Peculiar risks: art and insurance, 1780–1914

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Peculiar Risks:
Art and Insurance, 1780–1914

by

Avigail Edith Moss

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ART HISTORY)

August 2022

Copyright 2022 Avigail Edith Moss
ii
Acknowledgements
I was lucky to have excellent teachers at USC, and foremost in my advisor Kate Flint.
This dissertation has its roots in the work that I produced in Kate’s 2014 graduate seminar on
Victorian best sellers, where I first started to reflect on insurance as a peculiar, invisible
commodity that touched every aspect of the human experience. Since then, Kate has been a firm
supporter and guide, generously sustaining and pushing my thinking through her advising, her
readings of my drafts, and through her work. My understanding about insurance’s invisibility
relies upon her scholarship about Victorian visuality, and she has profoundly shaped my sense of
what it means to be an art historian, a cultural historian, and so much more. Amy Ogata has been
a vital mentor, helping me parse design histories, and offering incisive and unstinting feedback
on my drafts. Thanks also goes to my committee members, Jennifer Greenhill and Nathan Perl-
Rosenthal, whose work I admire, and who I hope will find value in these pages.
Other scholars and tutors shaped my project and contributed to my intellectual
development. Vanessa Schwartz asked early, probing questions about the insurance of
international exhibitions, while Sonya Lee’s seminar on the institutional collecting of Asian art
grounded me in the literature about imperialist museum and exhibition practices. I am grateful
for the guidance I received from Elinor Accampo, Suzanne Hudson, Ann Marie Yasin, Daniela
Bleichmar, and Devin Griffiths. Thanks also to Theodore Porter, whose UCLA history of science
seminar about data helped me to articulate the difference between the “actuarial” and the
“insurantial.” I would also like to thank former tutors at UCL, Mechthild Fend and Tom Gretton,
for guiding me through nineteenth-century histories of science and visual culture, as well as
Andrew Hemingway, whose scholarship and commitment inspires me.
iii
My thinking for this project was also shaped in co-organized seminars, workshops, and
conferences. Matthew Hunter at McGill University has been a generous, long-term collaborator
and insightful teacher. In 2015 we initiated a research project, “Art and the Actuarial
Imagination.” This led to two McGill seminars in 2016 and 2018, where our interlocutors,
Sophie Cras, Nina Dubin, Ross Barrett, and Oliver Wunsch graciously shared their time and
research. Over the years other scholars have also contributed their energy and enthusiasm to the
project, including Steve Edwards, Richard Taws, Timothy Alborn, Hannah Farber, James
Glisson, and Jonah Rowen. To the brilliant students in my 2018 USC undergraduate seminar on
“Art & Money,” and to the students in Matthew’s 2020 graduate seminar at McGill on art and
insurance, who thought with me about invisible services and artistic labor.
Many archivists, museum professionals, and scholars assisted this project. Anna Stone at
the AVIVA Group Archives in Norwich kindly accommodated my numerous visits and emails
over the years with good humor, often sending me art-insurance-related tidbits that she knew I
would find useful. Fahema Begum at the V&A Blythe House Archives patiently fulfilled my
complicated folder requests, while Zara Moran, Alex Leigh, and Barbara Pezzini helped me
navigate the Agnew’s Collection at the National Gallery Research Centre, and Marco Keiller
assisted my eleventh-hour visits. Alastair Adams PPRP with the Royal Society of Portrait
Painters kindly granted me access to his association’s papers at the London Metropolitan
Archives, while both Rosa Sepple PRI and V&A Senior Archivist Christopher Marsden gave me
access to the uncatalogued Royal Institute for Painters in Water Colours archive. Julie-Anne
Lambert was an invaluable guide through the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera at
Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries. John Wells and Martin Barrow facilitated my access to the Phoenix
Assurance Collection at the Cambridge University Library. Mark Pomeroy and Adam Waterton
iv
offered critical help at the Royal Academy, while Helen Smailes at the Scottish National Gallery
shared Henry Raeburn provenance information. Leanne Green at the Manchester Whitworth Art
Gallery, and Sian Yates at Lloyds Banking Group Archives and Museum in Edinburgh helped
me navigate the Walter Crane and Scottish Widows’ Fund material, while Victoria Lane at the
newly emergent Lloyd’s Archive in London assisted my research on Cuthbert Eden Heath. Brian
Wright benevolently shared material from his personal collection of fire insurance marks.
Further thanks to the numerous archivists and assistants at the Yale Beinecke Rare Book Library,
the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the British Library, the British Museum, the British
National Archives, the British National Portrait Gallery, the Institut national d’histoire de l’art,
the John Rylands University Archive, the London Metropolitan Archives, the Manchester
Central Library Archive, the Manchester Metropolitan University Library, the Middlesbrough
Central Archives, the Tate Archive, the Frick Collection, the Getty Research Institute, the Harry
Ransom Center, the Yale Center for British Art, the University College London Special
Collections, and the V&A’s Prints and Drawings Collection and National Art Library.
Appreciative thanks to Matthew Kidd (“Archive Mole”) and to the USC librarians and assistants
for making last-minute research possible under impossible conditions.
Thanks goes to the institutions that sponsored my project, and to the workshop leaders
who provided enriching experiences. The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
generously supported my work, and I am grateful to Martin Postle and Gillian Forrester for their
comments at a talk I gave in London about the Fine Art & General Insurance Company, Ltd. A
fellowship with the Victorian Society in America allowed me to travel with Ian Dungavell and Jo
Banham across Britain, visiting sites like the Albert Dock in Liverpool, Port Sunlight, the Watts
Gallery, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and many Aestheticist and Arts and Crafts
v
landmarks. Visiting these places afforded me a rare, emplaced, material understanding of my
subjects. A Mellon Fellowship to attend the NYU IFA Summer Institute in Technical Art History
introduced me to conservation studies and made me appreciate the many condition reports I read
in the V&A archives. At the Dickens Universe Conference at UC Santa Cruz I was most
intrigued by the life insurance thread running through The Life and Adventures of Martin
Chuzzlewit (1842–44), and I was also grateful to get to know Nancy Henry. Grants from the
Historians of British Art Association, the USC Graduate School, the USC Visual Studies
Research Institute, and the USC Department of Art History made further travel possible.
Conversations with colleagues at USC and at other conferences and seminars over the
years have sustained me. Thanks to Hector Reyes, Allan Doyle, Justin Underhill, Sol Jung,
Shannon Steiner, Robin Coste Lewis, Jason Nguyen, Christopher McGeorge, Caitlin Silberman,
Dina Murokh, Emily Anderson, Jess Brier, Grant Johnson, members of the USC nineteenth-
century art history reading group, and the USC Visual Studies Research Institute. Thanks also to
Pamela Fletcher, Bénédicte Miyamoto, Marie Tavinor, Adriana Turpin, Paul Melton, Nancy
Rose Marshall, Anne Helmreich, Erika Vause, Sharon Ann Murphy, Sabine Go, Martin
Lengwiler, Phillip Hellwege, and especially Robin Pearson. Tracey Marshall and Beth Massari
were administering angels.
To the friends and comrades who shared spaces with me, hosted me, messaged me, broke
bread with me, lifted my spirits, smoothed paths, and made life sweet and generally worth living:
Noura Wedell, Kerstin Stakemeier, Marina Vishmidt, Flint Jamison, Katy Smith, Dubravka
Sekulić, Nic Tammens, Tom Allen, Ellen C. Feiss, Danny Hayward, Oki Sogumi, Anja
Kirschner, Larne Abse-Gogarty, Ken Ehrlich, Janet Sarbanes, Jamie Stevens, Lisa Radon, Luisa
Lorenza Corna, Sara Farris, Peter Thomas, Patricia Lennox-Boyd, Nizan Shaked, Rafael Levi,
vi
Rebecca Cohen, Aaron Benanav, Greta LaFleur, Jessica Quiason, Louis-Georges Schwartz,
Daniel Marcus, Jaleh Mansoor, Jennifer Nelson, John Tain, Sebastian Lecourt, Grant Mandarino,
Tzuchien Tho, Judith Rodenbeck, Joni Spigler. Special thanks to the “LA Anti-Party Party
Crew”: David Adam, Samantha Blanco, Vlad Gallegos, Julie Zemel, Zen Dochterman, Amanda
Leigh Smith, Andrew Culp, Eva Della Lana, Daniel Spaulding, Alana Lebeaf, Lydia
McHam, Julio Cervantes, Anita Martinez, Esteban Félix, Lauren Graber. It truly took a village.
To my brother and my sister-in-law, David Moss and Chiyomi Azuma, and to my
parents-in-law, John Dentler and Maureen Leclaire, sources of exuberance and warmth. To my
parents, Tina Feiger and Andrew Moss, whose love and support has always been boundless. And
to my friend, husband, and away mission co-pilot, Jonathan Dentler.

vii
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... ii

List of figures ............................................................................................................................. ix

Abstract .................................................................................................................................. xxiii

Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1

A note on prices, inflation, and currency .................................................................................. 23

Chapter 1. Exceptional risks? Insuring art property ................................................................. 24
1. Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 28
2. Early-modern art logistics ............................................................................................... 24
3. Knowable risks: fine and applied art in merchant handbooks ........................................ 34
4. Insuring agents: art in transit ........................................................................................... 48
(I) Marine insurance history .................................................................................... 48
(II) Fortuna favet fortibus: art risks during the Napoleonic Wars .......................... 53
5. Fire insurance for middle-class and landed consumers .................................................. 65
(I) Fire insurance history ......................................................................................... 65
(II) Pictures in the Sun ............................................................................................ 70
(III) Rating art risks ................................................................................................ 79
(IV) Cataloguing art risks ....................................................................................... 84
(V) “Already dedicated to Moloch”: art insurance and landed property ................ 95
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 105

Chapter 2. Circulating risks – insuring exhibitions ................................................................ 107
1. Introduction ................................................................................................................... 107
2. Insuring exhibitions before and after 1851 ................................................................... 112
(I) Insurance before the Great Exhibition of 1851 ................................................ 112
(II) Insurance after the Great Exhibition of 1851 ................................................. 115
3. The Fire Offices Committee: the trouble with valued policies ..................................... 128
4. Contracting art risks: South Kensington Museum as gatekeeper ................................. 143
(I) Property on the premises .................................................................................. 147
(II) Loans out in Britain, or “a holy dread of porcelain” ...................................... 155
(III) Insuring loans abroad .................................................................................... 179
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 197

viii
Chapter 3. Ars longa, vita brevis – The Fine Art & General Insurance Company, Ltd ......... 199
1. Introduction: a business of art’s impermanence ........................................................... 199
2. “A damaged picture is a destroyed picture”: art insurance in the 1880s and 1890s ..... 207
3. Formation, branches, personnel .................................................................................... 216
4. Practices and policies .................................................................................................... 232
5. Agnew’s and the Fine Art: classing the art world’s risks ............................................. 250
(I) Internal affairs: insuring Agnew’s family and Fine Art directors .................... 252
(II) Domestic insurances, town and country ......................................................... 255
(III) Warehoused risks: the Pantechnicon and Bond Street .................................. 257
(IV) International trading: exhibition risks and magnates .................................... 260
6. Underwriters and art dealers ......................................................................................... 263
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 268

Chapter 4. Art into life – artists, emblems, insurance ............................................................. 271
1. Introduction ................................................................................................................... 271
2. Pelican: Emblematic contracts or imaging insurance ................................................... 273
3. Wolf: “Peculiar habits” or The Artists’ Annuity Fund and actuarial science ............... 292
4. Pegasus: Walter Crane and the Scottish Widows’ Fund ............................................... 325
(I) Radical origins, emblematic beginnings .......................................................... 326
(II) Sun Life, Scottish Union & National, and Scottish Provident Institution ...... 331
(III) Insurance and solidarity ................................................................................ 333
(IV) A Pegasus for the Scottish Widows’ Fund .................................................... 335
(V) Abstract mutualities ........................................................................................ 348
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 355

Epilogue .................................................................................................................................. 357

Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 366

Figures..................................................................................................................................... 414

ix

List of Figures

1. “Destruction of Naworth Castle, by Fire,” Illustrated London News, May 25, 1844, 340.

2. The four heraldic Dacre Beasts, The Dacre Gryphon, The Dacre Ram, The Dacre Dolphin
and The Dacre Bull bearing the arms of the Greystoke family, the De Moulton family and
Lord Dacre respectively. (Griffin, Ram, Dolphin, Bull), English, ca. 1507–25, carved,
painted and gilded oak, with tinned copper banner, Victoria & Albert Museum, W.6,7,8,9-
2000.

3. J. M. W. Turner, Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhoon coming on
(“The Slave Ship”), 1840, oil on canvas, 90.8 × 122.6 cm (35 3/4 × 48 1/4 in.) MFA
Boston, 99.22.

4. Thomas Rowlandson, Auguste Charles Pugin; Joseph Stadler, Lloyd's Subscription Room,
1809, from Microcosm of London, pl. 49, Hand-colored etching and aquatint, Sheet: 9
5/16 × 11 5/16 in. (23.6 × 28.8 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Elisha
Whittelsey Collection, 1959 59.533.1671(29).

5. Peter Paul Rubens, Rainbow Landscape, c. 1636, oil on oak panel, 137 × 233.5cm,
Wallace Collection, London, P63.

6. Hand-in-Hand Policy Register, MS08674-146, London Metropolitan Archives.

7. Detail with list of pictures insured and their prices, Hand-in-Hand Policy Register,
MS08674-146, London Metropolitan Archives.

8. William Bromley, after Philip James de Loutherbourg; published by Valentine and Rupert
Green, Robert Cribb and Christian von Mechel, The grand attack on Valenciennes by the
combined armies under the command of his Royal Highness, the Duke of York on the
twenty-fifth of July 1793, 1801, engraving, 585 × 797 mm, London © British Museum,
1877,0609.1821.

9. Sun Fire Office Instructions for the Clerks who write Policies, July 18, 1803, London
Metropolitan Archives.

10. Sun Fire Office Instructions for the Clerks who write Policies, July 18, 1803, London
Metropolitan Archives.

11. Instructions for the Agents of the Sun Fire Office. London: Norris and Son, 1822.

12. “List of Effects in Madame Tussaud & Sons Exhibition including Entrance passage lobby
& Chamber of the Revolution,” PX 1510/1, 1830s, Schedules of paintings, sketches, and
drawings, privately owned (1838–1876), Phoenix Assurance Collection, Cambridge
University Library.
x

13. [No name] PX 1510/4, c. 1830s, Schedules of paintings, sketches, and drawings, privately
owned (1838-1876), Phoenix Assurance Archive, Cambridge University Library.

