Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves by Jacqueline Yallop

marriage into the industrial, and industrious, middle classes, she helped show the way for new generations of collectors whose enthusiasm would be supported by erudition. She challenged the conventions about how female collectors could act and what they could achieve. She took collecting out of the drawing rooms of her aristocratic heritage and on to the streets of a changing Europe.

Pride, Passion and Loss: Collecting for Love
    J OSEPH M AYER

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Waiting for the Rain to Stop

    J oseph Mayer was having his portrait painted. It was around 1840 and he was in his late thirties, a successful silversmith and Liverpool businessman, socially secure, reasonably wealthy, a man of fashion – and an emerging collector. 1 This portrait, the first Mayer had ever commissioned, was a way of marking how far he had come, and where he was going. His business was thriving: he was a partner in his brother-in-law’s jewellers in Lord Street, at the heart of the flourishing Victorian town. He lived in considerable ease and some splendour in a townhouse on Clarence Terrace, Everton Road (since demolished), establishing himself as a member of Liverpool society. But this was not just another standard Victorian portrait, reinforcing respectability and professional success. It was a statement about Mayer’s passions and ambitions, a portrait of an aspiring connoisseur. Surrounded by vases and busts, sculpture, classical marbles, Greek and Etruscan antiquities, Mayer was showing off the part of him that mattered – his collection.
    When it came to choosing an artist for the commission, Mayerneeded someone who would depict the story of his life in the objects around him, its bonds with the past and its potential for the future; someone who would pay as much attention to portraying the artefacts crowding the edges of the painting as to the man at its centre. He chose William Daniels. Daniels was ten years younger than Mayer, but was already becoming known in local circles. He was everything a painter should be: proud and eccentric, unreliable, passionate and poor. The town’s middle classes delighted to hear how he had been discovered as a boy in a ditch in the brickfields, modelling figures from the clay; how he had been adopted out of the notorious Scotland Road district, Liverpool’s poorest and roughest area, and introduced to the Liverpool Academy of Art by one of the masters, Alexander Mosses, and how he had learned so well and so quickly that he had won first prize for a drawing of a dying gladiator. Ashamed to clatter on to the wooden platform to receive his award in his clogs, Daniels had apparently borrowed a pair of boots from a gentleman’s son. This poignant tale of talent in adversity further charmed Liverpool society when the penniless Daniels fell in love with a pretty girl called Mary Owen, who was also penniless and whom he painted as a rosy-cheeked gypsy pedlar in an attempt to raise money for a wedding. When the portrait was immediately bought by Sir Joshua Walmsley, MP and Mayor of Liverpool, Daniels had secured a future. He had a patron, and, better still, a romantic reputation.
    It was not necessarily a straightforward commission. Daniels could be tetchy, puffed up by his sudden success and celebrity. He drank heavily, and, if he was in a sensitive mood, he would rage against the humiliation and sterility of being asked to paint to order; ‘his inspiration was always fleeting,’ explained one of his early Liverpool patrons, ‘and when out of temper he would slash a partly completed canvas or daub it with aimless strokes’. 2 But for Mayer, Daniels seemed willing to cooperate. PerhapsMayer adopted a ruse that had helped some of Daniels’ other customers manage the temperamental artist: one explained how he carefully displayed a ‘few guineas on a convenient mantelshelf in the hope of attracting him, thus doling out the price as the picture went on’. 3
    However it