Samuel Bancroft and collecting English art

Magazine Antiques, June, 2005 by Margaretta S. Frederick

At the turn of the twentieth century American taste in foreign art was focused almost exclusively on France, and there was a general disregard for the work of the English Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, among them Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), and John Everett Millais (1829-1896). The brotherhood officially came together between 1848 and 1853, and significantly influenced the next generation of painters and artisans. What then was the inspiration for Samuel Bancroft (Pl. III), a successful cotton manufacturer in Wilmington, Delaware, to assemble what is today the premier collection of Pre-Raphaelite art in the United States?

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Described as "frank, almost to bluntness" and "fearless as to what others might say or think," (1) Bancroft was, in retrospect, the ideal person to champion these painters at a time when they were both underappreciated and misunderstood. He assembled the bulk of his collection of more than two hundred works between 1890 and 1915. The few Americans who were then buying English art tended to buy single works, showing minimal long-term interest. Bancroft, on the other hand, immersed himself in the study of the Pre-Raphaelites, going so far as to seek out living members associated with the group.

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Bancroft was born in 1840 in Wilmington, Delaware. His father, Joseph (1803-1874), was a cotton manufacturer of English birth, and his mother, Sarah Poole (1804-1896), was a Philadelphia Quaker. Despite a limited education, Bancroft had a strong interest in literature--particularly poetry--and theater. In 1865 he was made a full partner in his father's cotton finishing firm, Joseph Bancroft and Sons, located on the banks of the Brandywine River in Wilmington, and married Mary Askew Richardson (1847-1933). When Joseph Bancroft died the firm passed to Samuel and his brother William (1835-1928) and prospered.

Samuel Bancroft purchased his first artworks in the 1870s. He was particularly attracted by the work of Jervis McEntee (1828-1891), an American painter of evocative, autumnal landscapes, which were much in vogue with American connoisseurs on the East Coast. The enthusiasm for the landscapes of the Hudson River school painters was gradually being usurped by an interest in the more "civilized" views produced by painters like McEntee, (2) whose freer, more tonal views of the Hudson River valley undoubtedly appealed to the Victorian enthusiasm for the poetic in art.

Bancroft's initial foray into American art is not surprising given the limited possibilities available in the United States for viewing British art. This inadequacy prompted one art critic to lament:

It is not surprising that Americans entertain the poor opinion they do
of English art; for British painters are seldom represented at their
best in their pictures seen in this country. (3)

One exception was the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. Although no specifically Pre-Raphaelite work was on view, the English section did include paintings by Sir Edward John Poynter (1836-1919) and Valentine Cameron Prinsep (1838-1904), both associated with the group. (4)

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Bancroft's cousin and friend Alfred Darbyshire, an architect and theater designer in Manchester, England, introduced him to British art of this period. (5) Darbyshire's profession allowed him introductions to such men as William Morris (1834-1896), Ford Madox Brown, and William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919), Dante Gabriel Rossetti's brother. In 1880 Darbyshire took Bancroft to visit Barlow Fold, the Cheshire house of William Alfred Turner (1839-1886), a Manchester cotton manufacturer and art collector whose house Darbyshire had renovated in 1870. Turner was a friend and patron of Rossetti and Madox Brown, among other Pre-Raphaelites, and Rossetti's La Bella Mano (Pl. IX) of 1875 hung at Barlow Fold. Bancroft asked to have a photograph of the painting, which marked the beginning of his Pre-Raphaelite collection. Of this visit he later wrote, "I was thus ... brought within one person [Turner] of contact with the master [Rossetti]." (6)

It was a decade before Bancroft purchased an actual Pre-Raphaelite painting, but there is evidence that his interest in British art persisted. We know that he owned a catalogue of the large and immensely popular exhibition of the work of George Frederick Watts, a close friend to many of the Pre-Raphaelites. (7) Held in 1884 and 1885 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, it was the first exhibition devoted to the work of any British artist to be held at that museum. Watts was lauded in the press as "among the greatest painters of all nations and times." (8) Six years later Bancroft purchased Watts's Portrait of Eveleen Tennant [Jessamine] (Pl. IV).

Despite the lapse of time, it was the visit to Turner's house that lay behind Bancroft's first significant Pre-Raphaelite purchase. In addition to La Bella Mano, Bancroft had also seen in the house Rossetti's Water Willow (Pl. VI), a small portrait of Jane Morris (1839-1914) depicted in front of Kelmscott Manor in Gloucestershire, where she lived with her husband, William Morris. In April 1890 Bancroft learned that the painting was for sale. He wrote enthusiastically to Darbyshire, "I have an idea that I shall be the owner of a unique example if I get this one." (9) Darbyshire responded with his own illustration of the painting, and described the frame as well (see Pl. V). (10)