The British Museum

Sir Robert Bruce Cotton.

For Cotton, his growing collection, like Sloane's, was a considerable asset, for on it rested such political power or influence as he possessed as the indispensable authority on arcane antiquarian questions. He gained considerable favour with James I by drawing up a pedigree of the king's descent from the Saxon kings, and he could pronounce on ambassadorial precedence to English advantage. Cotton was in the right place at the right time, for Henry VIII's earlier dissolution of the monasteries had resulted in the dispersal of a great number of treasures that had survived in monastic seclusion over the centuries. However, his manuscripts having been used by others for more sinister political reasons, he fell from grace. His library was sealed, supposedly causing him to die of a broken heart.

The British Library

The Lindisfarne Gospels.

His heir, Sir Thomas (1594-1662) was able to regain the library. The next heir, another Sir John (1621-1701) determined to present it to the nation but died before arrangements could be made. In 1700 the second Sir John's grandson, also Sir John, oversaw the transfer to the nation of 958 volumes of manuscripts, together with books and a valuable coin cabinet.The third foundation collection, acquired for £10,000 was that of Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford (1661-1724) and his son Edward, the 2nd Earl (1689-1741) both of whom were possessed of the collecting mania in ample measure. This collection, now also in the British Library, includes such treasures as the thirteenth-century round 'Summer is icumen in' and a portrait of Chaucer in an early fifteenth-century manuscript.Collectors tend to be single-minded and well informed in the pursuit of their quarry. A lengthy shopping list, which hints at a considerable intelligence operation, was given to one of Harley's agents and includes such directions as:

The family of Moscardi at Verona, have many valuable Antiquities.... At Rome, The Greek Monks of St Basil have very many old Greek MSS.... Buy as many as you can, for I hear they are poor, and therefore they may sell the cheaper.... The Family of Septata, at Milan, have a Latin Writing upon Bark.--Buy this, if it will be parted with.

On Edward's death in 1741 there was no direct male heir. His wife, described as 'a dull worthy woman', began to recoup her losses by disposing of her husband's treasures. The scale of the Harleys' collecting careers can be judged by the final record: antiquities, coins, medals and portraits, together with 50,000 printed books, 41,000 prints and some 350,000 pamphlets were auctioned off. In 1753 the incomparable collection of 7,639 volumes of manuscripts and 14,230 original rolls, charters, deeds and other legal documents was sold to the nation by Edward's daughter for the modest price of £10,000.

Belk writes of the speculative collector 'whose passion was for financial gain and not for the objects themselves'. While some collectors acquire to pass on, a concern merely for investment does not make a collector. Among the mixed motives of Sir William Hamilton (1730-1803), who is popularly remembered as the husband of Admiral Nelson's mistress Emma, was a good eye for an investment, although he wrote: 'I am delicate as to the manner of selling, as I should hate to be looked upon as a dealer.'

But that is not the entire story. It has been suggested that , 'Sir William's primary motive seems to have been that which compels all successful collectors, namely a passion for things and a desire to own them.'

He wrote to his nephew: 'It is impossible for me to be without an object, whilst I can command a farthing.'

Hamilton combined scientific and antiquarian interests. One of his passions was for volcanoes and after his appointment as British envoy to the Court of Naples in 1764 he had within four years made 22 risky expeditions up the then-erupting Vesuvius, accompanied by rather nervous artists, in search of specimens and sketches. In 1767 he gave a volcanic collection to the Museum. His portrait by David Allan shows him with Vesuvius in the background.

The British Museum

Vase by the Meidias Painter.

At a time when excavations were beginning to uncover the classical past, Hamilton was well placed to combine the traditional aristocratic role of promotion of the arts and good taste with investment. He is notable as one of the first Englishmen to collect, identify, appreciate and publish Greek vases, which had previously been considered to be Etruscan. At the beginning of 1772 his museum is recorded as including 730 vases, 175 terracottas, about 300 specimens of ancient glass, 627 bronzes, 150 ivories, about 150 gems, 143 gold ornaments, more than 6,000 coins, miscellaneous objects, and a few marbles.

This collection was sold to the British Museum in 1772 for £8410--the first antiquities of note it was to receive, and the origin of the Department of Greek & Roman Antiquities. (The collection included a vase by the Meidias Painter, still in the British Museum, which is depicted in Hamilton's portrait). Hamilton then renounced collecting but, inevitably, the passion revived and in 1787 Goethe found his private art-vaults at Naples full of busts, torsos, vases and bronzes. He now formed a collection of Greek vases finer than the first. In 1798 it was sent for sale to England in the merchant ship Colossus which was wrecked off the Scilly Isles. Eight cases were lost but sixteen were rescued. (In the 1970s the British Museum financed a diving expedition on the site but disappointingly only fragments were found.)

Although Hamilton found collecting irresistible, he was not exceptionally rich and, unlike Edward Harley, if in need of funds he had sufficient detachment to sell off his treasures. One item that got away was the Barberini (now Portland) Vase. In 1784 Hamilton sold it to the Dowager Duchess of Portland. It was loaned to the British Museum in 1810 and embarrassingly smashed by a student dropout in 1845. There is a letter in the archives, written by the one Trustee unfortunate enough to be on the premises which more or less reads'Terribly sorry, Your Grace, but as I write they are sweeping your vase up off the floor!' The vase was pieced together by the Museum's restorer and eventually purchased in 1945.

Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode (1730-99) is remarkable for his exquisite taste, always purchasing 'fewer and better rather than more and worse'. Some collectors have a weakness for a bargain or for the excitement of outwitting the dealers on whom they depend, but of Cracherode's collecting policy his biographer quoted the maxim of John Selden:The giving a dealer his price hath this advantage:--he that will do so shall have the refusal of whatsoever come to the dealer's hand, and so by that mean get many things which otherwise he never should have seen. Among the treasures of his collection is a particularly fine drawing, 'An Indian elephant' by Rembrandt (1606-69) one of four probably made in 1637. One of the great strengths of the collection is the series of Rembrandt etchings.

The British Museum

Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode (1730-99). Print.

Cracherode fits the model of the single-minded collector whose life revolves almost in its entirety around his collecting passion. A semi-recluse, he lived with the recurring nightmare that as the owner of the manor of Great Wymondly in Oxford he would have to observe the hereditary and somewhat archaic privilege of handing the new sovereign the first cup with which he drank at his coronation. He therefore lived in horror of King George II's death--fortunately the King outlived him. For 40 years his routine never varied. Each morning he walked out to a bookseller's shop in the Strand then to a more noted shop at the Mews-gate where in the parlour he would meet his literary friends. He called punctually every Saturday at Mudge the chronometer makers in Fleet Street to have his watch exactly regulated.

In his will, drawn up in April 1792, he bequeathed his collection to the British Museum and 'from that point onwards he was as much collecting for the public as for himself'. Depressed by the rise of Napoleon, he nevertheless continued his acquisitions to the end. Four days before his death, he paid his regular visit to the Strand and Mews-gate, his biographer thought to bid farewell to both. While he was on his deathbed his agent was still buying prints for him.

Cracherode bequeathed to the Museum a library of some 4,500 printed books, eight volumes containing 848 drawings and between 5,000 and 10,000 prints, a cabinet of coins and medals, a fine collection of gems and a small but precious cabinet of minerals. Among the drawings is the unusual 'Trees reflected in water at sunset' by Rubens.