14. “Catalogue of the Collections of Works of Art, Curiosities, and Decorative Objects of
Thomas Lucas,” PX 1511/3, 1883, Schedules of pictures and decorative art (1838–1930),
Phoenix Assurance Archive, Cambridge University Library.

15. [Catalogue of Robert Craig] PX 1510/40, 1854, 1856, 1861, Schedules of paintings,
sketches, and drawings, privately owned (1838–1876), Phoenix Assurance Archive,
Cambridge University Library.

16. [Catalogue of Robert Craig] PX 1510/40, 1854, 1856, 1861, Schedules of paintings,
sketches, and drawings, privately owned (1838–1876), Phoenix Assurance Archive,
Cambridge University Library.

17. [Catalogue of J. (or T?) Anson] PX 1510/17, 1845, Schedules of paintings, sketches, and
drawings, privately owned (1838–1876), Phoenix Assurance Archive, Cambridge
University Library.

18. [Catalogue of William Spike, Esq.] PX 1510/22, 1846, Schedules of paintings, sketches,
and drawings, privately owned (1838–1876), Phoenix Assurance Archive, Cambridge
University Library.

19. [Catalogue of Mrs. Elizabeth MacDonald] PX 1510/33, 1850s, Schedules of paintings,
sketches, and drawings, privately owned (1838–1876), Phoenix Assurance Archive,
Cambridge University Library.

20. [Catalogue of Donald Maclean Esq], PX 1510/15, 1845, Schedules of paintings, sketches,
and drawings, privately owned (1838–1876), Phoenix Assurance Archive, Cambridge
University Library.

21. “Drawing Room, Crewe Hall, Cheshire,” in Joseph Nash, The mansions of England in the
olden time, re-edited by J. Corbet Anderson; with the original one hundred and four
illustrations, carefully reduced and executed in lithography, by Samuel Stanesby. London,
Henry Sotheran & Co., 1869–1872.

22. Postcard, “Exposition de Bruxelles, 1910: Le Grand Palais en Feu Dimanche le 14 Août,”
Produced by the Official Exposition Committee. Collection: author.

23. Plan de l’exposition universelle de Bruxelles, 1910, A. de Boeck (Bruxelles), 1910,
Bibliothèque nationale de France.

24. Bird’s-eye view of destroyed sections of the Brussels Exhibition, Source:
https://www.worldfairs. info/forum/viewtopic.p hp?t=3273

xi
25. Postcard, “Bruxelles-Exposition, L’Incendie des 14–15 Août 1910 Bruxelles-Kermesse.
Un pompier arrosant le brasier.” Collection: author.

26. “Utterly Destroyed: In the British Section of the Brussels Exhibition,” Illustrated London
News (August 20, 1910): 284.

27. “BURNT AT BRUSSELS: TREASURES THAT ARE DUST AND ASHES,” Illustrated
London News (August 20, 1910): 268-269.

28. Photographs of electrotype loans from the V&A lost in the Brussels International
Exposition Fire, August 14–15, Belgium 1910, MA/35/10/2, V&A Administrative
Archive, Blythe House, London.

29. “From the World’s Scrap-Book,” Illustrated London News (September 3, 1910): 343.

30. Le Livre d’Or de l’Exposition universelle et Internationale de Bruxelles en 1910.
Bruxelles: Em. Rossel, 1910, 600, 532.

31. Sun Fire Office policy 567494, “John & Josiah Boydell of Pall Mall, Esq’rs,” March 30,
1790, MS 11936/413, Sun Fire Office Policy Registers, London Metropolitan Archives.

32. Guardian Fire Office policy, “On the Collection of Pictures, the Property of the late John
Julius Angerstein, Esq. deposited in his late Dwelling House, No. 102 Pall Mall, Brick
Built. £20,000 against Fire. Paid £50 yearly on the 25 March,” F/ANG/108, London
Metropolitan Archives.

33. Frederick Mackenzie, The National Gallery when at Mr. J. J. Angerstein’s House, Pall
Mall, watercolor, c. 1824–34, exhibited 1834, 18 1/4 × 24 1/2 inches. Victoria & Albert
Museum, 40-1887.

34. Left: Catalogue No. 1 of Paintings Insured in the Phoenix Fire Office by the Trustees of
the Salford Mechanics’ Institution, 1839. Insured: £1,180 14s. Right: Catalogue No. 2 of
Paintings Insured in the Phoenix Fire Office by the Trustees of the Salford Mechanics’
Institution, 1839. Insured: £820. [Salford Mechanics’ Institution], PX 1510/5, 1839,
Schedules of paintings, sketches, and drawings, privately owned (1838–1876), Phoenix
Assurance Archive, Cambridge University Library

35. “Exhibition of the West of Scotland Academy of The Fine Arts, 1841,” [total insured:
£6,108 6s. 6d.] PX 1501/2, 1841, Exhibition catalogues with inventories of paintings,
correspondence and other papers relating to fine and decorative art or exhibitions (1840–
1886), Phoenix Assurance Archive, Cambridge University Library.

36. “Exhibition of the West of Scotland Academy of The Fine Arts, 1841,” detail with
insurance valuations and other annotations. PX 1501/2, 1841, Exhibition catalogues with
inventories of paintings, correspondence and other papers relating to fine and decorative
xii
art or exhibitions (1840–1886), Phoenix Assurance Archive, Cambridge University
Library.

37. George O’Neill (1828–1917), Public Opinion, oil on canvas, c. 1863, Leeds Art Gallery,
Leeds Museums and Galleries, LEEAG.PA.1888.0086.

38. Great Britain, Spencer H. Walpole, and Charles Stedman, “Plan of the Exhibition Building
to Illustrate The Water Supply And Measures for Security Against Fire,” in First report of
the Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851...presented to both Houses of Parliament by
Command of Her Majesty. London: Printed by W. Clowes and Sons, for H. M. S. O.,
1852.

39. “Comparative Statement of Expenditure,” Report of His Majesty’s Commissioners for the
Paris International Exhibition 1900. London: H. M. S. O., 1901, 83.

40. Burning of the New York Crystal Palace, Currier & Ives, publisher, New York 1858,
lithograph with hand coloring, 9 3/4 × 13 7/8 in. (24.7 × 35.2 cm), Museum of the City of
New York, The Gerald LeVino Collection, 1957, 57.100.4.

41. Company No. 17414: Fine Arts Insurance Company, Ltd., Board of Trade 31/3060/17414,
British National Archives, Kew.

42. Irish International Exhibition map, 1907, PX 1634, F.O.C. Rules, Exhibition Rates: Irish,
Phoenix Assurance Archive, Cambridge University Library.

43. Irish International Exhibition map (detail), 1907, PX 1634, F.O.C. Rules, Exhibition
Rates: Irish, Phoenix Assurance Archive, Cambridge University Library.

44. Insurance Plan of the City of Manchester, Vol. II: “Key Plan,” 1888, and detail. British
Library http://www.bl.uk/onlineg allery/onlineex/firemaps/england/northwest/map
su145ubu17u2uf025r.ht ml

45. Sun Fire Office, “Instructions for the Clerks who write Policies,” July 18, 1803, London
Metropolitan Archives.

46. Sun Fire Office, “Instructions for the Clerks who write Policies,” July 18, 1803, (detail),
London Metropolitan Archives.

47. F.O.C. Rules, Exhibition Rates: Franco-British Exhibition, 1908, PX 1635, Phoenix
Assurance Archive, Cambridge University Library.

48. An example of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s display corridors: “The new V&A.
Textiles on display in Room 114, which stretched the entire length of the building (about
1,000 feet).” Source: Burton, Vision and Accident, 166.

xiii
49. “The Loan-Collection, South Kensington Museum,” Illustrated London News (December
6, 1862): 614+.

50. Norwich Union Poster Reproduction of Great Exhibition Policy for 1862, c. 1863 (002),
NU5363, Photo: AVIVA Group Archives, Norwich Union.

51. “RETURN OF LARCENIES from the South Kensington (Art) Museum, from 1859–
1897,” in Great Britain, Parliament, House of Commons, Select Committee on Museums
of the Science and Art Department, Second report from the Select Committee on Museums
of the Science and Art Department; together with proceedings of the Committee, minutes
of evidence, and appendix. London: H. M. S. O., 1897.

52. “Appendix, No, 28. Total Breakages in Museum and in connection with Circulation,” in
Great Britain, Parliament, House of Commons, Select Committee on Museums of the
Science and Art Department, Second report from the Select Committee on Museums of the
Science and Art Department; together with proceedings of the Committee, minutes of
evidence, and appendix. London: H. M. S. O., 1897.

53. Charles Thurston Thompson, “Side view of packing case and horse-drawn ‘van’ for
transport of Raphael Cartoons from Hampton Court to South Kensington Museum.”
photograph, 1865, Museum no. 44413. Photo: Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

54. South Kensington Museum Board of Education “Form Six,” Receipt for Circulation loans,
Circulation Loans: Documents relating to loans to provincial museums and the insurance
of objects on loan (1897–1931), ED 84/126, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House,
London.

55. “Form 605,” for Circulation loans, Circulation Loans: Documents relating to loans to
provincial museums and the insurance of objects on loan (1897–1931), ED 84/126, V&A
Administrative Archive, Blythe House, London.

56. “Rough Sketch made at West Ham (Passmore Edwards Museum) Robert F. Martin,
November 29, 1900,” Circulation Loans: Documents relating to loans to provincial
museums and the insurance of objects on loan (1897–1931), ED 84/126, V&A
Administrative Archive, Blythe House, London.

57. William Henry Fox Talbot, “Plate III: Articles of China,” in The Pencil of Nature, 1843–
44, salted paper print, image: 13.7 × 18.2 cm; paper: 18.7 × 22.4 cm (7 1/3 x 8 5/8 in.),
The Art Institute of Chicago, 2015.74.

58. “Circular 474,” Board of Education, South Kensington, London S.W., June 1901,
Circulation Loans: Documents relating to loans to provincial museums and the insurance
of objects on loan (1897–1931), ED 84/126, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House,
London.

xiv
59. “Form 605,” for Circulation loans, with edits on new requirements about insurance,
Circulation Loans: Documents relating to loans to provincial museums and the insurance
of objects on loan (1897–1931), ED 84/126, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House,
London.

60. “Form 605,” (detail) for Circulation loans, with edits on new requirements about
insurance, Circulation Loans: Documents relating to loans to provincial museums and the
insurance of objects on loan (1897–1931), ED 84/126, V&A Administrative Archive,
Blythe House, London.

61. “The Fine Art and General Insurance Company, Limited: Statement of Progress and
Financial Position,” June 19, 1901, Circulation Loans: Documents relating to loans to
provincial museums and the insurance of objects on loan (1897–1931), ED 84/126, V&A
Administrative Archive, Blythe House, London.

62. John Maclauchlan, “Museum and Art Insurance,” Museums Journal (London: Museums
Association, 1902): 347-348.

63. Form 605,” Croydon Needlework Exhibition 1901, UK various loans (1901–1905),
MA/35/132, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House, London.

64. “Form 605,” Arts and Crafts Exhibition, Port Sunlight 1904, UK various loans (1901–
1905), MA/35/132, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House, London.

65. “Form 605,” Birmingham Japanese Art Exhibition, 1902, UK various loans (1901–1905),
MA/35/132, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House, London.

66. Photograph of Case I. “Jeweled Jade, Crystal, Enamels, Damascened Work, Silver Work,
etc.,” India Delhi, MA/35/48, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House, London.

67. Unknown painters, three of seven details of pietra-dura work showing flowers and birds
on the walls of the Diwan-i Am, Delhi or Agra, ca. 1845. Birds, 24 × 16.5 cm, and
interior, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 292I-1871, 292F-1871, 292-1871.

68. Left: “Orpheus Panel,” watercolor on paper, 24 × 16 cm; Right: One of seven details of
pietra-dura work showing flowers and birds on the walls of the Diwan-i Am, Delhi or
Agra, watercolor on paper, both images ca. 1845, Victoria & Albert Museum, London,
292D-1871, 292-1871.

69. India, Delhi, MA/35/48, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House London.

70. Case 1 Condition report “Jeweled Jade, Crystal, Enamels, Damascened Work, Silver
Work, etc.” India, Delhi, MA/35/48, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House London.

71. “United Provinces Exhibition, Allahabad,” prospectus, map, Allahabad 1910, MA/35/47,
Victoria & Albert Museum Archive.
xv
72. Robert F. Martin’s report, Belgium 1910, MA/35/10/2, V&A Administrative Archive,
Blythe House, London.

73. Postcards: Bruxelles-Exposition, L’Incendie des 14-15 Août 1910. Collection: author.

74. Postcard: Bruxelles – L’Exposition de 1910, “After The Fire - View taken behind the
Main Façade (Entrance to Avenue des Concessions),” with detail of Valentine & Sons
concession stand. Collection: author.

75. Fine Art & General Insurance Company, Ltd. Prospectus (n/d, 1894?) SC/GL/NOB/064/9,
Theophilus Charles Noble Collection of Ephemera, London Metropolitan Archives.

76. Left: “Mr. Murray’s Handbook Advertiser,” at the back of art critic Anna Jameson’s
(1794–1860) volume, Handbook to the public galleries of art in and near London.
London: John Murray, 1845. Right: Letter to Charles Eastlake from J. & R. McCracken,
November 10, 1860, NG5/138/9-10, National Gallery Research Centre.

77. Left: William Agnew in the newly built gallery, 39 (later 43) Old Bond Street, by the
architect, E. Salomons, 1877 Image: Agnew’s 1817–1927. London: Bradbury Press, 1967,
29. Right: Frank Holl, Sir William Agnew, 1st Bt. 1883. Oil on canvas, 40 in. × 50 in.
(1,016 mm × 1,270 mm). © The National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 6991.

