Entering the Victoria and Albert Museum’s jewellery gallery, one of the first things you see is a glorious spiral of gemstones, arranged in order of hardness. The display showcases the variety and beauty of gems used by jewellers ― but is that why they were collected by their donor, the Reverend Chauncy Hare Townshend?
If you read the small print on gallery labels, you might notice a line crediting the donor or collector behind the object. And, behind this rather dry information, we can often find a much more interesting story of generosity and scholarship but also of accidents, eccentricity and pride.
Townshend led an enviable life. His Times obituary of 7 April 1868 described him as “a lover of art, and collector of rare judgement and exquisite taste. Every house in which he lived had, indeed, the interest of an art museum”. One of his hobbies was collecting gemstones, partly for their aesthetic charms but mostly as part of his interest in mesmerism. This type of hypnotism, invented by Dr Franz Mesmer, was wildly popular, somewhere between a serious scientific inquiry and a parlour trick. Townshend, like his friend Charles Dickens, was an interested adherent and was also fascinated by table turning and spirit rapping.
Townshend’s 1840 book Facts in Mesmerism: With Reasons for a Dispassionate Inquiry into it described his attempts to stimulate the “animal spirits” of his subjects (mostly young women) through the application of gemstones. Most mesmerists worked by directing invisible beams of energy at their patients but Townshend felt that gemstones, with their innate qualities, might also produce a good effect. He reported that: “The diamond, when presented to the forehead of a sleepwalker, seemed inevitably to excite agreeable feelings; the opal had a soothing effect; the emerald gave a slightly unpleasing sensation; and the sapphire one that was positively painful […] One sleepwalker loved the diamond so much as to lean forward after it when I held it in my hand and to rub her forehead against it.”
Clearly the appeal of diamonds held even in sleep. And Townshend’s gem collection continues to bring pleasure aesthetically if no longer mesmerically.
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Further investigation of the gallery labels will reveal the name of Edmund Waterton under many of the rings. Unlike Townshend’s, this was not a generous bequest. Waterton had bankrupted himself, partly through his extravagant ring collecting. In 1871, his collection moved directly from his pawnbroker to the new museum galleries. Waterton’s collection of historic rings was intended to offer a miniature history of style and design and was linked with as many famous figures as he could manage.
It was also a pointed rejection of his father’s life and values. Charles Waterton, sometimes known as England’s first naturalist, was an extraordinary figure. He was a collector of natural history specimens, a taxidermist, a devout Catholic, when this was still a bar to entering universities and professions, and a deeply eccentric character. While Edmund enjoyed fine clothes, jewels and a life of luxury, Charles dressed so shabbily that he was mistaken for his own groundsman and slept in a room without window glass. Edmund’s magnificent collection, which gave him access to the antiquarian societies and notable collectors of the 19th century, was, in part, financed by opening up his father’s nature reserve for hunting and fishing.
Lady Jane Cory’s collecting was motivated not by mesmeric activities or family psychodrama but by a genuine love of jewellery. She entered society as “one of those lovely Lethbridge girls” and swiftly married Sir Clifford Cory. The marriage was annulled after a mere three months, leaving Lady Cory with an independent income and a wish to collect and wear a lot of jewellery, with historic jewels often modified to make them more wearable. She made her first offer to the V&A in 1918 with the generous thought that “Anything worthy of a museum ought to be in it, I always think” but met rather a lukewarm response. Despite this, when she died in 1947, the museum received news of the bequest of “all my diamond ornaments, jewellery and trinkets and a very small jewelled fan and all my laces, shawls and textiles also.”
The V&A were, at the time, quite suspicious of 19th-century design and approached the gift less than enthusiastically. The museum files note that: “The jewellery presents a bit of a problem. With one trivial exception, it dates between 1850-1880. It is nearly all English. Though there are a lot of unimportant pieces, there is much of the best work of the period… As you are aware, we have a fair representation of Castellani and Giuliano jewellery but otherwise our collection of 19th-century jewellery is unimportant.”
As the “trivial exception” included Catherine the Great’s diamond dress ornaments, rare survivors from the Tsarist court, it is fortunate that they were accepted. They became the splendid centrepiece of the current jewellery gallery.
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Without collectors and donors, we would lose much of the pleasure of visiting museum galleries and sometimes, it can be spiced with notes of mesmerism, bankruptcy and almost missed opportunities.
