The Albert Collection: Five Hundred Years of British and European Silver

Apollo, July, 2005 by Timothy Schroder

The Albert Collection: Five Hundred Years of British and European Silver

Robin Butler, edited by Philippa Glanville, Broadway Publishing 120 [pounds sterling]

ISBN 1 85149 478 2

Timothy Schroder is intrigued by the portrait of a mysterious collector that emerges from the catalogue of his remarkable collection of silver.

In the auction world the 'single-owner sale' has always had a special place. Even when billed as the property of 'a gentleman' or, in the French tradition, 'Monsieur X', such sales speak eloquently if silently of the taste and character of the vendor. The Albert Collection is not a sale catalogue but 'Albert' is an 'X' and the text offers few clues as to his identity. It lets slip that he was a man, that he was a Londoner and that his collection was formed over the last thirty years of his life. But it is the collection itself that reveals most of this nameless personality and it gradually became clear to me as I read through its 350 pages and its 800 or so catalogue entries that this review would inevitably be more a reflection on the collection itself than its hand-maiden, the text.

One's first impression on looking through this handsomely produced volume with its profusion of colour illustrations is sheer astonishment that one man could have accumulated so many, many things. Perhaps hazed around the edges of this is a hint of a question about why anyone might want to acquire so much. And yet, 'reason not the need'; for the true collector, even one who does not discover his vocation until well into adult life, there is no end to it and the urge to collect is constantly refreshed by some chance purchase opening up a whole new vein to mine.

It is the second impression that is the more interesting, however. For one soon becomes aware of the special and consistent qualities that emerge from the pages of this book: there is nothing flash here, nothing glitzy or meretricious. There is hardly anything large. An exceptional number are entirely unmarked, revealing a true passion for the objects themselves rather than the stamp-collector's fascination with hallmarks. Whether a Georgian taperstick, a seventeenth-century tobacco box or a sixteenth-century spoon, there is a constant sense of quality, design and integrity that informs even the most modest of these objects.

Modesty, indeed, is the single word that most frequently comes to mind in looking at this collection and it is a quality that one feels must most accurately reflect the collector himself. For this, surely, is the reason for his guarded anonymity. Another word that repeatedly comes to mind is 'eye' and on almost every page one is intrigued by something quirky and unexpected and which most obviously reflects the collector's connoisseurship.

In this collection, as in many others, one can sense a journey. Although by his own admission the collector's original aim was just to acquire things for his dining table, he evidently discovered special areas along the way that developed from an interest into a quest. The result is several collections within the whole that are among the most comprehensive to have been formed by any individual. Silver boxes, as a subject, have never enjoyed the cachet or eminence of their gold cousins, but the 117 described here are of extraordinary diversity and together form as useful a resource for their study as Eric Delieb's famous, and still solitary, book on the subject. Similarly, the fifty-four drinking vessels represent one of the most interesting groups available within the confines of a single volume, representing nearly all the main forms and rivalling, for example, the Carter collection at the Ashmolean Museum or the Hyman collection at Colonial Williamsburg. Eighteenth-century cream jugs, especially the concentrated rococo nuggets of the mid-century, clearly captured 'Albert's' imagination too and led to a group that recalls the Munro collection at the Huntington in San Marino. But to my mind, the most fascinating sub-collections are those that one would be most hard put to find elsewhere: a group of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century silver penners (ingenious travelling compendia for quill pen and inkwell before the invention of the fountain pen), early nineteenth-century king's messengers' badges and so-called 'butter spades' from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In many ways Robin Butler is the perfect accompanist to such a soloist. His introduction is a charming description of 'Albert' himself and the growth of his collection and he never allows his text to upstage the objects. But there are occasions when the commentaries are arguably too reticent and when his approach is perhaps less inquiring than might be wished. Equally, there are many instances where the text might have been significantly enriched by a wider use of the specialist literature or primary sources. There are editorial irritations as well, such as the absence of sequential catalogue numbers. This means that the reader can check a cross reference only by following a cumbersome and avoidable route through the accession number, by way of a concordance at the back of the book.