Ulrich Middeldorf 
 
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THE SPORT of 
 COLLECTING 
 
Photo bY F W. Stuin 
 
 ST. JOHN 
 Wooden figure, 14th century 
 (See p. 130) 
 
 Frontispiece 
 
THE SPORT of 
 COLLECTING 
 
 SIR MARTIN CONWAY 
 
 Late Slade Professor of Fine Art 
 in the Uniwrsity oj Cambridge 
 
 NEW YORK 
 FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
First published in i 
 
 [All rights reser'ued] 
 
 IHEGOTYCOtM 
 LIBRARY 
 
2)el)icatton* 
 
 To Dr. Wilhelm von Bode, 
 
 General Director of the 
 
 Berlin Museums. 
 
 Dear Dr. von Bode, 
 
 Over thirty -five years ago a callow 
 art-student went to Berlin in quest of 
 woodcuts in Dutch printed books of the 
 fifteenth century. Your kindness to him 
 began in those happy days, and has 
 continued unbroken ever since. To 
 catalogue your benefits would be a long 
 tale. The last of them came only the 
 other day, when you were good enough 
 to read and give your blessing to this 
 little book, which, with your permission, 
 that same student now takes great 
 pleasure in dedicating to you. 
 
 MARTIN CONWAY. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 ^ Page 
 
 Chapter I. A False Start 7 
 
 „ 11. The Hunt in Milan - - - - i6 
 
 „ III. The Finding of a Foppa - - - 26 
 
 „ IV. More Finds in Milan 38 
 
 ,, V. Here and There in Italy - - - 48 
 
 „ VI. The Hunt in Egypt - - - - 61 
 
 „ VII. From India to Peru - - - - 83 
 
 „VIII. Greek and Roman Antiquities - - 97 
 
 „ IX. A Find of Giorgiones - - - - 107 
 
 „ X. Furniture 121 
 
 „ XI. How We Found a Castle - - - 133 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 St. John : Wooden figure, 14th century - - Frontispiece 
 
 Bevilacqua facing p. 22 
 
 Neri di Bicci „ /. 24 
 
 FopPA » 36 
 
 Lotto A 3^ 
 
 ROMANINO „ /. 44 
 
 MORETTO „ 46 
 
 TiEPOLO - „ 48 
 
 Bramantino » 54 
 
 SOLARIO J) /• 57 
 
 Painter unrecognised - - - - - j>/»59 
 
 Gilt Bronze Cat (from Beni Hasan) - - /• 75 
 
 Tanagra and Asia Minor Terra-cottas - „ /. 78 
 Various Egyptian, Peruvian, and other 
 
 Objects - - » /• 7^ 
 
 Gandhara Sculpture „ 86 
 
 A Gilt Buddha - - - : . - „ 88 
 
 Antique Bust - » /• 98 
 
 Porphyry Bust - - - - - - „ 100 
 
 GiORGiONE >, /• 109 
 
 Dilrer Drawing 0/ i^g^ (alcove). Detail of 
 
 Painting by Giorgione (below) - - - „ no 
 
 GiORGiONE ' - - - . - „ 112 
 
 School OF Tintoretto „ 118 
 
 Ysenbrandt - - - - - - - „ 120 
 
 Allington Castle in 1909, from the East - » 133 
 
 Allington Castle: Gatehouse - - - » 13^ 
 
 Allington Castle: Outer Courtyard - „ 138 
 
THE SPORT OF COLLECTING 
 
 HE passion for " collecting " must correspond with 
 
 X some deep-seated instinct in man. Children of 
 tender age often fall under its sway, and it is the 
 last passion that still masters the very old. I once knew 
 an aged collector who was suffering all the ills that nature 
 accumulates on the last years of some nonagenarians. His 
 sight was feeble ; he was deaf ; he was often racked with 
 pain. It seemed evident that his end was at hand. His 
 days and nights had to be spent in an armchair, and each 
 gasping breath seemed likely to be his last. To him 
 entered a dealer of his acquaintance with a splendid K'ang 
 Hsi Famille verte vase, which the old man had long 
 wished to possess. The sight of it revived his forces ; his 
 breathing cleared ; he sat erect in his chair, and presently, 
 in the excitement of bargaining, was upon his feet 
 striding about the room. The struggle and the victory 
 revived him, and he lived on for several years before death 
 finally won him, and the British Museum entered upon its 
 inheritance. 
 
 Naked and owning nothing, we enter into the world, 
 and the fewer material things we have to house and guard 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 A FALSE START 
 
8 
 
 A FALSE START 
 
 the freer we remain ; yet upon most of us a necessity seems 
 to be laid, not merely to acquire that kind of wealth which 
 is strength, but to obtain possession of objects, not always 
 beautiful, by which our lives thenceforward are con- 
 ditioned, and our goings out and comings in suffer a daily 
 fettered freedom. 
 
 As a child, I passed through the stages of collecting 
 stamps, butterflies, and fossils in a more than usually 
 vague and unscientific manner ; and it was not till after I 
 had been pursuing the study of art-history many years 
 that I yielded to the spell and became a collector of works 
 of art. I can even fix the date when I caught the infec- 
 tion. It was in the early part of the month of May, 
 1887. I was spending two or three months in Milan. The 
 famous Giovanni Morelli, the great connoisseur of Italian 
 Art, was then living, and mine was the good fortune to 
 be brought much in contact with him and with his scarcely 
 less distinguished friend and follower. Dr. Gustavo 
 Frizzoni. 
 
 Morelli was no mere dry-as-dust student, but a fully 
 equipped man of the world, active in politics, socially 
 gifted, and with a force of character that could not but 
 impress itself upon a youthful admirer. One day, when I 
 was in his apartment and he was discoursing upon paint- 
 ing, and illustrating his remarks by reference to his own 
 collection of pictures, now the property of the city of 
 Bergamo, he suddenly broke off to say: "The only way 
 really to get 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 recom- 
 mend ; but how am I going to pay for them ? " 
 
 "That's not difiicult," he replied ; " they are cheap 
 
MORELLrS BET 
 
 9 
 
 enough, if you know how to look for them and where 
 to find them. It's not so much money as an educated eye 
 that a collector needs. If you were to find a previously 
 unknown Raphael, the chances are you could buy it for a 
 hundred francs. Anyhow, you must begin collecting at 
 once." 
 
 " And, please, where and how am I to begin ? " I asked. 
 
 " Well," he answered, " I will tell you how to begin. 
 You have been studying 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 
 Vincenzo 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 Foppa in some dark 
 corner; and, by way of stimulus, I will now bet you 
 twenty francs that you don't find one, though I think it 
 quite possible that you may." 
 
 We went away from Morelli's that afternoon, my wife 
 and I, with our heads full of Foppa and the determina- 
 tion to win that twenty francs. The very next day I 
 began that pilgrimage amongst the dealers' shops, which, 
 except when I have been exploring mountains, has con- 
 tinued till the present time. We bent our steps at once to 
 a cafe and asked for the local directory. It provided us 
 with a Hst of dealers, and I remember that there were 
 some fifty or more of them scattered over all parts of the 
 city. Milan in those days was very different from Milan 
 to-day, not merely in all the large and obvious differences, 
 but quite as markedly from the point of view of a col- 
 lector. Then the passionate hunt for old works of art was 
 
lO 
 
 A FALSE START 
 
 only beginning. In Florence and Venice it had well 
 begun, but it had scarcely extended to Milan, still less to 
 the smaller cities. The number of little dealers was 
 legion, because there was an abounding material for their 
 trading. They were all loaded up with goods. The pave- 
 ments in front of the shops, the shops themselves, the back 
 premises, their own sitting and bedrooms, and all manner 
 of neighbouring lofts, stables, and warehouses, were 
 crammed with old stuff of many sorts, which was patiently 
 awaiting buyers. In all this accumulation, of course, good 
 things were astray amongst bad. If a man had an eye to 
 distinguish, it was a mere question of labour before 
 search was rewarded. 
 
 So I took the Milanese dealers in order, and religiously 
 visited them all in rotation, and examined each one's stock 
 completely before I went on to the next. It was a work 
 of many long and tiring days. I think it was in the first 
 of the smaller dealers I went to that we made our first 
 purchase. It was a Venetian Virgin and Child with 
 saints — one of those small altar-pieces, wider than they 
 are tall, with a series of half-length figures about life-size. 
 If I live to be a hundred, I shall not forget the enthusiasm 
 of that purchase. It was, I believe, the first time I had 
 seen a real " Old Master " out of a picture gallery or some 
 famous private collection. Such objects had seemed 
 inaccessible treasures of priceless value. And here was 
 one that could be ours for a mere ten pounds. It was 
 clearly a genuine old picture, certainly Venetian, not by 
 me assignable to any special artist, but with the great 
 Giovanni Bellini shining, if somewhat dimly, through. 
 And then it had obviously been all painted over. Who 
 could say, but that underneath that later painting a 
 
A FIRST PURCHASE 
 
 n 
 
 genuine Bellini might not lie hid ? Without hesitation, we 
 paid our money, hired a cab, and carried the treasure off 
 at once to our apartment. 
 
 It was a glorious home-coming! and adds lustre even 
 now to the memory of that agreeable abiding-place. It 
 stood in a remote corner of Milan, in the Porta Venezia 
 direction, where was then much open land, with spacious 
 gardens surrounding comfortable houses. Ours belonged 
 to a peculiar Baronessa, a great dancer in her time, almost 
 contemporary with Taglioni, but fallen upon less fortunate 
 days, and compelled to let off part of her house. Besides 
 our rooms, we had a large terrace stretching out beyond 
 them and looking down upon the garden on two sides, and 
 over a wall into a quiet lane on the third. Here, in fine 
 weather, we used to dine, and such was our infatuation 
 with the wonderful picture that we carried it out to the 
 terrace for dinner and back to the salon when we went 
 in. I rather think it was propped up in my bedroom at 
 night. I could not bear to be separated from it for a 
 moment. We were always finding new beauties in it — its 
 splendid colour, its wonderful blues and reds. No Titian 
 had ever seemed to us more rich. Such is the glorifying 
 effect of ownership! 
 
 A second-rate picture that is one's own is finer than 
 all the great galleries of the world that are public 
 property. It is easy to tell us that we, you and I, share 
 the ownership of the National Gallery; but that is mere 
 talk. To own a picture is to be able to do what you please 
 with it: to hang it where you please, to change it about, 
 to look at the back of it, to show it to your friends, and 
 to shut it up from people you don't like. A picture in a 
 gallery belongs in any effectual fashion only to the director 
 
12 
 
 A FALSE START 
 
 of the gallery for the time being. He has the fun of it, and 
 no one else. He can have it lifted about, the glass taken 
 off it, the back turned round, the 'frame removed. No other 
 kind of ownership is worth a rap. Whether a picture is 
 in the Louvre or the Uffizi or the National Gallery is all 
 one to a visitor; it is only by conscious pretence that he 
 can make himself imagine a kind of proprietorship in one 
 more than in the others. In a gallery, you are looked 
 after by a guardian ; you are kept away from close vision 
 by a horrid bar. You can't sit where you please and smoke 
 in comfort, while you enjoy for hours together the object 
 of your delight. To own a single work of art is pleasure 
 of an altogether different kind from looking at objects in 
 a museum or public gallery. Hence the extraordinary 
 blindness of owners to the real merits of their possessions. 
 "A poor thing, but mine own," looks to its possessor so 
 much finer than a far better thing belongmg to someone 
 else or to the public. It is difficult for an owner to imagine 
 how little merit someone else may be able to find in what, 
 to him, is so keen a source of delight. The glamour of 
 possession is a reality. It enforces all beauties; it clouds 
 over defects. There is nothing like it for awakening 
 sensibility to what an artist intended to convey. It is at 
 once stimulus and anaesthetic. It helps the eye to see 
 what is there of beauty; it blinds the eye to faults and 
 failures that would otherwise be glaringly apparent. 
 
 Such was our first experience of the effect of possession. 
 We thought our poor picture was the finest thing on earth, 
 — for the first day or two. It was better to sit at home 
 and gaze at it than to spend our time before the master- 
 pieces in the Brera. But presently the effect began to 
 wear off. The over-painting became unpleasantly promi- 
 
THE JOY OF POSSESSION 13 
 
 nent. We attributed to it all the faults of drawing and 
 modelling, of which we began to be only too conscious. 
 As the hours went by we became more sensible to these 
 drops of bitter in our cup of sweetness. At last the 
 suggestion was made that we should clean off the repaints 
 from one little corner and see what the real picture under- 
 neath was like. I ran out for some turpentine and spirits 
 of wine, and, with a bit of cotton-wool in each hand, 
 saturated with the one and the other, I made tentative 
 dabs at the extremity of the Child's foot down at the bottom 
 of the panel. A beautifully drawn toe emerged from 
 under the later smearing of paint, then another, finally the 
 whole foot. It was damaged; but the whole was pro- 
 mising. The toes were excellently drawn. Our latent 
 enthusiasm burst forth once more. We magnified the merit 
 of what we had revealed, and imagination spread the like 
 over the whole picture. We assigned every fault to the 
 restorer, and every merit to the beclouded artist. The 
 foot was like a certain foot by Cima ; perhaps the picture 
 was by him after all, and some horrid botcher had brought 
 it to the pass from which we would now rescue it. Our 
 decision was soon made. We would strip off the whole 
 of the repaints and see our picture, for better or worse, as 
 it actually was. 
 
 In a few minutes the deed was done. What a horrible 
 experience! One more frightful detail after another 
 emerged from beneath the kindly veil of modern paint. 
 The only tolerably good feature was the little foot we had 
 first revealed. The backs came off the heads. Wretchedly 
 drawn ears appeared in strangely false positions on ill- 
 shapen skulls. Unpaired eyes looked this way and that. 
 Large patches of bare panel occurred, where all the old 
 
14 
 
 A FALSE START 
 
 paint had fallen or been bruised away. In one comer was 
 the brown mark of a burn, where apparently a hot poker 
 had been in contact with the picture. It was, indeed, a 
 frightful daub. Our house of cards fell to the ground with 
 a crash, and we sat silent and disgusted amid the ruins. 
 
 Thus it was that we bought, and very cheaply, an invalu- 
 able experience. We learnt what restorers can do. We 
 realised that, in the great days, there had been bad painters 
 as well as good, and that all Old Masters are not fine merely 
 because they are old. We learnt that appearances may be 
 very deceptive, and we plumbed with startling suddenness 
 the immense depth of our also wide ignorance. A few 
 days later a very differently laden cab carried us and our 
 picture back to that little dealer's shop. There was no 
 enthusiasm on board that journey, no glorious pride of 
 possession. We hid the thing from the public gaze, and 
 smuggled it across the pavement as quickly and unobtru- 
 sively as possible. The dealer was quite hospitable to the 
 idea of taking it back. He could easily have it restored 
 once more, and would allow us credit for what we had 
 paid, less the ridiculously small sum we now learnt would 
 suffice to pay for bringing the poor picture back to the 
 condition in which we had acquired it. I wonder where 
 that picture is now, and what it looks like ? It can scarcely 
 again have given to anyone even the brief delirium of joy 
 we had from it; nor, perhaps, was there anyone both so 
 green and so adventurous likely to come around and receive 
 from it the priceless and enduring lesson which it yielded 
 to us. 
 
 I am not going to pretend that this was the last time I 
 have been taken in by forged or cleverly " restored " 
 works of art. Forgers and semi-forgers are an inventive 
 
EXPERIENCE BOUGHT 
 
 15 
 
 tribe. As connoisseurship advances, so does their skill 
 and initiative. Each new field of collecting opens up a 
 new area for the forger's activities. The omnivorous 
 collector must often buy his experience as he ventures into 
 a fresh category of antiquities. But if we were once and 
 again in future years to be victimised by specious 
 " treasures," we never had so dramatic an emergence from 
 so joyous a cloud of dreams, nor did we ever again make so 
 headlong a plunge into wild and extravagant imaginings. 
 Unfortunately, as the years pass, so passes the power of 
 ecstasy. No moonlight any more is like the moonlight on 
 the waters of our youth. No mountain panorama in all the 
 splendour of clearest mid-day can be like the first views 
 from mountain summits that greeted our wondering eyes, 
 when, all glorious with a difficult ascent safely accomplished, 
 iwe gazed forth in the passion of youth on a world actually 
 fairer than any old prophet's vision of an imagined 
 paradise. 
 
CHAPTER IL 
 
 THE HUNT IN MILAN 
 
 THE incident of the Venetian picture was but byplay 
 in our real quest, which was, to search for and find a 
 Foppa. Those twenty francs of Morelli*s had simply 
 got to be won. So after the loss of less time than my 
 narrative may perhaps suggest, I settled down seriously 
 to pursue a steady and relentless search. Memory, as I 
 try to recall those far-off days, brings before my mind's 
 eye a confused vision of dirty antichita shops, dark, deep- 
 laden in dust, malodorous. Usually there were a number 
 of pieces of furniture in the style of Giovanni Batista 
 Maggiolino, with which the houses of Milan seem to have 
 been filled. They were, for the most part, inlaid chests-of- 
 drawers and other pieces of bedroom furniture, and whole 
 suites of them were to be had for little more than their 
 price as old timber. They used to be heaped up on the 
 pavements, and piled high in garrets and lofts. Everyone 
 was selling them, and few desired to buy. Yet they were 
 really very admirable work, beautifully inlaid, a kind of 
 Italian Sheraton, and nowadays they command a good 
 price, and are not easy to obtain. In an afternoon, I could 
 have bought enough to panel a great room. I wonder 
 where they have all gone to now. 
 
LOST CHANCES 
 
 17 
 
 In such places I sought long and carefully, finding and 
 passing by many a good picture, either too costly for our 
 notions of what was a reasonable price in those days, or 
 of some school or period which I did not understand. How 
 often in these later days have I regretted the economies of 
 that time. Why did we not empty out our purses to the 
 dregs? Why were we so foohsh as not to plunge deeply 
 into debt rather than, for instance, allow a genuine Gentile 
 Bellini to slip through our fingers, when we might have 
 captured it for a mere eighty pounds ? I might have had a 
 now well-known Giotto for seventy pounds. Alas for the 
 foolish economies and abnegations of an imprudently pru- 
 dent youth! 
 
 Each day I went to look at one or other of the known 
 Foppas, to impress its style ever more and more distinctly 
 on my memory ; then off to the slums again to pursue the 
 apparently endless quest. Of course, I encountered and 
 recognised a certain number of forgeries, and, no doubt, 
 failed to identify many more ; but the surprising thing was 
 the extraordinary number of genuine, but utterly bad, old 
 pictures that had been swept together by dealers. The 
 galleries of Europe contain on their walls many bad old 
 pictures ; their magazines are filled with a much larger 
 quantity of worse; but it was a revelation to me then tio 
 discover that there still existed in the dark backgrounds 
 of the dealers' warehouses an almost countless multitude of 
 yet viler daubs, which had maintained a dishonoured 
 existence throughout some four centuries, and were still 
 hopeful of finding purchasers. I suppose they were painted 
 by minor craftsmen in the smaller towns, or by itinerant 
 journeymen going from place to place, perhaps for some 
 domestic oratory or village chapel Who can say that they 
 B 
 
i8 
 
 THE HUNT IN MILAN 
 
 may not have stimulated as fervent devotions in simple 
 hearts as were ever poured forth by Pope or Cardinal be- 
 neath some altar-piece by Raphael or Titian? Be that 
 as it may, the search through these wrecks of bad or in- 
 different works of art was a sorry and fatiguing business. 
 As daylight waned, and I gladly hied me back home from 
 my slummy haunts, it was often with a sense of utter weari- 
 ness, disgust, and failure. At last the day came when not 
 only all the recognised art dealers of Milan had been visited, 
 but all the furniture-menders, frame-makers, and gilders, 
 and every discoverable person who added the sale of old 
 goods to any other trade, had been visited by us, some of 
 them more than once. We had not found the desired 
 Foppa, though we had by no means drawn an absolute 
 blank. One acquisition, indeed, we had made which came 
 very near to what we were seeking, but before telling about 
 that I ought, perhaps, to say something about who Foppa 
 was. 
 
 I hope some of my readers may never have heard of him, 
 because I am not writing this little book for my colleagues, 
 the hard-shell students of art-history, but just for the enter- 
 tainment of nice people who have other interests in life 
 than the mere question who painted this or the other 
 more or less obscure picture. Not that the work that leads 
 to the decision of such apparently unimportant questions 
 is not worth while. There is really no better fun than to 
 hunt out forgotten facts of whatever kind, and bring order 
 into any sort of neglected chaos. Fifty years ago, pictures 
 were vaguely attributed to painters of repute, sometimes 
 on mere grounds of tradition, sometimes because a name 
 was wanted as a kind of handle for holding on to some 
 admired work, and sometimes as the mere say-so of a self- 
 
CONNOISSEURSHIP 
 
 19 
 
 appointed " authority." When the real love of old works 
 of art set in and captured the fancy of a great many people, 
 and when facilities of travel improved, and public picture- 
 galleries began to grow, and loan exhibitions to be held, of 
 course it became inevitable that all these attributions should 
 be tested. Lovers of art, as they grew familiar with the 
 paintings of the Old Masters, became conscious that many 
 a " Raphael " was not painted by Raphael. They also learnt 
 tliat many a picture to which no name was attached was 
 as fine as, or finer than, others by artists of well-rooted 
 reputations. Thus the hunt began — the hunt after for- 
 gotten reputations, and for the purifying of the record of 
 established masters. 
 
 In consequence of the persistent labours of some three 
 generations of earnest workers, a great change has been 
 wrought Pictures have been deprived of false attributions 
 which once masqueraded as the work of greater men. Pic- 
 tures have been raised from anonymity into the rank of 
 acknowledged masterpieces by famed artists. Finally, for- 
 gotten artists of the first rank have been found anew, and 
 equipped with a longer or shorter list of known works 
 now acknowledged to have been painted by them. Simul- 
 taneously with this work of connoisseurship, the old archives 
 have been ransacked, dates have been discovered, the trust- 
 worthy facts about artists' lives have been revealed, and all 
 manner of interesting information clearly set down, grouped 
 together, and made to yield precious treasures of deduc- 
 tion. This work has called into existence a whole class 
 of investigators — experts, historians, archivists, and the 
 like — and for them the museums and universities of 
 Europe and America have provided a reward of bread 
 and butter in return for their devotion of a lifetime to 
 
20 THE HUNT IN MILAN 
 
 research. These men, however, are paid not so much in 
 money as in sport. Theirs is the joy of the hunt. They 
 do not have to await the winter for their quarry. They 
 are hot on the scent all the year round, and never know but 
 that to-morrow may give them some new fact or open their 
 eyes to some unsuspected generalisation which will thrill 
 them with the delight of success in keener form than ever 
 big-game hunters experienced, and will bring them also 
 the envy and admiration of their rivals, and, rarely, even 
 the momentary attention of the great world. 
 
 Based on all this activity of research, the whole giant 
 growth of art-dealing has arisen with its huge money re- 
 wards, and out of the same impulse has come that vast 
 enterprise of excavation — the most sporting category of 
 all historical sports — which has carried men who at home 
 are fancied to be dry-as-dust antiquarians to places remote 
 and sometimes insecure, where, superintending perhaps 
 hundreds of labourers, talking unknown tongues, and as 
 lawless as the miners of Damsite Gulch, they have delved 
 into the piled heaps of ancient ruin and recovered lost 
 cities, forgotten civilisations, nameless races, and treasures 
 of glorious beauty. Yes, indeed, the hunt is worth while in 
 any of its forms, and the mere fox-hunter, in what he be- 
 lieves to be the greatest moment of his glory, does not begin 
 to know the passionate thrill of delight, almost enough to 
 strike a man dead, which comes, it may be in the still hours 
 of the night, at a moment of discovery to some silent worker 
 in his quiet study. 
 
 Whether Foppa was quite, or only almost, forgotten 
 before the days of research I myself forget. I think he 
 was a name and little more. Presently, he began to emerge. 
 Pictures were assigned to him with certainty one after 
 
VINCENZO FOPPA 
 
 21 
 
 another, and now he is the subject of a thick and large 
 octavo biography, by Miss Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes, 
 fully documented, fully illustrated, and accepted as authori- 
 tative by those entitled to an opinion. To that book let 
 any reader desirous of accurate detail refer. He will there 
 find dates of birth and other events. He will find a list of 
 his pictures and photographs of them, including the two 
 that will be referred to below. He will find whence his art 
 was derived, and how he lived much longer than used to 
 be supposed, and how, in his old age, he failed in power, 
 and actually painted the bad pictures which kind critics had 
 wanted to ascribe to someone else. For us here, all that 
 we need to note is that from him and his contemporary, 
 Mantegna, the great Renaissance schools of painting in 
 North Italy derived their origin. Those of Venice and the 
 East go back to Mantegna; those of Milan, Brescia, and 
 the West go back to Foppa. His importance, from the 
 historical point of view, is thus obvious. Bevilacqua and 
 Borgognone were his followers, if not both his pupils. 
 Luini, amongst other well-known artists of the next 
 generation, descended from him. Those grey faces I had 
 by now so well learned to recognise re-emerge charac- 
 teristically in Luini. Borgognone's fascinating angels first 
 appeared on Foppa's panels. Foppa's compositions were 
 repeated and developed long after he had ceased to paint 
 for Lombard patrons. 
 
 When, therefore, one day, whilst hot upon the Foppa 
 scent, we stumbled on a Bevilacqua, we felt that success 
 might not, after all, elude us. It came about in this way. 
 There was an old man who sold pictures in a back street 
 in rather a remote quarter of the city, whose shop I had 
 visited late one afternoon. I found in it a picture, apparently 
 
THE HUNT IN MILAN 
 
 of the Leonardo School, a version of the "Madonna del 
 Lago," which he sent home after me on approval. Daylight 
 revealed it as a modern copy done on an old panel, so I 
 took it back to him. He was disappointed, and well he 
 might be, to see it returned on his hands, as perhaps it had 
 often been returned before, and he was more than usually 
 eager that I should see every picture he possessed, in hopes 
 that he might not fail, after all, to sell me something. He 
 was a queer little old fellow, and wore a black velvet cap, 
 which made him look like a sorcerer out of a Rembrandt. 
 He took us through his various living rooms, and finally 
 up to his bedroom. My wife entered first, and at once 
 saw and recognised the Bevilacqua. I followed and did 
 the like, but we said nothing, and awaited developments. 
 ^OT anyone who knew as well as we did the Brera 
 Bevilacqua there could be no doubt about this one, though 
 people with a general knowledge of the school often mis- 
 take it for a Borgognone. Really it comes much closer 
 to Foppa than any picture Borgognone ever painted, and 
 the angels might have been designed by him. I am not 
 going to tell the price we paid for it, nor shall I hereafter 
 reveal our prices generally. Suffice it to say that they were 
 moderate for those days, and, from the point of view of 
 to-day, absurdly small. We, however, thought them quite 
 large enough, and no doubt they gave the vendors a suffi- 
 cient profit. Thus we carried off our first substantial pur- 
 chase, and if our home-coming that day lacked the wild 
 enthusiasm with which we had convoyed the Venetian daub, 
 hke the Florentines their Rucellai Madonna, we, at aU 
 events, enjoyed a sohd delight in that we knew what we 
 had got without the shadow of a doubt, knew it to be a 
 sound painting by a definite, if not absolutely first-rate 
 
BE VILACQU A 
 
 33i X 24 in. 
 
