Norman R. Bobins, the Chicago financial consultant and banker, is a very professional man, but he shares his collecting passion with one of the most distinguished of all American amateurs, and indeed was first inspired by him.
In his autobiography, Reflections in a Silver Spoon, Paul Mellon, the American multimillionaire banker, philanthropist, Anglophile, avid collector of art — including prints — and successful racehorse owner, wrote with characteristic self-deprecation: “I have been an amateur in every phase of my life; an amateur poet, an amateur scholar, an amateur horseman, an amateur farmer, an amateur soldier, an amateur connoisseur of art, an amateur publisher, and an amateur museum executive. The root of the word ‘amateur’ is the Latin word for love, and I can honestly say that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all the roles I have played.”
More than 25 years ago, Norman Bobins visited the Yale Center for British Art — rated by Mellon among his proudest achievements equal second with the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington, after winning the Derby — and found himself particularly taken by the hand-coloured aquatints and lithographs in the sporting collection.
It was the print medium as much as the subject matter that interested him, which meant that in forming his own collection he was never tempted to acquire second-rate examples. His greatest concerns have been for the fineness of the impression and the quality of hand-colouring, along with visual attractiveness and interest of subject. The heyday of British sporting prints ran for a hundred years from the second half of the 18th century, and while many of the artists had particular specialities, most were happy to illustrate any sporting activity. Thus the emphasis of the Bobins collection may be equestrian, but it came to include not just horse racing, steeplechasing and fox-hunting, but archery, shooting, fishing, wild fowling, boxing and wrestling, fencing, cricket, golf, rackets, billiards, bowls, cockfights and such Indian exotics as boar and tiger hunts. There is also a good group of coaching subjects.
The collection is topped and tailed by two golfing prints. The first is an impression of the earliest golfing subject to be published, Valentine Green’s 1790 mezzotint after Lemuel Francis Abbott’s To the Society of Golfers at Blackheath, a striking, very 18th-century image of William Innes, Captain of the Club, and a Greenwich Pensioner acting as his caddy. The second, dating from 1870, is a coloured lithograph of the members of the Westward Ho Club, Devon, posed on the course in full Victorian formality, after a watercolour by Major F. P. Hopkins, a golfing artist known as “Shortspoon”.
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This is a collecting field in which quality is of the first importance. As J. H. Slater wrote in Engravings and their Value, first published in 1891 and frequently reissued: “The practice of buying anything, no matter what, which happens to take the fancy, is not one that can be recommended when the formation of a collection of prints is the primary object in view,” though it may serve for such casual purposes “as the decoration of the wall of a room”.
Print production was a considerable industry. Rudolph Ackerman published Pugin and Rowlandson’s Microcosm of London in an edition of 1,000. It contains 104 etched plates, and thus 104,000 prints had to be hand-coloured in watercolour. Popular sets of hand-coloured sporting prints could have involved similar numbers. Generally they were published unframed, but in wrappers. Others were preserved by being bound into books. Indeed, as with any early watercolour, it can be quite a shock to see an early impression in pristine, unfaded condition.
Not only the colours quickly lost their sharpness through exposure to light, but the plates themselves would soon lose definition and detail, especially when a print was popular. They might be retouched for new issues, but in time the wear becomes apparent. However, they were often sold on to other publishers, and still weaker impressions would be taken, sometimes without removing the original publication details. Colour-printing does not run quite the same danger of fading, but again, the plates wear down in time.
Reproductions have continued to be made by one method or another, and some are still being hand-coloured in the traditional manner, It is worth quoting Captain Frank Silzer at some length on the hazards for collectors, and on the importance of developing one’s eye. His Story of British Sporting Prints first appeared in 1925, but is still an invaluable first guide. “When minute inspection has been given to a print, the surface criticised, the back examined, if the print, where possible, has been held up to the light and looked through, when tone and colour scheme have been carefully noted, when depth of engraving has been appreciated, when the various points of technique which their flair will suggest to them have been assessed — there may come a moment (it frequently does come) when, in spite of all ostensible perfection, the would-be purchaser has an intuition that there is something wrong, a screw loose so to speak, an indefinable lack or superfluity — then I would say that nine times out of ten this presentiment is justified, and that the amateur would do well to follow his instinct and reject the print to avoid disappointment and trouble.”
No buyer in this sale will risk disappointment or trouble; Bobins has made sure of that by the care he has taken in his buying.
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The highlights of the collection are to be viewed in the pavilions overlooking the pre-parade ring at Newbury.
There is a great deal of social and other history among these prints. When away from hunting fields and racecourses Henry Alken delighted in “then and now” contrasts, giving us, in lightly caricatured form, the history of transport from the 1830s to the 1850s, not just the coming of the railway, but the short-lived fashion for steam cars and wagons. Rackets, we learn from Theodore Lane, originated in the King’s Bench and Fleet prisons. At different times ladies are present on, or absent from, hunting fields. In the aquatint by Attbalin after Joseph Constantine Stadler we see the future King Louis Philippe riding out from Orléans House, Twickenham, after Waterloo. We see that the Leander boat at Henley, around 1840, is rowed by a crew in top hats. We meet that unpleasant “wag” the Marquess of Waterford, who was said to be “half mad without a drink and quite mad with it”. His wife, the sensitive artist Louisa Waterford, seems to have been genuinely distressed when he broke his neck.
Sporting prints offer pleasures aplenty for almost everyone, including the constitutionally unsportive. This collection is among the best there is.
The sale of the Norman R. Bobins Collection of Sporting Prints is by Dreweatts at Donnington Priory, Donnington, Newbury on April 20.