Passionate collector

Masterpiece Watercolours and Drawings
Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, until 9 November

Even passion has its limits. The first Lord Leverhulme — that ‘Soapy Billy’ who founded Lever Brothers — was a man of many passions. Uxoriousness, philanthropy and, of course, hygiene swayed this confident, capable Victorian magnate. So, too, did art. Leverhulme devoted his final decade to the creation of the Lady Lever Art Gallery in his model village of Port Sunlight. A memorial to his adored wife, it is also a pantechnicon of the vast collection of artworks he amassed lifelong, but particularly during the 12 years of his widowerhood. Leverhulme had an omnivorous passion for art. Within that passion, inevitably, were blindspots and lacunae of indifference.

The Lady Lever’s latest exhibition, Masterpiece Watercolours and Drawings, is a selection of 35 works on paper from the gallery’s collection — 30 acquired by Leverhulme, five by the gallery’s trustees after his death to round out perceived gaps. An examination of the provenance of these works exposes the half-heartedness of Leverhulme’s partiality. Almost all were acquired late in life, many in the period after his wife’s death when he slaked his devastation with an orgy of arts consumerism. It is significant that among Leverhulme’s few earlier watercolour purchases is ‘Old Cottage, Pinner’ by Helen Allingham, a standard, pretty but simpering exercise in bucolic nostalgia, complete with blossom and attendant ducks.

Leverhulme bought the painting from Agnew’s in 1896. Two years earlier he had begun buying Chinese porcelain from the Bond Street dealers. On one occasion he paid Agnew’s more for a pair of Chinese vases than for a portrait by Reynolds. Allingham’s watercolour was less expensive. Perhaps it was an impulse buy. With its assured draughtsmanship, high degree of finish and safely romantic narrative content, it satisfies conventional Victorian requirements of a painting, a credo with which, up to a point, Leverhulme kept faith.