 Facing p. 22 
 
BEVILACQUA 
 
 23 
 
 master, and were thus secure against any unforeseen and 
 violent reaction or disappointment.* 
 
 That same day, too, I obtained access to the apartment 
 of a dealer who was known as the Widow Arrigoni. She 
 kept her things in two or three lofty salons. For the most 
 part, they were large things, giving to the rooms somewhat 
 of the imposing aspect which every dealer in Italy nowadays 
 knows how to achieve. Great gilt pieces of furniture and 
 other rococo objects curled and twisted and glimmered 
 among dark hangings, and there were several large and, 
 to my thinking, ugly late works, which then had no interest 
 for me. She owned also quantities of splendid old stuffs, 
 and a great deal of china. Much of all this was of fine 
 quality, but not in our line. I was about to go away when 
 she said : — 
 
 " I know what you want — a Raphael. I have one, and 
 will now show it to you." Alas, how many " Raphaels " 
 had I even then already been shown ; and how many more 
 was I afterward destined to behold! Dealers nowadays, 
 even the most ignorant, know too much to play thus with 
 the great names ; but the habit of the eighteenth century 
 still lingered on when I began to collect, and Raphaels, 
 Michelangelos, Titians, and Leonardos were frequently 
 among the pretensions of the smallest dealers. Accordingly, 
 my heart did not flutter when the Raphael was produced, 
 even though it was framed in what is, or then was, known 
 as a "robbery" box. A robbery is a well-made cabinet 
 
 * This Bevilacqua Madonna was exhibited at the Burlington Fine 
 Arts Club in 1898, and was noticed as follows : By Dr. G. Pauli (Zeits. 
 f.b. Kunst, N.F. x. p. 106), who called attention to resemblances to 
 Bevilacqua's "Adoration" at Dresden, and the Madonna of the Picci- 
 nelli Coll. at Bergamo ; by Dr. Frizzoni (Gazette des B-A., 1898, 
 pp. 296, 298) ; by Dr. W. von Seidlitz (Repertorium, xxx.. Heft 5). 
 
THE HUNT IN MILAN 
 
 of blackened wood, closed by shutters or wings, into which 
 the frame fits under glass. The fact that a picture is so 
 carefully enshrined is thought likely to dispose a buyer to 
 regard it instinctively as a thing of special value. The 
 glass prevents him, at least until it is removed, from examin- 
 ing the paint too closely, so that a strong first impression 
 may be produced, and on that foundation a clever salesman 
 can often effect a satisfactory bargain. 
 
 This " Raphael,*' when its doors were opened, proved to 
 be a very obvious Flemish-Milanese picture — one of several 
 known versions of the " Virgin with the Cherries," a com- 
 position based upon some Leonardesque design, which was 
 popular with Italianising Flemings in the first half of the 
 sixteenth century. I find in my old diary that I attributed 
 this picture, which I presently purchased, to Bernard van 
 Orley. It was not really by him, but it came out of that 
 entourage. No one has yet fully accounted for the origin 
 and popularity of the type, examples of which can be seen 
 in almost every gallery in Europe to-day. Who first gave 
 it vogue ; in what place it obtained fame ; where and why 
 it was so often repeated — these are questions to which no 
 answer has yet been given. My example of it was a good 
 one, with an attractive landscape of Flemish type seen 
 through an open window. I soon tired of it, however, and 
 before many years was lucky enough to exchange it and 
 an old Steinway grand piano for a Neri di Bicci Madonna 
 and a new Steinway, neither of which has yet worn out its 
 welcome. 
 
 I promised to call on the Widow Arrigoni again, and 
 see some other treasures not just then accessible, but it 
 was twenty years before I fulfilled that promise. I was 
 then spending two or three days in Milan, and had drawn 
 
NERI DI BICCI 
 2Vi X 15 in. 
 
 Facing p. 24 
 
THE WIDOW ARRIGONI 
 
 25 
 
 an absolute blank in all the dealers' shops in the city. I 
 bethought me, by some sudden illumination, of the old lady, 
 and found her name in the directory, though not, I think, 
 any longer as a dealer. Arrived at her door, my summons 
 was answered by a curious-looking domestic, who, in reply 
 to my question whether her mistress was at home, informed 
 me that she was^ but that she was, at that very moment, in 
 the act of dying. That, I believe, was the last time when 
 I even hoped to make a purchase from the dealers of Milan. 
 Those I once knew are all dead ; their successors, except 
 one or two of European reputation, have now nothing 
 to sell. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE FINDING OF A FOPPA 
 
 I HEADED each of the preceding chapters in turn, 
 " How I Found a Foppa," and have had to change it, 
 for still the actual adventure eludes my pen; but I 
 vow this time that the story shall be gotten rid of before 
 this third chapter closes, even if I have to stretch it out 
 to a hundred pages. Of course, the simple fact, which 
 might have been told in two lines, is that in Milan I found 
 no Foppa at all. Hunt high, hunt low as I might, starting 
 early and returning late, no Foppa was discoverable be- 
 cause none was in the market then, nor, I believe, has any 
 turned up since in the Lombard capital. My twenty-franc 
 piece was beginning to lie more than lightly in my pocket, 
 and looked like taking flight. But this was not the worst. 
 To my horror, I now discovered that my own domestic 
 prestige was in peril. A bet taken in the presence of one's 
 wife, it seems, has got to be won, or she will be shamed by 
 her husband's humiliation. Perish the thought! Frizzoni 
 had found a Foppa, then why not also I? If there were 
 none in Milan, one must be sought elsewhere. Foppa did 
 not only live in Milan ; where else did he live ? Brescia ? 
 Well, then, off with me by the first train next day to 
 Brescia, and " don't come back without a Foppa " ! Here 
 was a pretty kettle of fish ! There was no doubt what had 
 
LUIGI OF BRESCIA 
 
 27 
 
 to be done, so off I went next morning by an eight-thirty 
 train to Brescia. 
 
 ; Arrived there, I left my bag at the station, and 
 wandered forth on foot into the town. The apparent hope- 
 lessness of my quest came upon me, and I determined to 
 commit my fate to chance. The whole town seemed to 
 resound with the hammering of copper. In the front of 
 one little open workshop after another sat a workman 
 beating out some copper vessel, and behind and around 
 him were piles and heaps of the finished product. Who 
 on earth could want so many copper vessels? I watched 
 the copper workers, and then the people passing me on the 
 pavement, I don't know what I expected to find in their 
 faces. Presently, a kindly looking, intelligent person 
 attracted my attention, and I made bold to address him. 
 
 " I want to buy some old pictures," I said. " Can you tell 
 me how to set to work to find them ? " 
 
 " Certainly," he repHed. " Go to the Italia Inn and ask 
 for Luigi. He will be there, or not far off. He makes it 
 his business to know who has pictures to sell, and he takes 
 strangers about and makes his Hving that way. They call 
 him Luigi deir Italia." 
 
 I thanked the gentlemaui and took his advice. At the 
 Italia I found Luigi, an energetic and apparently honest 
 person, as such fouts go. He has been dead long years 
 now. I afterward learnt that he had been serviceable to 
 many collectors in his day. Mr. Henry Willett acquired 
 through him that remarkable set of decorative portrait 
 heads from the Castle of San Martino, which are now 
 scattered through various museums — ^the Victoria and 
 Albert, the New York Metropolitan, and others — whereof 
 more anon. 
 
28 THE FINDING OF A FOPPA 
 
 Luigi at once took me in hand. I was careful not to tell 
 him anything about Foppa, though it would not have 
 mattered if I had told him, for he had never heard of 
 Foppa, nor could he tell the work of one artist from 
 another's. " I will take you first," he said, " to a house full 
 of old pictures. It belongs to Nobile Angelo Mignani. 
 He is an old fellow who paints, and he gives small sums 
 for any old pictures that people bring him. These he is 
 almost always willing to sell" 
 
 The house was at no great distance, and we were at 
 once admitted. It was a tall and spacious dwelling, in a 
 rather narrow street. Internally, it was much out of repair, 
 and the great staircase was dark. We found the noble 
 Angelo at home, and delighted with the chance of a 
 bargain. He and Luigi greeted one another as old con- 
 spirators, and I felt like a chicken about to be plucked 
 in their hands. They played up to one another, and 
 echoed each other's praises of this and that. The storeys 
 of the house seemed as interminable as those of a sky- 
 scraper, but that was because they were so full of things. 
 On the first floor the rooms contained framed pictures, 
 carved chests, heavy furniture, hangings, and church 
 draperies. I wish I had the chance of choosing amongst 
 them now, for then I understood only pictures, and not 
 many styles of them. However, all the pictures I saw were 
 bad. Some worse than others, but none in the least 
 attractive to me. So we went up to the next storey, where 
 things were more dilapidated, frames incomplete, panels 
 cracked, canvases torn. The pictures down below had all 
 been fairly complete, and were, at least, gay with bright 
 and often new colours. Noble Angelo now told me that he 
 had restored them himself, while these pictures were wait- 
 
NOBILE MIGNANI 
 
 29 
 
 ing their turn. He took them as he felt indined. I believe 
 him to have been the worst restorer that ever lived. He 
 painted on an old altar-piece as a child paints in a pattern- 
 book, using only three or four shrill colours, and laying 
 them on thickly within uncertain outlines. 
 
 Higher up, we came to rooms filled with broken altar- 
 pieces, unframed panels, and piles of canvases. They 
 stood in rows, leaning against one another, twenty or thirty 
 deep. I worked steadily through them hour after hour, 
 and all were bad. Thus in some almost abandoned house 
 in Belgravia, perhaps, in the twenty-third century, the 
 sweepings of the rejected pictures of nineteenth-century 
 Academy exhibitions may drift together, still begging for 
 a purchaser, and a collector may turn the wrecks over and 
 wonder how such pictures came to be painted, and, even 
 more, by what mischance they have survived. With less 
 and less hope, I mounted higher and higher, and we all 
 became dejected — they, because nothing they showed 
 could tempt me to buy, and I because I found no Foppa 
 nor any even moderately desirable picture. 
 
 At long last we reached the very highest attic, and in it 
 a room called the studio, into which we chmbed by a ladder. 
 Here it was that the noble Angelo did his work of refresh- 
 ment to the wrecks that came into his hands. As the door 
 opened, I saw the floor wholly heaped up with panel 
 pictures over all the area displayed. But yonder, what was 
 that? My heart almost ceased to beat. There at the far 
 end, leaning against the wall, with a number of smaller 
 predella panels leaning 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. I said nothing. I 
 hardly dared to look that way ; in fact, I turned my back 
 
THE FINDING OF A FOPPA 
 
 on the disgraced treasure and began examining a village 
 altar-piece mounted on a large easel, and in the process of 
 undergoing final destruction at Mignani's hands. It had 
 never been anything but a third-rate work, and evil had 
 been the days through which it had passed ; but the candles 
 that had fallen against and burnt it had not left such 
 abominable traces as those of noble Angelo's brush. Far 
 other was his opinion, as he pointed out his work with pride. 
 I had to say that the picture was too big for me. Then 
 he began on the predella panels. There must have been a 
 hundred of them on the floor, poor, wretched things, dis- 
 honoured in their making, their life, and their fate. He 
 saw it was no use, and evidently did not think the Foppa 
 Madonna likely to be any more attractive to me than the 
 rest. So we looked out of the window and admired the 
 really wonderful view over the roofs of the town and away 
 to the foothills of the Alps. The sun was shining ; the 
 noise of distant copper beating, wafted by a soft breeze, 
 mingled with the hum of the nearer streets. "Well," I 
 said, " I must be going ; but I want something by which to 
 remember this visit. How much do you ask for that 
 Madonna there against the wall ? " He named a moderate 
 price, and I accepted it. The thing was wrapped up in an 
 old newspaper. Luigi hitched it under his arm, and noble 
 Angelo conducted us down the ladder and all the dark 
 stairs, and so out into the street. " I will now go and 
 lunch," I said, " but first show me the way to the telegraph 
 office." It was not far off. " I have bought the Foppa," I 
 wired. What happened during the remainder of the day I 
 do not remember. But that night a mysterious thing 
 occurred, for which I have never been able to account, 
 except upon the assumption that some evil spirit was 
 
A FOPPA FOUND 
 
 31 
 
 enraged with me and wanted to pay me out for having out- 
 witted him in the matter of the Foppa. 
 
 In my bedroom in the hotel there were some hooks 
 fastened in the underside of a beam, and so placed that 
 clothes suspended from them hung clear out away from 
 any wall Even if you were to have swung them to and 
 fro, they would not have reached any wall or come in 
 contact with any other solid object short of the ceiling. 
 Before going to bed, I wound up my watch, and then put it 
 into the pocket of my waistcoat hanging upon one of the 
 said hooks. I carefully locked the door of my room, 
 jumped into bed, and, with pleasant thoughts of the Foppa 
 and a triumphant home-going, was soon sound asleep. 
 Bright sunlight awoke me early next morning, and I leapt 
 out of bed. Reaching up for my watch to know the time, 
 my fingers encountered broken glass in the pocket. This 
 was surprising to begin with, but it was much more sur- 
 prising to find, not merely the glass, but the dial of the 
 watch broken, and presently to realise that the works also 
 were smashed — smashed as though the whole thing had 
 been pounded in a mortar with a heavy iron pestle. In 
 that way the devil tried to get even with me. But I was 
 glad that he had selected the watch instead of the picture 
 on which to wreak his rage. One would have thought 
 that if he had been angry about the picture he would have 
 smashed it ; but he didn't. I have always wondered why. 
 
 Of course, I was back in Milan double-quick, with the 
 old panel under my arm and glory on my head. The very 
 next morning we called on Dr. Frizzoni, who rejoiced with 
 us, and took us immediately to Morelli. There was, of 
 course, no shadow of a doubt about the Foppa, for all its 
 plastering with repaints. The face was untouched, and it 
 
32 THE FINDING OF A FOPPA 
 
 told its story beyond possibility of mistake. So there were 
 congratulations all round, and much discussion as to the 
 relation of the new picture to others already known. But 
 the one obvious necessity was to have the thing cleaned 
 and its real surface and nature exposed. This meant that 
 it had to be taken, and forthwith, to our good friend, then 
 and ever since. Professor Luigi Cavenaghi, than whom no 
 better physician for old Italian paintings has ever Hved. 
 Even in those days, he had accumulated an unrivalled 
 experience, and possessed unexampled skill in this difficult 
 art ; whilst since then an almost countless number of the 
 greatest masterpieces in the world have passed through his 
 hands. 
 
 All four of us accordingly made a rendezvous for the 
 next day in Cavenaghi^s studio, and duly kept it. The 
 Foppa was placed on an easel and work at once began. 
 Our hearts were in our throats with unutterable excitement, 
 because it was still possible, nay, almost probable, that 
 under the repaints we might find irreparable damage. Off 
 from the child's head came his golden curls, and a red cap 
 took their place. Other no less remarkable changes 
 followed. The most extraordinary was with the land- 
 scape. Four successive landscapes there were, one on the 
 top of another. Three came off without resistance, and 
 disclosed the original beneath in perfect preservation. One 
 wonders what kind of mania possessed people to deal thus 
 with a picture. In this case, not an inch of the panel, 
 except the Virgin's face, had escaped some botcher's hand, 
 yet for all this over-painting there was no excuse. The 
 picture underneath was in sound condition, except for one 
 or two small injuries in unimportant places, each of them 
 no larger than a threepenny piece. Foppa's own paint 
 
THE PICTURE CLEANED 33 
 
 was as hard as enamel, and was quite unaffected by the 
 solvents that swept away the later disfigurements. But 
 when all of them had vanished that could be dissolved, 
 there still remained on the Virgin's hood some very ancient 
 and unnecessary repainting, which Professor Cavenaghi 
 skilfully chipped off with the sharp edge of a knife gently 
 tapped like a chisel. The sight of work so skilfully done 
 was a joy to see. These last hard and opaque layers came 
 away like the peelings of an onion, and finally the original 
 painting was before us, almost as fresh as when it left the 
 hand of the fifteenth-century artist. The crown of our 
 satisfaction was thus complete, and we hugged ourselves 
 with joy.* 
 
 This, however, was not the end of our adventures with 
 Foppa. Having found one picture by him after these ex- 
 citing adventures and repeated disappointments, another 
 fell into my hands like a mere gift from the gods a few 
 days later. Brescia, of course, was to us, after this, a place 
 of golden delight ; so we went there again very soon to 
 spend a few days, during which time I made a careful study 
 of the pictures of my period in the gallery, besides having 
 further adventures with Luigi, then and in later years, of 
 which more anon. I was particularly struck by a little 
 picture of the Crucifixion by Foppa, which seemed then to 
 me, and still remains, one of the most pathetic representa- 
 tions of that subject ever painted. With that well in my 
 memory, it was impossible for me to fail in recognising 
 a similar work by the same master if it happened to come 
 my way. 
 
 A few days later I was in Bergamo, now more than ever 
 
 * This picture is now in the well-known collection of my friend, Mr. 
 J. G. Johnson, of Philadelphia. 
 
 C 
 
THE FINDING OF A FOPPA 
 
 on the hunt. Everyone who has been there will remember 
 the rope railway by which one ascends to the upper town. 
 I cannot now recall by what chance I was led that morning. 
 It was, I know, the first jubilee day of Queen Victoria, 
 and it brought me uncommon luck. The rope-train's 
 upper terminus is in the ground floor of a house that com- 
 mands a wonderful view over the Lombard Plain, then 
 steaming and glimmering in mid-day splendour. Some 
 luck took me further into that same house. I mounted its 
 stone staircase to an upper floor and knocked at the door 
 of an artist, who not only painted pictures, but added to 
 his income by dealing in Old Masters. I bought an un- 
 important picture from him by way of setting the ball 
 rolling, and then he recommended me to visit the school- 
 master Gabezzeni, whom I had much difficulty in finding. 
 The innkeeper in the house where once Colleoni lived 
 helped me to run him to earth, but not till he had tried 
 to sell me some frescoed portraits of the Colleoni family 
 still remaining on the walls of one of the rooms. I told 
 him he ought to be ashamed of himself, and went oS 
 in dudgeon. The little schoolmaster had all the arts of a 
 fisherman, and treated me as though I were a shy trout, to 
 whom he offered his pictures like various flies. He would 
 not approach the question of price till I had seen all his 
 store, and he thought he had formed some idea of which 
 I liked best. Of course, I correspondingly tried to mystify 
 him, and so we played the game for an hour or two, both 
 thoroughly enjoying ourselves. A number of neighbours 
 formed, alternately, audience and chorus, and prevented 
 the altercation from dropping or growing dull. 
 
 I was reminded of my friend Moberley Bell's story 
 about the Cairo carpet-seller. A certain Anglo-Egyptian 
 
HOW TO BARGAIN 
 
 35 
 
 official saw and coveted a carpet in his shop. He inquired 
 the price. " Thirty pounds/' said the dealer. " Nonsense," 
 said the official ; " I'll give you fifteen." The dealer tried 
 to bargain, and suggested twenty-eight pounds, but the 
 official stuck to his price and went his way. Next day 
 he looked in again, offered his fifteen pounds, was refused, 
 and went away. The process was repeated at intervals 
 for some time, and always with the same result. One day 
 the official saw this same carpet on the floor of a friend's 
 room. " Hullo," he said, " you bought that carpet at 
 Abdullah's ! How much did you pay for it ? " " Twelve 
 pounds " was the reply. 
 
 " Twelve pounds ! Why, IVe offered him fifteen pounds 
 over and over again, and he always refused. How did you 
 manage to get it for twelve ? " Off went the disgusted 
 official to Abdullah and complained. 
 
 "YouVe sold for twelve pounds to Colonel the 
 
 carpet which you have always refused to sell to me for 
 fifteen. Why did you do that ? " 
 
 "Sir," said he, "you came to my shop and asked the 
 price of the carpet, and I told you thirty pounds. You said 
 fifteen, which was all right so far ; and then I said twenty- 
 eight. It was then your turn to raise your offer a little, 
 and we should have talked together, and I would have sent 
 out for coffee, and we would have bargained together in a 
 kindly fashion, and by degrees, you going up a little and I 
 coming down a good deal, we should have come to terms, 
 and you would have bought the carpet. But you always 
 rushed into my shop and said, ' TU give you fifteen pounds,* 
 and off you went. In that fashion, I would not have sold 
 you the carpet till the end of my days. But what did 
 Colonel do? He came to my shop and asked the 
 
36 THE FINDING OF A FOPPA 
 
 price of the carpet, and I said ' Thirty pounds.' He in turn 
 offered me five pounds. But he came in and sat down 
 and we talked and bargained together, and by degrees, he 
 raising his offers and I lowering my price, we came 
 together, and I sold him the carpet for twelve pounds, 
 which I would not sell to you for fifteen. To buy and 
 sell as you would do may be all right for your people, but it 
 is not our way. You had better go to the European stores 
 if you want to buy like that." 
 
 The Italian dealers at the time I am writing of retained, 
 and in out-of-the-way places they still retain, something of 
 this Oriental attitude of mind. Buying and selling to them 
 is not a mere matter of exchange of a thing against 
 money ; it is a pleasant way of spending time and an oppor- 
 tunity for cultivating conversation. A bargain is not so 
 much a matter of science as of art, in which each party 
 has to display his human qualities, and not merely effect 
 a deal, but obtain some insight into the character and 
 quality of the other. Thus the schoolmaster and I 
 wrestled together for an hour or two. I forget what the 
 pictures were that he had for sale. One, I know, was a 
 rather large canvas painted by Moroni, which had been 
 partly burned in a church fire. The fragment remaining 
 had been cut into pieces, with a single figure or mere head 
 on each, and I began by buying a cherub for a few francs 
 as a sort of entree. The real piece de resistance was the 
 Foppa, which finally passed into my possession, and was 
 duly removed to Milan when I returned there on the 
 following day. 
 
 The picture represents a half -figure of the dead Christ, 
 as it were, standing in the tomb, with the cross and other 
 instruments of the Passion behind. It probably once 
 
Facing p. 36 
 
ANOTHER FOPPA 
 
 37 
 
 formed the top panel of a composite altar-piece, and 
 perhaps the other dismembered panels are scattered in 
 different museums. The Christ is of astonishing dignity 
 and beauty, and the whole treatment of the subject, which 
 is emblematic of the flesh and blood of the Eucharist, is 
 very fine. The delicate light and shade of it, throwing 
 the head into high relief and dissembling the accessories 
 as merely decorative adjuncts, which do not attract the 
 eye, but only serve to frame the figure, is unobtrusively 
 clever in a high degree. The Brescia Virgin and Child 
 was a brighter and more attractive picture, a decorative 
 rendering of a traditional group. The Bergamo C. C. is 
 an imaginative work of high originality, the like of which 
 Foppa seldom if ever again produced. 
 
 * Both the Foppas were exhibited at the Burlington Fine Arts Club 
 Exhibition in 1898. They were discussed in the same articles as those 
 cited above (p. 23, footnote) for the Bevilacqua. Dr. Pauli attributed 
 the Christ to Foppa's early period, little later than the Bergamo 
 " Crucifixion." Sir Claude Phillips described the Christ as "noble* and 
 reposeful in sentiment." Miss C. J. Ffoulkes and R. Maiocchi in their 
 book ("Vincenzo Foppa of Brescia," London, 1909, pp. 87-90) assign 
 the Christ to about 1460- 1470. They continue as follows: "The 
 owner of this picture and Morelli (who saw it when it was first 
 acquired) considered it to be not much later than the Crucifixion of 
 1456. The drawing of the cranium certainly recalls that of the central 
 figure in the picture at Bergamo, and the hands, in form, come very 
 near to the hands of the Trivulzio and Berenson Madonnas. The 
 expression of the head is significant and touching, though the type is 
 unusually soft and gentle. The outline is still rigid and primitive, but 
 the modelling of the body is remarkably good for so early a date, and 
 in this particular it is interesting to compare the drawing of the form 
 with the figure in the three versions of the St. Sebastian, with the 
 Dead Christ in the Piet^ of the Berlin Gallery, and with that of the 
 Bernacoin collection, all works of much later date. Innumerable 
 examples of this subject are met with in every branch of art, from the 
 fourteenth century onwards ; and among panel paintings this picture 
 may have been the prototype of a vast number of works of the school, 
 many of which are still existing in North Italy and in Liguria." 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 MORE FINDS IN MILAN 
 
 THUS I can now say with thankfulness, Foppa is at 
 last finally swept out of the way, and my narrative 
 can proceed, though not strictly on chronological 
 lines ; for the necessities of the case have already carried 
 it beyond the points of occurrence of several incidents 
 which must find place somewhere within the covers of this 
 little book. There is, for instance, the story of the Lotto, 
 which certainly ought to have been told before this; but 
 it simply would not come in, and had to be bundled aside 
 to await its chance. I had better set it down here, and at 
 once, before I am switched away on some other unfore- 
 seen track. 
 
 It was the very day we were going to Cavenaghi's 
 studio, with the first Foppa under my arm, that I stumbled 
 across the Lotto. I simply walked into an upstairs shop 
 that I had not before noticed, and there it was on the table, 
 the very first thing I saw. Lotto at that time was outside 
 the rather narrow range of my connoisseurship, so I cannot 
 say that I recognised the picture for what it was. But I at 
 least knew that it was not by Rottenhammer, as the dealer 
 tentatively suggested. Rottenhammer was a favourite name 
 with ignorant dealers then for any smooth-surfaced picture 
 with a landscape background that obviously could not be 
 called Raphael;, or Titian, or Correggio, or by some other 
 
Facing p. 38 
 
LORENZO LOTTO 
 
 39 
 
 of the few great names they knew ; but I never could find 
 out what it was that induced them to pitch on that seven- 
 teenth-century German's name rather than any other. This 
 dealer, at any rate, had his doubts, and admitted, that the 
 picture on the easel might be by some other artist ; but it 
 was beyond his wits to attain any certainty in the matter. 
 All I could surely assert, in the state of my knowledge 
 then, was that there was Venice at the heart of the work, 
 and more particularly Giorgione; beyond that, I only 
 knew that here was something of a finer excellence than 
 any picture we had yet had a chance to buy. And now a 
 curious thing happened. With the opportunity of our lives 
 before us, and only a small price demanded, I simply could 
 not decide to walk off with the picture. My wife entreated ; 
 the man offered to take less ; it was all no use, and I de- 
 parted from the shop and left it behind. 
 
 But with the night came sanity, and on our way to 
 Cavenaghi's studio next day we stopped and just picked 
 up the treasure. The dealer, for luck, threw in a majolica 
 alberello, probably worth as much since as what we paid 
 for both. He also told us that the picture had formerly 
 been in the Castelbarco collection. We tied it up with 
 the Foppa, which we were taking to be cleaned, and by a 
 curious coincidence the two panels were of exactly the 
 same dimensions, only differing in thickness. Arriving at 
 Cavenaghi's, where, as above told, we met Morelli and 
 Frizzoni, I was able to spring a surprise on them, for my 
 packet only seemed to contain the Foppa, and, when that 
 had been dealt with, the second panel seemed to arrive by 
 magic. It was easy to see how astonished and pleased 
 they were when I offered it to them. I could not follow 
 what they said to one another at first, but only their swiftly 
 
MORE FINDS IN MILAN 
 
 reached conclusion. " It is his ; it is certainly his." Then 
 I had to expose my own ignorance, and demand to whom 
 it was they so confidently ascribed it, and they replied, 
 " Lotto." " But," I said to Morelli, " I noticed that at first 
 you seemed to have some other artist in your mind; who 
 was that ? " He replied that, for a moment, it almost 
 seemed to him that it might be by Giorgione, but only for 
 a moment. It was certainly painted by Lotto in his early 
 Giorgionesque days, about the time when he painted the 
 St. Jerome in the Louvre, which has a similar beautiful 
 landscape background. Since then Lotto has been the 
 subject of a masterly study by Mr. Berenson, in which our 
 picture is carefully analysed."^ But he makes the same 
 mistake that we did in calling it at first " Danae," with whom 
 the subject has really nothing to do. Under Cavenaghi's 
 skilful hands the small repaints, clumsily added to cover up 
 a single injury in an unimportant position, were soon re- 
 moved, and in due season the damage was perfectly 
 repaired. 
 
 As I have questioned the correctness of the name used 
 by both Morelli and Berenson, a brief discussion of the 
 actual subject of the picture cannot be avoided. In the 
 centre there lies a little white-robed maiden, and some- 
 thing is, indeed, being poured into her lap from the sky ; 
 but it is a baby Cupid, not Jupiter, who does the pouring, 
 and the shower consists, not of gold, but of flowers. Jupiter 
 
 * B. Berenson, "Lorenzo Lotto," London, 1895, p.i. He says that 
 the girl's face recalls that of the Virgin in Alvise Vivarini's Madonna 
 in the Redentore at Venice. He cites also other resemblances to Alvise 
 and to Jacopo de' Barbari. In recent years, however, Mr. Berenson 
 has altered his attitude towards iVlvise, and he might now be less 
 inclined to assign to him so much influence in the formation of Lotto's 
 style. See also Morelli's "Italian Painters," Vol. II., London, 1893, 
 pp. 46, 51. 
 
