Studio: international art (82.1921)

LORD LEVERHULME'S PICTURES:
HIS MODERN FAVOURITES. BY
MALCOLM C. SALAMAN. a a

FROM his earliest working days Lord
Leverhulme has collected works of
art, but his tastes have been too varied
and comprehensive to permit exclusiveness
in his collecting and restrict his enjoy-
ment to specialisation. His practice has
been to acquire, as occasion offered, the
things he cared for, things he felt would
bring beauty into his dwelling places, and
give him pleasure to live among, rather than
to seek, or to set agents seeking, the rare
pieces which professional connoisseurship
might ordain as requisite to fill lacunae in
his collections. " I buy nothing because
I am told I ought to have it," he said once
to me years ago, after he had been showing
me the treasures of art and craft he had
gathered in such variety and profusion in
his beautiful Hampstead home. " People
seem to think I employ agents to collect
for me ; but everything you see here I
have got myself because I liked, admired
and wanted it. I have always loved art
and tried to understand its various forms,
and I still treasure the first picture I ever
bought—bought simply for the pleasure
of living with it—when I was a grocer in
Wigan, living in a house at forty pounds a
year." That far-off memory, recalled with
such happy pride, may be taken as the key
to that continuous enjoyment which has
spurred Lord Leverhulme's hobby of
acquiring artistic things to keep pace with
increasing means and opportunities. One
cannot but feel this as one walks through
the rooms and galleries at " The Hill,"
North End, Hampstead Heath, where
amid the wealth of fine and applied art
that lends decorative beauty to the living
charm of the place, one may get a fair
idea of the directions in which this great
industrial chief allows his artistic tastes
to express themselves. Here are pictures
ancient and modern, water-colours, minia-
tures, prints, statuary, bronzes, Chinese
porcelain, Wedgewood ware, furniture of
all the periods when the craftsmen were
artists. It is not my present purpose,
however, to attempt a comprehensive
survey of Lord Leverhulme's collections.
In a future article I may be privileged,
LXXXII. No. 341.—August 1921

perhaps, to speak about the notable ex-
amples he possesses of the great eighteenth
century English portrait-painters ; also
about the fine group of drawings repre-
sentative of the great school of English
water-colourists for whom this collector
has always had a special fondness ; and
of the exceptionally rich collection of
William Etty's pictures, which are favoured
with a gallery to themselves, because their
beauties and qualities have long made a
genuine appeal to Lord Leverhulme. His
appreciation, defying, as it does, collecting
fashion, must credit him with far-sighted
connoisseurship, for Etty has yet to be
accorded his just place among the master-
painters of the nude female form. a
For the moment I must be content to
speak only of the series of pictures at
" The Hill " which one may suppose to
represent the most modern phase of
Lord Leverhulme's collection. Perhaps

"mother and child"
by lord leighton, p.r.a.

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