England's loss, Russia's gain

Magazine Antiques, April, 2003 by Alfred Mayor

A Capital Collection: Houghton Hall and the Hermitage, ed. Larissa Dukelskaya and Andrew Moore (Yale University Press, 800-288-2129), $75.00 (hardcovers).

Catherine the Great established the Hermitage picture gallery in Saint Petersburg in 1764. To fill it, this relentless acquisitor bought six large collections of paintings in rapid succession. Ten years after it was founded, the Hermitage had 2,080 pictures. The story of the next large addition, 204 pictures collected by Sir Robert Walpole (1676-1745), in 1779 is the subject of this encyclopedic book.

Walpole had already collected 113 paintings at his house Houghton Hall in Norfolk by 1736, a year after its completion. He then added more pictures from his houses in London and Chelsea, and bought still more. However, Walpole was hardly a languid aesthete, for he was also very fond of hunting and maintained packs of hounds at Houghton and at his hunting lodge in Richmond. Apparently he also had 20/20 vision for the ladies and a salty vocabulary when in the company of men. In short, he was a regular guy interested in having a good time and damn the expense. Incidently he assembled an enviable collection of pictures.

Sir Robert Walpole was never close to his fourth son, Horace (1717-1797), until the latter returned from the obligatory grand tour of the Continent in 1741. Upon his retirement from the government in 1742, Sir Robert invited his son to stay at Houghton, which Horace did, probably induced by his father's shared love of painting. Although definitely not amused by the hunt, the horse races, and the evening revels, Horace plunged into the pictures, which he catalogued in a compendium honoring his father entitled Aedes Walpolianae. The work included Horace Walpole's "Sermon on Painting" and, oddly enough, a deplorable poem by the Reverend John Whaley entitled "A Journey to Houghton." The manuscript was completed in 1743, before his father's death, but the book was not published until 1747.

Sir Robert left forty thousand pounds worth of debt behind him, and his first-born son, also Robert, the second earl of Orford, only added to it before his death m 1751. Houghton was then inherited by George Walpole (1730-1791), the only son of the second Robert, and he became the third earl of Orford. He apparently had the most profound indifference to the fate of the house and its contents. In 1773 George Walpole had his first bout of mental illness, which affected him intermittently until he died. Horace Walpole, who adored Houghton, stepped into the breach, and as Larissa Dukelskaya writes: "He looked over kernels, sold pointers, hounds and exotic beasts, drew up pedigrees for horses, sold sheep and oxen, listened to the complaints of servants who were drunk from morning tonight, mended the roof, sorted through papers with the lawyer and managed other household affairs"

In October 1778 George Walpole asked James Christie to come to Houghton and evaluate the picture collection, while holding Christie to "observe the most profound secrecy" Negotiations were already underway with the Russian ambassador to London to sell the painting collection to Catherine, and this was duly accomplished for the sum of [pounds sterling]40,550, which was just about Christie's evaluation. In April 1779 Catherine wrote to her agent in Paris, Baron Friedrich Melchior von Grimm, that the Walpole pictures were sewed up "because your very humble servant has them under her thumb and won't let them go any more than a cat will let go of a mouse." (This is my translation of the empress's earthy French.)

George Walpole expressed his gratitude to the empress in a thoroughly bizarre way by drawing up for her a code of the laws of hunting to the hounds and by naming his favorite greyhound bitch "Czarina." Meanwhile, the precious cargo was to travel to Saint Petersburg aboard the Russian frigate Natalia, which foundered off the coast of Holland on its way from Russia to England to pick up the pictures. Nonetheless, the rumor instantly took hold that the Walpole pictures were at the bottom of the sea, and this misapprehension lingered in some quarters into the nineteenth century Oddly enough, it is still not known how the collection got to Russia. Be that as it may, in March 1780 the empress wrote to Baron Grimm that the pictures had arrived safely and had already spent the winter in the Hermitage.

In addition to the story of the rise and fall of the collection, the book contains a detailed catalogue of all the Houghton pictures sold to Catherine; a catalogue of all the works of art remaining at Houghton; a reprint of Horace Walpole's Aedes Walpolianae; seven appendixes on related topics; and an enormous bibliography.

The transfer of the Walpole collection to Russia was immediately lamented as a sad day for Britain. Nothing remotely related to this melancholy loss has been omitted from this monumental book.