A MAIDEN'S DREAM 
 
 41 
 
 pouring gold into Danae s lap is a wholly different subject 
 from a Cupid pouring flowers into the lap of this very pure 
 and simple girl, who seems as far removed as possible from 
 the kind of person that would sell herself for money, even if 
 a god gave it. The meaning of the subject is indicated by 
 the presence in the foreground, on either side, of a female 
 satyr of the woods and a god of the fountain. These are 
 the genii of the fair landscape, in the midst of which the 
 maiden lies day-dreaming at the foot of a laurel. There 
 are trees and hills behind ; a sunset sky, ruddy below, deep 
 blue above, fills the rest of the panel. The maiden is dream- 
 ing of love as a vision of flowers falling upon her. Pro- 
 bably the artist was moved, by some poem of the day, not 
 yet identified, or perhaps the subject was given to him by 
 a patron. 
 
 It was only during a very brief period in the childhood 
 of the Renaissance that such a picture could have been 
 painted at all. Its naive charm was impossible to the more 
 sophisticated artists of a few years later, whilst a little 
 earlier the old religious spirit still retained too much 
 potency for this pure paganism to be possible. Save for 
 Giorgione, Lotto could not have painted thus. The very 
 naivete of the picture doubtless seemed to its own maker 
 a defect, which he was soon after able to avoid. Every 
 great school of art passing through its various inevitable 
 stages, from uncouth and tentative beginnings to culmina- 
 tion of flower, exuberance of fruit, and final decay, does, at 
 some moment of its youth, produce works of extraordinary 
 charm and naivete. Venetian artists passed through this 
 phase about the years 1490 to 15 10. The Florentines 
 passed through it a trifle earlier. Albertinelli exemplified 
 it in his "Adam and Eve" at Agram. Fra Bartolomeo 
 
42 MORE FINDS IN MILAN 
 
 would have produced perfect examples of it had he been 
 less pious. Perugino's "Apollo and Marsyas" in the 
 Louvre, Raphael's " Knighf s Dream," the National Gallery 
 "Amor and Castitas" (now given to Cosimo Roselli), are 
 all delightful products of this attractive phase of the early 
 Renaissance. The same spirit lingered on later in Car- 
 paccio, and occasionally re-emerged in other Venetians; 
 but it was soon lost in the greater powers and mightier con- 
 ceptions of the culminating artists, who yet, in the full 
 triumph of their unrivalled maturities, never again attained 
 the particular charm which in no picture is more visibly 
 incorporated than in this " Maiden's Dream " — ^the name 
 by which I have chosen to call it. 
 
 I was then too young and immature to imagine that 
 perhaps MorelH might feel a little sore at such a stroke of 
 luck coming to so callow a collector as I was. I had bought 
 it, evidently for little money, under his very shadow. He 
 might well think that fortune was unkind not to have given 
 it to him. But it seemed to me then the most natural thing 
 in the world that he and our admirable friend, Dr. Friz- 
 zoni, should have patted me on the back and rejoiced with 
 me, and made us feel that our pleasure was no less theirs. 
 Yet such magnanimity is of the rarest, and just then in my 
 presence was manifest that real nobility of character which 
 Morelli carried through life, and which gave him not merely 
 the respect of scholars and critics, but the admiration, and 
 even the affection, of a wider circle. 
 
 He bade me have the picture well photographed, as he 
 would have occasion to need it, and it has always been one 
 of the minor enduring regrets of my life that I failed him 
 in this matter. When the picture arrived in England I did 
 have a photograph of it made, but it turned out poorly. A 
 
MORELLFS KINDNESS 43 
 
 year or two later Dr. Frizzoni wrote to me : " Ella conoscera 
 il primo vol. della nuova opera di Morelli (Gall. Borghese e 
 Doria). Ora egli lavora assiduamente al secondo nel quale 
 trattera del Lotto in particolare. M'incarica quindi di 
 chiederle Ella potesse procurargli una buona fotografia 
 della sua Danae que servirebbe per la riproduzione nel 
 volume stesso come punto di partenza per Tartista." I sent 
 him the bad photograph, but it would not reproduce, and, 
 the picture being in Liverpool and I in Egypt, or some 
 such place, a better was not procurable in time for his 
 publication. 
 
 Since then the picture, like the Foppas and others above- 
 mentioned, has often been exhibited, and is well known to 
 all who study the art of its land and period. It has, no 
 doubt, given much pleasure to others, but no one has had 
 the chance to feel in its presence what we have felt, on 
 whom it burst so unexpectedly, and to whom it was the key 
 that unlocked a whole school and phase of the greatest 
 pictorial art of Europe and the world. 
 
 When the picture was exhibited in 1905 — I believe at 
 the Burlington Fine Arts Club* — ^the following notice of it 
 appeared in the AthencBum (December 2nd, 1905) by a 
 writer whose style will be readily recognised : — 
 
 "No one has ever doubted that Sir Martin Conway's 
 so-called Danae is not only the earliest existing work by 
 Lotto, but also in many ways the most entirely enjoyable 
 of all his paintings. For Lotto was an artist of exquisite 
 sensibility if imperfect talent, and, in consequence, he pro- 
 mised more than he could ever perform. Here, in this early 
 work, which breathes the fine earnestness and illusion of 
 
 ^ Or perhaps in the Venetian Exhibition at the New Gallery, where 
 it also appeared. 
 
44 MORE FINDS IN MILAN 
 
 youth, he is really greater in what he suggests than in the 
 imperfect accomplishment of his maturity." 
 
 It has entertained me to recount thus at length these 
 early adventures of ours in the field of Italian picture col- 
 lecting, and I hope the reader has been able to follow me 
 so far without weariness. Evidently, however, I must not 
 trespass too far on his patience, being, as I am, completely 
 in his power, and able to be switched off in a moment by 
 the mere closing of the pages, as one switches off a need- 
 less electric lamp. The remaining acquisitions of this 
 extraordinary six weeks of good luck can only be recorded 
 in brief fashion. In all, as far as I remember, we took 
 home some thirty pictures, most of minor imf)ortance, which 
 I afterward sent to the sale-room, and have regretted ever 
 since. But besides the two Foppas, the Lotto, and the 
 Bevilacqua above described, four other pictures by 
 Romanino, Tiepolo, Cotignola, and of the school of 
 Moretto, cannot go unrecorded. 
 
 The Romanino came out of a private house at Brescia, 
 in which were quite a number of attractive pictures, 
 amongst them a Moretto Visitation, which I have since 
 seen in some public gallery. Our picture is a Virgin and 
 Child with the little St. John, not beautiful in form, but 
 agreeable in colour. It possesses something of Venetian 
 warmth, but the peculiar red of the Virgin's robe is 
 Romanino's own, and so is the dark slaty-blue of the cloak, 
 whilst the plain architectural background of marble is 
 obviously Brescian. There can be little doubt that 
 Romanino's pupil, Francesco Prato of Caravaggio, had a 
 hand in this work, as in several other of the same artist's 
 pictures, notably the large painting in the National Gallery. 
 
 A full-length life-size St. Peter, leaning on a stone 
 
Facing p. 44 
 
SIX WEEKS OF GOOD LUCK 45 
 
 pedestal or balustrade, with his chin resting on his hand, 
 manifests unmistakably the design of Moretto ; the drapery 
 is his, and so is the chord of colour and the rather smoky 
 blue sky and rounded cumulus clouds. This canvas 
 formed part of the wall decoration of a chamber or chapel 
 belonging to the Fenaroli family at Brescia, which was 
 supphed by Moretto. Of course, most of the actual paint- 
 ing must have been done by assistants. There were also 
 figures of Paul, Jerome, Solomon, and John the Evangelist, 
 but the Peter was far the best, and I think that the master 
 himself had some hand in the actual painting. The series 
 is mentioned by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, who do not 
 seem to have been informed of their original purpose.* 
 
 At this time, but I forget whether in Brescia or Bergamo, 
 I also acquired a goodi example of Tiepolo — one of those 
 small, upright canvases which seem to bear designs for vast 
 wall-paintings. I remember to have been attracted by a 
 distant vision of it in some corner of a shop, owing to its 
 likeness to one of the two pictures which I had seen Sir 
 Frederick Burton purchase for the National Gallery at the 
 Beckett-Denison sale at Christie's two years before. It 
 appeared to me to be one of the same series, the figures 
 being grouped under the similar enframing arch of an open 
 portico. Over their heads is a boy angel casually swoop- 
 ing about in the air, and being at the moment upside down, 
 but entirely comfortable and enjoying himself. The mean- 
 ing of the picture is clear enough. St. Peter is seen en- 
 throned on a high pedestal, like St. Augustine in the 
 National Gallery picture. He is stretching out his key 
 toward Faith, a blue-robed, white-winged lady-angel 
 
 German edition. Vol. VI., 1876, p. 480. 
 
46 MORE FINDS IN MILAN 
 
 standing before him. In front is the swarthy cind mascu- 
 line figure of Paganism, fallen off the globe of the world 
 and lying prone, with his overthrown incense altar and 
 books beside him. The whole is painted with the dextrous 
 fluency characteristic of the eighteenth-century Venetians, 
 and especially of Tiepolo, and is in perfect preservation. 
 
 Last to be mentioned, though of earlier date, is a small 
 but very beautiful Httle panel picture by that rare painter 
 of the Romagna, Francesco ZaganeUi, of Cotignola, by 
 whom there are pictures in the Brera, and at Naples, 
 Ravenna, Berlin, Chantilly, and Dublin, as well as an im- 
 portant altar-piece in the collection of Mr. David Erskine. 
 Mine is a small half-length of St. Catherine, painted with 
 great smoothness of finish. The influence of Perugino is 
 evident in the design, but all the critics agree in the attri- 
 bution to Cotignola, which, besides, is rendered certain by 
 the appearance of the same model in the same costume on 
 one of his altar-pieces in the Brera. In his large pictures 
 the composition often seems to lack unity, the figures 
 being put together rather like the parts of a puzzle, but his 
 individual figures are often expressive and beautiful. He 
 appears to have been fond of upturned eyes, and he painted 
 the eyeball very full and round, as, for instance, in the 
 Berlin Annunciation. There is a delicate drawing by him 
 at Stockliolm, which was a study for the small Madonna 
 at Chantilly. He designed with facility and grace decora- 
 tive details, such as foliated friezes or pilaster panels. The 
 little St. Catherine shows him at his best. He is evidently 
 happier and: more at home in work on a small scale, like a 
 Flemish painter. He could linger lovingly over details and 
 find scope for his decorative predilections in the crown, the 
 embroidered borders, the angel clasp, the Httle pearls and 
 
MORETTO 
 
 65 X 384 in. 
 
 Facing p. 46 
 
COTIGNOLA 
 
 47 
 
 tassels, and the ring, all of which he finished with scrupulous 
 care, so that a magnifying glass is required to manifest their 
 completeness. My wife at once annexed this picture of 
 her patron saint as specially her own, and none has better 
 kept its place. 
 
 Nowadays, after such a streak of luck as we had in that 
 early summer at Milan, I should know better than to quit 
 the field unless overwhelming necessity compelled. But 
 the world then contained other wonders no less, perhaps 
 even more, enthralling to me than works of art. These were 
 snow mountains. The climbing season was at hand, and 
 the call of the glaciers inexorable. So we packed 
 up our spoils, shipped them off to England, and by July gth 
 I was on the arete of the Nadelhom, suffering horrible 
 pains from lack of condition, but rejoicing in the glory of a 
 world where there are no dealers and nothing to hunt, save 
 new routes up peaks or over passes. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 HERE AND THERE IN ITALY 
 
 A FEW years passed before another opportunity came 
 for devoting any considerable time to the hunt for 
 works of art in Italy. I had been enjoying an un- 
 usually successful mountaineering season, which was sud- 
 denly terminated by storms and snowfalls of exceptional 
 ferocity. All the high peaks became inaccessible, and 
 climbers were driven away home in crowds before their 
 appointed dates. I spent a week walking up hills in the 
 neighbourhood of the Italian Lakes, and it was while seated 
 on the summit of one of them that a sudden and irresistible 
 desire came upon me to turn my back on the snow-laden 
 Alps, and take up again in the cities of North Italy the old 
 hunt which had been so successful in 1887. 
 
 I had observed that the great dealers in London, Paris, 
 and elsewhere obtained much of their stock from smaller 
 but still important dealers who were themselves, respec- 
 tively, the most important in such cities as Milan, Venice, 
 Florence, and the like. These dealers in turn gathered 
 what they had for sale by going the rounds of the yet 
 smaller men, beneath whom again were the scouts who 
 visited the villages and attended the country sales. As at 
 each step up this scale prices were at least doubled, it was 
 evident that whoso would buy cheap must go as near the 
 fountain-head as possible. My former campaign had been 
 
Facing p. 48 
 
THE BRIANZA 
 
 49 
 
 amongst the smaller dealers, but it occurred to me that 
 if I pursued my search into the villages themselves I might 
 be yet more fortunate. It was a pretty plan, but there 
 were a good many villages and country villas in Italy, and 
 it had not occurred to me that to ransack them would be 
 work for several lifetimes, rather than for a few autumnal 
 weeks, which were all I had to spare. 
 
 There was, however, a district famed for its beauty 
 which I had long wished to visit. It was actually at my 
 feet on the hill where I was at the moment sitting when 
 my determination was formed. It was the Brianza — that 
 region of chaotic little hills and lakes, with villas and vil- 
 lages patched about, which lies between Como and Lecco, 
 and stretches out somewhat southward, having been shaped 
 and fashioned out of the terminal moraines of the vast 
 Alpine glaciers of the Ice Age, reaching out at their furthest 
 toward the great Lombard Plain. I decided to traverse 
 this region on foot, combining the enjoyment of its beauti- 
 ful landscapes with a hunt for works of art in its villages, 
 farmhouses, and villas. I started early one morning a few 
 days later from Bellaggio, with Burton's story of his journey 
 to Mecca in one pocket, and some light provisions iri 
 another. How well I still remember the beauty of the way 
 as I mounted along the backbone of the ridge dividing the 
 two arms of Como Lake, with a fine disregard of roads and 
 even footpaths, and no kind of idea whither I was going 
 or what I was going to do. 
 
 Presently I passed over a col, and began the descent of 
 the Val Assina. I lunched by the roadside near a village, 
 and instituted casual enquiries as to whether anyone 
 about had any old things to sell. It soon became apparent 
 that everything not new was alike " antica " in these parts. 
 D 
 
so HERE AND THERE IN ITALY 
 
 Before long I thought I was hot on the scent of something 
 really precious ; exactly what it was I could not learn. 
 It was to be very beautiful, very old, I gathered, and 
 I should find it in that farm away off up a long hillside 
 on which the sun was shining hotly. I toiled exceedingly 
 in the ascent, and arrived gasping at the door. My 
 enquiries elicited an immediate response. I was taken 
 into a room, and the thing proved to be a much damaged 
 spinet of London make! It was not exactly what I had 
 expected, and I went on my way rather crestfallen. I need 
 not describe other the like adventures and disappointments 
 in detail. One day was as little fruitful as another. I 
 pursued false scents and found nothing ; or what I found 
 was absurdly different from what I wanted. 
 
 The hunt, however, was very amusing. There was talk 
 with all sorts and conditions of men and women — farmers, 
 priests, road-menders, labourers, carriers, and what not. I 
 slept in curious places ; the scenery everywhere was lovely. 
 Most beautiful of all was an evening spent at Erba, where 
 I dined on a terrace commanding a most glorious view over 
 all the Brianza, flooded with the blue shadows that drown 
 it at sunset, when the hilltops are golden and all the sky 
 aflame. 
 
 At last, however, I met with a very intelligent person, 
 who seemed to understand exactly what I was after. 
 
 Would you like to find an old sculptured figure ? " he 
 asked, "because I think I can tell you where to look for 
 one which is really very precious and beautiful. It belongs 
 to some people at the village of Bami, whom you will easily 
 find if you care to walk there." 
 
 I had been at Barni and found nothing, but then, no 
 doubt, I had missed these people. I did not want to go 
 
A TREASURE REPORTED 51 
 
 back on a wild-goose chase ; so I made very careful 
 enquiries. " What kind of a figure was it?" I enquired. 
 " Male or female ? And how big ? " 
 
 " Oh, it was the figure of a man about one metre high 
 and finely made. It was very old, very, very old ; as old 
 as the figures you can see all over the Cathedral at Milan, 
 and as fine as any of them." 
 
 " Was it a marble figure," I asked, " or one of commoner 
 stone, or, perhaps, terra-cotta ? " 
 
 " It was surely marble, very beautiful marble, and there 
 was some colour on it, but not much. Perhaps it was once 
 coloured all over, but now there is only colour on some 
 parts — the hair, I think, and, perhaps, the clothes, but that 
 I don't rightly remember." 
 
 " How did the owners of it get it ? Did it come from a 
 church or did it belong to their house ? " 
 
 " I don't know how they got it. I only know that they 
 and their forefathers have owned it as long as anyone 
 remembers. People have wanted to buy it, but they 
 would not part with it. But now the old man is dead, 
 and the children sell it so as to divide the price between 
 them." 
 
 Accordingly I set off and walked back to the village of 
 Bami, and the people sought were soon found. Yes ! They 
 had a beautiful figure for sale, very old, and sculptured in 
 stone, a thing of great value. Sad were they to have to 
 part with it, but there was no help for it. People had 
 offered good prices for it, but not what it was worth, and 
 I might have it if I paid what they were asking. 
 
 Could I see the figure? Alas, no! It was no longer in 
 their house. Up till yesterday it had been, but then they 
 had sent it away to their relative at Bellaggio. He was a 
 
52 HERE AND THERE IN ITALY 
 
 man of . influence and position, sacristan and bell-ringer at 
 the parish church there. He would have no difficulty in 
 getting a good price for it from the foreign visitors there. 
 Perhaps he had already sold it. 
 
 This talk took place beside a fountain where the water 
 gushed out from a pipe protruding from a roughly carved 
 sandstone head intended to represent Victor Emmanuel — 
 a type of fountain-head common in these parts. The even- 
 ing was coming on, and the shadows were creeping down 
 the hills ; the water plashed musically into the great stone 
 trough where the village girls had been washing their linen, 
 which was now spread to dry. By this time I was fairly 
 determined to run the elusive sculpture to earth, so I de- 
 cided, without hesitation, to go back to Bellaggio, and hunt 
 up the " man of influence and position." 
 
 It was the following day before I reached Bellaggio 
 Church and enquired for the sacristan. He was not forth- 
 coming. He had gone away for the day on business of 
 importance. My heart sank within me. What other busi- 
 ness could he have but to dispose of the statue ? Did they 
 know whether he had a statue to sell, or whether he had 
 taken it away with him ? Oh, yes, he had a statue to sell, 
 a fine old statue ! It was brought to him from the country 
 only the day before. But he had not taken it away with 
 him. He had caused it to be carried up into a chamber 
 in the church tower, and there he had locked it in. When 
 he went away he took the key with him, and till he re- 
 turned no one could enter. But he would be back to- 
 morrow and then I could see it. Till to-morrow I should 
 have to wait. I asked what the statue was like, but no 
 one could describe it. All they knew was that it was very 
 old, very beautiful, and very precious, worth perhaps hun- 
 
VICTOR EMMANUEL 
 
 53 
 
 dreds of francs. If I chose to wait I should see it, and 
 could judge for myself. 
 
 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 interminable 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 see for myself. We came to the door of the bell-chamber, 
 and the lock 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 making my way toward it, the shutters opened, 
 and a burst of sunlight illumined the vast moustache of 
 another figure of Victor Emmanuel, if anything worse than 
 the fountain-head of Barni ! " Is this your wonderful 
 statue? " I cried. " Certainly, that is it. Is it not beautiful ? 
 It is very, very old ! " That was the end of my attempts 
 to go behind the little dealers and discover Old Masters 
 for myself in North Italian villages. 
 
 With much humility I made my way by boat over to 
 Cadenabbia, and comforted myself by purchasing on the 
 quay a quantity of excellent wrought-iron work, and a 
 delightful sculptured and painted wooden group of St. 
 Anne with the Virgin and Child, by an Augsburg artist, 
 all for 150 francs. The iron candelabra would be worth 
 more than that now. The dealer had a ton or so of good 
 old wrought-iron strewn about him, but it seemed then so 
 common that it was impossible to believe how soon such 
 stuff would become difficult to find, and I had little use 
 
54 HERE AND THERE IN ITALY 
 
 for it The train carried me off to Brescia, and into the 
 • arms of Luigi FeHsina once more. Whither he led me 
 
 I no longer remember, save that we paid an early visit to 
 Nobile Mignani. By some obscure route word had reached 
 him that the picture he formerly sold me was a good one, 
 and that he might have asked for it a larger price than I 
 had paid. In consequence, all his prices had gone up to 
 absurd figures, but as he had nothing I would have carried 
 away if he had given it to me, this was not of any conse- 
 quence. One thing was evident enough, however, all over 
 Brescia, the general run of prices for everything old had 
 everywhere increased. There were no more ten-franc Old 
 Masters, however bad. Still, I was able to make one or two 
 acquisitions, and to see interesting works which were on 
 sale, but beyond my range. There was a whole collection 
 of paintings, some of them valuable, in the Casa Carlini, 
 and I greatly coveted a brilliant fragment of Romanino 
 fresco which they would only part with if I purchased also 
 some more costly work. 
 
 After one or two more false starts, Luigi took me to a 
 studio where, to my astonishment, I saw what looked like 
 three of the finest heads from Mr. Henry Willett's series 
 of decorative portraits, and indeed it immediately appeared 
 4r that they actually did belong to the same series.* They 
 were originally painted as a frieze, and used to decorate a 
 room in the Gonzaga Castle of San Martino di Gusnaja be- 
 tween Mantua and Brescia. The panels purchased by Mr. 
 Willett were forty-four in number, and they "formed a 
 frieze on two opposite walls, and on each side of the deep 
 
 * Eighteen of them were published in the Burlington Magazine^ of 
 November, 1905, of which nine are in the MetropoHtan Museum, New 
 York, and nine in the Victoria and Albert Museum. See also "^Port- 
 foHo," 1884, p. 35. 
 
BRAM ANTING 
 17h X 18 in. 
 
 Facing p. 54 
 
BRAMANTINO HEADS 55 
 
 beam which cuts across the centre of the room parallel with 
 the other panels." All these "were entirely concealed by 
 the numerous coats of paint applied over them by succes- 
 sive tenants of the building." It was only by an accident 
 that the existence of paintings in that position was dis- 
 covered. The panels were taken down, and Mr. Willett 
 had the enterprise to buy them uncleaned, with nothing 
 but a little paint showing through here and there. They 
 were skilfully cleaned by Prof. Church, and immediately 
 attracted much attention. Again, to quote Mr. A. J. Koop, 
 writing in the Burlington Magazine, " By common consent 
 the painter to whom the portraits are, ultimately at least, 
 assigned is Bramantino." The whole series was evidently 
 designed and the best heads painted by a first-fate master 
 influenced by Foppa, but several of the panels betray the 
 hand of assistants. 
 
 It was supposed that the forty-four thus found com- 
 pleted the set, but two or three years later it was noticed 
 that there were some more panels, whose existence had not 
 been suspected, at the principal end of the room, I beheve 
 over a fireplace. Three panels were thus added to the 
 series, and one of these proved to be in faultless preserva- 
 tion, and I had the luck to capture it. The other two re- 
 quired considerable repainting, and ultimately went, I 
 believe, to Germany. Mr, Koop is in error in supposing 
 that my panel was one of the original forty-four ; neither 
 was he aware of the other two. The total number now 
 existing is forty-seven, and they are widely scattered. Mine 
 occupied the central position at the most important end of 
 the room, and appears to me, and to others who carefully 
 studied the rest when they were all together, to be the best 
 of the whole set. 
 
S6 HERE AND THERE IN ITALY 
 
 " Mr. P. G. Konody," continues Mr. Koop in the article 
 .referred to, " has recently put forward* an ingenious theory, 
 which, if proved true, would greatly enhance the value of 
 these paintings, at any rate, in the eyes of those to whom 
 a great name, attached with more or less justification to an 
 art object, is a fetish. It is to the effect that, though owing 
 their origin to a set of paintings in fresco by Bramantino, 
 our panels are not by his hand, but are the actual copies 
 mentioned by Vasari t (in the Life of Piero della 
 Francesca) as having been prepared just before the de- 
 struction of the original pictures. These copies, says 
 Vasari, were made for Raphael by one of his pupils " to the 
 end that he might possess the likeness of the persons repre- 
 sented ; for these were all great personages." Curiously 
 enough, these original portraits, which are thus en fas s ant 
 referred to in Vasari's Life of Piero della Francesca, are 
 completely ignored by the author in his short but com- 
 prehensive sketch of Bramantino, while of the copies, which 
 after Raphael's death were presented by his heir, Giulio 
 Romano, to Paolo Giovio, no further trace has hitherto been 
 found. Now, seeing that Giovio stood for many years in 
 the position of friend and adviser to that insatiable art 
 collector, Isabella d'Este, what more probable than that the 
 copies were transferred to the Duchess's collection, and are 
 in actual fact these very panels from the Gonzaga Castle ? 
 The probability is further strengthened, as Mr. Konody 
 points out, by the absence of any Gonzaga portrait among 
 the series, and by the fact that these are in tempera on 
 wood, as might be expected in copies from what were doubt- 
 less frescoes. . . . Whatever conclusion may be finally 
 
 * New York Herald, Paris edition, Aug. 28th, 1905. 
 t Vite, ed. Milanesi, 11., p. 492. 
 
SOLARIO 
 22 X 17 in. 
 
 Facing p. 57 
 
SOLARIO 
 
 s; 
 
 arrived at as regards the artist responsible for the portraits, 
 or the persons represented, all will agree as to the super- 
 excellent merits of the paintings fer se. Such grace and 
 refinement, such delicately restrained characterisation, are 
 found only in the great masters of the period." 
 
 It presently appeared, after we had left the studio with 
 the newly acquired picture, that Luigi had kept what he 
 considered to be his bonne bouche till the last. This proved 
 to be a panel painting of " Christ Crowned with Thorns," 
 by Solario — a picture brilliant in colour, and perfect in pre- 
 servation, besides being an important example of a rather 
 rare artist. I would, of course, have preferred to drop upon 
 a portrait by him, but hunters cannot often be choosers ; 
 they have to follow whatever scent they happen to strike, 
 hoping always that it may lead them to some record trophy. 
 The subject of my picture was painted by Solario more 
 than once. There is the well-known and highly finished 
 example in the Poldi Pezzoli collection at Milan, an early 
 work, in which, as likewise in his landscape backgrounds, 
 he comes closer to the effect aimed at by fifteenth-century 
 Flemish artists than he does in his later pictures. The 
 central figure from my picture was several times repeated, 
 either by the artist himself or in his studio. Such repeti- 
 tions are in the Liitzschena Gallery, and in the collection 
 of Mr. J. G. Johnson at Philadelphia. Another example 
 was for sale in London about 1891. Besides these there 
 are versions in the Crespi Gallery at Milan, and one with- 
 out arms in the Bergamo Gallery. A good copy was sold 
 in the de Somzee sale, and there is one signed by Simon 
 de Chalons, and dated 1 543 in the Borghese Gallery. 
 
 Our picture had a wretched gaudy frame, but fate was 
 keeping a real beauty in reserve for it. We only found 
 
58 HERE AND THERE IN ITALY 
 
 that, however, a good many years later, when motoring 
 about in France. It happened that we stopped for a night 
 in Avignon. Though the hour was late and twilight already 
 coming on, I plunged into the dark recesses of an antiquity 
 shop, kept by a merry old lady, who followed me about 
 with a candle. I was not long in noticing the frame, and 
 its excellent carving. A rococo addition had been fixed 
 on the top, and a mirror had replaced the picture it originally 
 contained. I said, " That will just fit our Solario." It was 
 a lucky guess, because, when we had brought it home we 
 found it to fit with the most perfect accuracy. In the same 
 shop was one of those large leather-covered, brass-nail- 
 studded, round-topped trunks, so popular with wealthy 
 travellers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We 
 had recently been at Grignan, and had mentioned our visit 
 to the old lady. " Then you must certainly buy Madame 
 de Sevigne's trunk," said she, and buy it we did ; not that 
 I have any reason to suppose that it had anything to do 
 with Madame de Sevigne, beyond existing in her lifetime, 
 but because it was a fine example of its kind, in good con- 
 dition, and the nail-heads are arranged in a pretty pattern 
 of lilies and stars. 
 
