Louis Huth - Assessment and Influence

Assessment and Influence

Barbara Bryant has recently provided a more sympathetic opinion of Louis Huth, who ‘was noted for his taste and collecting’, and she continued,'Helen and Louis Huth formed an extraordinary collection of modern paintings and decorative arts. Huth’s tastes turned towards the Aesthetic preoccupations of his friend Rossetti with whom he vied for the pick of blue-and-white porcelain in the 1860s. At about this time Watts painted Helen again in a work that betrays the increasingly Aesthetic taste of the Huths, as the figure wears pale whitish grey, verging on blue, a colour scheme equally apparent in the first painting they bought from Whistler in 1865, The Symphony in White, No. 3.'

As regards porcelain, ‘It was Rossetti who introduced to the beauty of the china of ‘old Nankin’ and Louis continued to collect it throughout his life’. Huth owned what at one time was regarded as one of the most important specimens of old Chinese Blue-and-White, the prunus-blossom vase, called a ginger-jar, which was sold at Christie's, when the Huth collection came under the hammer, for no less than £6,195, a huge sum in those days. This oviform (or egg-shaped) vase (lot 31 in the 1905 sale) measures 10¼ inches in height. It is decorated with branches of white prunus-blossom, upon a ground of blue which looks as if marbled. It is an example of the white upon blue, rather than blue upon white. On 3 August 1866, Rossetti had gone to see Huth’s famous ‘ginger-jar’. The vase’s latest outing was also at Christie’s, London, on the 7th of April 1997, where it was sold for £24,000 (an indication of how prices have fallen).

It can also justifiably be claimed for Huth that he was a major influence on the activities of one of the greatest collectors and connoisseurs of the late Victorian era and the Edwardian years, George Salting (1835-1909), also a member of the Burlington Fine Arts Club, and described after his death by The Times as ‘the greatest English art collector of his age, perhaps of any age’. Salting, who was born in Australia of Danish parents, is famous for having left to the British nation his great collection of art, much of which had already been placed on long-term loan to the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) and the National Gallery, and which bequest ultimately meant that 'Over 2,500 objects went to the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), 153 prints and 291 drawings were selected for the British Museum, and 192 paintings were chosen for the National Gallery. The range, as well as the quantity and quality of the works, remains astonishing. They include such iconic masterpieces as Nicholas Hilliard’s miniature of the Young Man among the Roses at the V&A, and Vermeer’s Young Woman Seated at a Virginal in the National Gallery. They extend from Turner watercolours to Byzantine ivories, and encompass among other things, oriental porcelain, Italian Renaissance ceramics, Japanese netsuke, Limoges enamels, jewellery, ironwork, textiles, bronzes, furniture, illuminated manuscripts, etchings, engravings, drawings and paintings by old and modern masters.'

In an article in The Connoisseur in 1910 the year after Salting’s death, W. Roberts commented:'Mr Salting, as is well-known, was a disciple of the late Mr. Louis Huth in the matter of art collecting, and he could have had no more competent a mentor. Mr Huth had for the most part formed his splendid collection – dispersed within recent years – before the pupil had seriously entered the pursuit of objects of art.' Another commentator has noted that following his father’s death and the receipt of his inheritance, Salting embarked on his ‘career’ as an art collector ‘with single-minded determination’ and ‘encouraged in his pursuits by the advice offered by his friend Louis Huth’.

Patricia Rubin has recorded that Salting’s ‘generous intentions were known to his friends and…influenced his collecting’, and that 'Of ‘eclectic mind and sensitive eye’, Salting was ‘cosmopolitan’ in his acquisitions from the outset. Inspired and guided by his friend Louis Huth, he was soon buying oriental ceramics of great quality and in great quantity.’ In Salting’s collecting of ceramics, the influence of Huth – by whom ‘he had been introduced to the beauty of the art form’ - was pivotal, as is recorded by several writers. By his will, dated 14 October 1889, Salting also gave various pecuniary legacies, including £2,000 to Louis Huth ‘who’, as Rubin has stated, ‘is credited with guiding salting’s early collecting’. Huth’s death in 1905 would have caused the legacy to lapse, but Salting obviously took no steps then or in the remaining four years of his own life to re-write the will or to add a codicil to it.

Huth’s collection of antique porcelain was first rate. By any parameters his collection of British paintings, let alone those of other schools, was of high quality, and Huth’s patronage of contemporary British or British-based artists, amongst them Watts and Whistler, was considerable. It is unclear how many of these paintings, particularly of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had already been acquired by Louis Huth before his marriage in 1855, but it is clear that the development of the collection from the mid-1850s extended to the commissioning also of one of the leading sculptors of the day, Alexander Munro.