78. Map location of the Fine Art Insurance Company, Ltd. West End Office, London Gallery
Project, https://learn.bowdoin.edu/fletcher/london-gallery/map/

79. Left: “Lloyd’s - The Underwriting Room,” The Graphic (August 7, 1886).
Right: Cuthbert Eden Heath OBE, 1859–1939 © J.J. Heath Caldwell.
https://www.jjhc.info/heathcuthbert1939port

80. Right: Silver plate from Nelson’s “Nile” and “Copenhagen” Services, originally presented
in 1801 and re-presented in 1910, Lloyd’s of London. Left: Pair of Entrée Dishes with
covers featuring handles in the form of the chelengk rising from a coronet. 1801, made by
Paul Storr. 12.5 (31.7 cm) × 8 3/4 (22 cm) inches; height excluding handle, 3 2/5 in. One
side of the cover is engraved Nelson's Arms, with supporters; on the other side, the
inscription from Lloyd’s. Text reference: Dawson, The Nelson collection at Lloyd’s, 10.
Photos: author. With thanks to Victoria Lane.

81. Cuthbert Heath, Cadogan Mansions, 1892, watercolor, reproduced in Antony Brown,
Cuthbert Heath: Maker of the Modern Lloyd’s of London, 82.

82. Walter Crane, “My Lady’s Chamber,” color wood engraving, frontispiece to Clarence
Cook, The House Beautiful. New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1878.

83. Left: Hong Kong Fire Insurance Company insurance policy (1924) John Johnson
Ephemera Collection, “Insurance” Box 3, Oxford Bodleian Libraries, Oxford. Right: Fine
xvi
Art Insurance Company Shares Allotment Book with entries for members of Jardine,
Matheson & Co, at £10 per share, CU4070, AVIVA Group Archives, Norwich, Norfolk.

84. Royal Society of Portrait Painters Balance Sheet for 1891, RSPP Meeting Minutes (1891–
1898), AAC/3489/001, London Metropolitan Archives.

85. Edward Burne-Jones, Love Among the Ruins, engraved by M. Dormoy for The Magazine
of Art c.1 v.17 (1894): 48.

86. Fire insurance office nine-year comparative survey (1895–1903), Post Magazine
Almanack – Insurance Directory, 1903.

87. Fine Art Insurance Company circular, February 6, 1892, John Johnson Ephemera
Collection, “Insurance,” Box 3, Oxford Bodleian Libraries, Oxford University.

88. Right: Francis Davis Millet, Between Two Fires, c.1892, oil paint on canvas, 740 × 914
mm. Tate (insured for £350); Middle: Frederic, Lord Leighton, The Bath of Psyche,
exhibited 1890, oil paint on canvas, support: 1892 × 622 mm, frame: 2362 × 1187 × 195
mm (insured for £1,050). Total: £1,400 insured, September 21, 1894. Left: Fine Art
policies on the loan of Chantrey works to regional museums and galleries, 1888–1896,
RAA/PC/15, Royal Academy Archives, London.

89. Right: Imre Kiralfy, Empire of India Exhibition Official Guide, London: Earl’s Court,
1895; Middle: Imre Kiralfy, Empire of India and Ceylon Exhibition Official Guide,
London: Earl’s Court, 1896; Left: James Dromgole Linton PRI (1840–1916). Photos:
Hathitrust, Getty Research Institute, and archive.org.

90. Left: Unidentified photographer, Detail of the portrait of Henry James O.M. by J.S.
Sargent R.A. after being damaged by a suffragette, ca. May 1914, Photograph, 250 mm ×
283 mm, 03/5733, Royal Academy of Arts, UK. Right: Fine Art & General memo
addressed to the RA, May 11, 1914, indicating the Co.’s willingness to insure the picture
against all risks, retrospectively. AAD/1995/19/6/1, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe
House, London.

91. Fine Art & General Insurance Company Ltd. advertisements from The Year’s Art (1896).

92. Fine Art & General Insurance Company Ltd. advertisements, Post Magazine and
Insurance Monitor (March 24, 31, 1894): 204-205.

93. Calendar advertisement, Post Magazine and Insurance Monitor, June 11, 1904;
Advertisement reviews, Post Magazine and Insurance Monitor, 1905.

94. Left: Armand Rassenfosse (1862–1934) Fine Art & General Insurance Company Ltd. in
The Poster, April 1899, 141. Middle top: Armand Rassenfosse, n/d. Middle bottom:
Auguste Donnay (1862–1921) Fine Art & General Insurance Company Ltd., 1895, color
xvii
lithograph. Photo: Museu Nacional D’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona. Right: Émile
Berchmans (1867–1947), The Fine Art and General Insurance Company Ltd., n/d.

95. Fine Art & General Insurance Company Limited Circular (1897?), John Johnson
Ephemera Collection, “Insurance” Box 3, Oxford Bodleian Libraries, Oxford University.

96. Francis Eginton, Published by James Bisset, Draft Trade card of the Phoenix Company,
insurance brokers, c. 1800, paper trade card, © British Museum, Banks, 7.13.

97. George Richardson, Iconology; or, A collection of emblematical figures; containing four
hundred and twenty-four remarkable subjects, moral and instructive; in which are
displayed the beauty of virtue and deformity of vice ... Printed for the author by George
Scott, London, 1779 (again 1785), 4 vols. in 2 books, hand-colored edition. 49.C.12 +13.
National Art Library, V&A Museum, London.

98. “Plan of the Pantechnicon,” Sun Insurance Company’s scrapbook, “Pantechnicon on
Motcomb Street” (1874–1882), CLC/B/192/DD/028/MS38840/002, London Metropolitan
Archives. Photo: Archive Mole.

99. Left: “Ruins of the Belgravia Pantechnicon,” The Illustrated London News (February 28,
1874): 208. Right: Pantechnicon today (October 6, 2012) Image source: Wikipedia.

100. Left: Memorial exhibition of the works of George Frederick Watts in the Royal Scottish
Academy Galleries, 1905. Right: G. F. Watts Gallery Compton, Surrey Photo: author.

101. Henry Raeburn [Jr.] on a Grey Pony, after Henry Raeburn (1756–1823), oil on panel, c.
1796? Scottish National Gallery: Paxton House, NG 1026.

102. Sale of Henry Raeburn [Jr.] on a Grey Pony, Thomas Agnew & Son’s Picture Stock
Books (1909–19), pp. 128-129, NGA27/1/1/11, National Gallery Research Center,
London.

103. Bernard Baron, After Bernard Picart, Published by Thomas Bowles II, A monument
dedicated to posterity in commemoration of the incredible folly transacted in the year
1720, 1720, etching and engraving, 246 mm × 347 mm, © British Museum,
1862,0614.1423.

104. Left: Bill-head of George Mackereth, insurance broker, 1780, Trade cards Banks 7.6, ©
British Museum, London, D,2.2667. Middle and Right: Trade cards for insurance agent
and broker, John Johnson Ephemera Collection, Trade Cards (11, 26), Oxford Bodleian
Libraries.

105. Top: William Hamilton, R.A. (1751–1801), Pelican Life Insurance Company policy
heading, engraved by H. Richter. Engraving, 25 × 19 cm, John Johnson Ephemera
Collection, Insurance, Box ?, Oxford Bodleian Libraries, Oxford University; Left bottom:
Pelican Life Insurance Company Policy, 1790–1798, Heal and Banks Collection, ©
xviii
British Museum, 1915,0511.16; Right bottom: William Hogarth, Hymen and Cupid,
ticket, engraving, 218 × 209 mm, 1740, © British Museum, 1983,U.3868.

106. Aesop, and Robert Dodsley, Select fables of Esop and other fabulists. In three books.
London: printed for J. Dodsley, in Pall-Mall, 1761, reprinted 1793, 153-154.

107. Top left: Pelican Life Insurance Company trade card, Heal and Banks Collection, ©
British Museum; Top right: “The Pelican in her piety” ceiling at Lanydroc House,
Cornwall, National Trust, Reproduced in Peter Daly, The English Emblem and the
Continental Tradition, New York: AMS 1988, 37; Bottom: The “Pelican” portrait, Queen
Elizabeth I associated to Nicholas Hilliard, oil on panel © Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool;
The “Phoenix” portrait, Queen Elizabeth I associated with Nicholas Hilliard, oil on panel,
NPG 190. Around 1573 / 1575. (Plus details).

108. Cornelius Boel, frontispiece, King James Bible, engraving, 1611.

109. George Richardson, Iconology; or, A collection of emblematical figures; containing four
hundred and twenty-four remarkable subjects, moral and instructive; in which are
displayed the beauty of virtue and deformity of vice ... Printed for the author by George
Scott, London, 1779 (again 1785), 4 vols. in 2 books, hand-colored edition, 49.C.12 +13,
National Art Library, V&A Museum, London.

110. “Compassion,” vol. 2, 49.C.13, plate 52.

111. “Impiety,” vol. 2, 49.C.13, plate 91.

112. George Richardson, Iconology, subscriber list.

113. Left: James Thompson after J T Barber Beaumont, published by Lupton Relfe, J. T.
Barber Beaumont, stipple and engraving, 225 mm × 138 mm, illustration to the European
Magazine, 1822, © British Museum, g1876,1209.38; Right: Samuel Rawle after George
Rawle, Published by James Asperne, The County Fire and Provident Life Office, Regent
Street, Piccadilly, etching, frontispiece to the European Magazine, Vol 77. (1820) ©
British Museum, 1865,0708.863.

114. William Hogarth (1697–1764); Charles Grignion (1721–1810); Samuel Wale (d. 1786), A
catalogue of the pictures, sculptures, models, drawings, prints, &c. : exhibited by the
Society of Artists of Great Britain, at the great room in Spring-Garden, Charing Cross,
May the 9th, 1761, (being the second year of their exhibition) Spring-Garden. London:
Society of Artists of Great Britain, 1761.

115. John Pye, “Diagram of the Constitution of the Artists’ Fund, established 1810, as secured
by Incorporation 1827,” in Patronage of British Art, An Historical Sketch [...]. London:
Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman’s, 1845, 327.

xix
116. Oddfellows membership cards (1820s–1830s), Prospectus for a benefit societies’ special
asylum (1829?) Friendly Societies, Box 12, John Johnson Collection, Oxford Bodleian
Library.

117. Left: John Nixon, Freemasons’ Tavern, watercolor, c. 1800, location unknown; Right:
Anniversary Dinner Tickets 1832, 1833, Artists’ Benevolent Fund form book (1825-
1843), CLC/114/MS23670, Artists’ Annuity and Benevolent Fund, London Metropolitan
Archives.

118. Society for the Management and Distribution of the Artists’ Fund (London, England), The
regulations of the Artists’ joint stock fund, established March 22d, 1810 ... Governors:
Arthur William Devis, George Hawkins [et al.]. London: J. Tyler, Rathbone Place, 1811.

119. John Pye’s application form upper right corner, aged 30, 1813, Annuity Fund Proposals
for Membership 1812–1841, CLC/114/MS23663/1, Artists’ Annuity and Benevolent
Fund, London Metropolitan Archives.

120. John Pye, Patronage of British Art, An Historical Sketch [...]. London: Longman, Brown,
Green, and Longman’s, 1845.

121. William Mulready, Study of a Standing Female Nude, May 1851, drawing, 27.5 × 15.7
cm, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 6459.

122. William Mulready, sketches in John Pye, Patronage of British Art, An Historical
Sketch [...]. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman’s, 1845.

123. William Mulready, The Wolf and the Lamb, exhibited RA 1820, oil on panel, 60.0 × 51.1
cm, Royal Collection Trust, UK, RCIN 405539.

124. Left: William Mulready, Study for The Wolf and the Lamb, 1823?, pen and brown ink on
paper. Full sheet: 7 3/16 × 4 1/4 inches (183 × 109 mm); design area: 3 1/4 × 4 3/8 inches
(82 × 109 mm), The Morgan Library & Museum, 1988.42. Middle: Charles le Brun,
“Rapport de la figure humaine avec celle du loup,” Dissertation Sur Un Traité De Charles
Le Brun, Concernant Le Rapport De La Physionomie Humaine Avec Celle Des Animaux;
Ouvrage Enrichi De La Gravure Des Dessins Tracés Pour La Demonstration De Ce
Système. (Paris, à la calcographie du Musée Napoléon, 1806). Right: The Wolf and the
Lamb, 1828, John Henry Robinson after a painting of 1820 by William Mulready,
Published by William Bernard Cooke, Publisher F. Scotney, 45 Great Russell Street,
London. Publisher W. Radclyffe, Birmingham, Etching and engraving (stipple), Plate: 17
5/16 × 22 1/16 inches (44 × 56 cm) Sheet: 21 5/8 × 27 1/2 inches (54.9 × 69.9 cm),
Philadelphia Museum of Art.

125. William Mulready, Portrait of the painter Arthur William Devis; bust, in profile to the left,
with short hair, wearing jacket and bow tie. Ink on paper. Later illustration to John Pye’s
Patronage of British Art (1845). Album of drawings and prints by William Mulready
xx
(1786–1863), early nineteenth century, V&A Museum, London, D.28-1886. Photo:
author.

126. Right: Edmund Halley’s Life Table, 1693. Left: Richard Price’s Northampton Table
(used from 1782) in M. Campbell-Kelly M. Croarken, R. Flood, and E. Robson, “History
of Actuarial Tables,” The History of Mathematical Tables: From Sumer to Spreadsheets.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, 86, 88.

127. Right: Thomas Lawrence, Portrait of William Morgan (1750–1833), oil on canvas, before
1818, Institute of Actuaries, Staple Inn Hall, London; Middle: Charles Ansell (1794–
1881) actuary at Atlas Fire and Life Assurance Company, National Provident, the Friends’
Provident and the Clergy Mutual Life Office. Left: Portrait of John Finlaison (1783–
1860), Actuary of the National Debt, Government Calculator, and President of the
Institute of Actuaries. Photograph, n/d.

128. “Table of Payments of the Joint Stock Fund,” John Pye, Patronage of British Art, An
Historical Sketch [...]. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman’s, 1845, 321.

129. William Morgan, F.R.S., “Tables Calculated for the Artists’ Fund, in John Pye, Patronage
of British Art, An Historical Sketch [...]. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and
Longman’s, 1845, 381.

130. William Enson, who was first recommended to become a member of the Annuity Fund on
June 21, 1828, with William Mulready as Treasurer, Annuity Fund Proposals for
Membership 1812–1841, CLC/114/MS23663/1, Artists’ Annuity and Benevolent Fund,
London Metropolitan Archives.

131. Artists’ Benevolent Fund Calculations payable to Widows and Orphans 1829–1835,
CLC/114/MS23677, Artists’ Annuity and Benevolent Fund, London Metropolitan
Archives.

132. Walter Crane, “A Garland for May Day 1895,” cover design for The Clarion, May 1,
1895. From Walter Crane, Cartoons for the Cause: A Souvenir of the International
Socialist Workers and Trade Union Congress, 1886–1896. London: Twentieth Century
Press, 1896; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

133. Left: Walter Crane, “Prospectus for the Sun Life Assurance Society,” Insurance (box “S”)
John Johnson Ephemera Collection, Oxford Bodleian Libraries. Right: Walter Crane,
“Design for Trade Card [The Sun Life Assurance Society],” 1880–89, pen and brown ink
over graphite, 10 3/8 × 7 1/16 in. (26.4 × 18 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
62.595.1.

134. Right: Walter Crane, “Proof for the Scottish Union & National Insurance Company
Calendar,” 1889, proof, paper, ink, wood engraving (?) 465 × 559, Manchester Whitworth
Gallery Archive, WCA.1.2.5.125. Left: colorized version, origin [?].

xxi
135. Left: Walter Crane, “Prospectus for Scottish Provident Institution,” 1894, wood
engraving? “Insurance” (box “S”), John Johnson Ephemera Collection, Oxford Bodleian
Libraries. Right: Walter Crane, “Design for a Calendar for the Scottish Provident
Institution,” c.1892, pen and watercolor on paper, 28.70 × 22.00 cm, Scottish National
Gallery of Modern Art, D 3756.

136. William Home Lizars (1788–1859), “Scottish Widows’ Fund” Policy header (or placard)
“Insurance” (Oversize box), John Johnson Ephemera Collection, Oxford Bodleian
Libraries.

137. Scottish Widow’s Fund advertisements and prospectuses, 1861, 1862, 1863, Lloyd’s
Bank Archive, Edinburgh.

138. Right: Sir John Everett Millais, A Child’s World, 1886, oil on canvas, Lady Lever Art
Gallery, Port Sunlight, UK. Left: Sir John Everett Millais and A. & F. Pears Ltd.,
Bubbles, chromolithograph on paper, ca. 1889 (made), 22.2 cm × 14.5 cm; Image size
16.7 cm × 11.8 cm, Victoria & Albert Museum, E.3093-1921.

139. Walter Crane, “Preliminary Design for an Insurance Company Calendar,” 1888?, Chinese
white on paper, 33.70 × 26.70 cm, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, D 3759.

140. Cesare Ripa, “Fama” (Fame) in Iconologia di Cesare Ripa Perugina ... Nella quale si
descrivono diverse imagini di virtù, vitij, affetti, passioni humane, arti discipline, humori,
elementi, corpi celesti, prouincie d'Italia, fiumi, tutte le parti del mondo, ed altre infinite
materie. Opera utile ad oratori, predicatori, poeti pittori, sculptori, disegnatori, e ad ogni
studioso, per inuentar concetti, emblemi, ed imprese, per diuisare qualsiuoglia appatato
nuttiale, funerale, trionfale. Per rappresentar poemi drammatici, e per figurare co'suoi
propij simboli ciò, che può cadere in pensiero humano. Ampliata ultimamente dallo
stresso autore di CC. imagini, e erricchita di molti discorsi pieni di varia eruditione.
Siena: Matteo Florimi, 1613, 226.

141. Right: Walter Crane, Illustration of study for “Skeleton in Armor” as published in The
Building News, December 19, 1884, photolithography, proof, 1884, Ink printed on brown
paper 285 × 391 cm, Manchester Whitworth Gallery, WCA.1.6.1.28. Left: Walter Crane,
“Prospectus for the Scottish Widow’s Fund,” 1891, Manchester Metropolitan University
Archive.

142. Right: Walter Crane, “Little Red Riding Hood,” in The Blue Beard picture book:
containing Blue Beard, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the beanstalk, The Sleeping
Beauty / with thirty-two pages of illustrations by Walter Crane; printed in colors by
Edmund Evans. London, The Broadway, Ludgate and New York: George Routledge and
Sons, 1875, 2. Left: Walter Crane, “Prospectus for the Scottish Widow’s Fund,”
1891, Manchester Metropolitan University Archive.

xxii
143. Right: Walter Crane, William James Linton, “The Wolf and the Lamb,” in The Baby’s
Own Aesop. London: Edmund Evans, 1887, 10; Left: Walter Crane, “Prospectus for the
Scottish Widow’s Fund,” 1891, Manchester Metropolitan University Archive.

144. Walter Crane, Pegasus, 1889, pencil, watercolor and bodycolor with gum arabic on paper
laid on linen, 71 × 71 cm. Location: unknown.

145. Right: Walter Crane, “Design for the Scottish Widows’ Fund,” 1889, Pen and ink on
paper, 30.50 × 24.20 cm, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, D3760. Left: Walter
Crane, “Design for the Scottish Widows’ Fund,” lithograph on paper (proof with four
colors and gold) 31.70 × 25.30 cm, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, D3763.

146. Left: Walter Crane, “Scottish Widows” Fund Life Assurance Society poster,” 1888
(designed), 1890s (reissued) 76.2cm × 51.6 cm, E.4196-1915 V&A Museum. Right:
Walter Crane, “Poster for Scottish Widows’ Fund,” reissued c. 1903–1904, Lloyd’s Bank
Archive, Edinburgh.

147. Right: Walter Crane, “Pegasus panel,” brown ink on cardboard, 623 × 523 mm; Left:
detail, Manchester Whitworth Gallery, WCA.1.2.1.3.62.

148. Left: Walter Crane, Renascence; a book of verse. London: E. Matthews, 1891, 162-163;
Right: Walter Crane, The Work of Walter Crane, with Notes by the Artist: Extra Number
of the Art Journal. London: J. S. Virtue & Co. Ltd, 1898, 31.

149. Scottish Widows’ Fund Diary for 1896, with illustrations by Walter Crane,
MSA/9/B/S/1/1, Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections.

150. Right: “September,” Scottish Widows’ Fund Diary for 1896, with illustrations by Walter
Crane, MSA/9/B/S/1/1, Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections. Left:
“November,” Scottish Widows’ Fund Diary for 1896, with illustrations by Walter Crane,
MSA/9/B/S/1/1, Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections.

151. Two “May Queens” (1849, 1880); cover (1884), Illustrated London Almanack, Hathitrust.

152. “May,” Scottish Widows’ Fund Diary for 1896, with illustrations by Walter Crane,
MSA/9/B/S/1/1, Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections.

153. Scottish Widows’ Fund Diary for 1896, with illustrations by Walter Crane, Entries by
Emma Louise Bradbury (1866–1959), e.g. Friday, February 7, 1896: “Showed Mr. Crane
design for mosaic panel, which he liked very much.” MSA/9/B/S/1/1, Manchester
Metropolitan University Special Collections.

154. Left: Walter Crane, Exposition d’Art Décoratif Anglais, 1914, color lithograph print,
69.1cm × 44cm, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, E. 1784-1914; Right: [same title],
71.2cm × 45.7cm, E. 1786-1914.

xxiii
Abstract
My dissertation explores points of contact between the insurance industries and artistic
producers and exhibitors in Europe, and especially in Britain from the 1780s until the First
World War. I show that insurance was an important, yet largely invisible, gatekeeper for the art
world. During my study’s period, insurance developed into a global industry for pooling capital,
supporting imperialism, bolstering trade, and collectivizing hazards. In Britain, Parliamentary
Acts and legislation enabled the industry to proliferate beyond its main forms: marine, fire, life,
and accident. Through studies of mercantile and insurance literature, art agents’ correspondence,
insurance cartels like the Fire Offices Committee, institutional records of museums like the
South Kensington Museum/Victoria & Albert Museum, records of international art exhibitions,
and the business history of a dedicated art insurance company, the Fine Art & General Insurance
Company, Ltd., I show how insurers, artists, administrators, dealers, and agents of all kinds
struggled to think about artworks as property and as risks, affected by ideas of chance,
contingency, and value. Artists like William Hamilton, John Callcott Horsley, James Dromgole
Linton, John Pye, and Walter Crane appear in my dissertation as insurance industry service
providers. They directed associations, provided mutual aid to one another, and produced the
insurance world’s visual culture by creating emblematic advertising campaigns. I argue that in
the nineteenth century, risk—and insurance as a concrete means for articulating and mitigating
risk—affected art production and exhibiting practices in tandem with beliefs about security,
morality, and ethics. Broadly speaking, this project’s stakes in both art historical and humanistic
terms is to explain how contingency and finance affected artworks’ producers and stewards and
enabled new understandings about cultural value to take shape.

1
Introduction
“Peculiar Risks: Art and Insurance, 1780–1914,” explores the complicated relationship
between art and insurance over the long nineteenth century. During this period, the British
insurance industries underwent radical changes as they worked to facilitate trade and
imperialism, and adapted to new industrial developments, urbanization, transport methods, and
changes to working conditions. The advent of statistical methods and demography changed how
insurance companies understood and valued the individual human lives. At the same time, art
institutions and artistic production also underwent radical changes as art markets expanded,
international exhibitions became more numerous and complex, and more private collectors
sought to protect their property. In this history, I demonstrate how a multifaceted financial
service field, insurance, became enmeshed with the nineteenth-century art world. I argue that
insurance, a sphere that art historians have largely overlooked, performed an important
gatekeeping function for a globally distributed art world. Insurance’s presence or absence
determined what artworks got exhibited, transported, restored, valued, and visualized. At the
same time, for the insurance world, artworks and artists proved challenging subjects with
peculiar, idiosyncratic characteristics that made them difficult to subsume within the insurance
world’s technical, bureaucratic, and biopolitical regimes. Yet the insurance world also enlisted
artists as service workers to build the insurance world’s visual culture through advertising.

Services: insurance as the faux frais de production
To explain insurance’s structural position within capitalist society, it is helpful to locate
insurance in relation to political economy. Insurance is often described by scholars studying the
history of capitalism as a commodity and (in economics) as a “sold good,” that is, a good where
2
payment is prospective, anticipating something which might happen at a future date, rather than
retrospective, payment for something given immediately in return.
1
It has also been described as
a “‘transfer system’ by which one party (the insured) transfers the financial risk or uncertainty of
loss to another party (the insurance company).”
2
But insurance is also a service, and as such falls
into a category that Karl Marx referred to as the “faux frais de production”: the “incidental
costs” or “operating expenses of production” in political economy.
3
For Marx, insurance sits
outside of productive labor practices, like those that Scottish economist Adam Smith described
as producing “value fixed into permanent form” or “vendible commodities, which [endure] after
the labor is past.”
4
Productive laborers rely upon resources to feed and reproduce themselves in
society, and they share these resources with unproductive laborers, who—unlike productive
laborers—produce no physical, enduring objects.
5
In Smith’s formulation, the army, the navy,
the civil service, and even the king are all unproductive laborers. Smith argues that because the
services they provide perish “in the very instant of [their] production,” they add no value to the
wealth of nations and are in a sense parasitic to a society with scarce resources.
6

1
Geoffrey Clark and Gregory Anderson, “Introduction,” in The Appeal of Insurance, eds.
Geoffrey Clark and Gregory Anderson (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2010), 3.
2
Christiane Fischer and Jill Arnold, “Insurance and the Art Market,” in Fine Art and High
Finance: Expert Advice on the Economics of Ownership, ed. Clare McAndrew (New York: John
Wiley & Sons, 2010), 198.
3
Karl Marx, Capital: A critique of political economy, vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1990),
1043; Capital: A critique of political economy, vol. II (London; New York: Penguin Books,
1990-92), 209.
4
Adam Smith, Edwin Cannan, and George J. Stigler, An inquiry into the nature and causes of
the wealth of nations: two volumes in one (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 352.
5
For Smith, these unproductive laborers are a motley crew. They include “some both of the
gravest and most important, and some of the most frivolous professions: churchmen, lawyers,
physicians, men of letters of all kinds; players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera-
dancers, etc.” Smith, An inquiry, 315.
6
Smith, 315.
3
In Marx’s description of capitalist production, insurance is unproductive in the sense that
it is paid for out of revenue earned from the production of other commodities. It operates
adjacent to the capitalist production of commodities. This category of revenue-consuming
services includes book-keeping, taxes, transportation, and storage.
7
Unlike Smith, Marx defines a
service as “merely an expression for the particular use-value of labor where the latter is useful
not as an article, but as an activity.”
8
Insofar as it operates as an immaterial commodity that is
reliant upon, and indivisible from, an interpersonal network of individuals who verify its
compacts, insurance as a service is contingent and shifting.
9
In my dissertation, I argue that it is
helpful to think of insurance as essentially an expressive and relational activity. It is relational
because insurance is a corporate activity that requires collectively organized individuals to pool
resources. It is expressive because insurance sectors respond to societal shifts by strategically
identifying and monetizing risks.

