Waddesdon Bequest
In 1898, Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild bequeathed to the British Museum as the Waddesdon Bequest the contents from his New Smoking Room at Waddesdon Manor. This consisted of a wide-ranging collection of almost 300 objets d'art et de vertu, which included exquisite examples of jewellery, plate, enamel, carvings, glass and maiolica. One of the earlier objects is the outstanding Holy Thorn Reliquary, probably created in the 1390s in Paris for John, Duke of Berry. The collection is in the tradition of a schatzkammer, or treasure house, such as those formed by the Renaissance princes of Europe; indeed, the majority of the objects are from late Renaissance Europe, although there are several important medieval pieces, and outliers from classical antiquity and medieval Syria.
Following the sequence of the museum's catalogue numbers, and giving the first number for each category, the bequest consists of: "bronzes", handles and a knocker ; arms, armour and ironwork ; enamels ; glass ; Italian maiolica ; "cups etc in gold and hard stone" ; silver plate ; jewellery ; cutlery ; "caskets, etc" ; carvings in wood and stone. There is no group for paintings, and WB.174, a portrait miniature on vellum in a wooden frame, is included with the jewellery, though this is because the subject is wearing a pendant in the collection.
The collection was assembled for a particular place, and to reflect a particular aesthetic; other parts of Ferdinand Rothschild's collection contain objects in very different styles, and the Bequest should not be taken to reflect the totality of his taste. Here what most appealed to Ferdinand Rothschild were intricate, superbly executed, highly decorated and rather ostentatious works of the Late Gothic, Renaissance and Mannerist periods. Few of the objects could be said to rely on either simplicity or Baroque sculptural movement for their effect, though several come from periods and places where much Baroque work was being made. A new display for the collection, which under the terms of the bequest must be kept and displayed together, opened on 11 June 2015.
History
The collection was started by Baron Ferdinand's father, Baron Anselm von Rothschild, and may include some objects from earlier Rothschild collections. For Mayer Amschel Rothschild of Frankfurt, who began the prominence of the family, his business dealing in coins, "antiques, medals, and objects of display" preceded and financed his banking operations, and most Rothschilds continued to collect art.At least one of the objects now in the British Museum can be seen in a cabinet in the background of a family portrait from 1838, the year before Ferdinand was born. In his Reminiscences Ferdinand recalled his excitement as a child when he was allowed to help wrap and unwrap his father's collection, which spent the summers in a strongroom when the family left Vienna for a country villa.
The period after the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars offered tremendous opportunities for collectors of the decorative arts of the medieval and Renaissance periods. These categories were valued very little by the art market in general, and metalwork was routinely sold for its bullion value alone. Some of the older objects in precious metal in the collection may have first been received by the family as part of banking transactions; ownership of such pieces had always been partly a way to get some use from capital. Ferdinand records several complaints that his father did not make more use of his opportunities, but in his last years Anselm began to expand his collecting range, and it was he who bought both the Holy Thorn Reliquary and the Ghisi Shield. This golden age for collectors had passed by the time Ferdinand inherited his part of his father's collection in 1874, which was also the year he bought the Waddesdon estate and began to build there. Ferdinand continued to expand the collection until his death in 1898, mostly using dealers, and expanding the range of objects collected. In particular, Ferdinand expanded to around fifty the ten or so pieces of jewellery in his father's collection.
The New Smoking Room built to hold the collection was only planned in 1891, and the collection was moved in there in early 1896, less than three years before Ferdinand's death. Good photographs allow an appreciation of how the objects were displayed, in glassed cases and on open shelves around the walls, over doors, and over the small fireplace, which had an elaborate shelved chimneypiece in wood above. Several objects, including the Casket of Saint Valerie, were on tables away from the walls. Comfortable seating was plentiful, some upholstered with pieces from medieval vestments, and there were framed photographs and houseplants. The room is now refilled with objects from the same period though of somewhat different types, and visitors to Waddesdon Manor can see it from the doorway.
The room, with the adjoining Billiards Room, is the only reception room at Waddesdon Manor to follow the French Renaissance style of the exterior; the other rooms are in broadly 18th-century styles, and contain a magnificent collection of paintings and furniture centred on that century. The segregation of the collection was part of the concept of what has been called the "neo-Kunstkammer", adopted by some other very wealthy collectors of the period. The Renaissance Room at what is now the Wallace Collection and the collection of Sir Julius Wernher were other examples formed in England over the same period. The neo-Kunstkammer aimed to emulate the collections formed during the Renaissance itself, mostly by princely houses; of these the outstanding survivals were the Habsburg collections in Vienna, Prague and Ambras, as well as the treasuries of the Green Vault in Dresden, the Munich Residenz and Kassel. Unlike those collections, contemporary and recent objects were not included.
