A rich man should not always give his money to the poor

Studying, the other day, Nicholas Hilliard’s exquisite miniature ‘Young Man Among Roses’, I decided that it epitomised everything that was most delicious about Elizabethan England. Who, I wondered, gave it to the Victoria & Albert Museum, where the young man now stands in his briery bower? I discovered it was an Australian collector called George Salting (1835–1909), a dim figure who led an obscure life and then left Britain the biggest single series of art donations in her history, remarkable not just for its quantity but for its superlative quality.

The kind of person who amasses great collections often amazes me, and leads me to conclude that taste in art has nothing to do with either moral fibre or brainpower. After all, our two greatest royal collectors were both boobies: the foolish Charles I, who got us into the Civil War, and the selfish, silly and profligate Prince Regent. Crude men often develop the most discerning eye.