Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves by Jacqueline Yallop Page A

was, the portrait was completed. Daniels painted the dim light idling through heavy curtains, throwing the room into shadow so that it seems something more than a study or even a museum, something like a great ancient tomb, newly opened and packed with objects. He lets the papers twist open under the table, a glove fall to the floor, and Mayer’s spaniel peer, half-curious, from under his chair. The atmosphere is homely and relaxed, yet simultaneously strange and distant, as though Daniels is attempting to capture the sense of the past accumulating in the heavy quiet. And at the very centre is Mayer, contemplative and still; smaller than his sculptures and busts and the huge carved chair in which he sits, another piece in the collection, not separate from it but alive within it, a natural part of the things with which he is surrounded.
    It was a portrait of its time, evoking the idea of the chaotic, romantic antiquarian study that had been made popular by writers like Walter Scott and which was the height of fashion when Daniels was completing the commission for Mayer in the early 1840s. In Scott’s 1816 novel
The Antiquary
, he describes the ‘sort of den’ in which the collector might be found:
    It was a lofty room of middling size, obscurely lighted by high narrow latticed windows. One end was entirely occupied by book-shelves, greatly too limited in space for the number of volumes placed upon them. . . while numberless others littered the floor and the tables amid a chaos of maps, engravings, scraps of parchment, bundles of papers, pieces of old armour, swords, dirks, helmets, and Highland targets. . . The top of this cabinet was covered with busts, and Roman lamps andpaterae, intermingled with one or two bronze figures. . . A large old-fashioned oaken table was covered with a profusion of papers, parchments, books and nondescript trinkets and gewgaws, which seemed to have little to recommend them, besides rust and the antiquity which it indicates. . . The floor, as well as the table and chairs, was overflowed by the same
mare magnum
of miscellaneous trumpery, where it would have been as impossible to find any individual article wanted, as to put it to any use when discovered.
    In Daniels’ new portrait, Mayer’s study fitted the model perfectly. It would have been immediately clear to anyone seeing the painting, just what kind of man Mayer was (or at least how he wished to present himself); the viewer would have understood that by surrounding himself with objects in this way he was displaying himself as both fashionable and apparently learned. Daniels painted Mayer to look exactly how most Victorians thought a collector should look.
    In one hand Mayer holds a book. This is both serious and fitting, an indication of his connoisseurship. But when it came to selecting something particular for him to hold in his other hand, there was perhaps more of a problem. The random selection of objects in the painting aptly illustrates the haphazard and eclectic nature of Mayer’s collecting, which was enthusiastic rather than particularly knowledgeable. Although he no doubt wished to appear studious and erudite in his portrait, he was in fact much more likely to be guided by his instincts than by learning. He was not, as he admitted himself, particularly scholarly. He was the product of an average education at a local grammar school and his classical, historical and scientific understanding was limited and uneven. He could show Daniels an intriguing jumble of things to be painted but not the ordered, comprehensive collection of an intellectual. Some of his pieces were significant and historic; others were merely curiosities, and a few were little more thanhousehold junk. Mayer liked all sorts: rare antique objects from the ancient civilizations of Rome, Greece and Egypt, and broken archaeological finds from Anglo-Saxon burial sites; arms and armour, swords, guns and all things military; manuscripts from