Collier Edward - Mr. Colliers letter racks : a tale of art & illusion at the threshold of the modern information age

A TALE OF ART & ILLUSION AT THE THRESHOLD OF THE MODERN INFORMATION AGE

Dror Wahrman

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wahrman, Dror.
Mr. Colliers letter racks : a tale of art and illusion at
the threshold of the modern information age / Dror Wahrman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-973886-1
1. Collier, Edward, 17th cent.Criticism and interpretation.
2. Trompe loeil paintingNetherlands.
3. Art and societyNetherlandsHistory17th century.
4. Newspapers in art. I. Title. II. Title: Mister Colliers letter racks.
ND653.C56W34 2012
759.9492dc23 2011042929

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed in China
on acid-free paper

For my father, Jacob Wahrman,
who would have loved this story

In the chronologically arranged display of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, hovering indecisively in a corner between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, is an unobtrusive painting titled Still Life, about 1696 (). I had lived for eight years just down the road before I happened upon it one spring afternoon shortly before closing time.

The painting is remarkable for its surprisingly modern trompe loeil effect. It presents itself not as a piece of art, but rather as an illusion of a three-dimensional yet peculiarly perspective-less object: a letter rack. On the rack three leather straps, attached with irregularly placed nails, hold an assortment of objects that are dispersed across the canvas while often lying slightly on top of one another. The top strap holds a feathered quill, a pen knife, a pamphlet of a speech by the king, and a newspaper. Behind the middle one is a blank notepad titled Memorye, a sealed letter with a face on the red seal, and another letter with an address that doubles as the artists signature: For Mr. E. Collier/ Painter att/ London. At the center of the bottom strap is a double-sided yellow comb, flanked on both sides by slightly phallic red and black sticks of sealing wax, burnt at one end.

I had never heard of Edward Collier. The museum caption identifies him as a minor Dutch painter who worked in Holland and England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. His painting has enough disconnected, enigmatic objects and finer details to encourage the beholder to lean forward and peer closely, but such an encounter is likely to end with brief puzzlement. I was about to move onthe museum guards were beginning to shoo us outwhen it suddenly occurred to me that there was something peculiar about this painting, something that I, as a historian of Britain, was in a position to notice.

Fig. 0.1 (following page): Edward Collier, Still Life, about 1696. 19 24 in. Indianapolis Museum of Art, James E. Roberts Fund.

The peculiarity was a political one. This canvas was painted, we are told, in 1696. Britain had recently undergone a momentous political upheaval known as the Glorious Revolution. In a move unprecedented in the annals of the monarchy, the English elite more or less fired their king and hired another. The new king, William III from the famous William-and-Mary duo, was the one whose speech dominated the upper center of Colliers composition. A Dutch prince, formerly known as William of Orange, he had arrived in London in 1688, supposedly by invitation of the most powerful men in England, to replace the previous monarch from the House of Stuart, James II (also the father of Williams wife, Mary), whose Catholic tendencies had rendered him increasingly unacceptable in the eyes of the English Protestant elite. James escaped to Europe, either having abdicated or having been driven out, depending on ones political point of view. In the eyes of those who believed that God, not men, appointed monarchs, such a substitution of royal line was illegitimate. William and Mary therefore demanded from all their new subjects an oath of loyalty, which many refused to take. The supporters of the now exiled James II, who wanted to see his restoration, were known as Jacobites. They were to remain a major thorn in the side of British political stability for the next half century.

The main beneficiary of the Glorious Revolution was in many ways the English Parliament, which had set key terms in the revolutionary arrangement while gaining valuable power at the expense of the monarchy. So here Collier painted a speech delivered to a parliament that many believed had overstepped its authority, by a kingruling by himself since Marys death in 1694whose claims to this title were perhaps a deception or an illusion. And he chose to position this speech prominently in a painting that was itself an illusion, a trompe loeil, proclaiming in its very form that things are not what they seem. Was this then a muted dig at the kings assertion of legitimacy? Such a political reading of the painting is perhaps encouraged by the sealed letter right beneath the kings speech. A seal, after all, is a guarantee of veracity and authenticity, the very issues that might have put King William on the defensive. Collier, moreover, called attention to the seal by making it such a striking red circle at the center of the composition; and the clear face on the seal could serve as a reminder for a royally minted coin bearing the image of a (legitimate) monarch. In short, I thought to myself as I scrambled out the museum doors, have I not just discovered something that always gives historians pleasure, a covert act of political subversiveness?

I returned home with a small mission: to try to confirm the hunch that Edward Collier was a crypto-Jacobite. I did not dwell then on the oddity that a Dutch artist would prefer the cause of a Francophile Catholic English king to that of a Dutch prince, even though Collier himself had followed this prince to London in the wake of the very same Glorious Revolution that I believed him to repudiate. And indeed it did not take long to unearth damning evidence that Collier was apparently guilty as charged. Several examples of his art from the period after 1688 included portraits of Charles I, the Stuart king executed in the English Civil War. These I took to be clear expressions of Stuart sympathies, thus confirming my initial suspicion.