Speech to Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, January 13, 1968
Mr. Cheek, Ladies and Gentlemen, and Fellow Collectors,
When your distinguished director invited me to address this dazzling assemblage, he suggested I talk about my collection. When I began to ponder my earliest conception of this word, the first thing that came to mind was the collection taken up in church, which, as a child, seemed to me the climax of the Episcopal service. I remembered the time when one of my brothers was pressed into service to pass the plate and got a negative response from one of the faithful. Each time the alms basin was presented, she pursed her lips and shook her head. Finally, in desperation, he leaned over and whispered: "Well then, take some out — it's for the heathen!"
Tonight, although the particular mania we are here to celebrate seems to have a different motive than passing the plate in church, I hope to prove that the end result is substantially the same — to enlighten the heathen. But first, before assessing the end, let us consider the beginning of the process. People are always asking you "Why do you collect?" which seems to me slightly impertinent — like asking someone why he smokes or why he beats his wife. Another favorite question is "How did you start collecting?" This question I class with "How did you meet your husband?" — more reasonable perhaps, but equally embarrassing, since the answer usually sounds rather silly. Actually, meeting your husband and starting a collection have at least one thing in common — few people at that point have the vaguest notion what they are in for, for this moment marks the end of innocence and the beginning of ignorance. Before, you merely hope and dream. But from that moment on, you begin to learn the hard way.
No, the most valid question you can ask a collector is "Why collect?" If he is an old offender, he will give you a valid answer, arrived at through years of error, enlightenment, effort, expense, and ultimately, euphoria. My answer happens to be best expressed by an old French proverb, obviously devised to justify that other human compulsion just mentioned. It runs: "Vivre à deux, c'est deux fois vivre," which means, essentially, that in art and in learning, as in life and in love, one plus one equals four.
Whatever you collect, whether it be books or prints or paintings or three-legged frogs (I once knew a lady who collected three-legged frogs!) your knowledge and understanding of the subject increases in mathematical progression as your acquisitions increase — provided — and this is important — provided you preserve a method in your madness. Indiscriminate collecting is not collecting at all, but simply accumulation, and serves no useful purpose. But once you decide what subject you wish to learn about, there is no better teacher than collecting the objects that relate to it. If you persevere and use your imagination and energy and resources to bring together the scattered orphans of your chosen field, you will become, in spite of yourself, that American dream, an expert. And again, in spite of yourself, you will begin to convert the heathen by infecting them with your enthusiasm as they in turn profit from your discoveries.
To illustrate my point I shall tell you a story. One day I had a telephone call from Agnes Mongan, curator of paintings at the Fogg Museum at Harvard. She was in great distress. A portrait the museum had recently bought in Paris, purporting to be of LaFayette, and to have been painted just before he left for America, had been pronounced a fake because the uniform he was wearing could not be identified. Could I help? "Certainly," I replied blithely, "Send me a photograph with color notes and I shall go straight to work."
I quickly took down from my shelves a dozen biographies of LaFayette and listed all the regiments he had served in from the Mousquetaires du Roi at the age of 13 to the Garde Nationale, which he commanded during the Revolution of 1830, just before his death. Then I got out the various French uniform regulations from 1770 to 1830, and assembled all the LaFayette portraits I had, engraved or original. Thus fortified, I settled down to a good night's rest while awaiting the photograph. Well, it was the last good night's sleep I had for the next two weeks, for when the photograph arrived it simply did not agree with a single one of the uniforms I had so carefully assembled. The Fogg portrait showed LaFayette wearing a blue uniform faced with red and trimmed with silver, whereas as a Mousquetaire he had worn red faced with black; as a Noailles dragoon, green faced with white; as a Continental general, blue faced with buff; as a French general, blue trimmed with gold, etc., etc. Nothing fitted the portrait, even the French National Guard of 1789, which wore blue faced with white and piped with red. For 14 days and nights I searched the archives, growing more and more discouraged. Finally, in the middle of the 15th night, I suddenly pounced upon my sleeping spouse, crying, "John! There were no Noailles dragoons before LaFayette left for America!" and bounced out of bed. All the biographies must be wrong. What was the regiment commanded by Noailles, LaFayette's father-in-law, before it became dragoons? Back to the bookshelves! There, on pl. 9, Vol. II of a ponderous Franco-German schematic work in 5 volumes, was the answer — an officer of the Noailles Cavalry Regt. in 1776, the forerunners of the Noailles dragoons, wearing blue faced with red and trimmed with silver. Only two things were still wrong in the portrait. Instead of the prescribed red waistcoat, LaFayette wore a white one, and instead of the prescribed turnover collar he wore a standing collar. Back to the biographies. Lafayette had spent his last summer in France at Court in Versailles playing in amateur theatricals with Marie-Antoinette. Young officers at Court set the style, and only later did the King's regulations freeze them into law for the army. Furthermore, a regulation of May 1776 permitted officers to wear white linen waistcoats in summer. Therefore, the Fogg Museum's portrait could only have been painted a few months prior to LaFayette's departure for America. Agnes Mongan was much relieved. The Fogg was delighted, and Anne Brown's collection had come of age and prevented a lawsuit. Had it not been quite large, the right answer would not have been forthcoming. A rather nice touch is that, as a final proof, the best picture of a Noailles cavalry officer of the period was found in Marie-Antoinette's own copy of the Sieur de Montigny's illustrated regulations of 1772.
Now we come to the burning question: "How did the collection start?" It actually started with a book [I hold in my hand,] which appeared in the window of Schwarz's toy store in Baltimore sometime in March, 1915, when I was nine. The First World War had just broken out, and being at an impressionable age, I had become very military-minded. Though I still jump if a gun goes off, I cannot hear a military band without following it, nor see a soldier pass in a full-dress uniform without wishing to follow him. [None of your battle dress for me!] Well, the bands were still playing in 1915, and the French poilu still wore red trousers. [(The Americans in their khaki were not yet in evidence.)] So when this book with a charging British Life-Guard on the cover appeared in Schwarz's window, I conceived a passionate longing to own it. The season was Lent. The parsons were pouring into St. Paul's Rectory to preach at my father's noon-day services. As I scanned the printed schedule of preachers, I fervently hoped that, as in times past, the Rev. Mr. Garth, rector of St. Mark's Church, Islip, Long Island, would occupy the pulpit on March 25th, which was my birthday. For I knew that, as in times past, he would take me for a walk after lunch, and would pass by Schwarz's, and ask me to choose a birthday present. All of this came blissfully to pass. But when we reached the shop window and out of its jolly jumble of dolls and games and skates and school-bags, his client selected The Wonder Book of Soldiers, designed to lure small boys into the British Army, he was aghast. But Anne was not to be deflected. Within a month she was a walking encyclopedia on the British Army of 1912. She memorized the regiments from the 1st Royal Scots to the 105th Madras Fusiliers. And she was fairly embarked on the mad course whose unmentionable end you will barely adumbrate when you glance at the exhibition of British soldiers from Henry VIII to George V in the next room. For the awful truth is that I could easily cover every wall and fill every case in the Virginia Museum with pictures of soldiers and have plenty to spare, yet I do not yet know half the story of even the prescribed uniforms of all the soldiers who have marched through history, let alone what they actually wore. However, I am still trying to find out.
The Wonder Book of Soldiers was promptly followed in the Baltimore Rectory by a succession of toy soldiers which my brother Herbert and I, flanked as we were on either side by much older or much younger sisters, used to parade around the Christmas tree. The collection was somewhat limited, due to the fact that our regular weekly allowance was 5 cents apiece, and each solider cost 10 cents. Years later when I married and John took me to Europe on our honeymoon, I resisted his gallant offers of feminine frippery, but went absolutely haywire in the toy shops.
Before sailing, I had taken a quick look in the old family house in Providence at the boudoir that was to be mine, and had decided that, with its hand-painted French garden wallpaper, its pink brocades, and antimacassars, it was not for me. So I suggested to John that along the route we buy a few toy soldiers to liven it up and make me feel at home. What I wanted was a parade, marching around the room which I proposed to cover with some neutral stuff and furnish it in the "modern" style.
When we opened the boxes we had casually shipped home, and measured the contents, we found that the new army was 288 feet long! Then occurred our first domestic crisis. What to do with the surplus soldiers? Poor John! He had visions of his whole ancestral mansion being converted into a barracks, with soldiers marching all over the house. The idea filled him with absolute horror. After a good many proposals and counter-proposals, punctuated by a few tears from the bride, we compromised. If I consented to confine the soldiers to one room, he would design vitrines to hold all of them.
The months that followed were busy and perplexing. Each soldier had to be identified, catalogued, have a number stuck on the bottom of his stand, before being put into a vitrine. Having not the vaguest notion what most of them represented — in which country they originated, or even which century — this was quite an operation. I was very weak in history — especially European — and downright deaf to dates. 1492, 1066, and 1776 were the only three I could remember, and here was a whole chronology in dress, weapons, and accoutrements that I could ill identify, but needs must arrange in chronological order on the shelves of John's elegant cabinets.
This problem led first to a search for textbooks. Since each uniform must have been formally prescribed, I imagined in my innocence that I had only to find the official dress regulations published from time to time, and supplement these with plates the tailors used to carry out their rather cryptic instructions. This would tell the whole story. But I soon learned that this was only part of the story — and the shortest and dullest part.
Of the millions of different uniforms — and I mean millions — actually worn since uniforms were first invented in the 17th Century, only a few printed regulations and tailor's plates survive — principally because the first were dull and the second not very pretty. But there were other books on the subject which were veritable works of art. These, for the most part, were published by rulers to impress other rulers with the awesome magnificence of their own army. Designed and engraved or lithographed by the leading artists and craftsmen of the realm, they were issued in small editions for which no expense was spared to make them attractive and impressive. Beautifully bound and often stamped with the royal arms, these books had appeared in every dimension up to elephant folios. They were too precious to throw away, and too restricted in interest to fall apart from use. Except for those cut up by interior decorators to make lampshades and wastebaskets, or adorn the suites of the more pretentious hotels, they could be unearthed by anyone odd enough to want them and determined enough to find them.
Trying to identify the soldiers in John's cabinets, I stumbled upon this royal family of books, which persuaded me to try and learn how to identify all soldiers in uniform, regardless of time and place. Sometimes I wonder how any sane adult came to be possessed of such an idea. But I went blithely ahead. This program led down well-beaten paths to those green pastures known as book-and-print collecting. Only, the path I had chosen soon turned out to be rather less beaten than I had supposed, and the pastures only green in patches.
I remember spending an unconscionable time on top of ladders in the back rooms of bookshops, hunting for what the proprietors out front told me blandly they did not have — books on military costume. They had them all right, but they didn't know it because no one ever asked for them. They had usually come from someone's library or attic in odd lots from which the saleable items had been culled and placed in the window, and the rest put aside to mold in peace.
At this period I knew only three individuals who would even look at such a book, when found. One was a cadet at West Point, one a freight conductor on the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the third a retired policeman serving as bodyguard to Governor Dewey. John promptly christened them my "military nuts" and held rather aloof when they made occasional pilgrimages to Providence to see how my collection was coming along.
The four of us would spend whole evenings on our tummies on the floor of what was known by now as the "soldier room," comparing the miniature figures with books from the "library," which was then housed in a small adjacent cupboard.
To cheer myself up after months of searching through the back rooms of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and San Francisco, I went abroad where there were actually whole bookshops dedicated to military books and prints, and whole societies devoted to the history of uniforms. I discovered that one of these — by then unhappily defunct — had been dedicated exclusively to the study of French military headdresses, and had published a magnificent illustrated periodical on the subject from 1909 until 1924!
At that time, several royal collections of uniform books — kings being not only the chief designers and changers of uniforms, but also the most avid collectors of rival kings' books — were being dispersed, notably the Tsar of Russia's. Timidly, I looked over the lot and bought those offering the most illustrations for the least money. But just as I believed I was getting somewhere, World War II started and I found myself right back where I started from — in the back rooms.
Two events occurred in the war which radically changed the course and tempo of my collecting. The first was the Battle of Britain. A bomb fell on Ackermann's, the firm that had published practically every notable uniform book and print issued in England during the past 150 years. This threw me into a panic. What if every uniform book in Europe were burnt up in the blitz? Then never again could one positively identify a uniform in a portrait, a painting, a museum. This horrid thought spurred me to action, and, throwing discretion to the winds, I began a vast importing operation, paying the price asked, sight unseen, and trusting to luck. It turned out to be the brightest idea I ever had. During four years of intensive submarine warfare, I never lost a book or a print through enemy action, and I brought in thousands, many of which would undoubtedly have been destroyed if left to the mercy of the bombers.
The second event was a bicycle accident during the gas shortage that laid me up for two years. Up to then, my collecting had been largely acrobatic and conducted from the top of ladders, or in cellars and lofts. Now I had time to think and — more important — time to read. In the catalogues that began arriving from all over the world — for no honey attracts more flies than the unbridled collector — I began to find all sorts of peripheral military art that had a place in the collection. This showed the soldier, not as he was supposed to look on parade, as in the kings' books, but as he really looked in bivouacs and in battle. The popular artists of every age — even some of the most renowned — had produced a vast conglomeration of pictures of soldiers. These appeared in illustrated histories of wars and campaigns, of units and individuals, and in the memoirs of men who had fought in far places and exotic climes.
I added these to the dress regulations and royal books, and also bought original drawings and watercolors, photographs, caricatures, and popular prints showing soldiers in every phase of their activity. Thanks to my enforced immobility, I had time to study this material, to read some of the texts, and reflect on its significance. Soon I discovered that two dominant threads were woven into this web of military iconography. The first traced the pattern of our civilization as it followed the paths of exploration and conquest, met resistance, triumphed over it, and finally achieved assimilation and stability in its new environment. The second traced the personality of the individual soldier who, more than any other professional, had been the pioneer of that civilization. Whatever the modern historians claim to the contrary, without the military man — whether soldier or sailor — no commerce, no science, no art, no religion, no literature, or even political stability, could have developed on this earth, since the peace and security required to establish all these were bought with his blood, and maintained by his discipline and self-sacrifice.
The more I looked at the soldiers in my collection, the more intrigued I became by the men they represented, these toy warriors marching to nowhere around my room, or decorating the snuffboxes, the fans, the handkerchiefs, the books and prints of every epoch. What had they been, what had they done to inspire so many craftsmen to labor meticulously to reproduce them in lead, in porcelain, in wood and clay, to paint them and draw them and engrave them on so many sheets of copper and zinc, to photograph them under fire at the risk of their lives, and to fill the pages of so many books with their image and their exploits?
I truly believe that no category of human endeavor — which leaves out the gods, the saints, and the angels — has been pictured more than the military profession. And why? Because they were picturesque? Yes, but so were actors and acrobats. No, I prefer to believe it was because, as men, they were admired and respected, even when they were feared, and that over the years the men who themselves had no urge to pioneer and endure the heat of battle, the artists and poets and composers, felt in their hearts a debt of gratitude to the military men who had earned them the privilege of living in peace. So they made these men immortal.
Wilmarth Lewis, the great Horace Walpole collector, in his recently published reminiscences, One Man's Education, says in his summing up: "Collecting preserves interest in living." This is very true. To a collector, like the girl in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, "Things just keep on happening." There is always something waiting for you in the next shop, the next gallery, the next catalogue. The next mail will bring an intriguing query that puts you on your metal. Or the parlour-maid may come up some morning and announced that your husband's 18th-century dwelling is beginning to buckle under the weight of your books.
This actually happened to us last Holy Week, whereupon the Blessed Season was passed in moving 5 tons of books out of the house to stacks at Brown University. It was a traumatic experience, believe me, with architects clambering about measuring bulges, and carpenters boring holes in the walls from cellar to garret, while Mama tearfully or cheerfully went about designating the books she consulted the least, and movers packed cartons and filled vans. This was known in the family as "Operation Book-Out" though it might well have been termed the Second Battle of the Bulge.
No, collecting, if truly passionate, is never dull. Only you must not forget certain important details, like keeping a careful acquisition list, making a catalogue, which you ultimately publish, answering all serious mail, and granting reputable scholars and publications every opportunity to use your collection for the dissemination of the true faith. The last and most indispensable component is an indulgent consort.
I married a distinguished collector of Old Master Drawings, who was invited here tonight to share this award with me. He declined, explaining that when he collected a wife, he found that further collecting was inadvisable for him, since two collectors in one house were beyond his means. Realising that my soldiers, no matter how numerous, could never approach his drawings in aesthetic significance, I decided to round the collecting syndrome of the Browns — which, incidentally, reaches back to the 18th century — by going modern and introducing quantity into the Elysian Fields of quality.
Having set out to collect the uniforms of all countries at all periods, I found out quite soon that I had an elephant by the tail. But being stubborn, I persisted, since there was no such collection on this continent, nor even in this hemisphere. So today, like the lady in the song, the tyro of 1915 has "rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, and an elephant to ride upon wherever she goes."
Anne Seddon Kinsolving Brown