 Here will, perhaps, be the best place to include a very 
 beautiful little panel which I picked up at Lausanne one 
 year on my way back to England from the Alps. It has 
 often been exhibited, and has caused the critics more than 
 enough trouble, whilst no two of them, so far as I know, 
 have yet agreed upon a name for the painter of it. Venturi 
 assigned it to Gian Francesco de Maineri, painter and 
 miniaturist of Parma. Others have suggested some un- 
 known Romagna artist in the neighbourhood of Cotignola. 
 To me (though no one agrees with me) it seems the kind 
 
Painter unrecognised 
 
 ni X in. 
 
AN UNSOLVED PROBLEM 
 
 59 
 
 of work that Lorenzo Costa might have painted in his 
 youth. Whoever the artist may have been, he certainly 
 produced a very charming Httle picture, in which I can find 
 no trace of the feeling of a miniaturist, but rather of a man 
 who designed as though he were accustomed to paint large 
 altar-pieces with life-size figures. The Virgin is seated on 
 an elevated and elaborate marble throne, sculptured and 
 inlaid, the kind of throne beloved by Ferrarese and Bologna 
 painters. The child stands erect upon her knee. A beauti- 
 ful carpet with a gold ground is under her feet, the kind of 
 carpet that would make a sensation in a New York auction- 
 room if it could now be forthcoming ; but the like of it, I 
 believe, nowhere exists. On either hand in front stands 
 one of the brother physician saints, Cosmas and Damian, in 
 rich red robes. There is a fine dais overhead, and a pair 
 of floating cherubs, and in the lacustrine landscape back- 
 ground, before queer-shaped hills, are St. Eustace and the 
 magic stag on one side, and St. George overcoming the 
 dragon on the other. Nor must I forget to mention the 
 two peacocks that stand on the shoulders of the Virgin*s 
 throne. The composition retains much of the architectural 
 symmetry of an earlier day, and combines it with the re- 
 serve and plain good faith of those religious painters of the 
 fifteenth century, whom their religion served and fitted as 
 his armour a knight. But there is superadded to all this a 
 charm of colour, a grace of design, and a sense of decora- 
 tion which endow the whole with a singular power to please, 
 so that almost everyone that looks at it takes pleasure in 
 it, whether they already possess a liking for Old Masters 
 or not. 
 
 And yet, when we look at this picture, there is a drop 
 of bitter in our cup of sweetness ; for along with it in the 
 
6o HERE AND THERE IN ITALY 
 
 same house there hung a small profile portrait of a man, 
 painted, as I then believed, by the same artist. It was 
 really a charming little panel, and we wanted it sorely. We 
 thought, however, that we were extravagant in buying the 
 Madonna, and contented ourselves with that, feeling com- 
 fortably virtuous in the sense of abnegation wherewith we 
 left the other. It was a foolish and costly economy, because 
 the portrait would be invaluable now, not merely as a pre- 
 cious thing in itself, but as throwing light^on the authorship 
 of both. I have never been able to discover what happened 
 to it. It has not found its way into any collection known 
 to me, nor has it appeared in the sale-room. Perhaps it still 
 lingers unregarded in some Lausanne house. When it re- 
 appears, it will be far too costly for us to buy. Five hun- 
 dred francs was all they then asked for it. Alas, for the 
 neglected opportunities of the old days ! 
 
CHAPTER VL 
 
 THE HUNT IN EGYPT 
 
 IF nowhere but in Italy were any hunting-ground for old 
 works of art it would be joy enough, had the supply of 
 d-esirable finds not run so short. The world^ however, 
 is wide, and a catholic collector has ground for hope every- 
 where. Best of all ancient countries a quarter of a century 
 ago was Egypt. That was before its soil had been so 
 methodically ransacked by expeditions of all nations, and 
 before the fellaheen had been brought to understand that 
 they excavated at their peril. Of course, the sebak diggers 
 and poachers will always be making finds so long as there 
 are any old mounds to dig into ; but the days when a royal 
 tomb of the eighteenth dynasty could be discovered and 
 secretly looted for a series of seasons are fortunately gone 
 for ever. Science gains if the amateur collector loses, and 
 the attainment of accurate knowledge of the past is incom- 
 parably more important than any other consideration, even 
 to the most inveterate of collectors himself. 
 
 Now that shiploads of luxurious tourists annually hasten 
 to Egypt to escape a Northern winter, and find amusement 
 in the ordinary round of entertainments which is provided 
 everywhere on the same pattern for modern wealthy idlers, 
 a good deal of the glamour of the East has departed from 
 Cairo. Yet even now some may escape a sense of that 
 loss, by not having been born too soon. 
 
62 
 
 THE HUNT IN EGYPT 
 
 Who that has revelled in the " Arabian Nights " in his 
 childhcK)d can fail to feel a thrill at his first contact with the 
 old romantic world of Islam ? I have not seen Cairo since 
 that first visit, and I do not hunger to go there now. The 
 Cairo that I remember was still distinctly reminiscent of the 
 old great days. Its streets were peopled as with the ancient 
 folk. It was a city of camels and donkeys, of bright cos- 
 tumes and loud shouting. " Oah shemaluk ! Oah yeminuk ! 
 Yallah ! yallah ! "* — the very words call up still fresh 
 memories of its thronged highways, the hurry of men and 
 beasts, and the glamour of dust made golden by the sun. 
 When Islam is, if ever, harnessed into the shafts of the 
 modem industrial world, and all its hands are fettered to 
 machinery, the last great pool of romance will be drained 
 and " common day " will reign the whole world round. The 
 first evening in Cairo, the first distant view of the pyramids, 
 now at last actually beheld, the first plunge into the bazaars, 
 the almost incredible emotion that came with the first cup 
 of coffee from a native stall — these are some of the unfor- 
 gettable treasures, possessions for ever that go to build up 
 what for each of us is the real thing that he calls his life. 
 
 Someone must have quickly marked me down as a greedy 
 collector, seeing me, I suppose, grubbing in the bazaars and 
 following me home, for, late in one of the first evenings 
 after our arrival^ I was told that two natives were enquiring 
 for me. They entered my room like conspirators, bringing 
 an air of mystery with them. After seeming to assure 
 themselves that they were not overlooked, one of them drew 
 a small packet from his bosom and placed in my hands a 
 
 * "To the right! To the left ! Get on!" Heaven and the pro- 
 fessors of Arabic know how these words should be spelt. I merely put 
 down the memory of their sound, having no accessible expert to set me 
 right. 
 
A KORAN MANUSCRIPT 
 
 63 
 
 most beautiful little manuscript of the Koran. It was fif- 
 teenth-<:entury work, still in its original binding, and I think 
 they intended me to believe that it had been stolen, as was 
 probably the fact. It was the first time I had had dealings 
 with an Oriental. Would that that lost opportunity might 
 return ! but such a chance will never again be mine. 
 
 " What will you give us for this ? they demanded. " We 
 must sell it quickly, and you can have it cheap." 
 
 I bade them name their price, but they hung back. 
 
 " Tell us what you will pay ; it is worth much more money 
 than we can wait to get. Buy it from us, and you shall 
 have it cheap." 
 
 " No ! " I replied. " I can't be buyer and seller too. 
 Name your price, and if I can afford it I will buy. But I am 
 sure this thing is too expensive for me." 
 
 " A price, a price ! " they cried. " Name a price that 
 you will pay, and let us see." 
 
 But I would not, thinking that they would only laugh 
 if I did ; so at last they suggested eighty pounds. 
 
 " That is truly very cheap," I said, " and the book is 
 worth much more ; but I have not eighty pounds to spare, 
 as I want to buy ancient Egyptian things, so you must find 
 another purchaser." 
 
 " We will take less. Tell us what you will pay. Name 
 any sum." 
 
 But I foolishly would not. Five pounds was in the back 
 of my mind, and I was ashamed to utter the words. I 
 refused to deal, and sent them away still urging, and finally 
 whining out the words, " Name a price ; name any price, 
 however small." If I had said five pounds, I now know 
 that they would have jumped at the money, and that won- 
 derful book would have been mine; but through shame- 
 
64 THE HUNT IN EGYPT 
 
 facedness at a first contact with these new folk I lost a 
 golden opportunity. 
 
 An old-time Damascus dealer once gave to a friend of 
 mine the following simple explanation as to how he came 
 to sell to him for two pounds an object for which he had 
 begun by asking a hundred. " These things," he said, " are 
 worth to us — nothing. To you they are worth various sums 
 of money. How are we to know what they are worth 
 to you? The price you will pay seems to us to dei>end, 
 not on the things, but on the persons who buy them. You 
 say this thing is worth two pounds to you. It might be 
 worth two hundred to someone else. How are we to tell 
 what it will fetch except by trying ? " That was the 
 happy-go-lucky method of the good old days. 
 
 A few days later, returning on the back of a great white 
 hired ass, "Lily Tantry" by name, I was rapidly passing 
 the little stall of a working tailor. He was an aged and 
 hairy man, and he sat on a divan that filled the front of his 
 cupboard-hke shop. A curious little chest in the shadow 
 behind' him caught my eye, so that as soon as I could arrest 
 the ass I returned and entered into conversation with him. 
 
 " What is that chest behind you, O Father of Beards ? " I 
 asked. 
 
 " In the name of Allah ! it is a chest that belonged to my 
 father, on whom is peace, and to his father before him, how 
 far back I know not. I keep my threads and needles in it, 
 but it is old and crazy. If you want it, and will give me 
 wherewith to buy a new and better one, you shall have it, 
 and your donkey-boy can now carry it away." 
 
 Said and done it all was in a few moments, and we 
 parted, both rejoicing; only the donkey-boy grieved, but 
 he had not very far to carry it. We were presently jammed 
 
BUYING CARPETS 
 
 65 
 
 in the confusion of a wedding procession, and I noticed 
 that the box gave rise to some comment, as it was recog- 
 nised by the neighbours, who seemed to be congratulating 
 the tailor on having disposed of his old rubbish to an infidel, 
 doubtless at a high price. The box still stands on my 
 writing-table, and holds the tools of my craft — pens, 
 pencils, and the like — ^instead. of the tailor's. I have never 
 seen another at all like it, nor have I any idea of its age. 
 It is a solid construction of brown-toned wood, inlaid with 
 black wood, bone, and mother-of-pearl, and with bone 
 colonettes at the angles. Whatever its age may be, the 
 decoration preserves a very ancient tradition, the front pre- 
 senting the form of an arcading of four round arches, 
 roughly resembhng the fagade of a Sassanian palace. On 
 the top is a rosette between two formalised trees, and the 
 back is similar. The workmanship is very rough, but 
 highly effective, and the whole possesses an admirably 
 decorative quality. 
 
 Besides this box we only bought stuffs and carpets in 
 Cairo, and the buying of Oriental carpets is the same all 
 the world over, or, at least, all over the Eastern world. 
 Nothing is more entertaining. You are seated beside an 
 empty floor, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, while 
 carpet after carpet is unrolled or unfolded and strewn 
 around ; they gradually fill the whole place and pile up one 
 upon another, while the eye becomes stimulated and 
 finally satiated with the glory of colour, and one's own little 
 heap of acquisitions slowly piles up. I have sought for 
 carpets in Cairo and Smyrna, in Beyrut and Lahore, in 
 Srinagar and Armritsur. I have had them unladen from 
 the backs of great Bactrian camels newly arrived at 
 Peshawar from Merv and Penjdeh. I have bargained for 
 E 
 
66 the! hunt in EGYPT 
 
 them with dealers in camp in Ladakh, on the Yarkand road, 
 carrying them down into India from Kashgar, Khotan, 
 and yet further East. I have even purchased from a Cen- 
 tral Asian pilgrim en route for Mecca the carpet on which 
 he had just been saying his evening prayer. They are all 
 things of romance. They seem to have come, as it were, 
 on the wings of the morning from the land of dreams. 
 Fairy fingers have woven them in a world of colour and 
 happiness, where nothing is done by rule or law, but the 
 whim of the moment alone is guide, and whatever is done 
 is right, because right feeling has willed it so. 
 
 The rubbish heaps of old Cairo in those days were 
 strewn all over with broken fragments of pots and tiles. 
 These blue and green pieces with their glazed surfaces glit- 
 tered in the sunlight amid the sand like bright stars. A 
 few alert persons had already begun to pay attention to 
 them, and were wont to go out a-hunting, especially after 
 rain, in search for rare fragments of fine quality. Some 
 very valuable collections were thus made which found their 
 way ultimately into museums, and gave useful indications 
 as to the place and time of manufacture of certain well- 
 known types of fabric. The hunt was quite exciting, and 
 I went forth to essay it, but where experienced local col- 
 lectors only cared to pick up specimens of decorated ware, 
 any coloured fragment was good enough for me. I took 
 with me a spare donkey and a sack, and brought home a 
 small load at a time, thus ultimately securing two or three 
 hundredweight of fragments of all kinds and sizes, pre- 
 dominantly blue in colour, but of varying intensities. The 
 sacks returned with me to England, and remained unused 
 for twenty years, but at last an opportunity arrived for 
 their very effective employment. It was when I was 
 
CAIRO RUBBISH HEAPS 67 
 
 engaged in the repair of Allington Castle for rehabitation. 
 There was a niche in a wall in one of the rooms. It had 
 once been a window, but was closed in the thirteenth cen- 
 tury. I lined this niche with a mosaic made of the blue 
 Cairo pot-fragments, and fixed a fifteenth-century Flemish 
 statue on a pedestal in the midst. The effect is agreeable, 
 and I do not think that future inhabitants of the house will 
 want to undo it. The remainder of my pot-fragments 
 were similarly employed in other suitable positions, so that 
 they were finally used up to the last square inch, and my 
 labours so long before spent are receiving their ultimate 
 reward. 
 
 But the months of that winter in Cairo were not mainly 
 devoted to the great hunt. That was a time of terribly 
 hard work, with all the old mosques to be carefully studied 
 in their chronological order, the museums to be learned by 
 heart, and in the evening the mysteries of hieroglyphics to 
 be laboriously penetrated and the lore of the ancient 
 Egyptians acquired. At last the day came when we were 
 able to go on board our dahabiyeh and sail away south- 
 wards before a favouring breeze. The noise of Cairo, the 
 throng of its streets, the crying and the going of the folk 
 within it — all faded and vanished as we sailed away. A 
 great silence descended upon us with the oncoming of the 
 night, and all the striving and hurrying of recent weeks 
 seemed suddenly to have belonged to another world and 
 another life. The night silences of the Nile are as won- 
 derful as Alpine silences. Yet, though at first it seems as 
 if sound itself were dead, the listening ear by degrees 
 begins to apprehend a fainter category of subdued voices. 
 Distant sakiehs buzz Hke far-off swarming bees, an owl 
 hoots, the dogs of some remote village break forth into 
 
68 
 
 THE HUNT IN EGYPT 
 
 barking, and are answered by those of another, yet more 
 faint, in a further distance. Then the tiny echoes of these 
 sounds are perceived coming from the steep face of the 
 river-bank, so that presently what seemed the stillness of 
 death is found to be alive with all manner of little tink- 
 lings and soft sighs, gentle ripplings of water, and faint 
 rustling of the reeds. 
 
 Our progress up the river against unfavourable breezes, 
 and unaided by stecim, was almost incredibly slow. It 
 took thirty-seven days to reach the First Cataract. But 
 the slower we went the better we were pleased, and the 
 longer I was able to spend on shore at sites, some of little 
 fame, but to me of great interest. Every day brought 
 some grist to the mill — some new site examined, some 
 temple or tomb visited, some ancient object acquired. As 
 to these acquisitions, there is, for the most part, little to tell. 
 Things were offered for sale on all sides and by all kinds 
 of persons ; some were genuine, many were forgeries, most 
 were of little or no interest — damaged scarabs, broken 
 figurines, imperfect pots, bits of inscribed stone. Some- 
 times we would sail past an individual standing on the bank 
 of the river loudly shouting and waving some object in his 
 hand, for which he desired rather than hoped to find a pur- 
 chaser. Once it happened that the wind entirely failed us 
 as we were close in near such an individual. He was seated 
 on the bank, surrounded by ancient pots. They were of 
 many shapes and of more than one fabric, and he had no 
 doubt recently dug them up from tombs at the edge of the 
 neighbouring desert, for it was near Kasr-es-Saiyad. One of 
 these tombs must have belonged to a pre-dynastic Egyptian, 
 for several of the pots were of the same type as those after- 
 ward discovered in pre-dynastic cemeteries which a few 
 
SACRED CATS 
 
 69 
 
 years later were revealed to the world by the excavations 
 of Flinders Petrie. Others were of the eighteenth 
 dynasty. I carried off a crate full of them — things of little 
 value, notwithstanding their great antiquity, but to me 
 ever since a source of continual pleasure, because of their 
 fine simphcity of form and good proportions. Nothing 
 decorates a library better than a row of such pots high up 
 on the top of bookcases. In late years thousands of these 
 common pots have been smashed to pieces by excavators, 
 who had no use for more than a small proportion of those 
 they brought to light in ancient burial-places. The picture 
 of that black-robed Egyptian seated so patiently, apparently 
 miles away from anyone, on the bare river-bank, with his 
 ring of pots around him, awaiting the chance (that by a 
 miracle came to him) of someone in a boat stopping just 
 there, still lingers clearly in my memory — 3. characteristic 
 image of the East putting its trust in Fate, and not in vain. 
 
 The first at all memorable adventure of acquisition that 
 came to me on the Nile happened in the desert near Beni- 
 Hasan, on the way to the narrow valley in the side of which 
 is carved out the shrine called by Herodotus the Speos 
 Artemidos. The sacred animal of that temple and of the 
 surrounding district was the cat. It is claimed for man 
 that one of his greatest triumphs is the domestication of 
 that wildest of wild animals, the cat. The claim is mon- 
 strous ; it was the cat that domesticated man. Some wise 
 old tabby discovered the trick. She told her young, " Don't 
 run away from him ; sit still and lick yourself, and treat him 
 with confidence, always keeping an eye on him, though you 
 seem to be looking the other way. He's a blundering 
 creature, anyhow. What he throws never hits, and you 
 have always time to jump aside and get out of his way when 
 
70 
 
 THE HUNT IN EGYPT 
 
 he comes for you. But if you treat him with confidence 
 and purr when he touches you, he'll do you no harm, and 
 when he is not looking you can eat his food and save the 
 trouble of hunting. Have you not claws and teeth ? Use 
 them when finally necessary, and he'll be careful. But, on 
 the whole, trust him, though with discretion, and he'll let 
 you live on him." The policy was entirely successful. Man, 
 being tamed, came to think that he had tamed the cat, and 
 was correspondingly proud of himself. The cat never 
 undeceived him, and has lived a life of luxurious ease ever 
 since. 
 
 In Egypt the cat was worshipped. In early days it 
 began by being the totem of some ancient Egyptian clan. 
 Other clans venerated the bull, the crocodile, the hawk, the 
 jackal, the cobra, the lizard, and so forth. Observation of 
 existing totem tribes in Africa, Australia, and elsewhere 
 shows us that one or more representatives of the totem are 
 often fed or even kept alive in captivity by the tribe. Thus 
 Mr. Frazer tells us that " amongst the Narrinyeri, in South 
 Australia, men of the snake clan sometimes catch snakes, 
 pull out their teeth or sew up their mouths, and keep them 
 as pets. In a pigeon clan of Samoa a pigeon was carefully 
 kept and fed. Amongst the Kalang in Java, whose totem 
 is a red dog, each family, as a rule, keeps one of these 
 animals, which they will, on no account, allow to be struck 
 or ill-used by anyone." The Egyptian cat clan treated cats 
 as the Kalang treat red dogs. 
 
 At an early date the cat became a totem venerated all 
 along the Nile. So also did the ibis, the hawk, the beetle, 
 the asp, and other animals. Cicero says that no one ever 
 heard of an Egyptian killing a cat; the remark might be 
 made at the present day with almost equal truth. Herodotus 
 
CAT GHOSTS 
 
 relates that, when a fire occurred in Egypt, the people's 
 first idea was to save the cats and prevent them from leaping 
 into the flames. 
 
 Not only were cats preserved from injury, respected, and 
 j>etted during life, but they were buried with honour and 
 mourned when dead. Many a parallel may be found to 
 this custom of the ancient Egyptians. For instance, in 
 Samoa, to quote once more from Mr. Frazer, " If a man of 
 the owl totem found a dead owl by the roadside, he would 
 sit down and weep over it and beat his forehead with stones 
 till the blood flowed. The bird would then be wrapped up 
 and buried with as much ceremony as if it had been a 
 human being." The Egyptians' idea of respectable burial 
 implied preliminary mummification. According to their 
 notion, a living man consisted of a body, a ka, or ghost, a 
 bay or soul, and a " luminous." At death these component 
 parts were broken asunder and set adrift. It was believed 
 that some day all of them would come together again, and 
 there would be a resurrection. This, however, could only 
 happen if all the parts were preserved. Some of them 
 might be destroyed by the infernal powers ; that, of course, 
 could not be prevented by surviving relatives. They could 
 only help to keep the ka going. This ka was an impalpable 
 double of the man's body ; it was, in fact, the mediaeval, or, 
 for that matter, the modern, ghost. To keep it alive it had 
 to be fed with the ghost of food, clothed in the ghost of 
 clothing, and housed in the ghost of a house. It might be 
 pleased and amused by the ghosts of luxuries and games, 
 and served by the ghosts of slaves. The ingenuity of the 
 ancient Egyptians may be measured by the fact that they 
 not only invented the double, but found out how to supply 
 it with all these things. 
 
72 
 
 THE HUNT IN EGYPT 
 
 The ghost, or double, of a body (in ancient Egypt) had, 
 however, to have a material something to be the double of. 
 The actual body was, of course, best ; second best was an 
 image of it made in some lasting substance. Hence arose 
 mummification to preserve the body, and portrait sculpture 
 to replace it if destroyed. Such statues are called ka 
 statues. If the mummy were destroyed the ka could still 
 be kept in existence by means of them. A rich man was 
 mummified in costly style, had many ka statues, and was 
 buried in an elaborate tomb ; a poor man was merely dipped 
 in bitumen, rolled in a few yards of common stuff, and 
 hidden in the desert sand. 
 
 As with men, so with cats. They, too, had their ka and 
 all the rest of it, and their ka had likewise to be kept from 
 annihilation against the great day of resurrection of cats, 
 crocodiles, and men. A rich man*s cat was elaborately 
 mummified, wound round and round with stuff, and cun- 
 ningly plaited over with linen ribbons dyed two different 
 colours. His head was encased in a rough kind of papier- 
 mache mask, and that was covered with linen and painted, 
 even gilt sometimes, the ears always carefully pricked up. 
 The mummy might be enclosed in a bronze box with a 
 bronze ka statue of the cat seated on the top. Even finer 
 burial might await a particularly grand cat, as we shall pre- 
 sently see. A poor man's cat was rolled up in a simple 
 lump, but the rolling was respectfully done, which is more 
 than one can say about many a poor ancient Egyptian's 
 body brought to light in these excavating days. 
 
 Egypt possessed many temples of the Cat Goddess. 
 First among them was the great temple of Bubastis. It was 
 called by Herodotus the most pleasing of all the temples 
 of Egypt. A festival of an exceedingly merry and immoral 
 
A CATS^ CEMETERY 
 
 73 
 
 character was celebrated there to the yearly delight of 
 thousands of Egyptians. Cat mummies and cat ka statues 
 have been found in many parts of Egypt, but till recently 
 ninety-nine out of a hundred of them came from Bubastis. 
 In the summer of 1888, however, an enormous find of cats 
 was made near Beni-Hasan, a place some hundred miles or 
 so south of Cairo, and well known for its wonderful rock- 
 cut tombs. That an important cats' burying-place would 
 exist somewhere thereabouts might have been predicted 
 from the fact that, as aforesaid, the famous Speos Artemidos 
 exists in the immediate neighbourhood, and this temple 
 was dedicated to Pasht. Cats must, therefore, have been 
 specially venerated in the ancient city. 
 
 Fot three or four thousand years the cat mummies of 
 Beni-Hasan lay undisturbed, awaiting the resurrection ; 
 then a resurrection came to them, but other than they had 
 looked forward to. The archangel that heralded it was an 
 Egyptian fellah from the neighbouring village. By some 
 chance one day this genius dug a hole somewhere in the 
 level floor of the desert, and struck — cats! Not one or 
 two here and there, but dozens, hundreds, hundreds of 
 thousands, a layer of them, a stratum thicker than many a 
 coal-seam, in a series of pits ten to twenty cats deep, mummy 
 squeezed against mummy, tight as herrings in a barrel. The 
 discovery meant wealth for somebody. A systematic 
 exploration of the pits was undertaken. The surface sand 
 was stripped off, and the cats were laid bare. All sorts and 
 conditions of them then appeared — the commoner sort 
 caked together in black lumps, out of which here a grin- 
 ning face, there a furry paw, or a backbone or row of ribs 
 of some ancient puss stood prominently forth. The better 
 cats and kittens emerged in astonishing numbers, and with 
 
74 THE HUNT IN EGYPT 
 
 all their wrappings as fresh as if they had been put into the 
 ground a week, and not thirty centuries before. Now and 
 again an elaborately plaited mummy turned up ; still more 
 rarely one with a gilded face (of such I myself found three 
 lying about). As far as I can learn, only three cat ka 
 statues were found there. Two of these are small bronze 
 figures. The third is a life-size bronze, a hollow casting, 
 inside which the actual cat was buried. One or more 
 bronze statuettes of Osiris, god of the dead, were likewise 
 found among the cats. All these objects are in my 
 possession. 
 
 The plundering of the cemetery was a sight to see, but 
 one had to stand well to windward. The village children 
 came from day to day and provided themselves with the 
 most attractive mummies they could find. These they 
 took down to the river-bank to sell for the smallest coin to 
 passing travellers. Often they took to playing or fighting 
 together with them on the way, and then the ancient fur 
 began to fly as for three thousand years it had never been 
 called upon to do. The path became strewn with mummy 
 cloth and bits of cats' skulls, bones, and fur in horrid pro- 
 fusion, and the wind blew the fragments about and carried 
 the stench afar. This was only the illicit part of the busi- 
 ness. The bulk of the old totems went another way. Some 
 contractor came along and offered so much a pound for 
 their bones to make into something — soap or tooth powder, 
 I dare say, or even paint. So men went systematically to 
 work, peeled cat after cat of its wrappings, stripped off the 
 brittle fur, and piled the bones in black heaps a yard or 
 more high, looking from the distance like rotting haycocks 
 dispersed over the sandy plain. The rags and other refuse, 
 it appears, make excellent manure, and donkey-loads of 
 
Height 17| in 
 
 GILT BRONZE CAT 
 From Bent Hasan 
 
 Facing p. 75 
 
THE GREAT GILT CAT 
 
 75 
 
 them were carried off to the fields to serve that useful, if 
 unromantic, purpwDse. 
 
 I happened to be riding by just when some of the dig- 
 ging was toward ; while halting but a few moments the great 
 gilt bronze cat was discovered. Presumably the villagers 
 suspected that I might be some official who would be down 
 on them for unauthorised appropriation of antiquities. At 
 all events, they thought it better to be on the safe side, so 
 the cat was huddled up in a rag and given to a small boy, 
 who made off with it. Seeing what had happened, I fol- 
 lowed him. He began to run, cutting away over the 
 desert, with me in hot pursuit on rather a lazy donkey. I 
 had neither whip nor spur, but only a kind of Mrs. Gamp 
 umbrella wherewith to belabour my steed. The thwacks 
 were more resounding than efficient. However, I was 
 between the boy and his village, so that I could drive him 
 towards the desert hills. The chase was long, but the 
 scales of fate ultimately tipped my way, and as I finally 
 came up with the truant he cast himself on his knees and 
 held up to my deUghted gaze the gilt bronze cat. All I 
 desired was to purchase it, so that the boy's feelings under- 
 went a swift and agreeable revulsion. We returned 
 joyously together, I with the cat, he with a handful of 
 piastres. 
 
