The Secret Life Of An Heirloom

Matthew Dennison uncovers the remarkable travels of some of the world’s greatest artworks, often lost, hidden and rediscovered.

- Matthew Dennison

IN 1883, in a ‘shabby gallery behind a shop’ in London, William Powell Frith had his first glimpse in more than four decades of a self-portrait he’d painted at the age of 19. For £20, one of the 19th-century’s most commercially successful and lionised artists reclaimed a painting he had no recollection either of selling or of giving as a gift.

His autobiography doesn’t record his response to the shopkeeper, who assured him the picture was the work of a disappointed man: an artist who had died of drink.

The history of a work of art is subject to all the vagaries and vicissitudes of human existence. Like Frith’s student self-portrait, works disappear; like Frith’s, they resurface later, unexpected and unanticipated. Other works remain hidden, lost in attics, stolen, looted, reattributed. Works are destroyed by fire or flood, vandalism or warfare.

Artworks circle the globe. Like Frith’s self portrait, now in safekeeping in the National Portrait Gallery, their values fall and rise, their appeal by turns celebrated and denounced. They lead secret lives, at sea on personal odysseys that, in happier instances, end in triumphant rediscovery.

In September 1951, the widowed Queen Mary recorded her purchase, for the considerable sum of £5,000, of a cabinet that she noted bore the joint arms of the British Royal Family and the Duchy of Mecklenburg- Strelitz. The Queen understood perfectly what she was buying and the grounds for its expense: the cabinet in question was one of the masterworks of mid-18th-century English furniture-making.

The piece had been commissioned as a jewel cabinet almost two centuries earlier by a previous Queen Consort, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the wife of George III, who shared Mary’s passion for jewels, especially diamonds—Charlotte’s collection included a diamond stomacher valued ata staggering £70,000.