Mr Felton's Bequests

By John Poynter, Carlton: MUP, 2003, 665 pages, hardcover, 40 pp colour plates, $89.95. Reviewed by Gillian Dooley in the June 2004 issue.

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The cover of John Poynter's Mr Felton's Bequests is adorned with an adapted quotation from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: 'The good that men do lives after them'. Even if we disregard the disruption of the bard's flawless iambic pentameter caused by substituting 'evil' with 'good', this tag sits oddly with this book. Mark Antony, in his 'Friends, Romans, countrymen' speech, plays with many layers of irony when he says, 'The evil that men do lives after them / The good is oft interred with their bones'. In this worthy, solid work, on the other hand, there is little irony.

Still, the point is well taken. Alfred Felton's gift to the State of Victoria is indeed enduring and valuable. After taking care of the needs of his family and friends without actually enriching them substantially, Felton left the remainder of his estate to be devoted, in equal parts, to charitable causes and to the National Gallery of Victoria for purchase of works of art. The capital available for the Felton Bequests Committee upon his death in 1904 was about £378,000, an amount which has accumulated over the century to many millions of dollars. The timing was also fortunate for the art world, since in the earlier part of the century art prices were much lower, and truly remarkable works were available at prices which would make the modern collector swoon with envy. So all that was necessary was for the Committee to snap up as many bargains as possible for Victoria's posterity.

As another of Shakespeare's characters says, 'Aye, there's the rub'. John Poynter gives a depressing account of the transactions of the Committee and the Trustees of the Gallery. Unfortunately, Felton, for all his years of experience as a manufacturer and businessman, seems not to have imagined that the procedures stipulated in his will would cause such problems. The principal difficulty was that his Bequests Committee and the National Gallery Trustees had to agree upon what to buy with his money. Since, for the National Gallery, the Felton Bequest was for decades virtually the only source of funding for acquisitions, they reserved the right to be fussy, and to accept only the best works of the best artists. The Committee, made up mainly of men who were often dismissed as amateurs by the Gallery Trustees, could make suggestions that could be turned down by the Gallery, and vice versa. Add a Director of the Gallery who typically had his own strong views, and it becomes a seedbed of discontentment and bickering.

It soon became obvious that it would be essential to employ a London-based advisor, and it is the unfortunate appointees to this position who excite one's sympathy most. They were employed by the Bequests Committee, and both the Committee and the Gallery had the right to reject any of their suggestions. Time after time the unadventurous Melburnians cautiously turned down gems now worth many thousands, especially works by French impressionists which were thought, at the time, to be dangerously modern. One wonders at the persistence of these London experts in the face of such dispiriting discouragement. The Press was no help either. Every year when the Felton purchases arrived and were exhibited, they regarded it as open season. With so much money to spend -- to the public and the press it would have seemed practically inexhaustible -- everyone has a tendency to think they could find a better way of spending it, if they only had the opportunity.

Even so the works bought with the Felton money are stupendous in their range and quality. Fifteen thousand art works have been added to the Gallery's collection from the Bequest, and their estimated value is $1.5 billion, an astonishing return on an investment of less than £200,000 over a century. The money is in a sense irrelevant, of course, because the works' value is intrinsic and unrealisable. Fortunately it is a condition of the Bequest that anything purchased with the funds may not be sold or disposed of. If this were not the case, the potential for cashing-in by money-hungry economic rationalists, or even 'weeding' of unfashionable items by a ruthless management, is disturbing to contemplate.

A book like this can never have enough illustrations. In addition to black and white text illustrations throughout, there are forty pages of colour plates, each containing two or three items from the Gallery's collection. The reader naturally wants more pictures (and perhaps fewer words), but this is nevertheless a reasonable provision. There is a list of illustrations, but it would have been helpful if they were also included in the index, which is in other respects comprehensive.

The first part of Mr Felton's Bequests is a biography of Alfred Felton. This is certainly a worthwhile enterprise, since he must be nothing but a name to many. He emerges as a sensible, clever and scrupulous businessman and a good friend and brother. He never married or had children, and was charitable and an avid collector of art. His career as an industrial chemist was blameless from the point of view of his own time, even if we might now question the wisdom of some of his products.

The charitable side of the bequest comes a poor second in the book. There has been nothing like the controversy surrounding the purchase of art works when it comes to distributing funds to worthy causes. Most of the charities involved seem to have accepted the decisions of the Committee without protest.

Poynter has set himself a difficult task with this book. The volume of facts he has had to synthesise and explain is huge. Dozens of personalities have been involved with the Felton Bequests, and only a few of them stand out. Poynter's deployment of the material at his disposal is sometimes less than elegant. Amounts given to various charities might have been better presented as tables rather than strung together in paragraphs. And his sentences are sometimes marathon efforts: too long, containing too many ideas and too many parenthetic interruptions. Nevertheless this is a major work of scholarship and a lasting contribution to Australian social and cultural history.

Citation

• Gillian Dooley. 'Review: Mr Felton's Bequests by John Poynter' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), June 2004. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 24 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• Alfred Felton, a bachelor of definite opinions and benignly eccentric habits, was one of the remarkable group of Melbourne merchants who dominated the economy of the Australian colonies in the decades after the gold rush. In 1904 he left his substantial fortune in trust, the income to be spent by a committee of his friends, half on charities (especially for women and children), and half on works of art for the National Gallery of Victoria, works calculated to 'raise and improve public taste'. The Gallery suddenly gained acquisition funds greater than those of London's National and Tate galleries combined, and between 1904 and 2004 more than 15 000 items were purchased for it by the Felton Bequest.
  
  'Although the last quarter of the twentieth century saw a dramatic and exciting expansion of Australian art museums', Patrick McCaughey writes in the foreword of this book, 'no institution could hope to replicate the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria assembled under the aegis of the Felton Bequest.'
  
  How the Felton Bequests' Committee carried out its tasks, in cooperation and sometimes in conflict with the Trustees of the Gallery, is a human story of many triumphs and occasional follies, of decisions made and unmade amid changing notions of art, philanthropy and public taste. John Poynter's account of Felton's life and the story of his Bequests covers most of Melbourne's history, from the unusual view point of three themes, business, art and charity.

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