Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves by Jacqueline Yallop Read Free Book Online Page A

harlotte and Charles Schreiber made twenty-three foreign trips between 1869 and 1882, spending around half of each year, and sometimes more, travelling in Europe. This had the advantage of being cheaper than maintaining an appropriately large and fashionable household in England, and they were eager to see the sights in the towns and cities they visited. But the driving force by far was their collecting. Prices abroad tended to be more reasonable, even for British wares, and Charlotte’s journals reveal how the Schreibers sought out shops and dealers, private collectors and museums, in a constant rush to view, compare, buy and sell objects. Whatever the length and tribulations of a journey, it was usually just a matter of minutes before Charlotte was out into the streets of a new destination, continuing her search: in August 1869, for example, she bemoans arriving so late in Gouda that they were ‘barely in time to save daylight to ransack the old dealers’ stock’; on 8 March 1872, they disembarked from the night train in Amsterdam and immediately ‘took a carriage and went straight to Van Houtum’s to see what he might have’. 1 The Schreibers continued their collecting at a similarly frantic pace during the months back in England, but theattention given to the European crusade in Charlotte’s journals indicates just how absorbing and exciting it was to be collecting abroad at this time.
    As we have seen, Europe was ready for collectors. Thanks to the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, the revolutions and political instability that accompanied nationalist movements in Italy, Germany, Denmark, Hungary and Poland; changes to the old structures of royalty, nobility and the church; growing urbanization; shifting patterns of wealth; fashionable commercialism and economic fluctuation, there had never been a better time to be collecting. In Holland, the Schreibers hoped to pick up the distinctive blue-and-white ceramics of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century delftware, or even ‘original’ blue-and-white that had been imported from China. Such pieces had been popular as domestic furnishings in the seventeenth century but had since dropped out of fashion and been relegated to back rooms and store cupboards, junkshops, auctions and markets. In Dresden, the Schreibers were on the trail of more ceramics, in particular from the renowned Meissen works, but they were also offered ecclesiastical relics and the entire interior decoration of a local church. In Belgium, they were shown choice examples of oriental china, imported from Japan, Chelsea ware that had made its way from Britain, and an ornamental metal picture frame that had once graced the palace of Louis XIII of France. All over Europe, objects that had been hidden away in homes, castles and churches were coming on to the open market, while new and expanding trade routes were moving objects across the Continent, and even the world.
    The Schreibers travelled from north to south, taking advantage of a changing Europe. But for all the riches to be had elsewhere, it was in France that the network for collectors offered most. As Robinson had discovered as a student in Paris during the 1840s, by the middle of the century, the French had already discovereda widespread interest in collecting. In Germany, in contrast, undisturbed collections of treasures from the Middle Ages and Renaissance continued to languish quietly in the houses of the nobility. But in France, in the aftermath of the Revolution, greater instability created a much more vigorous marketplace in which similarly impressive objects changed hands frequently. ‘The French Revolution,’ according to writer and critic Jules Janin, ‘began to break everything, to destroy books, to cut paintings in pieces. . . to melt gold and silver. . . to sell – at auction even – the marbles of tombs.’ This, however, was not the end of the story.