The British Museum

Porcelain bottle vase.

Thus voraciousness is not necessarily the mark of the collector. Sir John was a serious, if amateur, scholar, with an austere classical taste. His gift to the Museum in 1974 was formed with the express intention of supplementing and enhancing the Museum's already magnificent holdings, each piece being carefully selected as a central masterpiece, or to show an unrepresented style or technique. The pieces include a porcelain bottle vase, second quarter of the fourteenth century AD, decorated with a poem which begins 'Man's life at a hundred years has reached its utmost length' and a porcelain jar, first half of the fourteenth century AD, incised with a lotus and a dragon among waves.

In the preface to the catalogue of his collection Sir John gives some interesting insights into his passion. He wrote:

A collection as it grows acquires an identity and it poses its own discipline and imperatives, and any fresh accession acquires a new significance by joining it. There must be a constant raising of standards, by discards as well as by accessions. Only the best in each class should be retained. 'The higher the fewer' is the collector's motto.

Sir John Addis had a distinguished career in the diplomatic service, becoming Britain's first Ambassador to the People's Republic of China in 1972-74. He had begun to collect in his early days in Nanking in 1947 when he was first Secretary and he writes:

First essays in collecting are usually indiscriminate. Opportunity offers and is taken. The initial pattern of a collection is formed as much by chance and circumstance as by deliberate choice. Specialisation is the only excuse for the amateur, at least in the present generation. He can never hope to have a good understanding of the whole field, as the professionals must, but by studying a corner of it in depth he can sometimes learn more about it than they know.

In a statement reminiscent of Walpole's remarks quoted at the beginning of this seminar Sir John describes the relationship between the private collector and the national museum:

unless you continue to construct, you undo. It makes another good motto for the collector. A collection should be a living thing, always rising to higher planes. If it stops, it dies. Better than death and dispersal is the apotheosis of integration into the national collection. There can be no more gratifying consummation for the small collector.

Finally, in contrast to Sir John Addis, we come to Edward Wharton Tigar (1913-95) whose collection, comprising over one million cigarette and other trade cards, is numerically, one of the largest collections the Museum has ever acquired.

In an article on Wharton Tigar's colourful life, intriguingly entitled 'Tales of Sabotage and Cigarette Cards', an interviewer recorded his subject's summation of his collecting principles: 'I would like to have an example of every card ever issued. It's a form of megalomania of course, but not, I think, a bad form.'

The British Museum

Cigarette card of Honus Wagner.

Wharton Tigar started to collect as a child and continued throughout an active and at times adventurous career. During the Second World War, working for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), he was responsible for blowing up a German monitoring station endangering the Allied landings in North Africa, and in 1944 operated in China what he described as 'the biggest black market currency operation in history'. Eventually, as a highly successful mining operator, he used his business travels to extend his contacts amongst cartophilists, buying a number of large collections. His home having filled with cards, like Sir Hans Sloane he bought the house next door and filled that too.

To an interviewer in 1995 he declared: 'I've been collecting cards ever since I was a boy and now I am a very big fish in the pond. It may be rather a small pond, but it's still satisfying to be the biggest fish in it.'

The Wharton Tigar collection of cigarette and other trade cards is the greatest and most definitive that has ever been assembled. It includes that splendid rarity--a card depicting Honus Wagner, a Pittsburg baseball player. Wagner was fiercely anti-smoking and in 1913 sued the tobacco company that issued the card, forcing it to be withdrawn, thus making it very rare. Wharton Tigar paid US$250 for an example after the War, by 1981 the price tag had risen to US$250,000 and at an auction in 1992 a copy sold for US$451,000.

Wharton Tigar was splendidly unapologetic, writing in his autobiography:

I fully recognise that there are those who think, and will always think, that people must be very odd to devote time, effort and money to the collection of such things as stamps, matchbox labels and cigarette cards. For me, my collection has not only afforded countless hours of pleasure, but in a busy business career it provided a diversion and relaxation in times of stress...

If to collect cigarette cards is a sign of eccentricity, how then will posterity judge one who amassed the biggest collection in the world? Frankly, I care not.

Change the face, dress, bearing or 'manner', and you have the collector of all and every age. There are thousands of them, and in their basic characteristics they are even more alike than they are numerous... at the same time it is impossible to mistake any one of these... victims of 'collecting fever' for any other.

Probably the simplest differentiation between the dabbler and the genuine collector is that the latter has stilled once and for all any inhibitions against spending money on the inanimate objects of his choice.

I would argue that there is such a thing as the true collector, whether of milk bottles or Old Master drawings, who can be distinguished from the mere accumulator. But, I am afraid, we have still to explain exactly why true collectors are as they are.

I should like to conclude with an 1867 description of Franks by his friend and fellow collector Robert Curzon, depicting the collector at his acquisitive best, or perhaps it is at his worst. Curzon writes: