Sir George Scharf's Survey of British Art Collections 1856/7

This ambitious online database is dedicated to an extensive countrywide survey of old master paintings and objets d’artin British collections carried out between 1856-57 by the National Portrait Gallery's founding Director, Sir George Scharf (1820-1895). This arose from Scharf's stewardship of the Gallery of Ancient Masters at the largest exhibition of British and European art ever staged, the 1857 Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition - a watershed event in the history of the collecting and public display of art in the United Kingdom. As a means of accruing and recording loans to the Manchester Exhibition, Scharf travelled the country, sketching innumerable works of art across around two-hundred collections.  

In addition to compiling a detailed visual record of the country’s art treasures, many of which have become widely dispersed or untraced, the sketchbooks are full of rare studies of the countless people, places and things which Scharf encountered on his travels throughout England, Scotland and Wales. The sketchbooks are, therefore, also of immense value to anyone with an interest in the wider socio-cultural fabric of Victorian Britain.

The material covered by the database has been drawn from seven of Scharf’s personal sketchbooks preserved in the Heinz Archive of the National Portrait Gallery, SSB 43–SSB 49. Their contents represent what Scharf later referred to as “an ideal gallery on paper, taking the choicest specimens of every [old] master... in this country”. Scharf crammed his sketchbooks with thumbnail studies and highly-finished pencil drawings of hundreds of important works of art, alongside jottings and memoranda relevant to their appearance and provenance. Also represented in the database are the only plans of the Manchester Exhibition’s innovative chronological display of Old Masters and British Portraits. These form the basis for the first systematic digital reconstructions of parts of the exhibition’s ground-breaking hang.

The database is designed to be of lasting value to provenance researchers, as it greatly augments our knowledge of what was actually exhibited at Manchester, where it came from, how it was displayed, and where it is now. Users of the database can browse individual pages of each sketchbook, zooming in on and rotating Scharf’s sketches of hundreds of works of art. The accompanying itemised catalogue of what Scharf represented on each page provides hyperlinks to a wide range of museum and auction websites in order to help researchers trace the current locations of particular works. Supportive essays also review the organisation and ordering of the material in each sketchbook, providing a day-by-day commentary on Scharf’s packed itinerary during the period of June 1856 to October 1857.

Philip Cottrell would like to express his sincere thanks to the following project partners at the National Portrait Gallery and Heinz Archive and Library: Bryony Millan, Robin Francis, David Saywell, Carys Lewis, Julia Bell and Emma Cavalier. Further thanks go to Susanna Avery-Quash of the National Gallery, London, and Elizabeth Heath of Art UK. The database could not have been realised without the invaluable assistance of UCD research student Sarah Maguire. Further essential help was provided by postgraduate students Mark Tully, Geraldine Canavan, Emily Glynn-Farrell and Alison Flynn. Vital support and advice was also provided by Jessica Kavanagh, Head of Trusts and Major Gifts, UCD, and Carla Briggs and Elizabeth Varley of UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy.