed at Biarritz while on a motor tour :— " I had a passionate desire to go to St. Jean de Luz, but next day something occurred to prevent our start, and took us to the garage instead. At last after lunch the third day we succeeded in starting, and gaily ran about five miles. Then bang I—a tyre burst, and we had to halt and put on another, That punctured, and so did a third. I was for turning back. I said, 'We are not intended to get to St. Jean de Luz. It's just as well to bow to the decrees of Fate first as last.' But my wife said, ' No. You've had a queer and apparently insensate desire to go to this place, and go we must. There's something for us there, and we've just got to go and get it,' So we travelled slowly on, with only some perilously old tubes on our wheels, expecting every moment that our last tyre would burst and we should be left stranded. That did not happen. We presently reached St. Jean de Luz and pro- ceeded to investigate the dealers' shops. There were one or two in the main street, and they contained nothing worth looking at. I said, 'Let us have some tea and go back to the hotel,' My wife said, 'No; there must be another shop, I am certain there is something for us in this place.' So we turned down a side street and came out on a flat expanse leading off to the sea. What nonsense it is,' I said, ' to be looking for entices here I You might as well dig for them in the sand:- An old fisherwoman, or some one of• that class, appeared, and. I was bidden to ask her whether, there was not an antica-shop hereabouts. The notion of asking her seemed to me absurd. What could an old fisherwoman know of such things, and who on earth would dream of keeping an antica-shop in such a neighbourhood—off the track of visitors, and in the midst of a fishing population P However, I am nothing if not docile, so I pursued the old woman and asked my question. Yes,' she replied. ' Just round that corner there is a house where they sell all sorts of old things ; you will have no difficulty in finding it.' Round the corner we went, and there was a house with the door open. Through it we could see the glitter of brass, the chaos of old furniture, and pictures on the walls. I entered amidst the usual rubbish, and was about to go out again and say there was nothing, when I saw an open door at the end of the room, and through it I could look into a room beyond. My attention was instantly arrested by two pictures hanging high up on a wall at the farthest end of that. I did not move or speak, but kept the corner of my eye on those pictures while occupied with objects close at hand. The pictures were quite far away and the light was poor, but there was no doubt that we were close to something very good. I wont out to my wife and said: ' In the far corner of the second room are two Venetian pictures which just might be Carp:sof:dos. Don't seem to look at them, but come in and let's look at everything else.' When we came near them I felt my heart thumping within me like a piston. I whispered that they wore early Giorgiones, and that we must certainly buy them at any price. Finally, we had them taken down and placed in our hands, one after the other, the last things we lo6ked at. It is hard under such circumstances to hide one's emotions, but we succeeded. A price was quoted—thank goodness moderate. The purchase was made then and there."
Here indeed was a discovery, for the pictures were recognized by students of Giorgione as probably the earliest existing paintings by the master. Most strange, too, was the coincidence that when Sir Martin was buying these pictures M. Monneret de Villard was inquiring for them in Italy. He bad found a manuscript catalogue of the Albarelli collection in Verona in 1815 with outline drawings of these two pictures, which were attributed to Carpaecio. M. de Villard recognized the compositions as early Giorgiones, and sought for the originals, and was enabled to include photographs of them in the book on the master he was just publishing. But the final con- firmation took place in the studio of Cavenaghi in Milan, where the great restorer placed them side by aide on an easel with the Bergamo " Orpheus and Eurydice," which had been under his care, remarking: "You see, either of those might be a piece cut out of the other."
We have not space to record Sir Martin's final acquisition, which fell into his lap from an advertisement he put into the Times—not a Giorgione, but a mediaeval castle in Kent. How it was restored and rendered habitable, and how delightfully warm and dry its think walls made it to live in, we must leave our readers to discover for themselves, along with many other things in this most entertaining volume.
Previous page