7
Karl Marx, “The Costs of Circulation,” Capital: A critique of political economy, vol. II
(London; New York: Penguin Books, 1990-92), 207-229; Karl Marx, “Relations of Distribution
and Relations of Production,” Capital: A critique of political economy, vol. III (London; New
York: Penguin Books), 1017-1024.
8
Marx’s definition of a service is informed by Smith, but he takes issue with “materialistic
theories” that argue that productive labor is only the kind of labor involved in making material
things. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 1047; I. I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, trans.
Milos ̆ Samardz ̆ ija, and Fredy Perlman (Montréal and New York: Black Rose Books, 1982. orig
1924, 1973, 1975), 259-275; Simon Mohun, “Does All Labour Create Value?” in Anti-
Capitalism: A Marxist Introduction, ed. Alfredo Saad-Filho (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 42-58;
Simon Mohun, “Productive and Unproductive Labour,” in The Elgar Companion to Marxist
Economics (Cheltenham, UK; Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2015), 277-282; Ben Fine and
Alfredo Saad-Filho, Marx’s ‘Capital,’6
th
ed. (London: Pluto Press, 2016), 28-45; Erik K. Olsen,
“Productive and Unproductive Labor,” in the Routledge Companion to Marxian Economics
(London: Routledge, 2017), 122-134.
9
When a capitalist middleman profits from a service provider’s work (like a cleaning company
who takes a cut of a domestic worker’s wages), the service worker is producing surplus-value for
the employer, even if they are not producing physical commodities. Fiona Tregenna, “‘Services’
in Marxian Economic Thought,” Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 0935, Faculty of
Economics, University of Cambridge, 2009.
4
The above description offers a glimpse of insurance’s economic ontology. In its historical
manifestations, insurance actually constituted distinct but often overlapping subfields. In the long
nineteenth century these were principally marine, fire, life, and accident insurance. Life
insurance is an ancient field that in the eighteenth century came to be associated with gambling,
but that partly shed this association in the nineteenth century when it adopted mathematical
assessment methods for measuring lives. Marine insurance also has ancient origins, but in the
nineteenth century it was a key technology for safeguarding a country’s mercantile, martial, and
imperial activities. Fire insurance expanded broadly after the seventeenth century, and it
protected personal, commercial, and industrial property. Accident and general insurance
developed in response to the mid-nineteenth-century spread of the railways and other transport
methods. In each chapter, I draw from works by economic and social historians to connect these
fields’ histories with my cases.
10
I show how from the end of the eighteenth century until the first

10
While I surveyed a number of primary and minor insurance fields, it is worth highlighting
some important authors and volumes that reappear across the dissertation. H. A. L. Cockerell’s
and Edwin Green’s introductory The British Insurance Business: A Guide To Its History &
Records (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994) provides an entry guide to the entire
insurance field and was a starting point for my archival work. The main twentieth-century British
company histories also provided critical guides: P. G. M. Dickson, The Sun Insurance Office
1710–1960 (London: Oxford University Press, 1960); Barry Supple, The Royal Exchange
Assurance: A History of British Insurance 1720–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1970); and especially Clive Trebilcock’s two-volume, Phoenix Assurance and the Development
of British Insurance, 1782–1984 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 and 1998). I
also relied upon Robin Pearson’s Insuring the Industrial Revolution: Fire Insurance in Great
Britain 1700–1850 (Burlington VT, Aldershot UK: Ashgate, 2004) and upon much of Pearson’s
other scholarship, including his entries on individual underwriters for the Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography. I am indebted to Timothy Alborn’s and Geoffrey Clark’s work on two
phases in the life insurance industries. Geoffrey Clark, Betting on Lives: The Culture of Life
Insurance in England, 1695–1775, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999) and
Timothy Alborn, Regulated Lives: Life Insurance and British Society 1800–1914 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2009). Hannah Farber’s work on marine insurance in the eighteenth
century was also critical. Hannah Farber, “Underwritten States: Marine Insurance and the
Making of Bodies Politic in America, 1622–1815,” Ph.D. diss., University of California,
Berkeley 2014.
5
decade of the twentieth, the British insurance industries came to identify and classify artworks
(and artists) as particular kinds of risks, and sought to monetize them. The dissertation’s time
frame reflects the period from around 1780, when premium insurance industries started to reform
themselves (although serious structural changes in some industries took place around 1800), to
the First World War, which disrupted the industries’ operations and provided an appropriate
closing point.

Peculiar risks
A painting is burned in a house fire; a load of precious china sinks with a galleon; a
traveling exhibition of ancient artifacts is blocked from entering a zone deemed by its organizers
and insurers to be environmentally unsafe. These are all situations in which actors have to decide
whether and how to act, before and after the event. Operative in all scenarios is the concept of
risk applied towards items in circulation. Art historians like François Brunet and Jennifer Roberts
have made important interventions on this subject, noting how “art history deals with notions of
circulation, be it money, news, anything—and its relation to ‘currency’ or ‘use.’”
11
The
circulations I chronicle trace works made and set in motion by human hands, which in turn
confront human-made risks.
The history of the term, “risk,” is multifaceted and interdisciplinary. A historian of the
French welfare state, François Ewald has argued that risk began as a concrete thing. The word
has one origin in early modern Italy, with risco meaning “that which cuts” linked to the word

11
François Brunet, ed. Circulation (Chicago and Paris: Terra Foundation for American Art;
University of Chicago Press, 2017), 12; Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions: The
Movement of Images in Early America, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). See
also Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel; “Circulation and the Art Market,” Journal for Art Market Studies,
Forum Kunstmarkt Cologne, 2017.
6
“reef.”
12
Risk was therefore a real material danger to ships and cargo on the seas, and it played a
role in legal agreements.
13
It also has origins in the Arabic word rizq, linked to navigation. As
Gaspar Mairal argues in his history of the word, “rizq refers to the spiritual blessing that all
believers and their possessions can receive from God before starting a long and uncertain
journey. Thus, the rizq, or ‘provision of God’ is a relational quality that links God to a person
and his goods.”
14
Mairal further argues that “it is the idea that someone, God at the beginning,
guarantees persons and their possessions safety when they participate in a long and uncertain
journey. When maritime voyages became increasingly common in the Arab world, the rizq was
developed as a conceptual tool to manage the human and commercial exchange across the new
routes in the Mediterranean Sea.”
15
Risks in this estimation are relational, transitional.
Studies of risk extend across science and technology studies, economics, political
philosophy, medicine and epidemiology, security studies, urban studies, and cultural analysis.
From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, people’s understanding about risk shifted as
probabilistic thinking and mathematical equations were brought to bear upon perceived risks.
Ewald argues that anything can be a risk: anything can be assessed as a potential hazard,
assigned calculations, and monetized, although Lorraine Daston has shown how the ability to do
so appeared with mathematical probability from the seventeenth century, and even then it was

12
François Ewald, “Insurance and Risk,” in The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality: with
two lectures, eds. Graham Burchell and Michel Foucault (Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press, 1991), 199, 197.
13
Ewald, “Insurance and Risk,” 199; Lorraine J. Daston, “The Domestication of Risk:
Mathematical Probability and Insurance 1650–1830,” in The Probabilistic Revolution, eds.
Lorenz Krüger, Lorraine J. Daston, and Michael Heidelberger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1987), 237-260. See also Peter Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (New
York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996, 1998).
14
Gaspar Mairal, “Has Risk a History?” in The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk, eds.
Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar (London: Routledge, 2020), 27-45.
15
Mairal, “Has Risk a History?,” 27-28.
7
not robustly applied until the nineteenth century.
16
Using Foucauldian terminology to define
insurance as an abstract “technology,” Ewald argues that it is one mode for “assigning a new
mode of existence to previously dreaded events,” and “creates value.”
17
Historians and
sociologists have since developed analyses of risk to explain events in modernity. Ulrich Beck
has argued that when people in modern industrialized societies live with and become acclimated
to dangers (risks), especially the transcendent and horizontalizing effects of epidemics,
environmental degradation, or nuclear fallout, they become “risk societies,” in which
proliferating uncertainties force people to turn away from traditional institutional supports
towards increasing “individualization.”
18
Anthony Giddens has built upon Beck’s work to argue
that such scenarios are also operative in the movements and institutional dimensions of global
financial markets, prone as these markets are to periodic disturbances and crises, although
Giddens here naturalizes what are manifestly human-made financial problems.
19

In my dissertation, and in the context of insurance history, art works and artists in the
long nineteenth century were perceived as “peculiar” risks. Etymologically the word reaches

16
Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1988), 138-139.
17
Ewald, “Insurance and Risk,” 201-202.
18
Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage
Publications, 1992).
19
Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1990). Alexander Callinicos provides salient critiques of Beck and Giddens, but especially
Giddens: a social-democrat who espoused the political concept of a neoliberal “Third Way” that
rejected socialism and embraced capitalism. Callinicos argues that there are differences between
“risks which arise from the unanticipated consequences of human intervention in nature (risks
inherent in human life), and those caused by crashes on the financial market (risks developed
specifically in capitalist countries).” By drawing both into alignment, Callinicos argues that
Giddens naturalizes financial risks, which really emanate from a “historically specific form of
society.” Alexander Callinicos, “In Place of a Conclusion,” Social Theory: An Introduction (New
York: NYU Press, 1999), 298-318. See also, Alexander Callinicos, “Social Theory Put to the
Test of Politics: Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens,” New Left Review, July 1999, 77-102.
8
deeper than the valence that something is strange or distinctive. The term originates in the
classical Latin, peculiaris, “of or relating to a person’s peculium, belonging to a person, one’s
own, personal, private, that characterizes or belongs to a person, thing, or place, specific, special,
singular, exceptional.”
20
To wit: private, alienated property is baked into the term’s origins. But
quite practically the word also suggested itself to me because it reappeared across the primary
sources that I consulted, which were written by agents, artists, insurers, and administrators.
21

Insurers worked to identify risks and classified them according to recognizable schema.
The notion that a risk might be deemed “normal” has bearing here. Writing about nuclear
accidents, environmental degradation from oil spills, and other human-made problems, Charles
Perrow has characterized “normal accidents” as accidents occurring in modern, advanced
societies rife with “high-risk systems” that are so interlinked and complex that accidents that

20
Oxford English Dictionary Online, “peculiar, n. and adj.” accessed January 1, 2020.
21
In choosing this term for a history of arts-related insurance—a narrative largely centered in
nineteenth-century Britain—I thought it somehow fitting to revisit E. P. Thompson’s 1965 essay,
“The Peculiarities of the English.” Published in The Socialist Register as a riposte to Tom
Nairn’s and Perry Anderson’s critiques about Britain’s supposed inability to manifest a
bourgeois political revolution like the French Revolution, Thompson’s essay argued for a more
dialectical understanding about historical culture in British historiography, including more
considered approaches to class. Upon re-reading Thompson’s essay, I was struck by his early call
for more nuanced approaches to middle-class culture: what was needed was “a sociological
anatomy of the components of the ‘middle classes’–small gentry, farmers, industrial
entrepreneurs with diverse interests, high and low finance, professional groups (independent and
salaried), civil service, institutions of imperialism–their conflicts and accommodations, differing
outlooks and styles” (Thompson, 325). Such studies appeared from the mid-1970s, when
scholars like Catherine Hall and Leonore Davidoff began working toward the publication of their
book, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London:
Routledge, 1987, 2018), xv. This was followed by books like Margaret Hunt’s important, The
Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England 1680–1780 (Los Angeles and
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). As it deals with the middle classes, the
professions, and the service sectors, my project builds upon this longer historiographical
movement. For an overall assessment of the Anderson-Nairn-Thompson discussion, see Ellen
Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and
Modern States (London; Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 1992, 2015), 1-21.
9
occur as results of multiple failures (“design, equipment, procedures, operators, and
environment”) are “inevitable, even ‘normal.’”
22
Writing about eighteenth-century events like
the 1720 plague in Marseille, and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, Saptarishi Bandopadhyay argues
that states do not conduct “disaster management” so much as they rely on disasters to justify
governance and policy: “floods, plagues, earthquakes, and famines are all real, there is no such
thing as ‘a disaster’ outside of narratives, techniques, and practices of political struggle within
and between societies.”
23
Risks are inherently man-made, but through humanity’s habitual
engagement with them, risks become less peculiar, and normalized.
It should be understood that a risk’s peculiarity is often temporary. Scholars in the history
of capitalism like Dan Bouk, Jonathan Levy, Caley Horan, and others have concretely shown
how risks are transformed into describable, monetizable commodities through decisions made by
states or by private actors.
24
In this respect, a study of insurance is necessarily linked to broader

22
Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies With a New
Afterword and a Postscript on the Y2K Problem (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984,
1999), 8.
23
Saptarishi Bandopadhyay, All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 7-10.
24
Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America
(Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2012), 327; Dan Bouk, How Our
Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2015), xx; Caley Horan Insurance Era: Risk, Governance, and the Privatization
of Security in Postwar America (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2021).
Kenneth Lipartito describes the new history of capitalism as a movement that builds upon the
cliometric studies of the 1970s and sweeping historical materialist works by Hobsbawm,
Thompson, and Hill. Jeffrey Sklansky describes it as a partial return to “histories from below,”
but a return less concerned with proletarianization than with heterogeneous labor forms, systems
of credit, trust, biopolitics, and knowledge. Jeffrey Sklansky, “The Elusive Sovereign: New
Intellectual and Social Histories of Capitalism,” Modern Intellectual History 9, 1 (2012): 233-
248; Kenneth Lipartito, “Reassembling the Economic: New Departures in Historical
Materialism,” American Historical Review (February 2016): 101-139.
10
histories of consumption, which in the British context has a robust historiography.
25
Industries
adapted their practices to encompass these peculiar art risks. I argue that the work that was done
to characterize these risks was variously “insurantial” or “actuarial.” By “actuarial” I refer to
work performed by actuaries who deployed mathematical statistics to calculate monetary
premiums.
26
However, as I show, insurers did not always apply mathematical calculations to
underwrite artworks, so a term like “insurantial” is more appropriate, as it describes something
like “the effect [rather] than the cause of these practices” that are not clearly constituted or even
attached to actuarial practices.
27
“Insurantial” refers to a “schema of rationality” that is
sometimes arrived at through a “probabilistic calculus,” but sometimes through more intuitive

25
In the 1990s, scholars participating in a three-year, NEH-funded research project at the Clark
Library at UCLA, “Culture and Consumption in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,”
published three edited volumes which have since formed the base for much consumption-related
scholarship. The project focused attention upon a so-called “consumer boom” that took place in
eighteenth-century society. Many contributors to these volumes argue that consumption was a
motive power for social change rather than production. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, eds.
The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text (London, Taylor & Francis
Group, 1995, 2016); John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds. Consumption and the World of Goods
(London: Routledge, 1993); Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, eds. The Birth of a
Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Edward
Everett Root, 1982, 2018). Critiquing this literature and the “consumption turn” away from
cliometric economic histories that were focused upon supply-side theories, production, and labor,
Ben Fine and Ellen Leopold argue that many contributors pay little attention to the position of
consumption within complex economic systems and social formations. Fine and Leopold argue
that some of this work exaggerates the level of economic and cultural development of
eighteenth-century British society, individualization, the actual diffusion of consumer goods, and
the element of “emulation.” On this latter, fraught point, which is present for example in Adam
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1789), lower classes supposedly emulate the upper classes’
consumption patterns. Lorna Weatherill has productively challenged that point (see chapter one,
ff142). Ben Fine and Ellen Leopold, “Consumerism and the Industrial Revolution,” Social
History 15, no. 2 (1990): 151-179.
26
The Oxford English Dictionary defines an actuary as “A person who compiles and analyses
statistics of mortality, accidents, etc., and uses them to calculate insurance risks and premiums.”
Oxford English Dictionary Online, “actuary, n.” accessed September 15, 2021.
27
François Ewald, The Birth of Solidarity: The History of the French Welfare State (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 97.
11
methods.
28
While I show how a concept like art insurance is formalized in the nineteenth
century, the historical movement I describe in this dissertation is not fully teleological, and
contemporary research continues to attest to the peculiar difficulties inherent in classing artists or
artworks as risks, a point that I return to in my Epilogue.
29

