Gendered collecting? An examination of the personalities,the taste and the displays of two 19th century collectors

'[Gilbert Osmond] was certainly fastidious and critical; he was probably irritable. His sensibility had governed him – possibly governed him too much; it had made him impatient of vulgar troubles and had led him to live by himself, in a sorted, sifted, arranged world, thinking about art and beauty and history. He had consulted his taste in everything – his taste alone perhaps.'
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady.

'[T]he arrangement and effect of everything … show … your admirable, infallible hand. It’s your extraordinary genius; you make things ‘compose’ in spite of yourself.'
Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton

Baudrillard’s powerful image of the male collector as ‘master of a secret seraglio’ is the starting point for this paper: ‘there is something of the harem about collecting, for the whole attraction may be summed up as that of an intimate series (one term of which is at any given time the favourite) combined with serial intimacy.’ In many ways the image fits the 19th century collector Alfred Morrison (1821-1897) of Fonthill; it does not, however, appear to fit Morrison’s neighbour the collector Madeline Wyndham (1835-1920) of Clouds House.

By comparing Morrison and Wyndham, this paper will explore both the prevailing stereotype of the masculine collector and an alternative feminine model. It will consider their economic circumstances and social positions, their taste and the display of their collections in their town and country houses.

Morrison, the son of a self-made millionaire textile merchant, was obsessed with status, collecting thousands of autographs and portraits of famous men and women. He sought objects of great value and engaged Owen Jones to create interiors of extraordinary and elaborate craftsmanship at Fonthill and in London.

Wyndham had no personal fortune but was confident of her aristocratic credentials; her great-grandfather was a Duke. While her husband Percy (the grandson of the Earl of Egremont) paid the bills and focused on horses, she developed close friendships with artists such as Edward Burne-Jones and an even closer relationship with his long-suffering wife Georgiana. The Wyndhams’ country house might have been dubbed ‘the house of the age’ but the interiors by Morris & Co were designed for a family home, for domesticity and intimate entertainment rather than display.

Morrison and Wyndham would appear to present very different approaches to collecting, differences that may reflect their gender. Both were known to the novelist Henry James and there are sufficient connections to justify comparing them to his fictional characters, Gilbert Osmond and Mrs Gereth. Like Morrison, the deeply unsympathetic Osmond is obsessed with status; he lures Isabel Archer into his aesthetically exquisite ‘cage’ (Morrison also married a much younger woman). But Mrs Gereth is also flawed. Her misguided attempts to save her only son from marriage into a (literally) ugly house are punished in the cruellest way, the destruction of Poynton and its treasures. Perhaps Madeline Wyndham was also guilty of exerting power from her position at the centre of her domestic stage, the equivalent of the seraglio. Clouds, like Poynton, was burnt down.