 The bronze cat sits bolt upright (some eighteen and a 
 half inches high), with her forelegs very straight and rigid 
 and her paws set close together. Her neck is long, and 
 perfectly cylindrical. Her head is practically a sphere, 
 with a face patched on to the front. She is, in fact, almost 
 the mathematical abstraction of a cat reduced to its simplest 
 form. The inside of her body is hollow, and in it the cat's 
 mummy was buried. Only the unmistakable smell and a 
 
76 
 
 THE HUNT IN EGYPT 
 
 few scraps of mummy cloth remained behind when I first 
 saw the creature. The whole thing, legs and all, was cast 
 in one piece, the cores of clay, about which the forelegs are 
 cast, being still inside them. The right leg has cracked ; 
 moisture at some time found its way to the clay within, 
 which has swollen and burst the whole limb wide open. An 
 interesting feature about this cat is that the whole body of 
 it was thinly plastered over with a fine coating of gesso^ and 
 that this was gilded.* Alabaster eyes were also introduced. 
 Most of the gilded gesso and one of the eyes remain. The 
 maker of the cat did not intend it to be gilt. This is 
 evident not only because the modelling of the face is 
 entirely altered by the plaster, which is thereabouts quite 
 thick, but because the whiskers were indicated by toohng 
 about the mouth, and this tooling the gesso^ before bits of 
 it flaked off, entirely hid. A cat buried with such excep- 
 tional magnificence can have been no ordinary beast. It 
 seems hardly too much to assume that it was the temple cat 
 of its day, the sacred animal of that Speos Artemidos which 
 all travellers in Egypt go to see. As such, at all events, the 
 owner finds pleasure in regarding it. 
 
 The next collecting adventure I can remember was a 
 wonderful night at Luxor, a village that in those days was 
 a perfect hive of illicit antiquity dealers. No doubt most 
 of the things they sold called for no secrecy, but it suited 
 their notions of how best to impose on travellers to repre- 
 sent every object in their shops as a priceless treasure which 
 the whole power of the local government was eager to seize 
 
 * There is a fine upright figure of Osiris in bronze at Ley den, which 
 is plastered and gilt in a similar fashion. This method is very ancient. 
 Compare some gilded, plastered, copper feathers found by Petrie in 
 Pepy's Temple at Abydos (sixth dynasty). 
 
LUXOR DEALERS 
 
 77 
 
 for the glory of the Cairo Museum. They had plenty of 
 forgeries, some almost perfectly made. Best were the 
 scarabs. There must have been a genius at work pro- 
 ducing them. I am told that he was as proud of his craft as 
 Bastianini himself, and was indignant if anyone suggested 
 that his scarabs were really old ; but the dealers who bought 
 from him had no such compunction. 
 
 I had spent two or three evenings in the dark native 
 houses of Luxor, finding nothing but the ordinary poor 
 rubbish that came to the surface everywhere in Egypt. At 
 last I w^as taken, with what seemed no more than the usual 
 precautions, into an inner room within the courtyard of a 
 specially secluded house, and there, to my astonishment, 
 they showed me a few quite extraordinary treasures. I 
 knew enough to recognise them at once as work of the 
 eighteenth dynasty, the most attractive period of ancient 
 Egyptian art. We were in a low-roofed room with a little 
 ramshackle furniture. The mud walls were naked. The 
 floor was of hard mud. The place was very dirty. It was 
 otherwise empty when we entered. Women, veiling their 
 faces, brought things in from the background, one by one. 
 First there was the head of a limestone statue of a woman, 
 very finely wrought and with remains of paint on the 
 voluminous wig. The long face, the drooping chin, the 
 broken fragment of what must have been a long neck, were 
 unmistakable. It was the head of some member of the 
 family of the heretic King Amenhotep IV. A friend who 
 was with me promptly acquired it. Then came a number 
 of small objects, some of very fine quality, but they were 
 all late, and the prices were high. It was no use trying to 
 bargain. Take them or leave them was the order of the 
 day. Then there was a delay. The whole aif air was excel- 
 
78 THE HUNT IN EGYPT 
 
 lently stage-managed. Faint sounds in the back quarters 
 indicated that a heavy object was coming. Two persons 
 brought it into the room and set it on the table. The cloth 
 that covered it was removed, and I beheld a seated lime- 
 stone figure about two feet hi^h and in faultless preserva- 
 tion, the portrait statue of a princess of the family of the 
 same Amenhotep. I have never seen a more perfect work 
 of ancient Egyptian sculpture. It was admirable in design, 
 delicate in finish, entirely portrait-like, and yet as com- 
 pletely incorporating the ancient Egyptian ideal of repose 
 as if it had been solely imagined to that end. The lime- 
 stone bust of Amenhotep IV. in the Louvre, which I did 
 not then know, may have been a work by the same sculptor, 
 but that is damaged, while this had not a scratch. It must • 
 have been recently removed from the tomb in which it had 
 remained untouched and even unbeheld for upwards of 
 three millennia. I ought at once to have recognised that 
 these people had found access to royal tombs of the family 
 of that Pharaoh who moved the capital of Egypt to Tel-el- 
 Amarna. But I did not put two and two together till later. 
 For half an hour I lingered regretfully over this beautiful 
 object, whose price was far beyond my reach. In its pre- 
 sence all other objects seemed relatively little desirable. A 
 Russian nobleman bought it next day, I believe, and I have 
 never since heard tell of it. Like the bird of the Synod 
 of Whitby that flew in at one door and out at the other of 
 the great hall, the white princess came for me out of the 
 night and vanished back into it again, but her beauty and 
 perfection abide for ever in my memory. 
 
 Returning late to our boat, the men that followed me 
 along the narrow lanes under the brilliant stars carried a 
 few not undesirable acquisitions. These included the 
 
TANAGRA AND ASIA MINOR TERRA-COTTAS 
 {See p. 103) 
 
 VARIOUS EGYPTIAN, PERUVIAN, AND OTHER OBJECTS 
 
 Facing p. 78 
 
THE WHITE PRINCESS 
 
 79 
 
 painted limestone figure of a kneeling priest holding a stele 
 upright before him. He was Tuty by name, and his office 
 was superintendent of the warehouse. The figure is good 
 genuine work of the early part of the nineteenth dynasty. 
 There was also a seated limestone portrait statue of a man, 
 about twelve inches high, of the end of the same dynasty, 
 a conventional example of well-known type. His naine was 
 Sebeh-menkh, and he was superintendent of the recruits. 
 There was also an early wooden figure of a bread-maker, 
 perfectly preserved, with its original wash of paint all over 
 — a sketchy piece of work, but remarkably vital. The 
 shadow or ghost of this figure buried in its owner*s tomb 
 was intended to supply that owner's ghost with the ghost 
 of bread throughout all the long interval between his burial 
 and his resurrection. It did its duty for the best part of 
 4,000 years, till the tomb-robbers carried it off. I wonder 
 whether its owner's ghost now comes to Allington for hot 
 rolls, and whether it hobnobs in the moonlight with the 
 ghosts of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Anne Boleyn. There was 
 also a small limestone figure of a woman of the seventeenth 
 dynasty, two other small portrait statues, and a number of 
 objects of minor interest and fragments. 
 
 A fortnight later, on our way down the river, we tied up 
 late in the evening off Ekhmin, At that time the place 
 overflowed with Ptolemaic, Roman, and Coptic antiquities. 
 The villagers seemed to possess right of free warren in the 
 tombs of their forefathers, and those must have been legion. 
 After dinner I landed with a boatman and a lantern, to 
 visit the dealers, of whom there were several. They offered 
 for sale wooden statues and alabaster vases, countless little 
 statuettes, and an excellent wooden Boat of the Dead, with 
 lots of painted oarsmen and steersmen, the dead man seated 
 
8o 
 
 THE HUNT IN EGYPT 
 
 in state under a four-post canopy, a priest and his son 
 standing before him, and his wife behind kneehng on the 
 deck. Such boats are common enough, but when one 
 comes to them straight off the Nile they have a strangely 
 vivid look. It was late in the season, and the market for 
 the dealers' wares was nearly over, so they began bidding 
 one against another for my custom. If I had had more 
 sense I should have devoted more attention to the quantity 
 of pieces of Coptic woven stuffs with figure designs upon 
 them which were only then beginning to attract the notice 
 they have since received in full measure. These old rags, 
 however, seen by the light of a flickering oil lamp, are not 
 particularly beautiful or attractive objects, and, besides, I 
 had not begun to take interest in Coptic art. It was the 
 three large wooden figures that attracted me, and I made 
 an offer for one of them. As it was not accepted, I 
 returned to the boat, and then the fun began. 
 
 The night was brilliantly starlit, and I could not drag 
 myself away from the company of the constellations. I was 
 only beginning to be familiar with the Southern Cross and 
 that neighbourhood of the heavens, which we had slowly 
 seen rise into view as we went southward, and were now 
 as slowly losing on our northward return. In bygone years 
 astronomy had been a chief interest for me, and for a long 
 time no clear night went by without my spending a few 
 hours at the telescope. Starry nights still bring back the 
 feeling of those young days, their stillness and solitude, the 
 wonder of the heavens, the excitement of a first view of 
 some nebula, some double star, some glittering cluster, 
 surely amongst the fairest sights the eye of man can behold. 
 It was the memory of those even then far-past nights of 
 bliss that kept me on the deck of the dahabiyeh till long 
 
COPTIC STELES 
 
 8i 
 
 after midnight. The village, or part of it, remained awake ; 
 there was a continual drumming and singing. Evidently 
 some local fete was going on. At intervals dim shapes 
 appeared on the bank and called out to me. They were the 
 dealers still trying to tempt me with their wares. The 
 wooden figures approached and vanished on the heads of 
 dusky bearers. Trays of other objects, fitfully illuminated 
 by smoky lights, were displayed, and then carried away. 
 Prices were called out. Folk kept coming forth and re- 
 treating again into the night, only to reappear once more. 
 At last, at two o'clock, I prepared to go to bed. The 
 watchers saw that the decisive moment was come. The 
 wooden figure I really wanted was brought forward once 
 more and handed over to me at my own price. I took it 
 down into my cabin, and it has dwelt with me ever since. 
 
 The only other incident of acquisition in Egypt which 
 needs to be recorded is the way we obtained some Coptic 
 steles of about seventh-century date. It was on one of 
 those contrary days in March, when a strong north wind 
 kept us from moving down-stream. As the day advanced 
 it became evident that progress was going to be impossible 
 till the morrow, so I rode off on a donkey to the Coptic 
 settlement called Dair Manaos wa Shenude, some distance 
 south of Esneh. The ruinous church consists of a kind of 
 honeycomb of square chambers, each surmounted by its 
 own Httle dome, supported on arches across the angles of 
 the square, whilst pointed arched openings connected the 
 chambers together and united them into a church. A great 
 number of Coptic tombstones were built into the walls of 
 the Dair, and there had once been many more. What had 
 happened to them was shown by the neighbouring cluster of 
 houses, of which many, in their turn, were in ruins. The 
 F 
 
82 
 
 THE HUNT IN EGYPT 
 
 old steles had been pillaged and used as hinge-stones for 
 the doors to turn on, or built in for coigns. A native fol- 
 lowed us to one disroof ed hut, which he assured us belonged 
 to him. When he saw me examining the stones he promptly 
 pulled down the remains of the door, disengaged the hinge- 
 post from the round hole in the stone within which it had 
 turned, pulled up the stone, and offered it to me for a piece 
 of silver. I purchased it, and he promptly pulled down 
 part of the wall and disengaged two more complete steles 
 and some fragments. Fortunately, several of the boatmen 
 had come with me. Each of them shouldered a stone, and 
 we marched back in triumph with them to the dahabiyeh. 
 They are now firmly built into the repaired part of a thir- 
 teenth-century wall at AUington Castle, from which it will 
 be difficult to rend them forth. It is to save future anti- 
 quarians trouble when, say in the thirtieth century, this 
 building may once again fall into ruin, that I here put on 
 record the provenance of these stones ! 
 
CHAPTER VIL 
 
 FROM INDIA TO PERU 
 
 INDIA is not a very good country for hunting antiquities. 
 One cannot carry away a Jain temple, even if one 
 might The decorative sculpture of mediaeval India 
 is not attractive ; at all events, not attractive to me. There 
 are ancient bronzes to be found, but they give so much 
 more pleasure to refined Indian lovers of their own past 
 than to the European eye that it seems best to leave them 
 where they belong. What the art-loving traveller is 
 tempted to buy is modern or recent work, but it is very 
 disappointing stuff in the long run. The carved tables, 
 the hammered copper and silverwork, the fapier-mdchiy 
 and even the shawls and embroidered or painted textiles, 
 that look so attractive when displayed in the shadow of a 
 verandah by picturesque native artisans in the light of 
 India, lose half their romance, half their charm of colour, 
 and more than half their general picturesqueness by trans- 
 plantation to an English interior. What was packed up 
 with pride is unpacked at home with disillusion. Who 
 does not know the sets of carved ivory chessmen, the inlaid 
 sandalwood boxes, the brass gods, and other the like bric-a- 
 brac which, after glorifying the drawing-room of some 
 retired Anglo-Indian, have drifted away into the cupboards 
 of his descendants ? England must be full of such stuff ; 
 and yet when for the first time one comes across it in the 
 
84 FROM INDIA TO PERU 
 
 bazaars of India, it surprises with a strange attractiveness, 
 only to disappoint yet one more purchaser when he gets 
 it home. 
 
 When I was on my way to India, I knew perfectly well 
 that I was not going to want any of these things, but there 
 was one kind of object that I did want, and intended to get, 
 if good luck would be with me. This was an example of 
 what is known as the Gandhara School of Sculpture. Before 
 Alexander the Great invaded North-West India, stone was 
 not used in that country either for architecture or sculp- 
 ture. They built in wood, and if they sculptured at all, 
 which seems unlikely, it must have been in clay ; but no 
 examples of pre-Alexandrian Indian art have survived. It 
 was the Greeks who taught the Buddhists of Swat and 
 thereabouts to sculpture in stone, and the tradition thus 
 founded lasted on. The best work of the kind is the 
 earliest The Greco-Bactrian School, of the third and 
 second centuries before Christ, took firm hold, and spread 
 its influences throughout the hill-country west of the Upper 
 Indus, and in the vale of Kashmir, as well as across the 
 great plain of North India. I am not concerned here to 
 trace either its rise or its fortunes. Perhaps there may have 
 existed a Buddhist school of art before the coming of the 
 Greeks, and maybe the various types of Buddha and the 
 incidents of his legend were modelled in clay or carved 
 in wood before ever a Greek chisel crossed Iran ; but no 
 trace of any such early Buddhist art has been found, and 
 its existence is doubted. As soon, however, as Buddhist 
 craftsmen came in contact with the Greek tradition, and 
 learned to use Western tools, their style, if they had one, 
 was modified, as well as their technique, so that the earliest 
 sculptures of what is known as the Gandhara School mani- 
 
GANDHARA SCULPTURE 
 
 85 
 
 f est plainly the Greek element in their design. They were 
 applied to the decoration of Buddhist sacred edifices, stupas, 
 temples, monasteries, and such-like. For the most part 
 they were wrought on a small scale. Some figures of 
 about life-size there were, and others rather smaller, but 
 the bulk of what survives is in the form of reliefs, almost 
 in the round, carved in little niches out of the black slaty 
 stone of the Swat country. For it is there and thereabouts 
 that the bulk of the early Gandhara sculpture has been 
 found. For some time Hoti Murdan was the chief source 
 of supply, but a quantity was obtained from previously 
 inaccessible sources by the Chitral expedition, and in con- 
 sequence of the more or less settled conditions in those 
 parts which then ensued. The school continued active for 
 many generations, and shows changes of style correspond- 
 ing to the passage of time. When the Greco-Bactrian 
 Kingdom was replaced by the Indo-Scythians, and the 
 Parthian Kingdom, in continual combat with Rome, inter- 
 vened between India and the West, Buddhist art had to 
 find its own way, free from Western influences. Thereupon 
 the purely Indian spirit gained the upper hand, and before 
 long, all but a faint trace of the original Greek impulse 
 was lost. 
 
 Possessed by the desire to obtain if it were only a small 
 fragment of this kind of sculpture of the early fine period, 
 I made such careful study as opportunity threw in my way 
 of the examples of it now honourably preserved in the 
 museums of India, and especially at Lahore. Everywhere 
 I sought for some unattached example that I might appro- 
 priate, but nowhere did success crown my efforts, and my 
 last month in India had come. Thereupon I determined 
 to go to Peshawar, as much on this quest as to visit the 
 
86 
 
 FROM INDIA TO PERU 
 
 Khyber Pass. The latter wish was fulfilled by the kind- 
 ness of General Sir Henry Collett, who took me to visit 
 the Pass, and gave me the delightful hospitality of a night 
 with his telescope, an instrument that chance threw twenty 
 years later into the possession of a kinsman of mine, so 
 that I may hope some day to have the use of it for a night 
 once more. I was leaving Peshawar the following after- 
 noon, and only had a few hours left for the bazaars. Char- 
 tering a vehicle, I drove rather at random about the town, 
 with my eyes open, and the thought of Gandhara sculpture 
 always at the back of my head. Peshawar is a hotbed of 
 Mussulman agitation, so that I was advised to be a little 
 careful where I went, but when I passed the gate of a Hindu 
 temple I felt that I might reasonably enough venture into 
 the recesses of the fane of a people unpopular and unim- 
 portant in that locality. A stone-paved pathway led straight 
 from the entrance gate through garden courtyards to the 
 inmost shrine. Something attracted me to follow it as 
 though I had been a needle drawn by a magnet. On 
 approaching the lingam, I saw wherein the strange force 
 resided, for there, actually leaning against the sacred stone, 
 and thickly covered by the oil with which it was periodically 
 anointed, was an admirable panel of Gandhara sculpture. 
 As I was standing in the deserted shrine with the sculpture 
 in my hands, an almost naked heathen came rushing to- 
 ward me. His skin looked so very smooth and brown, 
 and he appeared so comic, dancing about in a kind of fury, 
 that some Puck-like spirit entered into me. Raising my 
 hand, I gave him a resounding smack on his naked back, 
 which startled him into a petrified silence. We stood like 
 stone figures for a perceptible time, gazing at one another. 
 My hand glided gently to my pocket, and produced certain 
 
Facing p. 86 
 
PESHAWAR TEMPLE 
 
 87 
 
 silver coins. His hand crept forth with the palm open. 
 Nothing was said. I walked off quietly in one direction, 
 bearing the carved relief, he vanished noiselessly in the 
 other, clutching the rupees. Thus silence again descended 
 on the sun-bathed temple, and an hour or two later the 
 train was bearing me away toward Bombay and England. 
 
 The Buddha type, which may have taken form in North 
 India before the coming of Greek influence, was certainly 
 modified and dignified by that influence when the Gandhara 
 sculptors translated it into stone. The form it then 
 assumed became a standard, which went wherever the 
 Buddhist religion spread, and was maintained with little 
 alteration down to modern times. It is in Japan that the 
 finest existing specimens of the type survive. Remarkable 
 Buddhas and Bodhisattwas were made in Japan during a 
 long succession of centuries, some of them being wonder- 
 fully noble sculptures, incorporating the repose of the East 
 with a monumental dignity that found its earliest and per- 
 haps its best expression in ancient Egypt 
 
 About twenty years ago, owing to a change in the re- 
 ligious ideas of the Japanese, European markets were 
 flooded with Japanese Buddhas* and Buddhist saints. These 
 were of all sizes, large and small, and of various materials. 
 Most were of wood, lacquered or gilt. Many were of 
 bronze. I was greatly attracted by these figures, and 
 bought several of them. They were commonest in London, 
 but one met with them everywhere. Not infrequently they 
 were employed to give an Oriental tone to the windows of 
 
 * I use this term loosely for any seated, cross-legged figure that 
 looks to Western eyes like a Buddha, The majority of such figures do 
 not, in fact, represent Gautama Buddha at all, but various saints and 
 incarnations. All these figures, however, incorporate the same ideal, 
 and are practically the expression of a single conception. 
 
88 FROM INDIA TO PERU 
 
 tea-shops. The wooden figures were frail, and probably 
 a great number of them suffered rapid degradation, and, 
 finally, destruction, in their last refuges in England. The 
 purchasing public did not appreciate them, and I was thus 
 enabled to buy the finest example that till then, or ever 
 since, I have anywhere seen, out of a shop in Regent Street 
 at a very small price. They told me that this figure had 
 been in their hands for ten years, yet no one had ever even 
 asked its price. It is a seated figure, nearly half life size. 
 The type does not vary from the normal in any way, but it 
 surpasses all other Buddhas known to me in the quality of 
 the drapery and the refinement of the lines of the folds. 
 It dates from the sixteenth or seventeenth century. It has 
 lost the lotus pedestal and the gilt halo required to complete 
 it. It was sold in a cabinet which, however, was originally 
 used for another purpose. 
 
 Of similar size and type is a bronze Buddha seated on 
 a lotus pedestal, and much more highly considered than 
 its wooden companion. As sculpture, however, the wooden 
 Buddha is greatly superior. The best part of the bronze 
 example is the base, which is of remarkable delicacy and 
 finish of detailed form. The lobes around the base are as 
 beautiful as the finest eggs in the egg-and-dart mouldings 
 of Greek buildings of the culminating period of Greek 
 architecture. On the back is the following inscription, 
 translated for me by my friend, Mr. Shugio : " Respectfully 
 dedicated to the temple of Ankoji of Kamakura, July 3rd, 
 in the first year of Genroku (1688), by Kobayashi Heikichi, 
 the donor." 
 
 There are a good many other Japanese objects that have 
 fallen in my way, most of them picked up years ago, before 
 such things became costly, but I will only mention one lot — 
 
A GILT BUDDHA 
 Height 18i in. 
 
 Facing p. 88 
 
TIBETAN ANTIQUITIES 89 
 
 a bucketful of wrought-iron sword-guards, some beauti- 
 fully inlaid, but all of the early time before the great 
 elaboration of these articles became fashionable. I forget 
 how we heard of them. It was, I remember, the day before 
 I was sailing for India, when there was not a moment to 
 spare. My wife ultimately ran them to earth in the City, 
 and bought them by weight for little more than the value 
 of the metal. There was only one bucketful of them left. 
 Twice as many had been practically given away the day 
 before. 
 
 In the western part of Tibet, which belongs to the king- 
 dom of Kashmir, and is named Ladakh, Buddhism, or a 
 form of it called Lamaism, still flourishes. Every village 
 has its temple and its lamasery, and at points on all the 
 roads are Buddhistic monuments — ^Chortens, mani-mounds, 
 prayer-wheels, and the like. In this part I was able to 
 acquire a certain number of objects of small intrinsic value, 
 but of archaeological interest, which Sir Augustus Franks 
 gladly accepted from me for the British Museum. The 
 monks at Hemis and the other important monasteries are 
 wisely careful to keep every sacred object that belongs to 
 the temple. They will not sell an image, a banner, or a 
 book that belongs to them, and I trust that this attitude of 
 theirs will continue. I daresay that under the shadow of 
 darkness it might have been possible to overcome their 
 scruples, but I had no desire to try, and the more so that 
 at Hemis I was the guest of the convent, and they even per- 
 formed a splendid religious ceremony for my edification, 
 with much singing, beating of drums, and splendour of 
 masks and costumes. So I made no attempt on the temple 
 treasures, the figured banners of all colours, the images 
 large and small in clay or brass, the illuminated manu- 
 
go FROM INDIA TO PERU 
 
 scripts, and all the stores of things, many of them line works 
 of the Lhassa School, and of considerable antiquity, with 
 which this great store-house overflows. 
 
 From the smaller religious centres, however, I did not 
 go quite empty away. Thus, one night, when I was 
 encamped below Lamayuru, strange things happened. I 
 had visited the Gonpa in the afternoon, and been shown 
 over it. I had lingered for some time in the library, where 
 what seemed to be immense quantities of manuscripts were 
 stored. In particular there was a great set of books written 
 on large cardboard-like leaves stained blue, the text being 
 written in alternate lines coloured to resemble gold, silver, 
 and copper. There were also circular miniatures delicately 
 painted in bright colours at frequent intervals. The books 
 of this set, tied up between moulded boards for bindings, 
 must have numbered several hundreds. They were stacked 
 together in apparent confusion, many having burst their 
 strings, so that the loose leaves had poured forth and been 
 chaotically mixed together. I lusted for some of these 
 leaves, and asked to buy them, but great difficulties were 
 made, though I was finally allowed to carry off a few in the 
 "keeper's" pocket of my coat. No sooner had darkness 
 come on, and I was settled down with my fellow-travellers 
 to our evening meal, than a monk from the Gonpa slipped 
 quietly into camp. The servants brought him to me, and 
 he began to talk volubly, but none of us knew a word of 
 Tibetan, and he knew nothing else. The substance of 
 what he had to say was easily made apparent when he 
 produced a couple of manuscripts from the folds of his 
 raiment. I tried to explain to him that I was not interested 
 in unilluminated MSS., and gave him back his offering, but 
 he would not take it. He just left the books on the floor 
 
A LAMA'S MANIS 
 
 91 
 
 of the tent and slipped away. An hour later he was back 
 again, this time with a blue coloured manuscript like those 
 I had seen in the Gonpa Library, but whether it had be- 
 longed to the set I could not tell. He pushed it under the 
 fly of the tent, and then held out his hand. 
 
 These Tibetan monks were curious people. I met one 
 of them on the road saying his prayers by rotating a wheel 
 as he walked slowly along. He was carrying a copper 
 vessel, in shape like a teapot, with a turquoise mounted 
 on the spout, also a little plate and spoon and a couple of 
 small cymbals united by a chain, and very useful for driving 
 away devils. He offered them to me, and demanded a 
 price in rupees, which I paid him. His things were duly 
 packed into one of our pieces of baggage, and we were 
 about to go forward, when he sat down and began to weep 
 bitterly. I enquired why he was weeping. He said it 
 was because I was taking away his manis (sacred things), 
 which had belonged to his forefathers. I had them un- 
 packed and offered to return them. He was delighted, but 
 would not give back the rupees. He said he wanted to keep 
 both them and his manis. I told him to put the rupees on 
 the ground beside his things. He did so. " Now, choose 
 which you will have — the rupees or the manisr He picked 
 up the rupees and went his way, again weeping loudly as 
 long as we were within hearing. When I looked back on 
 him from a remoter distance, he appeared to have recovered 
 his peace of mind. 
 
 The day after our visit to Lamayuru, we camped at 
 Saspul, where is a new Gonpa, built down by the road-side, 
 containing three colossal figures, badly modelled in mud, 
 and with the walls crudely painted. I had been advised 
 to hunt up the ruins of the old Gonpa. What remains of 
 
92 FROM INDIA TO PERU 
 
 it is the rock-cut chambers, rudely hollowed out of a hard 
 conglomerate cliff. They were closed in front by built-up 
 walls. There were quite a number of these chambers, in 
 rows and storeys one above another, and connecting gal- 
 leries and staircases had been built up in front out of crude 
 brick ; in fact, it was a typical mountain Gonpa of the 
 traditional sort. Several of the larger chambers still retain 
 their painted decoration. The paintings were done on 
 plaster laid against the nubbly conglomerate walls. Here 
 and there a refractory portion of the surface was corered 
 with canvas, and the painting had been done on it on the 
 same kind of ground as that with which the plaster was 
 overlaid. A portion of canvas had fallen from the wall, 
 and was lying about in the dust on the floor. As the whole 
 place was utterly abandoned, I had no hesitation in rescuing 
 this fragment from the destruction which was overtaking 
 the rest. The pictures included hundreds of little seated 
 figures, like Buddhas, and many larger ones of gods, devils, 
 and the like. There was a seated saint, teaching, sur- 
 rounded by some fifty or more minute disciples. There 
 was also the figure of Avalokita with the Thousand Arms, 
 so popular hereabouts ; and there were besides many illus- 
 trations of legends which I had not the knowledge to 
 interpret. The drawing was admirably done with a free 
 and certain line, and the figures in action were drawn with 
 spirit ; the colours were applied flat, and were few in num- 
 ber and good in quality, combination, and proportion. I 
 don't think the paintings date from before the seventeenth 
 century. They contain, however, that mixture of Indian 
 with Chinese traditions which Dr. Stein has revealed in the 
 Central Asian art of a much earher period. 
 
