Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves Read Online Free PDF Page B

visible link between the care and display of respected works of art and the perception of responsible Republican rule. Between 1794 and 1813, treaties with Italy as well as the spoils of Napoleonic conquests swelled the collections: three huge convoys of marbles and paintings from Rome, central Italy and Venice were sent to Paris, with the arrival of the last, in July 1798, prompting a spectacular celebratory festival. Throughout the period, ongoing confiscations from aristocratic families further swelled the Louvre’s acquisitions. After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, some of the works looted from Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Italy and Spain were, grudgingly, returned. For the next couple of decades, until 1830, the unsettled politics around the brief restoration of the monarchy also meant that attention drifted from the Louvre, funding faltered and the galleries were neglected. But this still left plenty to see. By the time of Robinson’s visits during the early 1840s, the displays included Egyptian antiquities, ancient bronzes, medieval decorative arts,Etruscan vases, rooms devoted to ‘modern’ sculpture and a gallery of Spanish art.
    Robinson was fortunate to be in Paris at the beginning of a period of active expansion of the Louvre collections. From 1848, in particular, with the birth of the Second Republic, the government invested heavily in the building and the collections, allocating two million francs for repair work. And as the French economy grew during the middle of the century, so too did the number of works on display: over 20,000 works were added between 1852 and 1870. But even in the years before this, it was a unique resource for a young artist. The Revolution and its aftermath had made it possible to view, in one place, a range of artworks from many periods and in many styles arranged specifically to instruct students like Robinson. The emphasis was on works that could be usefully copied, and on hanging pictures chronologically and by national schools of artists (with French painting given pride of place) to explore the historical evolution of style and technique, ‘a character of order, instruction and classification’, as one of the early museum directors explained. 3 This was a relatively untried way of displaying works, with only a handful of German galleries experimenting with similar principles; the National Gallery, in contrast, modelled its displays on the domestic traditions of private country-house collections.
    In Britain, art was crammed into rooms from floor to ceiling and displays were arranged according to the aesthetic judgements of the organizers, the size and shape of works – or just to accommodate the space. It was unlikely Robinson could have profited from the type of education he received in France. ‘Nothing has so much retarded the advance of art,’ suggested John Ruskin, ‘as our miserable habit of mixing the works of every master and every century. . . Few minds are strong enough first to abstract and then to generalise the characters of paintingshung at random.’ 4 Moreover, British royal and aristocratic collections were still fiercely private, and Robinson’s routine of drawing and studying from private collections could not have been easily achieved: ‘The country was indeed rich in works of art, richer perhaps than any other,’ Robinson admitted, ‘but these treasures were the possessions of private individuals, scattered broadcast in a thousand places and town and country houses, for the most part hidden treasures, often unappreciated by their possessors even, and but casually revealed to the world at large.’ 5 Even aside from such scattered country-house collections, there was very little for the student. Sweden had had a national gallery of art since 1794; in Amsterdam the Rijksmuseum opened in 1808; and in Madrid the Prado was founded eight years later. London’s National Gallery, in