Art and insurance institutions
Institutions for art and for insurance play instrumental roles in this dissertation. My work
contributes to scholarship in museum studies and exhibition studies that view institutions as
ideological actors and as cultural and economic gatekeepers.
30
Writing in 2022, this is hardly an
unconventional position. Over the past thirty years, scholars have framed western museums as
more than “neutral sheltering spaces for objects [or] products of architectural design.”
31
The
museum is at once a site for the performance of bourgeois secular rituals, as well as sites where
governments “enlist [works of high culture] in new ways for tasks of social management,” a
point that Tony Bennett and Arindam Dutta explicitly make in relation to the South Kensington

28
Ewald, The Birth of Solidarity, 98.
29
John Kerr, The securitization and policing of art theft – The case of London (London:
Routledge, 2015); Dorit Straus, “Implication of art theft in the fine art insurance industry,” in Art
and crime: Exploring the dark side of the art world, ed. Noah Charney (Santa Barbara, CA:
Praeger, 2009), 87-106. Christiane Fischer and Jill Arnold, “Insurance and the Art Market,” in
Fine Art and High Finance: Expert Advice on the Economics of Ownership, ed. Clare
McAndrew (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2010), 197-210; Martin Wilson, “Shipping, Export
and the Insurance of Art” in Art Law and the Business of Art (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar
Publishing Limited, 2019), 299-312.
30
Tony Bennett, Museums, Power, Knowledge: Selected Essays (Abingdon and New York:
Routledge, 2018); Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Universal Survey Museum,” Art
History 3 (1980): 448-469.
31
Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (Abingdon and New York:
Routledge, 1995), 2.
12
Museum, a subject in my second and third chapters.
32
Institutions regulate and govern objects
and subjects transiting through their buildings, and, in the British context, have long been seen as
acquisitive imperial repositories.
33
After the 2020 murder of George Floyd spurred global
uprisings against racial injustice, the pressure for institutions to reflect on their own systemic
racism became more acute. Institutions have begun returning objects looted in the course of
violent imperialist adventuring—although to characterize this restitution movement as one
marked by general reluctance would be an understatement.
34
As I show in this dissertation, in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, insurance played a role in the expropriation of objects
and capital with which institutions continue to grapple.

32
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993); Duncan, Civilizing Rituals; Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum:
History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995); Arindam Dutta, The Bureaucracy of
Beauty: Design in the Age of Its Global Reproducibility (New York and London: Routledge,
2007).
33
Ivan Karp and Steven D. Levine, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum
Display (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe
eds., Theorizing Museums: Expressing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996); Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn, Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material
Culture and the Museum (New York and London: Routledge, 1998); James Hevia, English
Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2003); Timothy Barringer, Geoff Quilley, and
Douglas Fordham, Art and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007);
Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2007); Greg M. Thomas, “The Looting of Yuanming
and the Translation of Chinese Art in Europe,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 7, no. 2
(Autumn 2008) http://www.19thcart worldwide.org/autumn08/93-the-looting-of-yuanming-and-
the-translation-of-chinese-artin-europe.
34
The nearly two-centuries-old dispute over the British Museum’s refusal to return the
Parthenon Marbles to Greece is still very much live. For an example of recent institutional soul
searching, see the Museums Association’s 2021 guidance statement: “Supporting Decolonization
in Museums,” Museums’ Association, 2021, https://ma-
production.ams3.digitaloceanspaces.com/app/uploads/2021/11/07135807/Supporting-
decolonisation-in-museums-final-version.pdf. See also Ariella Azoulay, Potential History:
Unlearning Imperialism (London and New York: Verso, 2019); A recent restitution proponent is
Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural
Restitution (London: Pluto Press, 2020).
13
Large-scale temporary exhibitions appearing after the Great Exhibition of 1851 in
London provided fleeting visions that were no less ideological than museums.
35
With their
colonial palaces, “human zoos,” art exhibitions, and technological novelties, these displays
imaginatively and opportunistically projected nationalist and imperialist extravagance and
techno-optimism, undergirded by economic competition.
36
By looking at how insurance in many
ways made such projects possible, I am working to denaturalize the idea that some institutions
are inevitable stewards for cultural works, and show the conditions under which institutions did
or did not seek protections for the works in their collections.
In my narrative, art institutions form collaborations with insurance companies. By the
mid-nineteenth century, fire and marine companies were attempting to insure art museums and
institutions, and international exhibitions. By the late nineteenth century, the first fine art
insurance companies formed. Correspondingly, this dissertation surveys many insurance
institutions: from charted companies, to private associations and syndicates, to insurance cartels
like the Fire Offices Committee (F.O.C.). In discussing these institutions, my purpose here is to
ask how they all engaged with the problems about risk and contingency related to art objects.

Art, price, value
By looking at insurance company documents, I investigate how insurance affected an art
object’s price. An artwork’s price, it should be said, can never equate its value. While artworks

35
A key starting point for the histories of exhibitions and other spectacles before 1851 is Richard
Altick’s The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University,
1978).
36
Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and
World’s Fair, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); Alexander Geppert,
Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Sìecle Europe (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
14
are sometimes made up of measurable quantities of materials which contribute to an artwork’s
production costs, an artwork’s true value, like the value of a life, is always uncertain and
inexact.
37
Art’s consumption is essentially immaterial, and cannot take place without what Dave
Beech refers to as a “judgement of taste, in the modern sense, without exerting oneself, without
making the judgement oneself, and without risking the possibility of failure.”
38

Considering insurance’s impact on art prices, I contribute to fields like art market studies
and cultural economics. For the former, an early important intervention is art historian Gerald
Reitlinger’s multi-volume study, The Economics of Taste (1961–1970), which analyzed shifting
prices for art objects in Britain and France between 1760 and 1960. Praised by historian E. P.
Thompson for their “hard-headed financial realism,” these books took a dim view of how, by the
twentieth century, art came to be seen as an investment opportunity: well in advance of our own
era’s supercharged markets in which artworks and institutions are leveraged as investment
vehicles or tax shelters.
39
Like Reitlinger’s work, Harrison and Cynthia White’s Canvases and
Careers, Institutional Change in the French Painting World (1965) is also concerned with the
social networks binding patrons and artists.
40
The Whites identified a system in which dealers
and critics, particularly around the French Impressionists, conspired to regulate and speculate
upon artists’ careers, contributing to the inflated values of artworks. Scholars following the
Whites have since moved beyond the European nineteenth century to explore transcontinental

37
Dave Beech, Art & Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical, and
Marxist Economics (Leiden and Boston: Historical Materialism/Brill, 2015), 40.
38
Beech, Art & Value, 118.
39
Gerald Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste, 3 vols. (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1961–1970).
E. P. Thompson, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996, 1975),
330n4.
40
Harrison White and Cynthia White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French
Painting World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965, 1992).
15
trading networks, and also to provide hagiographies of individual art dealers and collectors—or
what someone at an Art Market Studies conference once described to me in an offhand, coded
way as a field of “nice people talking to nice people about nice things.”
41
Sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu’s concept of “fields” is often mobilized in these scholarly contexts in order to explain
how the art world’s professional and consumer networks operate: what Bourdieu characterizes as
“weakly institutionalized” social schemas.
42
On the consuming end, art patrons flex their
economic and political power through displays of social capital, what turn-of-the-nineteenth-
century sociologist Thorstein Veblen termed “conspicuous consumption.”
43
Yet, while
Bourdieu’s schema is based on a concept of capital—which he describes phenomenologically as
a “force” instead of as a concrete and constantly revolutionizing totality of the social relations of
production—his analysis, as Nizan Shaked has described, is primarily metaphorical.
44
It is less
concerned with class struggle than with what Michael Burawoy has characterized as, “struggles

41
Titia Hulst’s edited volume on the international art market presents a cross-section of this
field’s concerns. Titia Hulst, A History of the Western Art Market: A Sourcebook of Writings on
Artists, Dealers, and Markets (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2017). See
Jan Dirk Baetens, and Dries Lyna, eds., Art Crossing Borders: The Internationalization of the
Art Market in the Age of Nation States, 1750–1914 (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2019);
Agnès Penot, “The Perils and Perks of Trading Art Overseas: Goupil’s New York Branch,”
Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 16, no. 1 (Spring 2017). Several relevant journals for this
field also include Journal of the History of Collections, and the Journal for Art Market Studies
published out of Berlin.
42
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 1993, 12; Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of
Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. Richardson
(New York: Greenwood, 1986), 241-258.
43
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, orig.
pub. 1899 (New York and London: The Macmillan Company, 1902).
44
I am grateful to Nizan Shaked for sharing an early draft chapter, “The substance of symbolic
value: museums and private collecting,” from her monograph, Museums, the Public, and the
Value of Art: The Political Economy of Contemporary Art Collections (London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2022).
16
of classification.”
45
Correspondingly, studies of the art market—preoccupied with detailing and
classifying networks of agents and amassing bodies of data—operate quite well in the context of
digital humanistic production, but tend to eschew critical assessments of their subjects as
inflected by class or ideology.
Art market studies should be viewed as a species of business history: an elite, artisanal,
and parasitic kind of business history. But art market studies scholarship has often had little
contact with this wider scholarly world, although this isolation has become increasingly
ameliorated in the growing field of cultural economics. Lying outside of art history, this field’s
founding text is William J. Baumol’s and William Bowen’s Performing Arts: The Economic
Dilemma (1966), which scrutinizes how artists might be categorized as workers or as economic
producers, and also investigates how such issues relate to institutional investing practices, and to
the necessity for public support for the arts. This work also has bearing on my project, for I argue
that the artists and practitioners in my chapters were also effectively service-providers. However,
cultural economics’ positivistic, applicable orientation means that its practitioners often
implement their findings in public policy.
46

45
Michael Burawoy, Symbolic Violence: Conversations with Bourdieu (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2019), 16, 48, 51-56.
46
William J. Baumol and William Bowen, Performing Arts–The Economic Dilemma (New
York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1966); David Throsby, “The Production and Consumption of the
Arts: A View of Cultural Economics,” Journal of Economic Literature 32, no. 1 (1994): 1-29.
Ruth Towse, A Textbook of Cultural Economics (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2010);
Victor Ginsburgh and C. D. Throsby, Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, volume
2C (Oxford, UK: North-Holland, 2014). For an art historical work on public arts policy that takes
a historical materialist approach, see Ellen C. Feiss’s forthcoming doctoral dissertation (UC
Berkeley) on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty and its relation to public arts
initiatives in New York.
17
Artists, media
If art and insurance institutions play important roles in this dissertation, artists appear
primarily as participants working with and within these institutions. Although I analyze artworks
throughout the dissertation, and most attentively in my fourth chapter, I am ultimately less
concerned with an artist’s sedimented output in discrete art objects than I am with looking at how
artists worked collectively within specific social and economic milieus. In this respect, in my
study of works in circulation, I want to avoid assigning primacy or “artistic superiority to any
agents of the encounter, either the ‘center’ or the ‘periphery,’” meaning in this context that I am
attending to the logistical support systems that make such productions possible.
47
The artists I
discuss, like William Hamilton, James D. Linton, John Pye, William Mulready, and Walter
Crane, provided services to the insurance industries, and grappled with what those industries
meant for their own lives.
48
They worked as agents, contractors, experts, illustrators, insurers,
and investors. They developed competencies in the insurance sectors in order to collaborate with
other insurance agents. In a distant sense they quite practically enacted what twentieth-century
artists attentive to mundane, procedural, and bureaucratic aspects of daily and economic life
would later explore in aestheticized propositions that were at the same time “not necessarily
meant to be viewed as art.”
49
And they pragmatically, and sometimes imaginatively,

47
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, eds., Circulations
in the Global History of Art (London; New York: Routledge, 2016), 2-4.
48
Marina Vishmidt et al., “Art and Class Struggle,” ARTMargins 10, no. 3 (2022): 118-121;
Dave Beech, Art and Labour: On the Hostility to Handicraft, Aesthetic Labour and the Politics
of Work in Art (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020).
49
Here I cite my former teacher, the American artist Mel Bochner (b. 1940), and specifically
Bochner’s 1966 installation at the gallery of the School of Visual Arts in New York, Working
Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art. In the
American context, this installation is often cited as a milestone in Conceptual Art for stretching
the art object’s formal boundaries, and for introducing an aesthetic informed by mathematics,
administrative forms, bookkeeping, and bureaucracy. Bochner presented Xeroxed working
18
incorporated insurantial and actuarial elements into their practices. By taking a structural,
collective focus in the dissertation rather than a fully monographic focus, I argue for a cognate
analytic to a technology and concept which is explicitly about (monetized) collectivization.
The above being said, artworks play important roles in this dissertation, but function in
networks within a wider array of mediating forms. To construct each case’s historical texture, I
discuss disparate objects such as actuarial tables, advertisements, administrative minutes,
calendars, company accounts, paintings, parliamentary reports, photographs, postcards,
electrotypes, illustrated books, insurance policies, ledgers, maps, meeting minutes, newspapers,
pamphlets, posters, silver plate, watercolors, and year-end balance sheets. In this respect I am
indebted to—and contribute to—the expansive field(s) of visual studies.
50
It should also be clear
that this dissertation is largely object and archive-led, with the caveat that the archives are
primarily Anglo-American, and therefore partial because they omit some cases’ potential
counternarratives, in other archives, elsewhere.