 A leap from Tibet to Peru— from 75 deg. east longitude 
 
INCA ANTIQUITIES 93 
 
 to 75 deg. west — may seem somewhat inconsequential ; yet, 
 just as the fertile parts of Chile behind Valparaiso always 
 kept reminding me of Kashmir, so the desert region of the 
 Andes bears a remarkable resemblance to Western Tibet. 
 The traveller going from Europe to Peru looks forward 
 to landing in a world markedly "new," but the first im- 
 pression he actually receives is of the extreme antiquity 
 of man in that land. Peru and Bolivia, especially Bolivia, 
 have the aspect of antiquity quite as markedly as India, 
 except where purely European conditions have been intro- 
 duced, and both countries are alike in that respect also. 
 The Indian aborigines of the land of the Incas have all the 
 aspect of an ancient race, still in the possession of their 
 own most venerable traditions and civilisation. European 
 influence seems not to have touched them any more than it 
 has touched the mass of the natives of India. 
 
 But it is not only the Quichuas and Aymaras and other 
 surviving peoples of Peru and Bolivia that seem ancient. 
 The buildings of the Spanish conquerors likewise possess 
 a venerable aspect. Lima seemed to me more like a re- 
 stored Pompeii than anything else. Its houses, with their 
 courtyards, their blank faces to the street, their aspect of 
 reserve and readiness for defence, appear anything rather 
 than modem. Almost any city in Europe looks young 
 compared with Lima. Hence, from the moment of arrival, 
 my thoughts were turned rather back into the past than to 
 the present or the future ; because, of course, the history 
 and antiquities of any old country must always be more 
 interesting than its current activities or its future prospects, 
 except perhaps to the inhabitants themselves. What can 
 be more boring to a foreigner than to have some citizen 
 of the place he is visiting describe to him at length all that 
 
94 FROM INDIA TO PERU 
 
 that city is going to be in some future near or distant? 
 Eloquent local prophets of local glories to come no doubt 
 have a good time with their contemporaries at home, but 
 they should not be permitted to travel unmuzzled. Which 
 of us has not suffered from such? 
 
 The first shop I discovered in Lima was one that dealt 
 in antiquities. But you do not buy genuine old things 
 cheaply in those parts. Wealthy local collectors are 
 numerous and persistent. Old Spanish silver is hard to find 
 and very costly. In the earliest colonial days silver was a 
 common metal, and every self-respecting descendant of the 
 conquerors had his table service made by local craftsmen 
 out of silver. Such plates and bowls are of great thickness 
 and weight, generally almost plain, and lacking in grace 
 of form. I found them undesirable, and although I once 
 came across some fair specimens in a Bolivian finca, which 
 the owner would have given me for the value of the silver, 
 I had no desire to possess them. 
 
 It will, I imagine, surprise many European collectors to 
 be told that South America in the seventeenth and 
 eighteenth centuries produced furniture of excellent quality 
 and original design. The styles of Panama, Guayaquil, and 
 Lima were all different, and local collectors diligently seek 
 for the products of the old cabinet-makers of those places. 
 The finest piece of furniture I saw was in the house let 
 furnished to the Secretary of the United States Legation 
 at the time of my visit to Lima. It was a great mahogany 
 table at which the Inquisitors used to sit. The top was 
 very massive, and of splendid wood, and it was supported 
 on four lion-legs magnificently carved. I thought I had 
 succeeded in purchasing it, but there was some misunder- 
 standing, and it never reached England. 
 
INCA POTTERY 
 
 95 
 
 It is the misfortune of Peruvian antiquities that the 
 excavation of Inca cemeteries and remains has seldom been 
 scientifically carried out. As a rule the manager of some 
 sugar estate or person engaged in business finds huakkas 
 in the ground, and proceeds to dig them up, without pay- 
 ing the slightest regard to how they were buried, or putting 
 on record any of the facts which are essential from a stu- 
 dent's point of view. Only the other day a friend of mine 
 was asked to bring home for sale on behalf of the finder 
 a great mass of gold objects which had been discovered 
 in various chulpas and tombs, but the finding-place of 
 none of them was recorded, and as they are ugly, and of 
 little interest in themselves, three-quarters of their value 
 was thus destroyed. As with these gold ornaments, so it 
 is generally with Inca antiquities of all kinds. There is no 
 record with any of them of the circumstances of their dis- 
 covery. Hence, though by the kindness of friends rather 
 than by my own exertions I was able to bring away a few 
 quite fine examples of pottery, I cannot say in any case 
 where they were found. 
 
 The first pot that came into my hands was one in the 
 form of an animal of the cat tribe — I suppose a puma. It 
 was evidently intended by fate to be a companion for the 
 Egyptian bronze cats, and, in fact, they have now lived 
 peacefully together for many years. Only once have I 
 heard them caterwauling in the night, and even then I may 
 have been mistaken. My greatest prize, however, was a 
 pot that is to all intents a plain portrait bust, but for the 
 addition of a spout-handle at the back of the head. These 
 portrait pots of superior quahty are rare, and belong to 
 the best period of their school. The finest I ever saw 
 belonged in 1898 to Mr. Clay, at Lima, and it was he who 
 
96 FROM INDIA TO PERU 
 
 gave me mine. Both were dug up on the same sugar estate 
 in Peru, I believe near Chimbote. 
 
 The only other Inca antiquities I acquired were given 
 to me in Bolivia by gentlemen who had been made kindly 
 disposed towards me by my ascent of the great sacred 
 mountain Illimani. One of the mementoes of that climb 
 was a tiny bronze object of axe-like form, with a human 
 figure rudely modelled on it. It was found at Cusco. The 
 other object came from the same place. It is of wood, and 
 looks as though it had been cut off the top of a staff. It 
 represents a monkey, squatting on a base, over which his 
 tail hangs down behind. Never was monkey squarer-built 
 or more composed, or with such wide-opened eyes, or such 
 cocked-up ears, for all the world like a cat's. He holds a 
 human head in his teeth by the hair, and steadies it with 
 both hands. Age has endowed the wood with an iron-like 
 hardness, but who made it, or when, or what it means, 
 heaven only knows. 
 
 In the southernmost part of the South American conti- 
 nent, where I likewise went a-climbing, the only antiquities 
 I came upon were Fuegians actually dwelling in the kitchen- 
 midden stage of the Stone Age. They were as fat as 
 porpoises, and I saw them sitting in apparent comfort in an 
 open canoe, with the snow falling and melting upon the 
 rotund surfaces of their naked bodies. They hunt the 
 shores of the Fuegian archipelago for bottles thrown over- 
 board bypassing steamers, and out of fragments of these they 
 fashion arrow-heads, as neolithic man fashioned them out of 
 flints. Darwin once collected a live Fuegian, but he was a 
 troublesome acquisition. I had no desire to follow even so 
 distinguished an example. 
 
CHAPTER VIIL 
 
 GREEK AND ROMAN ANTIQUITIES 
 
 THE claim is now often made that in England more 
 art treasures of the past lie hid awaiting identification 
 than anywhere else in the world. The most important 
 recent addition to the recognised sculptures of the Par- 
 thenon was a fine fragment discovered on a rockery at Colne 
 Park, Essex. I myself found employed as an ornament in an 
 English garden one of the splendid wind-blown acanthus 
 capitals made to the order of Theodoric the Ostrogoth 
 for a church at Ravenna, and afterward used in Italy as a 
 well-head.* The old gardens of England doubtless possess 
 a still unsuspected treasure of such objects. I have a 
 drawing of a very elaborately sculptured mediaeval cross- 
 head, described as having been made from a stone in the 
 rockery of a Rectory garden. Several fonts of great 
 antiquity have been rescued from pig-sties, farmyards, and 
 the like unkenned localities. The only antique marble bust 
 which it has been my good fortune to acquire was bought 
 out of a back garden at Cambridge. The owner thought 
 he remembered to have been told by his father that some 
 old don brought it home from Italy a long time ago. The 
 story sounds quite eighteenth century. Dons nowadays 
 seldom come home from their holidays with a marble bust 
 in their luggage. 
 
 * See Country Ldfe^ October nth, 1913. 
 
 G 
 
98 GREEK AND ROMAN ANTIQUITIES 
 
 The bust in question is of Greek marble. The head has 
 evidently been broken off at the root of the neck from a 
 full-length figure. Its left shoulder droops slightly, and 
 there is a corresponding inclination of the neck, with the 
 head somewhat turned toward an erect position. The frag- 
 ment is inserted into draped shoulders supported by a base, 
 carved in late Renaissance style out of a coarser and greyer 
 marble than the head. The waving locks of hair enframing 
 the forehead are deeply grooved by means of a drill in a 
 manner characteristic of the time of the Antonines. The 
 crown of the head is merely roughed out, and was originally 
 surmounted by some kind of head-dress, probably of metal, 
 The stump of the pin which fixed it remains embedded in 
 the marble. I have not found it possible to point to any 
 definite original from which this copy has been taken. At 
 a first glance the type appears to go back to the fifth 
 century, but the soft, rounded oval of the face, the massive 
 neck, the small, slightly opened mouth, and the form of 
 the eyes, are all features characteristic rather of the fol- 
 lowers of Scopas, and in particular of the Niobide group. 
 Probably the Roman copyist had some original by an 
 eclectic sculptor before him. The Barberini Hera is nearest 
 to the required type. Furtwangler attributes the original 
 of that to Alkamenes. Helbig's idea is that it was the work 
 of some Hellenistic artist of about the second century B.C., 
 who combined fifth and fourth century types of head and 
 body. In these misty regions of conjecture as to copies of 
 lost originals by unidentifiable artists, who derived their 
 style by imitation of the styles and traditions of earlier 
 artists, whose work in their turn is only known from vague 
 descriptions and probably inaccurate copies, it seems to me 
 that definite assertions by one who makes no claim to be a 
 
ANTIQUE BUST 
 Total height 27 in. 
 
 Facing p. 98 
 
A PORPHYRY BUST 
 
 99 
 
 specialist in these matters may be spared. The head has 
 never been exhibited, nor have I had the advantage of dis- 
 cussing it with any of the recognised major authorities on 
 ancient sculpture. 
 
 Far more attractive than this marble bust is another on 
 a smaller scale, sculptured in that most refractory of all 
 stones — porphyry. It represents a youth, as it were, a 
 young David, with head erect on a long, slender neck, the 
 smooth surface of the finely formed face and delicate 
 features being set off delightfully by the loosely flowing 
 hair, which, in contrast to the finish of the face, is only 
 roughly blocked out. It is the veiry incarnation of high 
 breeding and youthful purity, like some youth beloved of 
 Leonardo* — alert, confident, and keen, without forebodings 
 and without regrets. 
 
 One of the most remarkable achievements of those 
 earhest Egyptians of whose work we possess survivals was 
 the discovery how to work the hardest rocks supplied to 
 them by nature in the neighbourhood of their homes. Bowls 
 and dishes of granite, diorite, and other hard stones in con- 
 siderable number have been found in tombs of the earliest 
 dynasties, not roughly hammered out, but truly and ex- 
 quisitely wrought to a high degree of finish. Already by the 
 time of the Middle Empire magnificent monumental 
 statues were made, and the traditions of this art 
 were maintained thenceforward. Who that has beheld it 
 can ever forget the majesty of the great Ramses II. at 
 Turin ? It is an error to say, with Helbig and others, 
 that fine modelling is not as possible of attainment in 
 porphyry and diorite as in marble, and that, therefore, 
 
 * A drawing in the Louvre attributed to Boltraffio (Braun, No. 176), 
 might almost have been suggested by this bust seen in profile. 
 
100 GREEK AND ROMAN ANTIQUITIES 
 
 sculpture in the hardest rocks must be inferior in quality. 
 Fine modelling is possible in any material, but not the 
 same kind of fineness. The Ramses 11. is finely modelled 
 in a style proper to diorite. The Hermes of Praxiteles is 
 finely modelled in a style proper to marble. To model 
 porphyry as though it were marble would not be to model 
 it finely. Egyptian sculptors preserved throughout the 
 whole course of their history a complete understanding of 
 how to work the hardest stones, and of what could properly 
 be done with them. In the Hellenistic period the workshops 
 of Alexandria turned out both porphyry and basalt sculp- 
 ture, whilst in early Roman Imperial days attempts were 
 made to introduce a taste for objects of this class into 
 Rome. It was not, however, till the time of the Antonines 
 that sculpture in the hardest stones became popular. 
 Marble heads were then fitted into coloured shoulders, and 
 draperies were imitated in variegated polished stones. It 
 was a vulgar and unseemly degradation of the ancient 
 dignified art of Egypt, and only had vogue for a short 
 time, as a fashion among the wealthy rather than a taste 
 among the refined. Finally, in the fourth century, a return 
 was made to the traditions of a better period, and a certain 
 number of notable portrait-figures and sarcophagi were 
 turned out by Alexandrian craftsmen. Such are the figures 
 in the Museums of Ravenna and Cairo, and the portrait 
 groups in the Vatican and on the outside of the Treasury of 
 St. Mark's at Venice. Soon afterwards the art of working 
 porphyry fell into neglect, though mediaeval craftsmen were 
 still able to cut sections of antique columns and work them 
 into mosaic pavements. The thirteenth-century porphyry 
 sarcophagi of Frederick II. and other members of his house 
 must also have been contemporary work. Later on, 
 
PORPHYRY BUST 
 
 Facing p. loo 
 
A FORGOTTEN CRAFT loi 
 
 however, the art of shaping porphyry seems to have fallen 
 into total oblivion. Vasari (Milanesi edition, L, p. 109) 
 relates how efforts were made by Leon Battista Alberti and 
 others to rediscover the lost craft, and how, at last, in 
 1555, success was attained in fashioning a large fountain 
 basin in porphyry for the Grand Duke, and presently there- 
 after in certain portrait bas-reliefs. 
 
 This brief resume of the history of porphyry sculpture 
 proves clearly enough that the beautiful little porphyry 
 bust of a lad in my possession is not, as I at first supposed 
 it to be, a Florentine work of the fifteenth century, because 
 no one alive in the fifteenth century knew how to sculpture 
 porphyry at all. If it recalls in some degree the David of 
 Verrocchio, it is because it was antique work of this type 
 that Verrocchio endeavoured to rival when he modelled the 
 David. The workshop from which this bust came was not 
 in Florence, but in Alexandria, and the traditions it incor- 
 porates are not Tuscan, but Hellenistic. 
 
 By a curious coincidence the crown of the head of this 
 bust, like that of the marble bust previously described, was 
 originally covered with some kind of metal head-dress, and 
 the stump of the rivet that held it firm here likewise remains 
 em_bedded in the stone. Probably a metal wreath sur- 
 mounted the rich ring of curly hair that so charmingly sets 
 off the severe form of the face. Careful examination shows 
 a number of polished, metal-stained spots remaining on the 
 stone where the head-dress used to rub against it. The 
 pedestal is a modern addition. The only injuries are a large 
 chip at the root of the neck in front and a breakage that cuts 
 right through the neck and the thick mass of hair behind, 
 dividing the whole stone in half. This breakage may have 
 been produced by the sculptor himself. As to the history 
 
I02 GREEK AND ROMAN ANTIQUITIES 
 
 of the head before it came into my hands, I know nothing, 
 except that it was acquired in Italy * 
 
 Judging from the rapid increase in the departments of 
 classical antiquities in American and other museums, the 
 supply of ancient sculpture obtainable has by no means 
 come to an end. The sale of such objects is, however, 
 mainly carried on sub rosa^ despite the opposition of Govern- 
 ments, and it does not become me here to relate what little 
 I may have been told about it Chances have now and 
 again come in my way, as, for instance, many years ago at 
 Alexandretta, when a person of ill-defined profession visited 
 me on a steamer anchored in the bay, and produced photo- 
 graphs of some half-dozen marble sculptures he had for 
 sale. They were all, he said, safely out of reach of the 
 Turkish authorities, and he named a French port where I 
 could see them. But what is an ordinary householder to 
 do with life-size marble figures } I was obliged to decline 
 to become their possessor. A few years later I saw one of 
 them comfortably housed in the fine gallery of the Ny Carls- 
 berg Glyptotek at Copenhagen. It is a high, almost round 
 relief, representing Attis, and came from Cyzicus, where it 
 appears to have adorned the side-post of a doorway, the 
 pendant to it being a Cybele.t There is a similarly attached 
 figure, also from Cyzicus, at Liverpool 
 
 In Smyrna I once had a notable afternoon's entertain- 
 ment. That was in the days when the supply of genuine 
 and fine terra-cottas had not ceased, though the number of 
 excellent forgeries put into circulation was already very 
 
 * A curly-headed youth or maiden, wearing a close-fitting cap, such 
 as might possibly have been the completion likewise of the porphyry 
 bust, is depicted in a well-known painting within a circular medallion 
 found at Herculaneum, and now in the Naples Museum. 
 
 f See Arndt's "Catalogue of the N.C. Glyptotek," pi. 144 and text. 
 
FORGED TERRA-COTTAS 
 
 103 
 
 large. Smyrna was supposed to be a centre of the in- 
 dustry. Examination of one or two dealers' stores there 
 showed me that a market of forgeries must be near at hand, 
 and I eagerly desired to run it to earth. As if anxious to 
 obtain a large number of terra-cottas for some foreign 
 market, I intimated that I did not greatly care whether 
 they were genuine or not. After much negotiation and 
 going from place to place, ultimately I was taken to what 
 appeared to be the workshop of an Italian plasterer. The 
 front room was full of plaster casts of modern works. Behind 
 that was the moulding-room, and further back, across a 
 little courtyard, what proved to be the headquarters of the 
 local Tanagra-forgery. Here I was shown a number of 
 genuine antique moulds which had been dug up, some in 
 Greece, others in Asia Minor. There were also many modern 
 moulds taken from genuine originals. The clay used came 
 from the neighbourhood, and was believed to be the very 
 clay which the ancient potters had used over two thousand 
 years ago. It was thus easy for a skilful workman to cast 
 and bake figurines which were practically identical with the 
 antiques they were intended to be taken for. These new 
 figurines, fresh from the oven, were delightful objects, but 
 I was not permitted to acquire any of them. The next 
 stage was generally to break them up. A large trade was 
 done in heads, arms and legs, backs, etc. Very few even 
 approximately complete figures or groups were allowed to 
 go forth. The best were carefully painted, and then " aged " 
 in a fashion too disgusting to be described. Armed with 
 the knowledge thus acquired, I was better able to distinguish 
 genuine from false thereafter, and I succeeded in obtaining 
 out of Smyrna and Athens three perfect figures. One was 
 a delightful winged Eros, with traces of paint on the deli- 
 
I04 GREEK AND ROMAN ANTIQUITIES 
 
 cately modelled body. He was skilfully constructed, so 
 that he stands firmly balanced on one foot and just a toe of 
 the other. Even his little fingers are almost complete. 
 Round his head is a floral wreath. The two others are 
 ladies fully draped, and each holding a fan — a common type 
 at Tanagra. One of these retained its old surface in very 
 good preservation, and I was particularly proud of it. Many 
 years later I was showing it to an expert, and to my sur- 
 prise he said it looked like a forgery. I examined it closely, 
 and lo! the surface was wholly new — every trace of the 
 old coloration was gone. Domestic investigation at length 
 brought forth an explanation. One day while I was in 
 India the thing had been moved, and broken. The frag- 
 ments were taken to a mender, who joined them together, 
 and washed the whole over to hide the breaks. The figure 
 was put back into its glass case with the others, and years 
 passed before I chanced to notice what had been done. 
 
 At Athens it was easy enough to buy antiquities, but 
 difficult to get them out of the country. While I was con- 
 sidering a small Greek stele, and wondering how, if I 
 bought it, I could get it away, the representative of a 
 German museum carried it off between sunset and sunrise. 
 The dealer was really a delightful person. As usual, I was 
 in an impecunious state at the end of a prolonged journey. 
 There were a number of things I wanted to carry away — 
 an archaic bronze priestess as a mirror handle, some vases, 
 a fine Albanian belt in silver filigree and enamel, and some 
 other trifles. I told the man if he would keep them for me 
 I would buy them three months later, and he could send 
 them. He agreed ; but added that it would save him a lot 
 of trouble if I would take them with me and send him the 
 money three months later. I had no objection. He 
 
A CONFIDING DEALER 105 
 
 vanished into an inner room, and came out with a paper 
 in his hand. This proved to be a receipted bill for the 
 things. I said, " This is not a bill, but a receipt." " I know 
 it," he replied. " IVe been thinking that when you send me 
 the money I shall have to send you the receipt ; and it may 
 go wrong in the post ; and then you'll have to write and 
 say you have not got it, and I shall have to write again. 
 Now if you take the receipt with you all that trouble will 
 be saved for both of us " ! 
 
 Cyprus also was a place where genuine antiquities of 
 many kinds were easy to acquire. When I was there, 
 Syrian glass of early Roman Imperial date was obtainable 
 in considerable quantities, but the difficulty was to bring it 
 safely home, so tender was the surface, so frail the fabric. 
 Most of this glass, recovered from ancient tombs, was 
 originally colourless ; but time has endowed much of it 
 with a brilliant iridescence, sometimes of extraordinary 
 beauty. I carried off several examples, and actually took 
 them home in my hand to London, where they arrived in 
 safety. The iridescence does not seem to have altered in 
 any way during upwards of twenty years, but it is not so 
 bright, and never was, as that on a broken fragment of a 
 modern wine-bottle which was dug the other day out of a 
 filled-in part of the moat at Allington. 
 
 It is scarcely worth while relating other such small 
 adventures among Levantine dealers. The really sporting 
 way to acquire antiques is to excavate for them, and no 
 chance of so doing has yet fallen to my lot except in Kent. 
 There I have emptied filled-in moats and dug up the 
 foundations of ancient buildings, but discovered nothing 
 older than George III. ha'pence. Outside the north wall of 
 AlHngton Castle there does indeed remain, undiscovered 
 
io6 GREEK AND ROMAN ANTIQUITIES 
 
 as yet, a very precious buried treasure. This is nothing 
 less than a Golden Pig, which has been hidden there from 
 a remote antiquity. The trouble with that, however, is that 
 the man who finds it thereupon always " softly and silently 
 vanishes away, and never is heard of again." The last time 
 that happened was some fifty years ago. Currant-bushes 
 then grew on the site, and a certain labourer was seen 
 hoeing among them. He has never been beheld since. The 
 conclusion is obvious. He found the Golden Pig! The 
 question remains : did he take it away ? 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 A FIND OF GIORGIONES 
 
 IN the summer of 1903 we made an extensive motoring 
 tour throughout the length and breadth of France, and 
 wherever we went we searched the antiquity shops 
 with patient thoroughness. It was not till we reached 
 Biarritz that we began to strike a fertile field ; but there 
 and thereabouts many good things were on sale which had 
 drifted over out of Spain. We made a certain number of 
 acquisitions, under quite ordinary circumstances, which it 
 would be tedious to linger over ; but one adventure is 
 worth describing at length. 
 
 In those days motor-cars were not the safe and sound 
 means of locomotion they are now supposed to be. Ours, 
 at any rate, perhaps through our own fault, was always 
 providing us with surprises, especially after it had collided 
 with a cow somewhere in the neighbourhood of Bayonne. 
 The cow did not mind, but our car did, and its internal 
 mechanism was never quite the same again. This delayed 
 us at Biarritz. 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! — a tyre burst, and we had 
 to halt and put on another. That punctured, and so did 
 
io8 A FIND OF GIORGIONES 
 
 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. YouVe had a queer and apparently insensate 
 desire to go to this place, and go we must. There's some- 
 thing for us there, and weVe 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 proceeded 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 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 anticas here ! 
 You might as well dig for them in the sand." An old 
 fisherwoman, or someone 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 ? 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 ghtter of brass, the 
 
AT ST. JEAN DE LUZ 109 
 
 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 we were now close to some- 
 thing very good. I went out to my wife and said, " In the 
 far corner of the second room are two Venetian pictures 
 which just might be Carpaccios. 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 were 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 looked 
 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. In a few minutes we were back in our car and away 
 for Biarritz as hard as we could go. Somehow it seemed 
 as though punctures were no longer to be expected. None 
 occurred, at any rate, and we were able to travel fast ; but 
 the hour that intervened before we could reach our rooms 
 and examine the new treasures at leisure and with minute 
 attention seemed like a long afternoon. It was past mid- 
 night before we had rejoiced enough to be able to think of 
 sleep. 
 
 The two panels were not in the best state of preserva- 
 
no A FIND OF GIORGIONES 
 
 tion. One was cracked right across, and the paint had 
 begun to " bubble off " both ; but all the figures were intact, 
 and the damage was confined to relatively unimportant 
 parts of the painting. I forget whether it was Mr. Herbert 
 Cook or Mr. Robert Ross who first told me the meaning of 
 the subjects, the " Finding of Paris " and " Paris being put 
 out to Nurse." At any rate, it was Mr. Cook who 
 humorously described them as " This Way to the Baby " 
 and " Isn't he a Beauty ? " In the first, the child lies on a 
 white cloth on the ground at the foot of some rocks near a 
 stream ; a man is pointing him out to two others, and two 
 more are following them over a foot-bridge. In the middle 
 distance is a village and a castle-crowned hill, and across 
 the background are blue hills beneath a blue sky. The 
 figures are all in brightly tinted costumes, and the whole is 
 a delightful pattern of brilliant colours. By what is per- 
 haps merely a curious coincidence, the child is almost 
 identical, though in reverse (as if seen in a mirror), with a 
 child drawn in outline by Diirer on a page of sketches* 
 made by him in Venice in 1495 — probably the very year 
 in which Giorgione painted this picture likewise in Venice. 
 Certainly Diirer "diirerised" his drawing, as he did in 
 every case when he sketched an Italian original ; but I find 
 it difficult to believe that there is no connection between 
 the two. 
 
 In the second picture a woman receives the child from 
 one of a group of three men. Further back, two others are 
 seated talking, near a herd of kine. There is again a 
 village in the middle distance and blue hills behind. I 
 have never wavered in the assurance that these pictures 
 
 * The drawing is in the Uflizi and photographed by Braun, No. 962. 
 
Facing p. no 
 
TWO GIORGIONES 
 
 III 
 
 were painted by the youthful Giorgione and no other. 
 Some of the figures are actually the same models as those 
 employed by him in works universally accepted as his, 
 but the palette is his likewise, and so are a quantity of 
 little tricks of design and of technique, as well as certain 
 weaknesses too tedious to set down in long-winded detail * 
 The dealer from whom I bought the pictures stated that 
 they had been in the Duke of Ossuna's collection, and this 
 statement is verified by the seal on the back of each. They 
 likewise had written labels bearing the name of Carpaccio, 
 and the seal of the Venetian Academy, doubtless impressed 
 when permission was given to export them. Their last 
 Italian owner was revealed as follows. 
 
 By a strange coincidence, just when I was finding these 
 pictures at St. Jean de Luz, Mons. Ugo Monneret de 
 Villard was enquiring for them in Italy. In the process 
 of preparing his book on Giorgione t he had examined in 
 the Communal Library at Verona a manuscript catalogue J 
 of the Albarelli collection, entitled " Gabinetto di quadri 
 o raccolta di pezzi originali esistenti in Verona presso il 
 sig. Gio. Albarelli, disegnati da Romolo Caliari, con illus- 
 trazioni. Verona, 1815." In this volume he noticed two 
 carefully made outline drawings of pictures which had been 
 attributed to Carpaccio, but which he had no difficulty in 
 recognising as compositions by Giorgione in his early 
 
 * I may point to the little stones in the foreground, and the way 
 they are painted ; to the slender rods carried by some of the men ; to 
 the peculiar cliff, with its little overhangs, and the brown vegetation 
 on it ; to the attitudes of the people seated on the ground ; to the 
 peculiar feet of the men ; and to the drawing of the figures, especially 
 of the man seen directly from behind. 
 
 •f "Giorgione da Castelfranco." Studio critico. Bergamo, 1904. 
 pp. 26 and 106. 
 
 t MS., 1847, CI. Arti, Ubic. 82. 6, Busta 5. 
 
112 A FIND OF GIORGIONES 
 
 period. After his book was already printed, but before it 
 was issued, Mons. de Villard saw the photographs of the 
 pictures themselves, which were published in the Burling- 
 ton Magazine^ and thus was enabled to insert in time an 
 extra page, with copies of the reproductions facing the 
 reproductions of the drawings, and a note which runs as 
 follows — 
 
 " Nel numero di Novembre, 1904, del Burlington Maga- 
 zine, H. Cook annunciava di aver scoperti nella Collezione 
 di S. Martin Conway due quadri che egli attribuisce al 
 Giorgione. Tah opere non sarebbero altro che le due tele 
 una volta alia raccolta Albarelli in Verona, e come si parla 
 a pag. 106 e di cui due disegni sono riprodotti a pag. 26-27 
 del presente volume. La scoperta, posteriore alia stampa 
 del volume, mi obbliga ad aggiungere questa nota, 
 indicando che io credo taJi opere non le primissime del 
 maestro di Castelfranco, ma posteriori al quadro degli 
 Uffizi ed air Allegoria della National Gallery." 
 
 It happened, also, that at this very time Mr. Herbert 
 Cook was bringing out a revised edition of his Giorgione 
 (London, 1904), and its pages were already printed off. 
 Knowing his interest in the great Venetian master, I made 
 haste to show him the panels as soon as they arrived in 
 London, and he not only at once published them in the 
 Burlington Magazine (November, 1904, p. 156), but felt 
 obliged to insert an extra leaf into his book, with the 
 following note : — 
 
 " As the second edition of this book goes to press comes 
 the announcement of the discovery and acquisition by Sir 
 Martin Conway of two pictures which appear to be by 
 none other than Giorgione himself. Not only so, but, from 
 
THE OPINIONS OF EXPERTS 113 
 
 the nature of the subjects represented and the style of 
 painting, these panels would seem to have formed the last 
 two of a series^ of which ' The Birth of Paris ' was the first 
 portion. ' The Discovery by the Shepherds of the Young 
 Paris ' and ' The Handing Him over to Nurse ' naturally 
 complete the story, of which the first scene is given in the 
 engraving (referred to at p. 147), whilst the statement of 
 the Anonimo that the 'Birth of Paris' was one of 
 Giorgione's early works is amply confirmed by the style 
 of the newly found paintings, which must have been pro- 
 duced by a very youthful hand. Indeed, there is every 
 reason to hold that they ante-date the little pictures in the 
 Uffizi, and thus rank as the earliest known works of the 
 young Giorgione." 
 
 The third monograph on Giorgione, which has been 
 published since these pictures were brought to light again, 
 is that by Dr. Ludwig Justi (Berlin, 1908, 2 vols.). 
 
 Dr. Justi, after citing the Albarelli catalogue and 
 describing the pictures, which he saw before they had been 
 cleaned and restored, continues : " Immerhin erkennt man 
 noch bei starkem Licht das Raffinement der Kostiimfarben, 
 zart gebrochene Tone, weit entfernt von der hiergegen 
 harten Art der Belliniani. Die ' Auffindung ' ist (relativ) 
 besser erhalten, man hat hier auch noch einen richtigen 
 Eindruck von der gesamtwirkung ganz hell, gleichmassig 
 in den Valeurs, sehr zart, sehr reich in den Nuancierungen 
 (z.B. in dem ins Violett gehenden Berg, in der Blaugriinen 
 Feme, den braunen Hausern) ; feinste Lichteffekte an dem 
 Rasen, den Hausern, den Baumen des Mittelgrundes. 
 Insbesondere bei Kraftiger Beleuchtung kommt diese 
 Feinheit und dierser Reichtum der Farbe ausserordentlich 
 heraus und iiberzeugt den Beschauer das es sich hier um 
 H 
 
114 A FIND OF GIORGIONES 
 
 ein werdendes Genie handelt, einen Koloristen von Gottes 
 Gnaden, der nur im Zeichnen und Komponieren noch 
 nicht gewandt ist. Das Kind ist in dem eigentumlich 
 rotlichen Ton modelliert wie auf der Epiphanie und den 
 Bildern bei Lord Allendale und Mr. Benson. In der 
 Bewegung hat das Kind — worauf mich Sir Martin 
 aufmerksam gemacht hat — eine nicht voHige, aber doch 
 auffallende Ahnlichkeit mit dem Kind auf Diirer's 
 bekanntem Studienblatt in den Uffizien; linke Hand und 
 linker Fuss etwas abweichend. SoUte man danach die 
 ^Auffindung' und ihr Gegenstuck um 1494 datieren? 
 Giorgione ware 1494 sechzehn oder siebzehn Jarhre alt 
 gewesen ; das wiirde zu dem Charakter der Conway- 
 Tafeln passen: das Koloristische Genie ist schon da, 
 anderes noch anfangerhaft. Freilich ist dies nur ein 
 Kartenhaus von Scliissen, da die Ubereinstimmung 
 zwischen Diirer und Giorgione sich ebensogut aus einem 
 gemeinsamen Vorbild erklaren kann." * 
 
 In theory it seems well to leave a picture as you find 
 it, with all the scars of time visible on its face ; but in 
 practice, when the paint insists on parting company from 
 the panel and forms dome-like excrescences resembling 
 bubbles, which presently crack and fall off, there is nothing 
 for it but to call in the aid of the most skilful and 
 experienced restorer that can be found — in other words, 
 Commendatore Luigi Cavenaghi, of Milan. The pictures 
 under discussion received what I may call "first aid" at 
 the hands of Mr. Roger Fry; but the mischief was pro- 
 gressive, and had to be radically taken in hand and stopped 
 once for all. When they were last exhibited at the winter 
 
 * Loc. cit., Vol. II., Nos. 18 and 19, and pp. 121, 122. 
 
CAVENAGHI REVISITED 115 
 
 exhibition of the Budington Fine Arts Club in 1911-12* 
 all the best authorities urged me to have the work put in 
 hand without delay, and the two panels were accordingly 
 shipped off to Cavenaghi's without further delay. Several 
 months later we followed them to Milan. It was a joyous 
 moment when we found ourselves once more in our kind 
 friend's presence and saw one of our pictures on the easel 
 before him. 
 
 It was not the same studio to which we had been taken 
 just twenty-five years before by Morelli, but it was the 
 same kind welcome that greeted us, the same hand that 
 clasped ours in friendly greeting, and the same common 
 interest that continued to unite us. Even a quarter of a 
 century ago Cavenaghi was the best restorer of Italian 
 pictures in the world — so Morelli was never tired of 
 proclaiming, and so all men agreed. If he was unrivalled 
 in 1887, it is easy to understand at what height of pre- 
 eminence he now stands, with the added knowledge that 
 comes from an unexampled experience in dealing with the 
 most precious Itahan paintings in the world. I was 
 naturally more than a little anxious to know what a restorer, 
 through whose hands several works by Giorgione had 
 already passed, might have to say about our pictures, for 
 nothing can afford so good an opportunity of learning the 
 hand of a master as the necessity of deahng so intimately 
 with his work as a pre-eminent restorer like Cavenaghi is 
 called upon to do. 
 
 By an admirable stroke of good fortune there was 
 another Giorgione under treatment by him at this very 
 
 * The pictures in their then condition are reproduced by photography 
 in the illustrated catalogue published by the club, "Early Venetian 
 Pictures," London, 191 2. 
 
ii6 A FIND OF GIORGIONES 
 
 time. It was the " Orpheus and Eurydice " belonging to 
 the Lochis collection in the Bergamo Gallery. This panel, 
 out of its frame, was standing on an easel and faced us 
 as we entered. Of course, one of the first questions I asked 
 was whether Cavenaghi was satisfied that our pictures were 
 by Giorgione. He replied, " Undoubtedly," and, taking up 
 one of them and the Bergamo picture, he placed them close 
 together upon a single easel, remarking, "You see, either 
 of those might be a piece cut out of the other," so absolutely 
 did they agree in colour scheme, in forms, in construction, 
 and in all the elements that unite to make a picture. It 
 would not be possible for anyone in presence of the two, 
 thus displayed together before him, side by side, without 
 frames, and under the same illumination, to doubt for one 
 instant that both had been painted about the same time 
 by the same artist, using the same colours, similarly mixed 
 and employed. 
 
 It occurred to me at that moment that I had before me 
 a concrete example of what the labours of a connoisseur 
 are directed to providing. A connoisseur is a person who, 
 by long years of training and observation, has educated 
 himself to retain in his mind, stored up and able to be 
 produced at will to his internal vision, the aspect of any 
 one of a multitude of works of art, and that not merely in 
 a general sense, but in every detail of colour, texture, form, 
 and chiaroscuro. What a thoroughly equipped and 
 competent connoisseur of painting can do is to call up a 
 mental image of any one of a great number of pictures 
 with such vividness as to see its details and its totality 
 almost as clearly as if the picture itself were before him. 
 When he comes into the presence of a picture new to him 
 he must be able to place beside it, before his mind's eye 
 
SIDE BY SIDE 
 
 117 
 
 as it were, on the same easel, any other picture he has else- 
 where seen with which to compare it ; in fact, to be able 
 mentally to produce just such a comparison as we had 
 actually and visibly before us at that moment. 
 
 Anyone who has the capacity, even in moderate degree, 
 of estimating the character and quality of works of art at 
 all can tell without difficulty whether two juxtaposed 
 pictures were painted in the same style, about the same 
 time, by a single artist. Not even an angel from heaven 
 could persuade a man whose eyes had beheld that kind of 
 identity that it did not exist. Seeing in this case is 
 ineradicable conviction. The trouble with art critics is 
 that few of them possess any such capacity of vivid memory 
 as is requisite to produce the materials for the kind of 
 comparison that anyone can make who has the two objects 
 to be compared actually present side by side. Such a gift 
 is of the rarest. Those who lack it and would yet pose as 
 art critics endeavour to supply the lack of vivid pictorial 
 memory by the use of photographs. Something can, 
 indeed, be accomplished by their aid, but not very much. 
 Where the characteristic feature common to two works 
 lies in the possession by both of an identical colour scheme, 
 that cannot be shown by any photograph. Hence it comes 
 that truly magistral judgment on such matters is the 
 prerogative of very few men indeed. Only after long years 
 of trial, by contact, discussion, and repeated triumphant 
 establishment and acceptation of their opinion by their 
 gifted and capable fellows, do these few ultimately attain 
 such authority. An admitted master of this type was 
 Morelli. It would be invidious were I to attempt to set 
 down the names of living masters of the art, but at any 
 given moment they are known, and their opinion, if never 
 
ii8 A FIND OF GIORGIONES 
 
 to be regarded as papally infallible, is always weighty 
 with the discerning and weightiest with the best. 
 
 From St. Jean de Luz to Malta is a long jump, which 
 I must invite the reader to take with me, for there also, by 
 unusual luck, a good Venetian picture awaited us. We 
 once had the chance to land there for a few hours when 
 returning from the East. After seeing the usual sights I 
 found my way into an antiquity shop. The dealer greeted 
 me with the assurance that he had nothing of any 
 consequence to sell, as H.R.H. the Duke of Edinburgh had 
 made a clean sweep of all his best things the day before. 
 We had, in fact, passed his ship going out as we entered 
 the harbour. The effect of this statement upon me was 
 the comfortable assurance that if I did find any good thing 
 in the shop its quality would have escaped the dealer's 
 observation ; and so, in the event, it proved. Among a 
 number of trumpery canvases I discovered one whose 
 appeal was instantaneous. Not only was the picture 
 obviously from the atelier of Tintoretto, but its subject was 
 both excessively rare and very charming. It depicts the 
 Virgin as a young maiden before her marriage, when, 
 according to the legend, she lived apart with , other holy 
 virgins in the Temple precincts. A common subject with 
 old Christian painters is the Dedication of the Virgin in 
 the Temple by her parents, when she is shown leaving 
 them and going up the Temple steps, the High Priest 
 waiting to receive her at the top. Titian's famous 
 rendering of this incident is well known to all lovers of art. 
 The legend relates that she and her fellows devoted their 
 spare time to needlework, and the Virgin is very rarely 
 depicted thus occupied. A drawing of this subject was 
 sold at Obach's a few years ago. Tintoretto shows her 
 
SCHOOL OF TINTORETTO 
 15 X 111 in. 
 
 Facing p. ii8 
 
YSENBRANDT 
 
 119 
 
 engaged in making Venetian lace. The white cushion on 
 which it is being worked is on her knees, and, at the 
 moment, she is about to thread her needle. In form and 
 colour the picture is delightful. Unfortunately its con- 
 dition left a good deal to be desired, for, though the head 
 is perfectly preserved, the hands have almost been rubbed 
 away, and have lost much of their proper and original form. 
 The thread which passed between the fingers has likewise 
 vanished, so that the meaning of the gesture is not at first 
 obvious. Notwithstanding these disadvantages, the picture 
 retains much of its original charm. It is painted on a small 
 scale, the figure being about half life-size. 
 
 One other picture, of which a reproduction is here for 
 the first time published, requires a brief mention, though 
 no adventure attended its acquisition, unless, indeed, a visit 
 to the shop of Messrs. Carfax and Co. may be so described, 
 for it was there I bought it, on the prompting of my old 
 and valued friend, Mr. Robert Ross. It belongs to that 
 group of early sixteenth-century pictures of the School of 
 Bruges, which are united together under the name of 
 Adrian Ysenbrandt. In former days they used all to be 
 attributed to Mostaert, but now we have learned that he 
 painted in quite a different style. The subject is St. 
 Jerome in Penetence, with an extraordmarily festive- 
 looking tame lion keeping him company. Such St. Jerome 
 pictures of the School of Bruges, where the landscape 
 forms the real subject and St. Jerome is merely brought in 
 as an excuse, present a marked resemblance to pictures 
 of the same saint, under like circumstances, turned out by 
 the followers of Bellini. St. Jerome, the scholar, was a 
 favourite saint at the time of the Renaissance of learning. 
 Diirer, Carpaccio, and many others depicted him in his 
 
120 A FIND OF GIORGIONES 
 
 comfortable study hard at work. The opportunity of 
 introducing a wide landscape background made his 
 Penitence almost as useful an incident for the new class 
 of landscape painters as were, for instance, " St. Christofer 
 Fording the River," or " St. John Baptising," or the " Flight 
 into Egypt." Those who delight in the landscape back- 
 grounds of that generation of artists will recognise the 
 charm of this carefully executed and well-preserved 
 example. 
 
YSENBRANDT 
 16i X 12 in. 
 
 Facing p. 120 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 FURNITURE 
 
 EVERYBODY nowadays collects eighteenth-century 
 English furniture and Elizabethan and Jacobean 
 oak. It is not so very long ago since no one wanted 
 either. When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge a few 
 superior members of the University used to manifest their 
 " culture " by equipping their rooms with old chairs, Crom- 
 well tables, oak coffin-stools, an oak bureau, an Arundel 
 reproduction of Perugino's " Crucifixion " over the mantel- 
 piece, and a few other Arundels and photographs of Old 
 Masters on the walls. They bought the furniture for the 
 most part at Jolly's, and we already began to say that it was 
 no longer possible to pick up good pieces at the prices that 
 had obtained a few years before. I remember the " young " 
 Jolly of those days teUing me how, when he was a boy, his 
 father's great warehouse was full of Chippendale and the 
 like furniture, especially chairs, which no one wanted to buy. 
 They were such a drug in the market that he and his 
 brothers actually destroyed some without suffering severe 
 retribution. The fun was, he said, to throw a sturdy maho- 
 gany chair into the air in such a way that when it alighted 
 it should come down on one foot, and start the joints of all 
 four legs at once. He said that chairs which he could 
 remember to have thus destroyed in the irresponsibility of 
 boyhood he now knew to have been really fine Chippendale, 
 
122 
 
 FURNITURE 
 
 the like of which he could only obtain to-day at very high 
 prices. 
 
 Those days were already past before my time, but plenty 
 of good things were still to be had at prices within the reach 
 of a very moderately equipped purse. Of course, I refer 
 only to genuine things. Such forgeries as were then be- 
 ginning to be made were too coarse to deceive any but the 
 ignorant. Genuine oak court-cupboards were to be had any 
 day for about four pounds apiece. A Cromwell table cost 
 perhaps thirty shillings, if it was a good one with spiral legs. 
 Solid-backed oak chairs were to be had in numbers. It was 
 about this time that I furnished our first house, and we 
 bought almost everything at Jolly's. We were horribly and 
 foolishly economical, and went without all sorts of delightful 
 things which we would now gladly suffer much privation 
 to obtain. Almost every old English town then had some 
 such dealer as Jolly, with one or two barns or warehouses 
 filled with what would to-day be considered most desirable 
 pieces. The greatest dealers of the present time can no 
 doubt show a selection of much finer things, but the local 
 dealers have only here and there one or two pieces, on hand 
 at any moment, at all comparable with the general run of 
 what was offered then on all sides, and but slowly unloaded. 
 Carved four-post oak bedsteads, great bulbous-legged oak 
 tables, fine Elizabethan court-cupboards, were never exactly 
 common, but anyone who had a taste for such things could 
 find them without a prolonged search, and could purchase 
 them at a cheaper rate than that obtaining for good con- 
 temporary furniture. 
 
 As during the 'seventies and 'eighties of the nineteenth 
 century the love of old things grew at equal pace with the 
 knowledge that came from an accurate study of them, this 
 
BYGONE OPPORTUNITIES 123 
 
 condition of the market passed away. What had at first 
 been a taste of the refined became a fashion among the 
 wealthy, as I have said ; when fashion sets in any direction 
 the day of the small collector is over. Before that hap- 
 pened one could, for instance, purchase, as I in fact did, at 
 a single visit to one shop, the following lot of things for a 
 total sum of about forty pounds : two Cromwell tables (one 
 very large), an oak court-cupboard, six Hepplewhite maho- 
 gany chairs and two armchairs, six other late eighteenth- 
 century chairs, a stuffed mahogany armchair, a carved oak 
 napkin-press, a three-storeyed dumb-waiter, a mahogany 
 wardrobe, a brass-bound mahogany wine-cooler, a carved oak 
 Bible-box, an oak coffin-stool, a Jacobean oak chest, an oak 
 bureau, and two little tables, besides other things I have 
 forgotten. All these pieces, after thirty years' service in my 
 possession, are still in as sound condition as the day I bought 
 them. They are plain, honest examples of the work of their 
 day ; none of them at all rare, but all quite genuine. The 
 dealers* shops all over England abounded with that kind of 
 old furniture. It was a pleasant time for a young collector. 
 
 Abroad, the search for furniture other than the fine work 
 of the French eighteenth century began later than in Eng- 
 land. Switzerland was a particularly good hunting ground. 
 The only trouble was that, buyers being few, the local 
 dealers made little attempt to " stock old things at all. I 
 remember, for example, going into a second-hand furniture 
 shop at Lausanne, and being taken by the dealer away off 
 to a kind of cow-shed beside a field. Not only was the cow- 
 shed full of good things in a bad state of repair, but quan- 
 tities of old materials lay about in the field. I took away 
 thence the fronts of a splendidly carved walnut chest and of 
 a fine cupboard, both substantially sound, but the backs had 
 
124 
 
 FURNITURE 
 
 been rudely knocked away, as not worth transportation. 
 Quantities of panelling also lay about, the lining of rooms 
 from houses that had been pulled down or modernised, and 
 this panelling was not offered for sale for its own sake, but 
 only as material to be worked up in new combinations. 
 Even the packing-boxes were often knocked together out 
 of such remains ! 
 
 The remote villages of Switzerland at that time often 
 retained excellent pieces of old furniture, employed for com- 
 munal purposes or in the chalets of wealthy villagers. These 
 were only too easily purchasable, and much work of admir- 
 able quality and great local interest drifted away into 
 foreign possession before the communes realised what they 
 were parting with so lightly. Thus, I remember to have 
 been offered at Stalden in the Visp valley one of the finest 
 carved chests I ever saw. It was in the priest's house, and 
 was used for holding the supply of candles for church pur- 
 poses. Doubtless it had so served for many generations, 
 and the wax had thoroughly toned the surface of the wood 
 within and without to an excellent richness. The front of 
 this great chest was divided into three panels, and in each 
 was carved in high rehef a noble design of Hhes. I was in- 
 formed that it could only be sold by resolution of the village 
 meeting held in the winter, but that if I liked to offer a very 
 moderate sum for it, I should no doubt be permitted to 
 acquire it. The matter slipped from my memory, and the 
 chest went elsewhere; at all events, it is no longer at 
 Stalden. 
 
 Of all existing types of old furniture, chests are the most 
 numerous, and cover the longest period of time. The pre- 
 dynastic Egyptians buried their dead doubled up in chests 
 or baskets, and numbers of these receptacles still exist, 
 
CHURCH CHESTS 
 
 though they would not be desirable for use as modern house 
 furniture. There are ancient Greek chests, such as that 
 wonderful box inlaid with gold found in a tomb at Kertch. 
 There are Coptic chests of various dates, standing on legs, 
 and with their panels agreeably carved. It is not, however, 
 till the thirteenth century that we find any English chests,' 
 save some few rudely hollowed tree-trunks bound with iron 
 which may be earlier, though no one can date them. The 
 real starting-point for England was the issuance by In- 
 nocent III. of an order that every church should provide a 
 box in which to contain the offerings of the faithful, to 
 defray the cost of the Crusade. The very considerable 
 number of thirteenth-century chests that still remain in 
 EngHsh country churches were probably made in response 
 to this command. 
 
 I once had the chance of obtaining one of these church 
 chests, but some remnants of good feeling — a horrible im- 
 pediment to a collector — prevented me from availing myself 
 of it. There is a church in one of our southern counties 
 which, only a dozen years or so ago, remained in a truly 
 seventeenth-century condition of neglect. The patron was 
 himself the rector, and he was at loggerheads with the squire 
 and all his flock. Grass and weeds grew waist-high in the 
 churchyard. There was no path to the church door, except 
 a trodden track used almost solely by the parson, for no 
 one attended his services. Within, all was decay. The 
 windows were broken, and birds flew in and out. The 
 rotten rafters were foul with old nests. The seats or pews 
 were all falling to pieces, so that hardly a bench remained 
 that had not lost its legs from one end or the other. The 
 pavement was broken to pieces, and the floor was all over 
 deep holes. There was a decrepit stove in the middle of 
 
126 
 
 FURNITURE 
 
 the nave, and an iron pipe-chimney meandered in a crooked 
 curve up towards the roof before bending off with final 
 direct determination and making its way out below the 
 eaves. The pulpit was broken and unstable, but I suppose 
 it can have been seldom used. Some fine monuments were 
 decaying, their heads and hands broken, and the pieces 
 lying about. But what excited my cupidity was a genuine 
 thirteenth-century chest and two Gothic helmets, which had 
 belonged to the monuments of late fifteenth-century 
 knights. The wicked old parson would have let me have 
 them, and goodness only knows how I came to escape from 
 that temptation. In due course of nature even he ultimately 
 died, and his successor was a man of different type. 
 Now the chest is carefully preserved. The helmets are 
 replaced on the iron pegs to which they belonged. There 
 is a new roof, new seats, new pavement, and all things 
 decent and in order. 
 
 The earliest existing English chests, made for domestic 
 rather than church use, are a group from the county of 
 Kent, all apparently the work of a single maker. They 
 are " pin-hinged," and consequently liave sloping ends ; the 
 fronts are carved with a simple but effective arcading 
 grouped under triangular pediments. Word reached me 
 that a chest, which I gathered was of this kind, had been 
 sold to a local dealer out of a cottage at East Peckham. I 
 sent a trusty foreman builder to bargain for it. He had the 
 good sense to take a cart with him, and promptly carried it 
 off. I happened to pass this cart on the high-road as I was 
 motoring in haste to catch a train. I just caught a glimpse 
 of the chest, with its feet in the air, and of its carved arcad- 
 ing, as we hurried by. That momentary view sufficed, and I 
 knew that one of my ambitions was fulfilled. Later 
 
IRON-BOUND CHESTS 
 
 127 
 
 examination showed it to be in very good condition, except 
 that it had lost its original lock, and that the lid had been 
 renewed. Curiously enough, a few weeks later, my neigh- 
 bour, Mr. Mercer, acquired another, almost identical in 
 design with mine ; but whereas mine is faulty above and 
 perfect below, his is imperfect below, but has the 
 original lid and lock in excellent condition. These chests, 
 and two or three more like them, date from the first half of 
 the fourteenth century, before the Black Death. 
 
 Fifteenth-century chests in England are very rare, until 
 we come down to the introduction of linen-fold, and 
 most of the linen-fold chests we see in museums and country 
 houses date from the first half of the sixteenth century. 
 Abroad, however, it is still possible to find large, iron-bound 
 chests of late fourteenth and fifteenth century work. I 
 bought one at Basle, and two others at Paderborn. The 
 latter came to us in the peculiarly determined fashion which 
 sometimes happens. We applied to see the Cathedral 
 treasury, but a meeting of bishops was going on in the 
 sacristy, and we had to wait an hour till that was over. So 
 we said we would fill up the time at an old furniture shop 
 we had been told of. We were stroUing across to it when 
 I said, " This does not seem to me to be the kind of place 
 where we shall get anything." " I feel, on the contrary," 
 said my companion, the prophetess, "that there is 
 something waiting for us there, and I believe it is 
 a Gothic chest." Sure enough, there it was, right 
 in front of us as we entered the inner room of 
 the shop. It was an iron-bound chest with the clamps 
 ending in fleurs-de-lys. The Basle chest is similar, so that 
 the type was probably common all over Germany in the 
 later Middle Ages. The South German example, though 
 
128 
 
 FURNITURE 
 
 of equal date with the Westphahan, is, as might be expected, 
 superior to it in design, proportion, and workmanship. 
 
 Such foreign furniture as has been intended for me by 
 the Fates has usually been bought in matter-of-fact ways, 
 but a purchase made at Genoa was rather an exception. I 
 had been visiting the Brignole Sale palace with a friend, 
 and the talk had fallen on the dating of furniture. " How 
 do you know that a particular chair is of the seventeenth 
 century, for instance ? " was a question put to me. We 
 were standing at the moment before one of the famous full- 
 length Van Dyck's, in which there is a chair. So I replied, 
 " If you were to find a chair just like the chair in that pic- 
 ture, you would be able to date it confidently to about the 
 time of Van Dyck*s visit to Italy, say, 1625." Half an hour 
 later we went into a very poor antiquity shop down near the 
 quays, and there was what might have been the very chair 
 in the picture, the woodwork in good condition, though the 
 upholstery was in rags. 
 
 Another time, in London, I was attracted by a chair of 
 unusual form, adorned with embossed leather and carving. 
 Being in doubt as to its country of origin and date, I did 
 not purchase it. The next day, at the house of a descendant 
 of Admiral Byng, I noticed in the middle of the hall an 
 exactly similar chair. " Please, what is that chair ? " I asked. 
 " Why, don't you know ? That's the chair in which Admiral 
 Byng sat to be shot." I returned to the shop in London, 
 and carried away its fellow. 
 
 No part of Europe produced so much solid and on the 
 whole good furniture in the seventeenth century as the Low 
 Countries. One has only to look at the pictures of Dutch 
 middle-class interiors to be assured how well-equipped they 
 were with desirable chairs, tables, cabinets, cupboards, and 
 
DUTCH CABINETS 
 
 129 
 
 bedsteads. These survived in great numbers down to the 
 nineteenth century, when they went altogether out of 
 fashion, and suffered much destruction. A friend of mine, 
 who possessed both sense and opportunity, made a great 
 collection of the handsome tall cabinets which are now 
 again so much sought after. He used to buy as many as he 
 wanted for about five pounds apiece. He used them for 
 panelling a long gallery in his Hertfordshire home. Per- 
 haps he may now regret having dealt so cavalierly with 
 cabinets of an elaborately decorative character which cer- 
 tainly have lost in value by being dismembered. His room, 
 however, into which these materials were fitted by an able 
 architect, is a very beautiful place, and the result, in this 
 case, can be held to justify a method of dealing with old 
 treasures which would not be generally commendable. 
 
