Art show honors an extraordinary collector

NEW YORK, Dec. 7 (UPI) -- Exhibitions honoring individual art collectors are rare, but one paying tribute to a connoisseur who died more than 150 years ago and whose collection has long been dispersed is even more unusual.

There have been art shows in recent years devoted to the collections of extraordinary royal collectors, such as Catherine the Great of Russia and Augustus the Strong of Poland, but their collections are the basis of national art collections in St. Petersburg and Dresden. William Beckford, an English collector who is being given a show by the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, was neither royal nor a museum patron although he collected on a princely scale.

Beckford (1760-1844), virtually unknown in America, was the aesthete son of a Whig politician who was twice Lord Mayor of London and inherited vast sugar plantations in Jamaica, where his own father had been governor. On his mother's side, he was related to the powerful Hamilton family and proudly claimed descent from King Edward III. His elder daughter married a cousin, the Duke of Hamilton, premier peer of Scotland.

Beckford's father died when his son was 10, and he was dubbed by Lord Byron "England's wealthiest son." He married the daughter of an earl, became a member of Parliament, and had every expectation of being created a peer, but a scandalous liaison ended his political career and sent him into self-imposed exile on the continent for more than a decade.

From then on Beckford threw himself into extravagant creative pursuits, putting together one of the largest collections of paintings and the decorative arts, writing a fantastic semi-autobiographical Gothic novel, "Vathek," which was the sensation of the day, dabbling in music (he studied with Mozart) and decorative design, and plunging into architecture with the great James Wyatt as his mentor.

He built Fonthill Abbey, a cathedral-like neo-Gothic residence in Wiltshire, considered the most extraordinary house constructed during the Regency in England. It was his greatest claim to fame and almost ruined him financially. He was forced to sell the estate in 1822 and three years later its 276-foot central tower collapsed, destroying most of the building. Although much of his collection was sold at auction, Beckford kept on collecting art for a new home in Bath.

The Bard Graduate Center has gathered 150 objects from the Beckford collection from museums and private collections in the United States and Europe for an exhibition that has become the "must see" show of this holiday season for serious art lovers. Titled "William Beckford: An Eye for the Magnificent," it will be on view through Jan. 6 and then will travel to the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London for exhibition Feb. 5-April 14.

"So much has been written about Beckford's literary efforts and gossip aspects of his life, but no one has ever really looked at his collections," Philip Hewat-Jaboor, a London art consultant who co-curated the Bard show with art historian Bet McLeod, told United Press International.

"The point of this exhibition is to examine the works of art and let them stand on their own. Beckford's involvement with painters and craftsmen was quite extraordinary. It was not something people of his station did at the time."

The sampling of Beckford's holdings ranges from medieval and Renaissance objects to baroque and rococo art, as well as the neoclassical and Renaissance revival pieces that were popular in his lifetime. Beckford commissioned the best French and English artisans of the day to create furniture, silver and objets d'art for him, often to his own designs or those of his longtime companion, Gregorio Franchi.

One of the most spectacular is a Regency-style table with a round top of mottled green marble from the Red Sea, supported on tripod gilded legs shaped like dolphins. The rare marble slab was brought to France by Napoleon Bonaparte as a gift for his wife, Josephine, and Beckford bought it in the 1816 sale of the contents of her country house, Malmaison, outside Paris.

Among the Fonthill Abbey furnishings on view are a gilded armchair with winged griffin arm supports from a suite of furniture acquired from the Paris residence of Cardinal Fesch, Napoleon's uncle, and an exotic Indian jade water pipe (hookah) with silver gilt and platinum mounts set with semi-precious stones designed for Beckford by James Aldridge of London.

Other treasures are a 10-inch-high gold casket adorned with the 12 Apostles in brilliant blue and green enamel work, one of the finest such pieces made in Limoges, France, in the 12th century, and a 13th-century Syrian enameled glass ewer depicting polo players. The latter was sold at Christie's auction house in London only last December for more than $4.6 million.

The pre-Revolutionary and Napoleonic French porcelains, silver, and silver-gilt objects which Francophile Beckford particularly admired and commissioned are of the highest quality, and he also collected fine pieces by Paul Storr, a leading 18th-century British silversmith. Beckford was crazy about genealogy and heraldry and had Storr make him a tea set, the entire surface of which is etched with heraldic badges.

He put his own heron crest on almost everything from silver, Chinese export china, and linens to carpets, furniture and bookbindings in his extensive library of rare books and manuscripts, including the entire library of historian Edward Gibbon, which he purchased. A great Storr silver-gilt basket, a sideboard display piece, and a solid gold coffee pot commissioned from Robert Sharp are the finest objects bearing the heron crest on display.

Not to be missed are a bejeweled covered cup by 16th-century Nuremberg master Veit Moringer and pieces from the 435-piece Meissen porcelain service that once belonged to Willem V of Holland. There are a group of lovely watercolors of the Italian countryside painted by John Robert Cozens in 1785 when he traveled with Beckford as part of an entourage so large that Beckford was mistaken for the Emperor of Austria traveling incognito.

There are family portraits galore and models and pictures of Fonthill Abbey, including three stunning views painted by J.M.W. Turner from different aspects. If you wanted a picture of your house, why not have it painted by the best landscape artist of the day? It is obvious from this show that Beckford only went for the best.