Method and Outline
Writing a cultural history about art’s relationship with a broad service sector like
insurance required me to engineer a research program using archives that were non-existent at

drawings by himself and his friends, along with diagrams, sketches and even receipts, in four
identical binders set upon plinths. Visitors were invited to flip through these books: an
interactive mode that challenged art-viewing conventions. Bochner was, however, not the first
artist to explore administrative or bureaucratic aesthetics, and he would not be the last. Benjamin
Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of
Institutions,” October 55 (Winter, 1990): 109. For a related discussion about contemporary
artists who explored financial institutions and metaphors, see Sophie Cras, The Artist as
Economist: Art and Capitalism in the 1960s, trans. Malcolm B. DeBevoise (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2019).
50
Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski, The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture
Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 2004).
19
worst and fragmentary at best.
51
I first needed to hazard guesses about the prime actors that
might have needed or wanted insurance in the long-nineteenth century cultural ecosystems. I
therefore consulted the administrative archives of national museums, galleries, international
exhibitions, and individual dealers, but also numerous insurance company and bank archives,
and municipal record offices across Britain.
52
I developed working competencies in fields where
I had no formal training, like business history and economic history, and I also learned the
rudiments of data analysis.
53

In my first chapter I ask how insurers, art agents, and other intermediaries
conceptualized, justified, and organized insurance for art objects before and during the rise of the
premium insurance industries, around the 1780s. What categories of objects were insured, and
why? In several sections I talk about how, in the early modern period, mercantile writers like
Malachy Postlethwayt and John Weskett lacked specialized conceptions of art works. I show that
during the Napoleonic Wars, insurance for art became difficult, and art traders like William

51
The archives I consulted were sometimes truly in fragments, disintegrating into the red rot that
Caroline Steedman writes about so movingly. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and
Cultural History (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 26. For a more
recent critique of the imperial politics of the archive, see Azoulay, Potential History, 2019.
52
My research has what seems to me several glaring omissions. The first is that I did not attempt
to consult the archives of major British auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s. This is
basically due to time limitations and is something that I intend to rectify before this dissertation
is transformed into book form. The second is that I did not attempt to visit extant archives of
individual great estates and other hereditary landed property excluded from larger repositories.
Again, this is due to time limitations and COVID-19-era challenges related to transportation and
access.
53
There are many salient precedents of art historians working with business archives. For her
analysis of 146 Victorian collectors, art historian Dianne Sachko MacLeod also ventured into
business and municipal archives in order to document hitherto unanalyzed elements of middle-
class cultural experience. Dianne Sachko MacLeod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money
and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On the
field of business history, see Geoffrey Jones and Jonathan Zeitlin, eds., The Oxford Handbook of
Business History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), and journals including Business
History and Enterprise & Society.
20
Buchanan effectively trained themselves in its methods in order to bring paintings into the
country from overseas, often under hazardous conditions. In the late eighteenth century, marine
and fire insurers started to shift their conception of art as a specialized risk category due to two
interlocking changes: the advancement and spread of insurance companies, laws, and practices,
and the expansion of art collecting networks and markets. By the late eighteenth century, insurers
introduced protocols and rules to differentiate art objects from other insurable risks, articulating
these shifts in handbooks and internal industry documents. Companies like the Sun Insurance
Company, the Phoenix Assurance Co. Ltd., and Norwich Union required individual property
owners of all classes to deposit “schedules” or valued inventories of their personal art collections
with the companies. These, I argue, created interpretative dilemmas for insurers who were
unversed in art’s prices, and for individual collectors: from modest, middle-class owners to
ostentatious landed-property owners.
Chapter two reveals how the increased domestic and international circulation of artworks
from the mid-nineteenth century created the need for clearly codified art insurance schemes.
After the Great Exhibition of 1851, art administrators and exhibition organizers sought insurance
coverage for works of art traveling between these ephemeral spectacles. Two British regulatory
and administrative bodies also emerged at this time who were responsible for overseeing
insurance for these circulating art objects in Britain and abroad: the Fire Offices Committee, and
the Department of Science and Art, associated with the South Kensington Museum (later the
Victoria & Albert Museum and the Board of Education). Both institutions—one a private fire
insurance cartel that regulated numerous companies, and the other a public art museum widely
regarded as the nation’s most important circulating and educational institution—served as
adjudicators for numerous smaller, dependent institutions, and as such, controlled how art
21
insurance was deployed. By looking at these two institutions’ interventions at exhibitions like the
1855 Paris Exposition Universelle, the 1862 Loan Exhibition at South Kensington, the 1903
Delhi Durbar Exhibition, the 1907 Irish International Exhibition in Dublin, and the 1910
Brussels Exposition Universelle, this chapter compares how risk assessment for art operated in
the insurance world and the art world: Where did practices converge? Where were both working
at cross purposes? And how did both sides’ conceptions of art’s value coincide or diverge? As
field-defining institutions, they both deployed agents to perform insurantial (if not always
actuarial) tasks that involved developing both textual and visual means to assess risks to
artworks, and to perform forensic analyses when a loss occurred. Through their risk-assessments,
they enabled or hindered the circulation and exhibition of artworks, and through their decision-
making, they also expressed forms of cultural chauvinism and exercised imperial oversight as a
form of soft power.
Chapter three is a business history of Britain’s first successful art insurance company,
The Fine Art & General Insurance Company, Ltd. Established in 1890 to offset risks to both
public and private art stewards, and operational through the twentieth century, this company
formed in reaction to the larger centralized institutions and exhibitions described in chapter two,
as well as in response to international changes to legislation for taxation and property. A unique
intervention in both the art and financial services worlds, this company was a private
collaboration between insurance men and arts professionals involved in exhibition-making and
collection-building. Through its financial and cultural networks, the company came to play an
important, but until now selectively visible role for numerous domestic and international
exhibitions. It impacted works traveling to the 1892–1893 Kimberley South African and
International Exposition, the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, as well as works at
22
institutions like the Royal Academy and the Victoria & Albert Museum. It served private and
public collectors, from American plutocrats to the British state. This chapter argues that in
boasting a labor force of conservative artists and forward-thinking insurers, the company
adjudicated upon insurable and conversely uninsurable risks. Thus, between chapters two and
three, I argue that these institutions reveal how even before the twentieth century, insurance
already constituted one of the art world’s most important, yet elusive institutional gatekeepers.
In my first three chapters I explore an essential question: How did the insurance
industries provide services to the art world? My fourth and final chapter reverses this question to
ask about the kinds of services that artists provided to the insurance world: by creating
insurance’s visual culture and by creating forms of solidarity amongst themselves in response to
a wider changing insurance infrastructure. Looking in particular at the British life insurance
industries and related sectors that provided coverage against illness and death (mutual insurance,
proprietary life insurance, friendly societies, annuity and “benevolent” funds), the chapter
presents three cases—rather, episodes—that highlight the role that emblems played for
insurance. Emblems emerged from legal and classical precedents in antiquity and were used in
nineteenth-century financial culture and especially in insurance. I discuss how artists created the
field’s advertising by relying upon emblematic imagery imported from classical or popular
sources: by helping to create insurance’s visual culture. In studies of the Pelican Insurance Office
in the 1790s, the Artists’ Annuity and Benevolent Funds from the 1810s to the 1840s, and finally
the artist Walter Crane’s work for the Scottish Widows’ Fund in the 1880s and 1890s, I provide a
century-spanning survey of art “entering life.”

23
A note on prices, inflation, and currency

My dissertation covers a broad time span, and I frequently refer to prices for items like pictures,
decorative objects, and insurance premiums. While it is difficult to precisely adjust these prices
for inflation in order to make them comprehensible for a twenty-first-century reader, I include a
rough table that describes the purchasing power of one pound in Britain at ten-year intervals
between 1750 and 1920, relative to the wages of a skilled tradesman and translated to 2017’s
numbers. For this table I drew upon the British National Archives’ “Purchasing Power” currency
converter: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/#currency-result. British
currency is given in pounds (£, l), shillings (s), and pence (p). Before it was decimalized in 1971,
the pound was equal to twenty shillings, while the guinea––the “gentleman’s pound” frequently
used by art world professionals––was equal to twenty-one shillings. A shilling contained twelve
pence.

To quote the National Archives’ disclaimer, these numbers are “a general guide to historical
values, not a statement of fact.” The website, “Measuring Worth” offers other ways to find
prices, and it explains how inflation may be calculated according to different criteria such as
labor value or average earnings. https://www.measuringworth.com/.

24
Chapter 1. Exceptional risks? Insuring art property
1. Introduction

In 1844, a fire broke out at Naworth Castle, situated in Cumbria north-east from Carlisle
on the Scottish border with England. Owned by the earls of Carlisle, with origins in the
fourteenth-century, the castle had fascinated Sir Walter Scott (supposedly because one of its
early owners had plotted to marry Mary Queen of Scots), while J. M. W. Turner had once
sketched it on a tour of England. Later William Morris would visit the castle and refer to it as
“the most poetical in England.”
1
But on the fateful day in 1844 when the fire broke out, only the
steward, John Ramshay, three female servants, and a groom were resident at the castle. When the
servants noticed flames rising from the castle chapel, they immediately sent for help, and
although fire trucks were sent by special train from the Corporation of Carlisle to try to
extinguish the blaze, significant parts of the castle were consumed. The castle was insured for
£10,000, but the Illustrated London News, which reported on the destruction, stated “the loss to
the lover of architectural antiquities must be irreparable,” and published engravings of the
scramble to salvage precious belongings.
2
One image, likely an imaginative reconstruction rather
than an eye-witnessed depiction, presented a whirling inferno engulfing what must have once
been the stately “guard-room,” which “formed a sort of gallery in the south front for armor and
paintings.”
3
The latter included a portrait of Charles I by Van Dyck, and portraits of Sir Walter
Raleigh and other national figures [Fig. 1].
4
Great beams crash down, while ghostly suits of

1
William Morris to Aglaia Ionides Coronio, August 13, 1874, William Morris and Norman
Kelvin, The Collected letters of William Morris, Volume 1, 1848–1880 (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1984), 228.
2
“Destruction of Naworth Castle, by Fire,” Illustrated London News, May 25, 1844, 340. The
purchasing power would be roughly equivalent to £604,170.00 in 2017.
3
“Destruction of Naworth Castle.”
4
“Destruction of Naworth Castle.”

25
armor tip dangerously and collapse, and portraits fling themselves from the walls, if they are not
already being consumed where they hang. In reality, not all was lost: the female servants,
“exerted themselves with great effect, in removing such valuables as they could reach, when they
saw that to stop the progress of the fire was beyond their power; and they succeeded in saving a
great deal of property.”
5
Items saved include the so-called Dacre Beasts: four sixteenth-century
heraldic polychrome wood sculptures, now at the Victoria & Albert Museum [Fig. 2]. Yet the
news picture seizes upon what must have captivated the journalist, illustrator, and their
readership: fire as sensational risk to precious and irreplaceable moveable property. In some
senses, the story is not a new one, as great houses often burned down. But some elements are
relatively new: the Corporation fire engines arriving by train, and the insurance policy.
Scholars of British eighteenth-century British art, like David Solkin, have explored how
“a visual culture came to be shaped by and for the purposes of commerce.”
6
This chapter
explores how commerce, and specifically the insurance industries, adapted to and shaped art
collecting. When did insurance first become important to art in Europe? How was insurance for
individual collectors’ art property conceptualized by industry agents, and carried out in practice
from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries? And what does insurance on art objects—its
presence or lack thereof—reveal about art property’s price and value?
In asking these questions, the chapter falls into four sections. First, the introduction
explores how art logistics—“the art and science of efficiently managing the mobility of things

5
An Historical & Descriptive Account of Naworth Castle, and Lanercost Priory: With a Life of
Lord William Howard, and an Account of the Destruction of Naworth Castle by Fire (Carlisle: I.
Fletcher Whitridge, 1844), viii.
6
David H. Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-
Century England (New Haven and London: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art,
1993), 2.

26
and people”—functioned in early-modern Europe prior to the eighteenth century, particularly in
Italy, the Low Countries, and Britain.
7
It identifies the kinds of agents who provided services
connecting networks and stewarding the circulation and transmission of fine and applied
artworks, and discusses the risks to which these works might be exposed, particularly in transit
by sea or land. It also charts the shifting cultures of risk-taking and gambling that edged
European art markets ever closer to formalized art insurance (the subject of my third chapter).
This section underscores that artworks in transit were the first to be insured before fire insurance
in the eighteenth century broadened the horizon of the possible when it came to risk assessment.
It shows how the industry haphazardly conceptualized fine and applied artworks as insurable
risks among many other commodities. The industry’s approach began to shift when clear
distinctions began to be made between guild crafts and fine art.
8
Indeed, one of the chapter’s
underlying arguments is that conceptually, fine and applied artworks needed first to be
considered exceptional among other classes of goods before they could be considered
exceptional risk categories requiring special treatment.
The second section asks how European communities—and especially the increasingly
formalized British mercantile community—perceived the fine and applied arts and rendered
them legible as risks. It analyzes merchant handbooks and instructional insurance guides from
the eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries to see how the insurance world understood and
articulated artworks as risks. In these texts, fine and applied artworks appear uneasily as

7
For a brief literary description of logistics in the nineteenth century, tied especially to the
Napoleonic era, see Susan Zieger’s very brief, “Logistics,” in Victorian Literature and Culture,
“Keywords for Victorian Literature and Culture,” 46, Iss. 3-4 (Fall/Winter 2018): 749.
8
Sociologists Howard Becker and Pierre Bourdieu both made important early interventions in
discussions about the communities involved in producing, distributing, and responding to art.
Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982),
and Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 1993.

27
especially hazardous insurance risks, although there is a sense that the insurance industries are
unclear how “risks,” as a property of art itself, are to be defined. Building on these findings, the
chapter’s third section asks how the insurance of art functioned in eighteenth-century British
marine insurance, arguably the first significant formalized insurance industry, with royally-
chartered companies and a private sector backed by government support and flush with capital
that eventually dominated European insurance networks. Individuals seeking insurance for fine
art works in transit faced numerous operative difficulties, particularly during periods of
imperialist conflict like the Napoleonic Wars. It reveals how art world actors and insurers alike
were forced to develop insurance competencies insurance on the one hand, and fine art
competencies on the other.
The chapter’s fourth and final section looks at another prominent service industry in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain where individuals purchased insurance for fine and
applied art objects: fire insurance on buildings and personal property. Using insurance industry
documents and records for personal collections, this section shows how a developing British fire
insurance industry gradually came to perceive and formalize cover for art risks. Art risks created
operative difficulties for insurers, forcing the insurers to establish prices and values for
collections held by middle-class clients and landed owners on great estates. It also discusses how
insurance, especially, played a background role in nineteenth-century discussions about the
valuation and stewardship of private property. What did it mean for someone to insure their art
collections? The section shows that this might be because they could afford to lay claim to
property that they deemed valuable and that served to reinforce their social status. The chapter
unveils a world in which collectors came to perceive their property as subject to risks and looked
for guaranties from an expanding insurance infrastructure.

