Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff
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ornamental furniture with rich Frizes and Cornices over each, the Chimney Peices to be made of rich Marbles finely Carved, Statuary Slabs, Black Marble Covings, and back Slips, and bright steel hearths.
For the “Eating Room,” Clive’s plans were especially grand. He commissioned a set of four history paintings from Benjamin West, each one to commemorate a different scene of his Indian achievements. To be sure, such splendor came at a price. A 1774 invoice from Capability Brown “for building the New House and other Works done at Claremont” billed Clive for almost £37,000, and still the house was not done—nor would it be when Clive died later that year.46
As Claremont rose on its high foundation (to keep it above the damp), Clive turned his attention to a final area of acquisition. He began to collect fine art. Of all Clive’s many purchases, his art collection most transparently attested to his desire to cultivate an aristocratic persona. By the mideighteenth century, Old Master paintings and classical antiquities had become de rigueur props for British gentlemen. Privileged young men would start collecting on the Grand Tour, the long ramble around Europe’s cultural capitals that served as a sort of finishing school for the British male elite. The focal point of the Grand Tour was Rome, where the ancient and the Renaissance met. There, dozens of art dealers supplied “Grand Tourists” with everything they were expected to take home with them, from Mannerist paintings and Piranesi prints, to Etruscan pottery and Roman busts. Dozens more artists earned their livings by painting flattering Grand Tour portraits, the essential “I was there” record of the experience, in which Grand Tourists posed soulfully against backdrops of ruins, caressing antiquities in their hands.47
A Grand Tour had been well beyond the reach of young Robert Clive, who had had neither the money nor the leisure to pursue one. He would discover the art and culture of the Continent only later in life, though he made sure to send his son Edward on a Grand Tour at the appropriate age. By the time Clive became interested in art, however, the opportunities to collect it in London itself were greater than ever before. In the decade from 1765 to 1774, more than ten thousand paintings were brought into Britain from the Continent, almost double the number imported during the (admittedly war-torn) decade before.48 A testament to, and encouragement of, the widening market for continental paintings in Britain came in 1766, with the founding of Christie’s auction house. (Sotheby’s had been founded in 1744 but chiefly sold books.) Between 1710 and 1760 there were perhaps five to ten art auctions per year in all of London. Throughout the later eighteenth century, Christie’s alone held between half a dozen and a dozen major sales of European paintings annually.49 Aristocrats, connoisseurs, and middling sorts alike came together in James Christie’s “Great Room” to gape at and bid on canvases by Europe’s most admired painters: Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorraine, Sebastien Bourdon, Guido Reni, Salvator Rosa, Peter Paul Rubens, David Teniers.
Robert Clive knew nothing about paintings, but he knew that they were things he ought to own. As he freely confessed, he “was no Judge of the Value or Excellence of Pictures and…left the Choice and Price of Pictures to others who understood them…” If paintings “fit for my Collection can be picked upon by Gentleman to be depended upon I have no Objection.”50 In 1771, Clive called in several experts to advise him: Benjamin West, a Scottish connoisseur named William Patoun, and possibly his cousin Charles, who was a painter himself.51 Then, with the same blitzkrieg prodigality he invested in his lands, his houses, and his person (he ordered his shirts in batches of two hundred), Clive formed a major collection of Old Master paintings almost overnight.52 The record of Clive’s art purchases in the first half of 1771 alone is staggering. In February and March, he spent some £1,500 on paintings at Christie’s, either attending auctions himself or appointing agents to buy for him.53 In May, he contracted to buy at least six canvases for £3,500 from the courtier and dealer Sir James Wright. He planned to spend a further £2,500 on paintings Benjamin West had picked out for him in Brussels.54 “You will think me picture mad,” Clive wrote to his confidant Henry Strachey; he had bought some thirty paintings in four months.55
As these numbers suggest, Clive’s purchases were not cheap. At a time when certainly no more than one in ten paintings sold at auction cost more than £40, two of the ten paintings Clive personally bought at Christie’s in 1771 cost nearly that, and three others considerably more, notably a landscape by Salvator Rosa, “clear and beautiful, touched with great spirits and freedom, and one of the most transparent and brilliant that any where can be found,” for which Clive paid almost £100.56 Some of Clive’s most treasured and valuable acquisitions, such as a pair of seascapes by Claude Joseph Vernet, set him back the stratospheric sum of £455 2s. 7d.57 This was a drop in the bucket for a man whose total wealth in 1771 and 1772 ran to well over £600,000.58 The real issue was what his extravagance showed the outside world. As a piece of pure, pricey conspicuous consumption, Clive’s art collection delivered the strongest evidence yet of his social ambitions. Horace Walpole, always armed with a put-down, sneered at the “learned patrons of taste, the Czarina, Lord Clive, or some Nabob,” who were completely ignorant about the real value of art.59 (A fine comment coming from Walpole, considering that “the Czarina” Catherine the Great was soon to acquire most of his father Robert’s Old Master collection, considered the finest in Britain, for the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.)60 But to Clive, it was hardly of consequence whether or not he liked the art himself.61 What mattered most was that his collection be admired by connoisseurs, and “seen to great advantage” at Berkeley Square or Claremont.62
Clive’s Old Masters put the finishing touches on the aristocratic profile he had worked so hard to cultivate. As a collector of art, he acted out the role he had defined for himself by “collecting” parliamentary power, estates, and houses. Buying up intangible commodities such as these may not usually be characterized as “collecting” in the way that buying up paintings is. (Typically, accumulating power and property gets called empire-building instead.) But the motives—and the money—behind all Clive’s various kinds of acquisitions were identical. His art collection simply captured in miniature his systematic collection of everything else that a British aristocrat should have, from status symbols to raw power. Call it a collection, call it an empire: it was effectively both, amassed in his search for a place among Britain’s ruling elite.
What did this self-made creation, Clive of Britain, look like? Clive’s aristocratic ambitions are captured in a little-known portrait, painted in 1764, shortly before he sailed to India for his third and final time. The portraitist was his cousin Charles Clive, an artist much less famous (and less talented) than the fashionable society painters Clive usually patronized. Nevertheless, the image Charles produced was every bit as flattering as Robert could have wished.63 Clive stands out from the murky canvas in vivid scarlet, larger than life. (Scarlet, the hue of military uniforms, was definitely his color, and he had