The Confessions of a Collector

by William Carew Hazlitt

I very soon abandoned the idea about Lowestoft porcelain. Gillingwater in his History of the place (1790) merely mentions that they had clay, suitable for making pottery, in the neighbourhood; but there was no material for fine china. Very possibly certain pieces of Oriental were shipped thither in the white, and locally decorated. But I have yet to see an important example of so-called Lowestoft, which was not really of Chinese origin.

At the place of business long kept by Brooks I was an habitual caller, and used to meet Mr Sanders of Chiswick, whose collection of Chelsea porcelain was probably one of the finest ever brought together. It comprised many large examples in figures and nefs seldom seen and of great importance. It was Sanders, who related to me the anecdote of a singular find at Antwerp of Chelsea figures in a confectioner’s establishment. The proprietor or his family once belonged to Chelsea, and had taken these pieces with them as part of their trade fittings or decorations; and he willingly exchanged them for others on payment of a reasonable difference.

Sanders and myself occasionally met also at Sotheby’s. He must have been a person of no mean resources; but his ways were mysterious, and his home, I fear, uncomfortable. Perhaps he found the neighbouring Sign of the Hoppoles more congenial for this reason; he found it, poor fellow, only too much so.

I possess numerous memorials of my transactions with Brooks. He had, besides china, occasional pictures on which I may have sometimes looked with extravagant distrust; and he was in fact an omnivorous buyer and not an injudicious one. I recall a tall Chelsea cup and saucer with a stalk handle, painted with fruit, and marked in puce, which my good acquaintance had obtained from a small house-sale in Chiswick—the sole treasure of the establishment. It was in the finest state. ‘They thought me a fool,’ remarked Brooks, ‘because I gave £10, 10s. for it.’ ‘And what would they say of the person,’ I put to him, ‘who took it of you at a profit?’ He grinned, and informed me that a medical man in the neighbourhood would jump at it. This frightened me, and I closed with him at £14. I owed many another prize to the same agency, particularly, in a small way perhaps, an old Dresden plate with a crimson and gold border, painted with a bird and foliage, the prototype of the Chelsea pattern, of which examples have fetched £35. Brooks had this lying in a drawer, and one day I disinterred it, and took it home at 25s. My Hammersmith man was not invariably so discreet in his consumption of liquor as he ought to have been; and I have to confess with some shame and contrition, that I priced, not for the first time, a very fine Cambrian ware mug marked (as usual) in gold, when he was a trifle festive, and he let me have it for 35s. He had two; the other was badly cracked; and I saw it in another shop some time after, valued at £7, 15s.

There were two examples of ceramic ware in his hands at different times, protected and (as I thought) disguised by old black frames. I asked him to take them out for me, that I might be satisfied as to their condition, which he did. One was a Wedgwood plaque, light blue, with figures in relief; the other an original Capo di Monte one, literally hidden under accumulated dirt. It was of the second period, in the alto relievo style, and represents the Bath of Diana, I believe. The sharpness of the impression was a strong contrast to the modern copies from the moulds. Brooks asked £6 for it; I took both.

He was ultimus Romanorum in the sense that he left no successor in Hammersmith with a stock of the kind worth regarding.

Brooks was an odd-looking small man, and he and his wife resembled Mr and Mrs Johnson in the Vauxhall song. I once spoke to him of his confrères in the trade, and as to his relations with them, more particularly in the old china line, and his less explanatory than sententious rejoinder was: ‘I knows them, and they knows me.’

Gale, who lived in Holborn, where I regularly visited him, was the brother of the County Court judge. He was an intelligent fellow, but not very speculative, nor did I ever, save once, carry away from him anything very notable. He set before me, however, on one occasion a splendid pair of ruby-backed eggshell plates painted with quails, and said that the price was £6. I felt slightly nervous, lest he should have made a mistake; but I agreed to his terms, asked him to pack the things up, and departed. I nearly broke them by a collision on the pavement, but eventually landed them in safety, calling en route at Reynolds’s in Hart Street, who told me that a customer would give him £60 for them, if I would let him have them at a figure below that. They are as thin and transparent as paper. It may be just worth noting that a cup and saucer of Capo di Monte of the first type, the paste opaque and the decoration Spanish, was sold to me by Gale as Buen Retiro. It is painted in the same taste, and has the same mark—M for Madrid; but I have always regarded it as of Italian origin, and as the work of the operatives who migrated from the neighbourhood of Madrid to Capo di Monte. The real Buen Retiro resembles eggshell.

Ralph Bernal had formerly dealt with Gale, who was fond of narrating anecdotes of the great collector’s hesitation and nearness. There was a particular Sèvres cup and saucer, which brought a heavy sum in his sale, and which he got for £5, 5s., after a palaver with the holder of some months’ duration.

Reynolds allowed me to make his premises in Bloomsbury one of my regular lounges. I did not altogether take a great deal off his hands, as he paid attention to Wedgwood, bronzes, ivories, and jade, rather than to china; and as I grew wiser, I also grew more exclusive, from a persuasion that one or two subjects are amply sufficient for any single madman, especially a rather poor one.