Sir John Charles Robinson (1824-1913) was a central figure of the Victorian art world. Trained as an artist, his groundbreaking catalogues, which ranged from Italian sculpture to Michelangelo ...drawings to Spanish decorative arts, were models of early art historical scholarship. After more than a decade of service to the South Kensington Museum (SKM; renamed the Victoria and Albert (V&A) in 1909), Robinson’s position as chief curator was first redefined in 1863 when he became an ‘art referee’ and then abolished altogether nearly five years later. Not surprisingly, this episode has attracted some attention with divergent interpretations in the literature of the early history of the museum and publications that take as their focus Robinson himself. Another event of 1868, however, forms the subject of this essay: the two-day auction of Robinson’s collection of paintings, miniatures, and drawings. Undoubtedly connected to the change in Robinson’s professional status, the sale on 7-8 May (fig. 2) was the first time paintings and drawings Robinson had accumulated were displayed as a substantial group to the public. Although the May 1868 sale is addressed in both Davies’ work on Robinson and Elon Danziger’s account of the formation of the Sir Francis Cook collection, my discovery of the auction register in the Archives de la Ville de Paris clarifies formerly misunderstood aspects of Robinson’s attempt to raise funds at this time. The chronology of events—the restructuring of the curatorial staff at the SKM in the early 1860s, Robinson’s repeated protests against this reorganization, the sale itself held on 7-8 May 1868, Robinson’s private publication of his Memoranda on Fifty Pictures also in 1868—is straightforward enough. However, Robinson’s decision to hold the sale in Paris, with Charles Pillet as ‘commissaire-priseur’ and Alexandre Febvre as ‘expert’, and not London, the identity of the buyers at the sale, and the results of the sale—both the immediate financial result and the longer-term consequences for Robinson’s career—deserve greater attention and help us to understand the evolving definition of the role of the curator in the public and private realms, the cross-channel networks of the museum, collecting and commercial art worlds, as well as the relationship between art experts and the market.
John Charles Robinson (1824-1913), though apparently not a humble man, was indeed a vital protagonist in the story of the early South Kensington Museum. In 1853 he became the Museum’s first curator, ...gathering together the foundations of an internationally renowned permanent collection and publishing an important series of scholarly catalogues on the Museum’s decorative arts holdings. His diverse responsibilities at South Kensington arguably paved the way for modern museum practice, consolidating activities in the private sphere (such as art dealing and criticism) with his public roles as curator, conservator, researcher, archivist and manager at a government-funded museum. From his carefully thought out acquisitions polices, to his complex educational display schemes and scholarly promotional catalogues, Robinson’s work at South Kensington made him a key contributor to the professionalization of museum practice. This article analyses Robinson’s display schemes at the Museum, considering the private Parisian collections that inspired them, his attempt to teach good taste to the visitor and his influence on British collecting habits. It also highlights Robinson as a prominent figure at the centre of a vast network of important artistic names, whose infamous contribution to professional museum practice in Britain blurred the boundaries of the role of the private collector and public curator in the mid- to late-nineteenth century.