Baron Ferdinand was a restless and, by his own account, unhappy man, whose life was blighted by the death of his wife after giving birth to their only child, who was stillborn; this was in 1866. Thereafter he lived with his unmarried sister Alice. As well as filling positions in local public life, he was Liberal MP for Aylesbury from 1885 until his death, and from 1896 a Trustee of the British Museum, probably at the instigation of Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks.
Ferdinand recognized and welcomed the drift of high quality art into public collections, which had begun in earnest during his time as a collector. While most of his assets and collections were left to his sister Alice, the collection now forming the Bequest and, separately, a group of 15 manuscripts now in the British Library, were left to the British Museum. He had already donated some significant objects to the museum in his lifetime, which are not counted in the Bequest.
Baron Ferdinand's bequest was most specific, and failure to observe the terms would make it void. It stated that the collection should be
These terms are still observed, and until late 2014 the collection was shown in the rather small room 45, in a display opened in 1973. In 2015 the Bequest was moved to Room 2A, a new, larger gallery on the ground floor, close to the main entrance on Museum Street. Until the Chinese ceramics collection of the Percival David Foundation moved to the British Museum the Waddesdon Bequest was the only collection segregated in this way.
Renaissance metalwork
Much of the collection consists of luxury objects from the 16th century. Large pieces of metalwork in silver or silver-gilt make an immediate impression in the display, and these were designed to dazzle and impress guests when used at table, or displayed in rows on a sideboard with shelves like a modern bookcase or Welsh dresser. Many are very heavily decorated in virtuoso displays of goldsmiths' technique; rather too heavily for conventional modern taste. They are certainly ostentatious objects designed to display the wealth of their owner, and in many cases were designed to be appreciated when held in the hand, rather than seen under glass.There are a number of standing cups with a cover, many from Augsburg and Nuremberg; these were used to drink a toast from to welcome a guest, and were also a common gift presented in politics and diplomacy, and by cities to distinguished visitors. Their decoration sometimes reflected the latest taste, often drawing from designs made as prints and circulated around Europe, but there was also often a very conservative continuation of late Gothic styles, which persisted until they came to be part of a Neugotic revival in the early 17th century. The largest object in the bequest with a specifically Jewish connection is a silver-gilt standing cup made in Nuremberg about 1600, but by 1740 belonging to a Jewish burial society in Bratislava, as a Hebrew language inscription records.
Apart from pieces purely in metal, a number are centred on either hardstone carvings or organic objects such as horns, seashells, ostrich eggshells, and exotic plant seeds. These "curiosities" are typical of the taste of the Renaissance Age of Discovery and show the schatzkammer and the cabinet of curiosities overlapping. A different form of novelty is represented by a table-ornament of a silver-gilt foot-high figure of a huntsman with a dog and brandishing a spear. There is a clockwork mechanism in his base which propels him along the table, and his head lifts off to show a cup, and he would have been used in drinking games. There are separate figures of a boar and stags for him to pursue, though not making a set; these can also function as cups.
One of the most important objects in the collection is the Ghisi Shield, a parade shield never intended for use in battle, made by Giorgio Ghisi, who was both a goldsmith and an important printmaker. It is signed and dated 1554. With a sword hilt, dated 1570 and now in at the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest, this is the only surviving damascened metalwork by Ghisi. The shield is made of iron hammered in relief, then damascened with gold and partly plated with silver. It has an intricate design with a scene of battling horseman in the centre, within a frame, around which are four further frames containing allegorical female figures, the frames themselves incorporating minute and crowded subjects on a much smaller scale from the Iliad and ancient mythology, inlaid in gold.
Other major pieces are sets of a ewer and basin, basin in this context meaning a large dish or salver, which when used were carried round by pairs of servants for guests to wash their hands without leaving the table. However the examples in the collection were probably hardly ever used for this, but were intended purely for display on sideboards; typically the basins are rather shallow for actual use. These were perhaps the grandest type of plate, with large surfaces where Mannerist inventiveness could run riot in the decoration. They were already expensive because of the weight of the precious metal, to which a huge amount of time by highly skilled silversmiths was added. The Aspremont-Lynden set in the bequest is documented in that family back to 1610, some 65 years after it was made in Antwerp, and weighs a little less than five kilos.