Alfred Fenton's 1904 bequest transformed the National Gallery of Victoria. The story of how his money was spent has been absorbingly and amusingly told

Apollo, Nov, 2005 by Patricia Anderson

Mr Felton's Bequests John Poynter Miegunyah Press, an imprint of Melbourne University Publishing AUS$89.95 ISBN 0 300 10243 7

When the National Gallery of Victoria acquired--courtesy of Alfred Fehon--Giambattista Tiepolo's Banquet of Cleopatra for 31,375 [pounds sterling] from the Hermitage in 1933, there was a commotion in Russia as well as in Melbourne. Many Russian emigres--some of whom had had valuable collections confiscated to enrich the Hermitage--saw the sale as emblematic of its dissolution and perhaps an end to their hopes of ever recovering their treasures. One such emigre, Mr A. Goukassow, wrote to The Times in London from Paris in despair: 'We consider it our duty to our country and its history to record a most emphatic protest.'

The generosity of Mr Felton, whose 1904 will had left the National Gallery of Victoria 378,033 [pounds sterling]--almost $28 million in 2000 values--and the gallery's spending of his windfall from that time to the present day is diligently traced and delightfully amplified in John Poynter's book. His exhaustive research, assembled with clear affection and laced with wit, has resulted in the story of a man whose fortunes paralleled those of the colony to which he voyaged in 1853. The twenty-one-year-old Felton found a city bristling with the tents of fortune seekers on their way to the gold diggings. The bright flare of commerce, fed by rampant speculation, would subside to a flicker in the depression of the 1890s, so he had arrived at just the right moment. Poynter provides a compelling history of the colony itself, before delivering a riveting account of how Felton's money would be spent. There were quarries pursued and interminable, irascible debates about purchasing priorities.

By 1861 Felton was listed as a 'wholesale druggist' selling Chlordane (a mixture of opium, morphine and chloroform) and 'Felton's Quinine Champagne'. Ultimately his business partnerships would expand--mirroring the colony's rising fortunes--to embrace manufacturing, importing and the largest pharmaceutical company in Australia. He lived a well-ordered bachelor's life, mostly in boarding houses around St Kilda. His habits were harmless enough: he wore knitted kneecaps, are whiting for breakfast every day of the year and chicken for dinner, and insisted on sleeping with his head to the north. He was particularly fond of his phonograph, and encouraged friends to attach rubber listening tubes to their ears to hear La Boheme. His travels did not necessarily inform his taste in painting, although he was a keen observer of human nature, noting in 1870 that the Americans he had met had 'hard practical natures' and a 'stupendous materiality'. His collection of paintings--mostly traditional and romanticised landscapes--were pedestrian and unadventurous, reflecting the taste of the period as much as any personal inclinations.

At the time of its announcement, Felton's bequest exceeded the combined acquisition funds of London's National Gallery and the Tate, and it elevated the National Gallery of Victoria into a buying league of international museums it would never again be in a position to compete with. Like a lottery win, large and unencumbered sums of money cause a rush of blood to the head, and so it was with the National Gallery of Victoria. That lumbering creature, the committee--or committees in this case--set its sights on grand purchases but was inexperienced where the international art market--with its uneven scholarship and sure-footed dealers--was concerned, and a number of unremarkable and frequently overpriced works were purchased. Some, such as a Rembrandt Self Portrait, a Watteau, a Van Eyck Madonna and Child, a Goya and a Reynolds, proved to be overly optimistic attributions.

From its inception, the bequest Wag dominated by elderly men who knew little about art but knew what they liked. One hapless London-based adviser after another was disabused of his good intentions, in a manner best compared to Aesop's fable The Old Man, the Boy and the Donkey. The carping began with a Pissarro purchased in 1905 and climaxed with the refusal of Delacroix's Les Naches in 1955. This prize went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Nonetheless, some master works survived their deliberations: the Tiepolo, a complete first-edition set of Goya's Los Caprichos, thirty-six of William Blake's illustrations for The Divine Comedy, works by Van Dyck, Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, Poussin, Turner, Gainsborough, El Greco, Gericault, two bone-fide Rembrandts and, later, works by Manet, Monet, Cezanne, Matisse, Bonnard, Van Gogh, Vlaminck and Balthus. Without doubt, the bequest's golden years were those between the wars, when the committee's London adviser, Frank Rinder, was providing excellent advice on the purchase of paintings. But the trustees were also busy buying manuscripts, furniture, porcelain, glassware, silverware, fans, robes and petticoats, jewellery, items of toilette, snuff bottles, handkerchiefs and miniatures. The acquisition of an eighteenth-century brocaded silk taffeta English gown in 1970--just three years before Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles made its way to Australia--reveals their longstanding predilections.