Compton Verney in Warwickshire, A New(ish) Museum in England 2005

Date: 16-01-2005
Owning Institution: Compton Verney
Publication: Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2010                  
Subject:   18th Century  19th Century  20th Century  Middle Ages & Earlier  Renaissance        

Compton Verney in Warwickshire is one of the most stately of English stately homes. Set in the rolling acres of a park laid out by Capability Brown, surrounded by a cluster of ancient cedars, poised beside a serpentine lake, the house was given its present Neo-classical façade by Robert Adam, who remodelled it for the 12^th Lord Willoughby de Broke in the 1760s. When the successors of Lord Willoughby went terminally broke, in the early years of the twentieth century, Compton Verney fell into disrepair. By the end of the Second World War, during which it was occupied by the Army and used as a base for developing varieties of camouflage, the house had become almost uninhabitable. Members of the Pioneer Corps are said to have celebrated VE Day by smashing parts of the balustrade of the Adam bridge that spans the ornamental lake, and hurling them into the water.

Ten years ago, when the house was on the point of complete dilapidation, its original Adam interiors ruined beyond repair, it was rescued by the philanthropist Peter Moores and remodelled once more – transformed, this time, from stately home into purpose-built museum, run by the Compton Verney House Trust, a registered charity, under the directorship of Richard Gray. Moores paid for all this via the Peter Moores Foundation, stumping up some £64 million for the repair of the house, its conversion into a museum and its fledgling collections, as well as several millions more to provide the institution with annual revenue funding. He is an unusual English multi-millionaire, in that he has plunged his money into art rather than into a soccer club (and, thence, into the bottomless pit of the football transfer market). His money, in fact, originally came from football, albeit indirectly, Moores being one of the heirs to the Littlewoods Pools empire – which makes him something of a one-man lottery fund. In recognition of this exceptional, idiosyncratic, evangelical project of cultural philanthropy, Compton Verney has been just been shortlisted for the Gulbenkian Foundation’s award for Museum of the Year.

The art that Moores has bought and put on public display there amounts to an eclectic mix of the good, the bad and the unashamedly ugly. There is an outstanding collection of Chinese bronzes and pottery artefacts dating from 2000 BC to 220 AD; an uneven collection of British portraits ranging from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries; a group of Neapolitan paintings, created for the most part in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including a wonderfully unrealistic panorama of Vesuvius erupting before the amused eyes of a group of lounging milords, comically unperturbed by the molten lava seething towards them; a modest accumulation of late medieval and early Renaissance German art; and an extensive collection of British folk art, including pub signs, a brightly painted ship’s figurehead, depictions of nineteenth-century bare-knuckle pugilists, a portrait of an exceptionally fat man, and such like.

The contents of the house are said to reflect its philanthropic founder’s own interests, although the collection of folk art, acquired en bloc from the collector and art dealer Andras Kalman, was apparently purchased as a lure to draw in what Moores has matter-of-factly described as “the ordinary people of this world” – that is to say “people who don’t feel they know enough to go to conventional museums; people without prior knowledge.” Visitors are encouraged to begin their tour of the house in its attics, the old servants’ quarters, which have been turned into a treasure trove stuffed with said folk artefacts – swelled by a somewhat random collection of Toby Jugs, porcelain dogs, swatches of fabric and other popular ephemera bequeathed by the textile designer Enid Marx – from where they descend, in a chronologically juddering sequence, to prehistoric China, Baroque Naples, post-Reformation Britain and Renaissance Germany. If there is a logic to the museum’s holdings, other than as a display of one man’s eclectic enthusiasms, it is perhaps that none of these areas of artistic endeavour – aside from British portraiture – are especially well represented anywhere else in the country.

Compton Verney opened as a museum last year, with considerable advance publicity, and although the place has gone a little quiet since then, it appears that this is just a period of hibernation. The house is closed to the public during the winter months and scheduled to reopen next spring, with an exhibition curated by Marina Warner, called “Only Make Believe”, which will take as its theme the relationship between play, children’s games and art, as well as an extensive exhibition of the seventeenth-century Neapolitan artist Salvator Rosa’s landscapes. The principal shows for summer and autumn will be “The American West”, an exhibition about both the reality and the myths surrounding the wild west, to be curated by Jimmie Durham, an artist, writer and poet who is of Cherokee descent; and a display of new work by the Belgian contemporary artist Luc Tuymans. Compton Verney has established itself as a venue for serious, or at least seriously ambitious, exhibitions, with remarkable rapidity. It remains to be seen whether its permanent collections can evolve, through sufficiently important new acquisitions, to put the place on the map as a significant museum in its own right. But recent developments suggest that serious progress is being made on that front.

When the museum reopens in the spring, three significant new acquisitions will be on display: Lot and His Daughters, a self-consciously risque treatment of biblical incest and overindulgence in alcohol, painted in about 1530 by Lucas Cranach, friend and confidant of Martin Luther, which Moores acquired for £870,000 at Christies in London; a Portrait of Mrs Baldwin of 1782 by Reynolds, acquired at Sotheby’s in London for £3,365,000; and A Female Saint carved in limewood by the German Renaissance master-sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider, of about 1515-20, bought at Sotheby’s in New York for just over £2 million. The last two acquisitions, in particular, are outstanding works of art.

The portrait by Reynolds is a depiction of the daughter of a merchant of the Levant Company, born in Smyrna in Turkey, who later married George Baldwin, a wealthy Alexandrian merchant and subsequently British Consul-General in Egypt. Mrs Baldwin was a renowned beauty, who charmed Dr Johnson’s friend, Mrs Thrale, into becoming her patroness – she charmed Dr Johnson, too, who cheekily asked her for a kiss on one occasion – and who made much of her own exotic charms. Reynolds depicted her in Persian fancy dress, reclining in a perfumed boudoir amidst swathes of richly patterned fabrics from the east, like a white woman in a sultan’s harem. His picture is a vivid document of the eighteenth-century fascination for Turkish life and customs, which was presumably inspired as much by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s celebrated “Embassy Letters”, with its descriptions of life in the harems of the East, as by the flesh-and-blood presence of Mrs Baldwin herself. It is one of the most sensual of all of his paintings, less a portrait than a kind of sexual fantasy given pictorial form, as well as a work that looks forward to the later romantic fantasies of the east painted by French masters such as Ingres and Delacroix (and, for that matter, Matisse). The Riemenschneider Female Saint is an equally remarkable acquisition, a sculpture of extraordinary delicacy and brilliance, with the sinuous elegance of late Gothic art, but animated by the emotional and spiritual energies of Renaissance art – a brilliant example of what Germany’s greatest sculptor was capable of, in the age of Michelangelo.

Compton Verney is still a museum in embryo, with a stated policy of selling as well as buying, and some selling may well take place to improve the overall quality of the collections. Certainly, such is the quality of the new acquisitions that they make some of the other works in the collection look all the more second-rate by comparison – shown up in particular are some of the more pedestrian English portraits, and some of the cruder German carved sculptures. It will be interesting to see just how much Peter Moores manages to raise the quality of the displays at Compton Verney. According to received wisdom, it is no longer possible to form great collections of historic art. Too much has already been purchased by the existing museums of the world, the argument goes, so that the prices asked for the art that remains have reached correspondingly stratospheric levels. But Compton Verney is visible proof that exceptional things can still be found, and purchased, in certain, still unjustly unfashionable areas of art history. This former stately home in Warwickshire seems to have metamorphosed, almost overnight, into a museum determined to compete with the major art institutions of London and Edinburgh, as no other supposedly “provincial” art gallery has done since the nineteenth century.

Photography by Compton Verney.