 The Dutch oak cabinets which are amongst our own 
 possessions are good examples of the type, and one of them 
 is of quite unusual dimensions. They are inlaid with a 
 black substance which is probably precious wood, though 
 I have sometimes had a suspicion that in one case it may 
 be whalebone. I have examined all the Dutch cabinets 
 I have been able to see closely during several years, in 
 search for inlaid whalebone, and never yet confidently 
 identified it. In the great days of whaling, at the beginning 
 of the seventeenth century, the supply of whalebone was 
 so large, and the uses for it so few, that the price had sunk 
 to twopence per pound. An English ivory-turner at 
 Amsterdam, John Osborne by name, invented in the year 
 1 61 8 a method of uniting together thin pieces of whalebone 
 into a black mass, which became so supple and soft that 
 it could be pressed into any shape in a metal mould, or it 
 would take the impression of even the finest lines engraved 
 I 
 
I30 
 
 FURNITURE 
 
 on a plate of metal. The substance was as black as jet, 
 and is recorded to have been used to ornament mirror- 
 frames, sideboards, mantelpieces, knife-handles, and so 
 forth. For this invention, which doubled the price of 
 whalebone, Osborne received a pension for ten years from 
 the States General. This fact is proof how general must 
 have been the use of the material, and yet, with one known 
 exception, whalebone has not been identified on any piece 
 of Dutch manufacture. The conclusion would seem to be 
 that it is generally hidden under the designation ebony or 
 horn. 
 
 The exception to which I have alluded is certain oval 
 medallion portraits of Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange, 
 and Amalia his wife, which were impressed in whalebone 
 by John Osborne himself in 1626, his name and theirs being 
 impressed on the back of them. There are examples of 
 these in the British Museum and other collections, and I own 
 a pair which were given to me by the late Mr. Henry Willett. 
 I have often seen them in catalogues described as made of 
 horn, from which, indeed, they are only to be distinguished 
 by the perfect blackness and brilliancy of their surface. 
 Whether Osborne's discovery of this method of treating 
 whalebone led to the similar treatment of horn, so commonly 
 employed in Holland m the seventeenth and eighteenth 
 centuries, I am not able to assert 
 
 It is not a far cry from old furniture to sculptured wooderi 
 figures. I have already related how we bought one such 
 group at Caddenabbia after the adventure of the Victor 
 Emmanuel. Two or three others were picked up in Eng- 
 land — the most notable, and one of the finest wooden figures 
 existing, having been found in a Brighton shop under the 
 tamest possible circumstances. I was unfortunately led 
 
SAINT MARTIN 
 
 to part with it about twenty years later, to my unutterable 
 regret, and it is now in the New York Metropolitan 
 Museum. The story with it was that it came out of a Surrey 
 chapel, and had been the property of a Lady Ashburton. 
 My own impression was and is that probably it was made in 
 the fourteenth century in the He de France, rather than in 
 England. The figure represents St. John the Evangelist. 
 
 The saint, however, whom I was always looking out for 
 was my own patron, St. Martin. Not that I felt called upon 
 to burn incense before him, but that I needed him to fill 
 a niche contrived in the restored part of Allington Castle, as 
 a kind of signature ; also I desired to carve over his head 
 this motto from the Persian poet, Labid ibn Rabiah : 
 
 " The mountains remain after us 
 And the strong Towers when we are gone." 
 
 Ultimately it was my daughter who found St. Martin for 
 me at a Brussels dealer's. It is rather a late and chubby 
 figure, but it retains its old colouring on man and harness, 
 and the gilt breastplate shines afar. The trouble was that 
 the niche was too large for the figure, which, besides, was 
 of rather tender wood, unsuited to last long in the open 
 air. So we decided to have a copy made of it in the same 
 Doulting stone which is used in our works of repair, and 
 we found that there was in the neighbouring town, 
 Maidstone, a stone-carver willing, and said to be able to 
 carry out the work. In due season the stone St. Martin 
 was finished, and displayed for a day or two, to the public 
 wonder, in a shop window in the town. He had a triumphal 
 journey out on a cart, and astonished everyone that met 
 him, his brilliant colouring and well-fed, cheerful aspect 
 producing an irresistible good temper in all beholders. 
 
132 
 
 FURNITURE 
 
 Fortunately, his niche faces north, or I think we could 
 scarcely have supported his new radiance without pumping 
 mud upon him. Time, however, has toned him down, and 
 rendered him a less obtrusive and soberer personage. After 
 he had stood a year or two in his niche, word was brought 
 to me that the stone-carver wanted to be allowed to come 
 and see the Castle courtyard. Permission was given, and 
 he came. I am told that he stood for an hour gazing enrap- 
 tured at the work of his hands. It appears that he was about 
 to emigrate, and wished to enjoy a last long look at his 
 masterpiece. 
 
 In the same Brussels dealer's, and at the same time as St. 
 Martin, was found an admirable fifteenth-century stone 
 figure of St. Columba — not the Celtic saint, but the Belgian 
 saintess of that name. This little lady in her voluminous 
 drapery might have walked out of one of Van Eyck's 
 pictures. There was a niche in a thirteenth-century wall 
 awaiting her, and she took her place in it at once, and has 
 seemed happy there ever since, with a blue mosaic made of 
 the old Cairo pot fragments for background. There is a 
 reredos with ten scenes from the life of St. Columba in the 
 parish church of Deerlyk, near Courtrai, in West Flanders — 
 so my old friend, Mr. W. H. James Weale, informs me. I 
 have an impression that our saint came from that 
 neighbourhood. 
 
CHAPTER XL 
 
 HOW WE FOUND A CASTLE 
 
 N the 15th of May, 1905, I inserted the following 
 advertisement in the Times: — 
 
 " Wanted to purchase, old manor-house or abbey, 
 built in the sixteenth century or earlier, with old garden, 
 not much land, no sporting facilities, preferably five miles 
 or more from a railway station." 
 
 The only replies that I received were two: the first 
 offering me a stuccoed " castellated mansion, suitable for 
 a hotel or hydro " — a real beast of a building ; the other 
 describing a true mediaeval castle in such fascinating detail 
 that it seemed impossible to believe that a building so 
 delightful could exist. It told of moat and towers, of two 
 courtyards, of high embattled walls, of dovecots, tilting- 
 yard, and I know not what other high-sounding reminis- 
 cences from the days of chivalry. What made this still 
 more surprising was the fact that this wonderful castle was 
 said to exist not ten miles distant from my own birthplace, 
 and yet I had never heard tell of it, unless my rather clear 
 memories of more than half of the first seven years of my 
 life were at fault. So incredulous was I as to the existence 
 of a castle at Allington, near Maidstone, in any such 
 completeness of preservation as the reply to my advertise- 
 ment asseverated that I hardly thought a journey down into 
 Kent worth while. As, however, we were starting a few 
 
134 HOW WE FOUND A CASTLE 
 
 days later to motor to Brighton, we thought we might as 
 well go round by way of Maidstone and see upon what 
 basis of truth this attractive superstructure was reared. 
 
 The drive that we took that beautiful 20th of May 
 proved to be a turning-point in our lives, little as we 
 expected any such result when we set off. There was only 
 a dim feeling within us that to "collect" an old building 
 might be delightful, and that, at all events, to hunt for one 
 was a form of the collecting sport that we had not 
 experienced. Save for the introduction of motoring, even 
 that hunt would never have occurred to us. The joy of 
 the road, however, had taken possession of us with the 
 acquisition of our first car — a 7 h.-p. Panhard — in 1903, 
 and we had spent every possible fine day of leisure in the 
 two years that had followed in scouring the roads and lanes 
 of England and France, seeking out remote abbeys, castles, 
 old houses, and monuments of all kinds, and finding a 
 continuously increasing joy in that research. Thus, as we 
 made our way out of London through Bromley that 
 brilliant morning, we were not thinking so much of an old 
 building to be acquired as of one to be seen. 
 
 A little more than a mile short of Maidstone a finger- 
 post indicated " Allington " as to be sought down a rather 
 narrow side-road much encumbered with farming impedi- 
 ments. It led us downhill, past various quarries of Kentish 
 rag sunk deeply into the ground, with always the wide 
 stretch of the North Downs broad open before us and the 
 Medway Valley in front at their feet. We passed the little 
 village church, beneath some great elms, and we must have 
 had the possibility of buying the place in our minds, or one 
 of us would not have said, " Perhaps there's where we shall 
 lay our bones." A little twist to right and left, over a 
 
ALLINGTON 
 
 135 
 
 hideous quarry tram-line, a further run down a steepish 
 lane, past some cottages and a barn, with a dreadfully 
 disfigured acre or two of ground covered with a tar- 
 paving manufactory right ahead, and then, when we were 
 finally concluding that there was no castle and that we had 
 been deceived, we turned the corner of another barn, and 
 there it was. Neither of us will ever forget that moment ; 
 we fell victims to the beauty of the ruin at once, and have 
 remained enthralled ever since. 
 
 It was not so much the outside that captivated us, for 
 that was wholly enveloped in the densest coat of ivy I have 
 ever seen on a building. An examination of old prints 
 and photographs shows that down to the first decade of the 
 nineteenth century ivy was still absent. It was beginning 
 to grow up the walls about 1820. It was still only a patch- 
 work covering in or about i860. In 1905 it had surged 
 over the whole exterior and had obliterated every 
 architectural feature. Only the archway of the gate- 
 house was free. As old orchards and other trees stood in 
 front of the ruins, they were practically invisible, except 
 from near at hand. Moreover, only a small portion of the 
 moat still contained a little water. The rest had been so 
 filled up and grassed over, that the gate-house bridge was 
 buried, and only appeared like two walls limiting the road- 
 way on either hand. 
 
 When, however, we passed under the long dark entrance 
 arch and found ourselves in the first courtyard, with its 
 green lawn, climbing roses and creepers, its charming Tudor 
 hall-porch, and all the other features we were destined to 
 know so well, the peaceful harmony of the place, its 
 delicate beauty, its sense of aloofness from the modern 
 world, its atmosphere of antiquity, overwhelmed us with 
 
136 HOW WE FOUND A CASTLE 
 
 such a .flood of delight that words will not avail to express 
 the half of it. 
 
 A moment later we were received by Mr. Dudley Falcke, 
 the good man who had stepped in at a critical moment and 
 saved the place from destruction. Ten years before he 
 had come down from London and found it about to be 
 abandoned, the last inhabited fragment in one corner of it 
 being considered no longer fit even to house the two 
 labourers' famiHes that had succeeded the farmers who used 
 to dwell in it. Then the courtyard was full of pigs, hens, 
 and mess. Everything was decayed, the roof rotten, the 
 floors full of holes — neglect rampant. He saw in a moment 
 the possibilities of the place, and, having obtained a lease 
 of it, he set to work and turned it into the loveliest little 
 house in Kent. He attempted no restoration, but contented 
 himself with repairing what had been the farm-house — the 
 kitchen-house of Tudor days — and living in it. It was to 
 the surroundings that he devoted his attention. Being an 
 expert and energetic gardener, and especially rose-grower, 
 he made the wilderness blossom, and the result, as we saw 
 it, was of surpassing beauty. 
 
 That meeting with him was the foundation of a friend- 
 ship, only just lately rounded by his death. It is impossible 
 for me to write even briefly about Allington Castle without 
 coupling with it the name of the man who actually saved 
 it from destruction at a most critical moment. Under his 
 guidance, then and several times afterwards in the 
 following weeks, we made close acquaintance with the 
 ruins, which he had studied as fully as was possible so long 
 as they were smothered in ivy. Unfortunately he loved 
 the ivy for its own sake, and did not realise the destruction 
 it was bringing to pass. And, of course, it was picturesque. 
 
DESTRUCTIVE IVY 
 
 137 
 
 Poets of the last hundred and fifty years have sung ivy into 
 fame. The " ivy-mantled tower " is a thing of dreams and 
 romance. Poets might, perhaps, effect a like miracle with 
 snakes. In fact, the ivy is the boa-constrictor of plants. 
 It was hugging the oaks to death in the neighbouring wood, 
 it was pulling down the walls and towers of the castle, and 
 it was digging out great caverns at their foundations. 
 
 Not many miles away there existed a few years ago the 
 noble ruins of a castle at Leybourne. Ivy invaded them, 
 and in no long time pulled down the whole of one of the 
 principal walls and of a tower. The owner will not allow 
 it to be cut off, and the rest, including a magnificent 
 fourteenth-century gate-house, is bound to fall. There is 
 no greater curse to ancient buildings than ivy. The 
 popular impression is that ivy is of great antiquity. I have 
 often been shown ivy-stems of great thickness and informed 
 that they are hundreds of years old. It is an error. Ivy 
 grows very fast. I have been able to prove that a stem 
 nine inches thick was much less than a century old — 
 scarcely more than half a century. An examination of a 
 great number of engravings of the old buildings of Kent 
 proves that there was little ivy on any of them about the 
 year 1800. The plague of ivy became rampant in Kent 
 about the middle of the nineteenth century. If ivy had 
 been the normal clothing of old buildings three hundred 
 years ago, hardly one of them would have been standing 
 to-day. 
 
 When we drove away toward Brighton after that first 
 short visit there was no doubt in the mind of either of us 
 but that we must buy Alhngton. The matter was not even 
 discussed on that basis. We would buy the lease from 
 Mr. Falcke, and the freehold also. But about the time 
 
138 HOW WE FOUND A CASTLE 
 
 we were approaching Tunbridge Wells a fundamental 
 difference of outlook became gravely apparent. To me it 
 was self-evident that we must repair the disroofed and 
 disfloored rooms of the mediaeval parts that were still 
 upstanding, and make the repaired house our principal or 
 only home. The companion of my travels and my life saw 
 chiefly the beauty of the place as it was. She would repair 
 the existing inhabited part and use it as a week-end cottage 
 to come down to from London. We agreed to let the future 
 decide, but to begin by getting possession ; and so it was 
 done. 
 
 Not then, nor for many months and, indeed, years 
 afterwards, did the full history of the place become known 
 to us. It was only a week or two ago that we established 
 for the first time the unsuspected fact that a small portion 
 of the building is actually Roman. The first thing to be 
 done was to tear off the ivy — sl work of many weeks. Tons 
 of it were consumed in persistent bonfires. It was a 
 sacrifice for the time. The walls at first looked gaunt, and 
 one side was actually ugly. Then, however, we were able 
 to read much of the history of the building, and we became 
 likewise of one mind as to the necessity of repairing the 
 ruin, which was seen to be in a parlous state of decay. It 
 had either to be let fall or propped up. We devoted a 
 year*s careful study to it before coming to a decision. We 
 dug away accumulations of soil many feet deep which had 
 piled themselves against the foot of the walls. We 
 excavated the foundations of walls that were otherwise 
 gone. We made an elaborate large scale plan of the whole, 
 and we investigated every existing detail that could 
 throw light upon what had once existed. It was a work 
 full of interest and sometimes of excitement Revela- 
 
ALLINGTON CASTLE: OUTER COURTYARD 
 
 Facing p. 138 
 
ITS EARLY HISTORY 
 
 139 
 
 tions and discoveries followed one another in quick 
 succession. 
 
 In this way we mastered the history of the building from 
 the beginning, and this is the outline of what was finally 
 proved. The site has been inhabited from the end of the 
 Stone Age. Doubtless the earliest inhabitants lived in pile- 
 dwellings erected in a swamp by the side of the Medway. 
 By degrees the debris of what they brought in, used, and 
 consumed accumulated till the site of the village rose into 
 dry land, and its margin became a ditch or moat. Many 
 stone implements have been found within the precincts, 
 but no excavation has been made down to the level of pre- 
 historic habitation. Within the moat there was, no doubt, 
 a stockade. When the Romans came, they must have 
 found a British moated and stockaded village on the site, 
 the inhabitants being in the late Celtic stage of civilisation 
 (like those at the neighbouring Aylesford). A few of their 
 burials, with characteristic pottery, have been revealed 
 close by in recent years in the process of quarrying. 
 
 The Romans erected some kind of a stone building 
 within the village enclosure and a villa outside it. It is 
 highly probable that they quarried the Kentish rag, of 
 which the Roman Wall of London was built, out of the hill 
 close to the villa. Roman interments have been found in 
 the immediate neighbourhood* After the Romans the 
 Normans were the next to leave lasting traces of their 
 coming to Allington. They set up a mound, surmounted 
 no doubt, as usual, with a wooden redoubt, just outside the 
 moat to the south. The village enclosure became the 
 bailey of this castle, and its palisade was presently replaced 
 by a stone wall, portions of which remaining show the 
 characteristic masonry associated in these parts with the 
 
I40 HOW WE FOUND A CASTLE 
 
 name of Gundulf. Still within what may be called Norman 
 days, a stone castle was built inside the moat, and the 
 mound castle without was then probably abandoned. This 
 stone castle was destroyed as a place of arms by order of 
 the King in the year 1174, though considerable fragments 
 of it were left standing, and some can still be identified. 
 Thereupon an unfortified manor-house was erected, and 
 some rooms of this still exist and are again inhabited. 
 
 This manor-house and its lands were purchased by Sir 
 Stephen de Penchester (otherwise Penshurst) and his wife, 
 who, in 1282, obtained a licence to crenellate, and there- 
 upon built the castle that now stands, including within it 
 the twelfth-century manor-house and considerable frag- 
 ments of the walls of the first stone castle. From them it 
 descended, generation after generation, several times 
 through heiresses, till, in the reign of Henry VII., it being 
 then very much out of repair, it was purchased by Sir Henry 
 Wyatt, and by him very thoroughly restored. He added 
 to it a cross building, dividing the original courtyard into 
 two, and including one of the earliest long galleries in 
 England, perhaps the earliest ; also a porch, and many 
 new windows, fireplaces, and other existing details, besides 
 a quantity of fine panelling, now, alas ! no longer to be found. 
 
 These were the days of Allington's greatest glory, when 
 it received within its walls kings and cardinals — Henry 
 VII., Henry VIIL, Anne Boleyn, Katharine Parr, Cardinal 
 Wolsey, and other notable personages. Sir Henry was 
 succeeded by Sir Thomas Wyatt, his son, the poet, states- 
 man, and diplomatist. Either he or his contemporary, 
 Surrey, was the inventor of English blank verse, the first, 
 or some of the first, lines of which may have been written 
 in his AUington study. Sir Thomas Wyatt the younger 
 
DILAPIDATION 
 
 141 
 
 did not long enjoy his inheritance, for, when still a young 
 man, it was his misfortune to become the leader of the 
 Kentish rebellion (a protest against Queen Mary's Spanish 
 marriage), whereby he presently lost his head. AUington 
 then escheated to the Crown, and thereupon fell on evil 
 days. Presently, in Elizabeth's reign, it did, indeed, come 
 into the possession of the Astley family, but they never 
 lived in it, and it evidently fell into neglect. About this 
 time, also, the great hall, the great chamber, the chapel, 
 and the north-east tower were burnt down and not 
 afterwards repaired. 
 
 Early in the seventeenth century the whole place was 
 once more put into some kind of order for letting, and it 
 was hired by members of the Best family, who were Roman 
 Catholics. For them a chamber in the east tower was 
 converted into a chapel, whilst over the whole of the 
 unburnt part of the building, except the Long Gallery, a 
 top storey of timber and plaster was added. That was the 
 last addition. All the remaining history of the building is 
 one of decay. In the nineteenth century the place was 
 divided into two farm-houses, which were inhabited by 
 different families side by side till about the year 1840. 
 The condition of the building is shown in certain drawings 
 by Turner, which are preserved in the Tate Gallery, and 
 in many engravings. About 1840 the top storey and the 
 floors were removed, for the sake of the oak, from all 
 except the Tudor kitchen and a neighbouring room. The 
 remainder was abandoned to ruin. The still surviving 
 farm-house was cut up into two cottages, and they in turn 
 were about to be abandoned when, as above related, 
 Mr. Falcke intervened, and the long tale of neglect and 
 destruction came to an end. 
 
142 HOW WE FOUND A CASTLE 
 
 Thus the existing building and surrounding wall contain 
 specimens of work of the Roman, Norman, early Enghsh, 
 Tudor, and Jacobean periods, and nothing later except 
 my own scrupulous repairs. The site has been continuously 
 inhabited from pre-historic times, and has, perhaps, the 
 longest record of occupancy of any house in England. Its 
 documentary history, as worked out by my daughter from 
 the archives preserved in the Record Office, is unbroken 
 from the days of Edward the Confessor. We know for 
 certain the name of every owner from that time to the 
 present day. That we should have been able to find 
 within thirty-four miles of London a building unique, 
 historically and architecturally, and one in which the great 
 bulk was still in tolerably complete preservation — in 
 preservation, in fact, more complete, relatively to its size, 
 than any other castle known to me in England, and that 
 we should have been, further, able to acquire it, was the 
 greatest stroke of good fortune that ever came to me as a 
 collector of ancient works of art. The castle was, in fact, 
 the crown of our collection, and long before the year of 
 probation had passed we had decided to undertake the 
 repair of it and make it a worthy casket to contain the 
 rest. 
 
 At this time of writing the process of repair is completed 
 as far as some three-fifths of the building is concerned. 
 The Long Gallery, which was burnt down in 1818, or there- 
 abouts, has been re-erected above its surviving ground-floor. 
 The west wing and gate-house have been refloored and 
 reroofed. Solomon's Tower, as the ancient donjon tower 
 was named of old, has had its knocked-off corner replaced. 
 The missing battlements have been renewed, in the gaps 
 between those that remained. The ancient wall of enceinte 
 
REPARATION 
 
 143 
 
 on the site of the old palisade has had its missing parts 
 replaced on their old foundations. 
 
 If all that was required had been to repair the castle itself, 
 we should be yet further advanced by now. But there were 
 worse horrors to attend to than the mere ravages of time. 
 All the land surrounding the castle had been mishandled in 
 the most appalling fashion. Not only had it been so badly 
 farmed that it was little more than a wilderness of stinging 
 nettles and docks, but some acres of the land had been 
 turned to hideous uses. Immediately in front of the prin- 
 cipal fagade, machinery for crushing stone and turning it 
 into tar pavement had been erected. The ground was 
 saturated with tar, loaded deep with barren stone-dust, and 
 piled high with huge heaps of tarred chips ready for 
 transport by barge or cart to distant places. Another 
 portion of the river front was a large manure wharf. Close 
 by were a row of ugly modern oast-houses, recently rebuilt 
 after what ought to have been a merciful fire. Moreover, a 
 crooked right-of-way led close in front of the gate-house, and 
 destroyed all possibility of privacy. These various dis- 
 figurements had to be removed one by one. A new, shorter, 
 and better road was made, far out of sight, which the public 
 authority accepted in lieu of the previous muddy and 
 berutted track. The tar-paving business was moved away, 
 and another site purchased for it out of view down the river. 
 The tar-stained ground was covered with a thick layer of 
 good soil, on which grass presently consented to grow. The 
 oast-houses were pulled down, and the stone of which they 
 were composed given back to the castle from which it had 
 been robbed. Acres of nettles were trenched and cleaned. 
 The deep railway cutting, down which the tram-line ran 
 that fed the stone-crusher from the quarry, was filled in with 
 
144 HOW WE FOUND A CASTLE 
 
 about 50,000 cubic yards of quarry refuse and soil. A new 
 drive was contrived, and the whole area was fenced in ; the 
 wooded, now long-abandoned, quarry, from which, as 
 tradition states, the stone was fetched that built the Tower 
 of London, was brought again into service, and by means 
 of paths and other careful attention was rendered a delight- 
 ful adjunct to all the rest. 
 
 In discussing any old picture, sculpture, or other the 
 like work of ancient art, it is always necessary to consider 
 what has been done to it in the nature of restoration. A 
 castle is merely another kind of work of art, as delightful 
 to collect, to study, to repair, to live with as is a fine picture. 
 If I were rich I should be greatly tempted to collect several 
 castles. I know of a dozen or more that could be repaired 
 and made into glorious modern homes, comfortable, con- 
 venient, and in some cases far more " livable " than most 
 modern houses. To begin with, a castle, properly repaired, 
 is silent. It is the most reposeful kind of a dwelling. Next, 
 it is draughtless, if the windows are made to fit. The walls 
 being always of very considerable thickness, it follows that, 
 properly supplied with a scientific system of heating, it can 
 be maintained at an even temperature. Once the walls 
 have been thoroughly warmed in summer, it is easy to keep 
 them at an even, mild temperature all through our coldest 
 winters. At Allington it is impossible to guess what is 
 happening to the weather without in the matter of tempera- 
 ture, unless one goes out to feel. I have noticed that this 
 uniformity of warmth — a steadily maintained temperature 
 of about 63 degrees — strikes visitors with surprise ; whereas 
 it is just about what ought to be expected, provided the 
 work of repair and refitting is properly done. Finally, by 
 a due employment of asphalt and concrete, a castle interior 
 
DOOMED RUINS 
 
 145 
 
 can be made and maintained absolutely dry. The ground 
 flooring is of concrete, on which is laid a layer of asphalt 
 carried also about three feet up the walls in the form of a 
 dado. The oak flooring is laid on the asphalt, and closely 
 united to it with pitch. The other floors and roof are of 
 reinforced concrete, and the roof is covered with asphalt. 
 Being flat, and surrounded by the battlements, it makes the 
 most perfect promenade imaginable. 
 
 I mention these rudimentary facts on purpose, because I 
 have found them novel to most of the people who have 
 come to see my work. It has been my hope that what has 
 been, and is being done at Allington, might suggest to other 
 people a like operation of conservation, repair, and conse- 
 quent rehabitation of other ancient castles now in ruins. 
 A ruin is a building in rapid process of decay. No ruin will 
 last for any considerable number of centuries. You have 
 only to look at Buck's views of Old English buildings in 
 the first half of the eighteenth century, and compare them 
 with existing remains to realise how much has vanished 
 in a little more than a hundred and fifty years. Only a 
 building that is being used is likely to last. Restoration of 
 a castle, in the sense of reconstructing it as an ancient 
 fortress (after the fashion of Pierrefonds), is anachronic. 
 The reparation of an old building, and the alteration and 
 extension of it to adapt it to modern needs — as Sir Henry 
 Wyatt in Tudor days repaired Allington — is legitimate and 
 praiseworthy. Every existing old feature that can be 
 retained or recovered should be. The addition of anything 
 else is permissible, provided that what is added is for use 
 or beauty, and is actually useful or beautiful. Success is 
 attained where the work of the past is scrupulously con- 
 served, and a beautiful and useful result ensues. Such are 
 
146 HOW WE FOUND A CASTLE 
 
 the principles which we have endeavoured to follow in our 
 work at Allington. The result is successful as far as the 
 work has gone. 
 
 I have only one more matter to mention before bringing 
 these discursive chapters to an end. We intended Allington 
 Castle to be made a kind of casket to contain such works 
 of art as we had acquired, or might in future acquire. Into 
 its repaired walls we worked, as opportunity offered, the 
 various sculptures we had acquired at different times and in 
 widely sundered localities. We found places in the windows 
 for our fragments of stained glass, on the walls for our 
 hangings, and in the various chambers for our old oak and 
 other furniture of all dates. But, alas! we were doomed 
 to one great disappointment ; in no room that we have 
 yet made, or, in the small part of the ruin that remains to 
 be repaired, can make, is there a single wall on which 
 pictures can be effectively hung. The necessary form and 
 position of the windows casting a low horizontal light makes 
 it impossible to illuminate pictures properly, or to avoid 
 reflections. Moreover, most of the rooms have of necessity 
 windows in both their opposing long walls, for all the rooms 
 are relatively long in comparison with their width, which 
 is that of a medium length oak beam — about thirteen feet 
 clear from wall to wall. Hence there are always cross 
 lights. To see a particular painting one must stand on a 
 special spot, and generally look at it obliquely, and then the 
 light is bad. That is the ounce of bitter in our pound of 
 sweet, and it is a bitter that unfortunately cannot be 
 neutralised. 
 
 I will not, however, take leave of my readers on a note 
 of regret. As I look back on thirty years of what I may 
 call sporadic collecting, because collecting has been only 
 
THE JOYS OF COLLECTING 147 
 
 the byplay of an otherwise rather full and busy life, I can 
 truly say that it has been to me, and to those dear to me, 
 who have shared its excitements, its disappointments, and 
 its occasional successes, a great joy and an abiding interest. 
 It has enabled us to take our share at times in rescuing 
 from imminent destruction, and often in preserving some 
 noble art treasures of the past. It has filled our recreations 
 with interest ; it has occupied us in a manner which has 
 been at all events harmless to others, and not injurious to 
 ourselves. We have enjoyed the passion of the hunt 
 without killing, and our trophies are not consumed. 
 
Printed by 
 Hazell, Watson &> Vinby, Ld., 
 London and Aylesbury.— 1412484. 
 
6 33^ 
 
&5 CONWAY (Sir Martin). The Sport of 
 tollecting. With 26 illustrations. Cloth. 
 London, (1914).* . $3.00 
 
 GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE 
 
 3 3125 01152 6601