A PRINCE OF PRINT-COLLECTORS:
MICHEL DE MAROLLES,
ABBÉ DE VILLELOIN
(1600-1681)
By LOUIS R. METCALFE
THE French make a fine distinction between three varieties of that very special individual to whom we refer in a general way as “a collector.” They have always been authorities on that subject and one of them has said: “On est amateur par goût, connaisseur par éducation, curieux par vanité.” While another adds: “Ou par spéculation.” By “collector” we simply mean a person who has formed the habit of acquiring the things in which he is particularly interested, and these in as many varieties as possible. It implies neither an artistic pursuit nor a deep knowledge of the subject. By curieux, however, is meant, as a rule, an amateur, a man of taste who collects things which pertain to art exclusively; he is in most cases a connaisseur, and always an enthusiast.
Paris, the home of taste, has never been that of the curieux more so than at the present day, when, it seems, every one who can afford a rent of over four thousand francs has a hobby of some sort and is a mad collector. A general history of the weakness for things either beautiful or odd or rare, or merely fashionable, would be both voluminous and chaotic, if a distinction were not made between that which pertained to art and that which did not. A complete description of the latter, a hopelessly heterogeneous mass, would make an amusing volume, for there is no end to the variety of things in which vanity and folly have caused human beings to become interested to the point of collecting in large numbers.
George IV collected saddles; the Princess Charlotte and many others, shells. Tulips were so madly sought after in Holland that one root was exchanged for 460 florins, together with a new carriage, a pair of horses, and a set of harness. Shop-bills and posters have been the specialty of many, while thousands of persons have collected postage-stamps and coins. A Mr. Morris had so many snuff-boxes that it was said he never took two pinches of snuff out of the same box. A Mr. Urquhart collected the halters with which criminals had been hanged; and another enthusiast, the masks of their faces. Suett, a comedian, collected wigs, and another specialist owned as many as fifteen hundred skulls, Anglo-Saxon and Roman. If there have been men who have shown a propensity to collect wives, Evelyn tells us in his diary:
“In 1641 there was a lady in Haarlem who had been married to her twenty-fifth husband, and, having been left a widow, was prohibited from marrying in future; yet it could not be proved that she had ever made any of her husbands away, though the suspicion had brought her divers times to trouble.”
Although we much regret that such an intensely interesting work as a Comprehensive History of Collecting has never been written, we realize that a mere description of rare and beautiful objects would be unsatisfactory as long as we did not know their history and the way in which they had been gathered together. It is the soul of the collector which we should like to see laid bare. Was his work a labor of vanity or one of love? Were his possessions mere playthings, speculation, to him, or did they represent treasures of happiness greater than all the gold in Golconda?
Without a doubt, it is one thing to collect what is highly prized on all sides, with large means at one’s disposal, and the constant advice of experts, and quite another to search patiently oneself for things which the general public has not yet discovered, and then to acquire them with difficulty.
Who shall know with what admirable zeal some collectors have made themselves authorities on the things which they loved? with what untiring energy they have sifted for years masses of trash in the hope of finding the hidden pearl? Who can tell the inner history of the auction-room, the heart-beats of those who were after the jewel which no one else seemed to have noticed, the sacrifices which many with a slender purse have made in order to secure the precious “find,” and lastly the enjoyment which they ever afterward derived from its possession? Many of the great French collections of the last century were made in this spirit: they were begun with a modest outlay and devoted to things which, at that time, no one else wanted. I know of one of the first collectors of Eastern Art in the nineteenth century, who at one time had greatly to reduce his household in order to satisfy his passion for Japanese vases; and of another wealthy enthusiast who would travel third-class to London to secure an old Roman bronze. The history of such collections becomes that of human beings for whom life is nothing without beauty, and it is too personal to be recorded. The collector will seldom believe that his enthusiasm can be understood by others besides himself: maybe, also, he would be unwilling to reveal the more or less innocent subterfuges to which he had recourse in order to acquire more than one of his treasures.
The American chapter of such a history is the most recent one, and the world is now watching its development with bated breath. The art of the Old World is being imported by the ship-load; fortunes are paid for single paintings, while the paneled wainscots of French châteaux, the ceilings of Italian palaces, the colonnades of their gardens, and the tapestries of the Low Countries, not to mention a hundred varieties of objets d’art, are constantly wending their way to the treasure-houses—still in course of construction—of the New World. All this is taking place to the indignation of Europeans and the æsthetes who consider such a radical change of background a desecration, and do not stop to think that this transplantation is hardly more unnatural than the sight of the Elgin marbles in foggy London, or the winged bulls of Ecbatana in the halls of the Louvre.