28
2. Early-modern art logistics
When one casually discusses the insurance of fine art, and particularly of art transiting
through European mercantile centers, Britain is not the first art center that comes to mind.
Rather, one would most likely look to earlier national contexts where, due to capital
accumulation, increasingly secular patronage networks developed; where independent dealers
and other agents collaborated to shift new products; and where entrepreneurial artists worked,
sometimes for the first time, within and sometimes outside of guild structures: in the Italian
Renaissance, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Lowlands. As scholars in the histories
of mobility and art markets will argue, the insurance of art predates the eighteenth century
insofar as fine and applied artworks have long circulated on sea and on land within a broader
world of transferable cargo and fungible commodities. Scanning studies of the Italian
Renaissance, the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Low Countries, and seventeenth-century
Britain, it is possible to selectively trace instances where fine and applied artworks entered into
insurance contracts as acknowledged risks.
Art historians studying Renaissance Italy’s mercantile networks have shown how art
objects transited between centers like other commodities, and they have also discussed how
artworks became differentiated from other classes of goods. Michael Baxandall’s work, Painting
and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style
(1972), introduced an analytic tool, “the period eye,” as a method for understanding how a
society’s vernacular world (like that of merchants or other everyday actors) connected to and was
manifested in its visual culture.
9
For our purposes, Baxandall lays useful groundwork for the

9
Michael Baxandall, Painting & Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social
History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 36-40.

29
longer history of art insurance because he reveals how artistic contracts between fifteenth-
century patrons and artists created settings in which for the first time the individual artist’s skill
was valued over the preciousness of particular materials (like gold or lapis lazuli) used in the
work’s production. That is, these contracts codified artist/patron relationships, and codified the
characteristics of an artwork. They bound both patron and artist to a timeline of production and
remuneration in which all parties were required to trust one another to deliver on their ends of
the agreement against risk of default.
10
These legal contracts in a sense provide a precondition
for the development of an art insurance contract, which also identifies participants, the specific
art property, premium amounts, restrictions, and a temporal framework in which the services
were to be rendered.
11

Recently, scholars like Barbara Furlotti have focused on the economic and social
histories of circulation, particularly the Italian Renaissance collecting of Roman antiquities.
12

Furlotti has creatively shifted attention from the outcomes of this traffic in goods—that is from

10
See for example Baxandall’s analysis of a 1499 contract for frescoes in the Orvieto Cathedral
in which the client prized the artist’s specific skills, thereby elevating the author of the picture:
“The said master Luca is bound and promises to paint (1) all the figures to be done on the said
vault, and (2) especially the faces and all the parts of the figures from the middle of each figure
upwards, and (3) that no painting should be done on it without Luca himself being present […]
And it is agreed (4) that all the mixing of colors should be done by the said master Luca himself
[…].” Baxandall, Painting & Experience, 23. See also Michelle O’Malley, The Business of Art:
Contracts and the Commissioning Process in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2005).
11
Richard Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). On contemporary artworks and contracts see Joan
Kee,“Felix Gonzales-Torres on Contracts,” Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy 26, iss. 3
(Spring 2017): 517-531.
12
Barbara Furlotti, Antiquities in Motion: From Excavation Sites to Renaissance Collections
(Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2019), 3, chapters seven and eight. Other art historical
interventions on circulation in the early-modern Mediterranean include David Young Kim, The
Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance: Geography, Mobility, and Style (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2014), Daniela Bleichmar and Meredith Martin, Objects in Motion in the Early
Modern World (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016).

30
the elite collectors and antiquarians—to the networks of excavator peasants, dealers, restorers,
and porters who made an art object’s journey from discovery to an aristocratic collection
possible. This shift from a top-down focus upon elite collectors, to the “bottom up” networks of
agents like courrieri (courriers) and the procacci (convoy guides), antiquarians, and artists
responsible for an artwork’s journey, allows Furlotti to focus on socio-economic actors usually
excluded from provenance histories.
13
In her assessments of these journeys, she shows how
antiquities were crated and shipped out of Rome to Florence or Livorno, and that shippers
preferred marine journeys as this circulation method proved less traumatic for antiquities than
traversing uneven roads. Furlotti omits insurance information, perhaps because contracts for
insured goods—from luxury goods to foodstuffs—might be imprecisely marked, or insurance
might cover an entire unspecified cargo, as Giovanni Ceccarelli and other scholars of
Renaissance insuring practices have shown.
14
Furlotti does show how agents sending antiquities
took precautions against unforeseen providential and human dangers. These providential
practices included Papal bulls—such as Pope Paul IV’s 1556 motu proprio, which banned the
exportation of antiquities out of Rome—that were instituted to mandate restrictions on the
antiquities trade, as well as the contracting of ambassadors and agents to find appropriate
convoys over land and sea.

13
The scholarly turn away from elite cultures of consumption has also entered Renaissance
studies. An exciting recent project is Paula Hohti-Erichsen, Artisans, Objects and Everyday Life
in Renaissance Italy: The Material Culture of the Middling Class (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2021).
14
Giovanni Ceccarelli, “Trade and Insurance: Goods,” in Risky Markets: Marine Insurance in
Renaissance Florence (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021), 47-59. For a discussion about the
theological critiques of usury and scholastic origins of some insurantial ideas, see Giovanni
Ceccarelli, “Risky Business: Theological and Canonical Thought on Insurance from the
Thirteenth to the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, iss. 3
(Fall 2001): 607-658.

31
When maritime power shifted from Italy to the Low Countries in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, economic service industries developed in support.
15
When the Dutch
Republic and Spain reached a truce in their war in 1609, the end of hostilities brought economic
expansion to the Netherlands, and as Violet Barbour, Frank Spooner, Oscar Gelderblom, and
Sabine Go have shown, the Dutch Republic became highly organized as a marine insurance
center.
16
By the 1590s it was an entrêpot for international commodities from Spain, Portugal, and
the New World. Exchanges for financial services and especially for insurance appeared in
Rotterdam by 1598 and in Amsterdam by 1611, which was also a busy shipbuilding center.
Art markets gravitated to the flow of capital. Entrepreneurial and mobile art dealers
reached larger and more dispersed client bases, while the Protestant Church’s
iconoclastic perspective on ecclesiastical patronage encouraged art networks to develop in which
painters produced works speculatively for anonymous markets.
17
From the early seventeenth
century, Amsterdam agents were already operating auction markets, while dealers shipped
inexpensive paintings from Antwerp abroad, challenging local guilds. Art objects in transit may

15
Oscar Gelderblom, Cities of Commerce: The Institutional Foundations of International Trade
in the Low Countries, 1250–1650 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2013).
16
Violet Barbour, “Marine Risks and Insurance in the seventeenth century,” Journal of
Economic and Business History I (1928/1929): 561-596; Frank C. Spooner, Risks at Sea:
Amsterdam Insurance and Maritime Europe 1766–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983); Sabine Go, Marine Insurance in the Netherlands, 1600–1870: A Comparative
Institutional Approach (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2009).
17
J. Michael Montias, “Cost and Value in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art,” Art History 10, no. 4
(December 1987): 455-466; Neil De Marchi and Hans J. Van Miegroet, “Art, Value, and Market
Practices in the Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century,” The Art Bulletin 76, no. 3 (September,
1994): 451-464; Filip Vermeylen, Painting for the Market: Commercialization of Art in
Antwerp’s Golden Age (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003); Eric Jan Sluijter, “On Brabant
Rubbish, Economic Competition, Artistic Rivalry, and the Growth of the Market for Paintings,”
Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 1, no. 2 (Summer 2009), 1-32; Dries Lyna, Filip
Vermeylen, Hans Vlieghe, Art Auctions and Dealers: the Dissemination of Netherlandish Art
during the Ancien Régime (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009).

32
have sometimes been considered little different from other goods and were insured accordingly.
Natalia Gozzano shows how Flemish agents operated in Italy in trading ports like Messina,
Livorno, Naples, and Venice, within a Flemish merchant community that subsumed art trading
and insuring within a broader mercantile network.
18
For example, the insurance of pictures and
tapestries from Flanders to Italy was carried out by operators in banking or shipping under the
aegis of the silk trade, as these commodities could all be rolled into barrels and transported by
sea.
19

In the Low Countries from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries, art
markets also became natural sites for pooling collective risks. As Jessen Lee Kelly and Sophie
Raux have described, such speculative practices included developments of a flourishing print
culture related to games and gambling, and public lotteries of art objects.
20
Independent
entrepreneurs like François Verbeelen (before 1580–after 1619) held such lotteries for private
gain, but civic authorities like the city of Leiden in 1596 also held lotteries to garner charitable

18
Natalia Gozzano, “From Flanders to Sicily: The Network of Flemish Dealers in Italy and the
International (Art) Market in the Seventeenth Century,” in Moving Pictures: Intra-European
Trade in Images, 16th-18th Centuries, eds. Neil De Marchi and Sohie Raux (Turnhout, Belgium:
Brepols, 2014), 151-187. See also Sandra Van Ginhoven, Connecting Art Markets: Guilliam
Forchondt’s Dealership in Antwerp (c.1632–78) and the Overseas Paintings Trade (Leiden and
Boston: Brill, 2016), 7-11, 99-101.
19
In particular, Gozzano describes the work of Antwerp-born, Naples-based merchant, Gaspar
de Roomer (c. 1596 and 1606–1674), who was an important dealer in textiles, foodstuffs, and
luxury goods, and who also worked as an insurance broker. It is implied that in his work
insurance prices for rolled pictures and tapestries were proportionate to insurance prices on
textile insurances, indicating that insurance differentiation between luxury goods was as yet less
distinct in this era.
20
Jessen Lee Kelly, “Renaissance Futures: Chance, Prediction, and Play in Northern European
Visual Culture, c. 1480–1550,” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2011; Sophie
Raux, Lotteries, Art Markets, and Visual Culture in the Low Countries, 15
th
–17
th
Centuries
(Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018). As a parallel research subject to this dissertation, the art lottery
also has a longer modern history. See Joy Sperling, “Art, Cheap and Good:” The Art Union in
England and the United States, 1840–60,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 1, no. 1 (Spring
2002).

33
funds for public projects. Lotteries had the benefit that the more tickets a participant bought, the
better were their odds of winning the plate or paintings on offer, and participants could also
spread risks by subdividing tickets. In an “atmosphere of speculation linked to nascent
capitalism,” pooled risks tied to fine and applied artworks became popular and naturalized.
21

Throughout the seventeenth century, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Hamburg dominated as
maritime insurance markets, but marine insurance already existed in England by the sixteenth
century, with the Royal Exchange serving as a marketplace for transactions from 1566, and
insurance already entering into the public consciousness. In An Essay Upon Projects (1697),
Daniel Defoe wrote “All the Contingencies of Life might be fenc’d against… (as Fire is already)
as Thieves, Floods by Land, Storms by Sea, Losses of all Sorts, and Death itself, in a manner, by
making it up to the Survivor.”
22
When companies for life assurance formed at the end of the
seventeenth century, a technology formerly derided as a form of gambling and outlawed in other
European countries became accepted as a means for binding people into associations against
future uncertainties.
23
In this period, marine insurance was also a tool for royal collectors
assembling ambitious art collections from the Continent. For example, Charles I, avid collector
of Spanish, Dutch and Italian pictures, who acquired more than 1,500 paintings and 500
sculptures, relied upon networks of agents to find and ship costly works to England. The logistics
for these endeavors were complex and also costly, as for example with Charles’ purchase of the

21
Raux estimates that 270 lotteries were held in the former Low Countries from 1500 to 1608,
but there may have been many more, testifying to their popularity. Raux, Lotteries, 15.
22
Daniel Defoe, An Essay Upon Projects (London: Printed by R. R. for Thomas Cockerill,
1697).
23
Clark, Betting On Lives. The terms “insurance” and “assurance” are often used
interchangeably, but historically “assurance” referred to long-term coverage for an event that
was certain to happen, like death, whereas “insurance” described financial coverage for an
unforeseen event like a dangerous accident.

34
collection of the Dukes of Mantua for £18,280 12s. 8d. between 1627 and 1632. This brought
with it also the costs for insurance and shipping £1,341 13s.: a massive sum.
24
Further, he
worked with prodigious agents like the Flemish dealer Daniel Nys (1572–1647), involved in
insurances and brokering the sale of the Gonzaga collection which Charles I would default on, a
spectacular miscalculation.
25
All of the above is to argue that specialized insurance for art, while
not unheard of, was far from common, but conditions were beginning to shift so that it would
become more naturalized in the eighteenth century.

3. Knowable risks: fine and applied art in merchant handbooks
How did the insurance world in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries view
fine and applied art works? How did it apprehend and value them? How did these valuations
change over the eighteenth century? What means were introduced to value them? One way to
understand how the mercantile and insurance world perceived fine and applied artworks as risks

24
Its purchasing power in 2017 would be £163,881.47. François Portier, “Prices Paid for Italian
Pictures in the Stuart Age,” Journal of the History of Collections 8, no. 1 (1996): 53-69; Jerry
Brotton and David McGrath, “The Spanish acquisition of King Charles I’s art collection: The
letters of Alonso de Cárdenas, 1649–51,” Journal of the History of Collections 20, no. 1 (2008):
1-16; Susan Bracken and Robert Hill, “Sir Isaac Wake, Venice and art collecting in early Stuart
England: A new document,” Journal of the History of Collections 24, no. 2 (2012): 183-198.
“The List for the paintings has still not been announced and doubts as to whether they will be
persisting in the same way as mentioned in my last communication. I await their publication.
Meanwhile, I do not see any danger of the sale of paintings listed in the memoranda for His
Majesty and Your Honour; the only one at risk was the portrait of my Lord the Emperor Charles
V, because it is such an outstanding piece. And I have therefore purchased it and have sent it to
you in a ship bound for Alicante. I have insured it for the purchase price of eight thousand reales.
A large part of the tapestry has also been insured and I am looking for an insurer for its
remainder, because reliable persons who might undertake this are not easy to find. The 6,000
escudos for the paintings of His Majesty and the 3,000 for those of Your Honour were cashed
and have been sent to me.” (9-10)
25
Christina M. Anderson, The Flemish Merchant of Venice: Daniel Nijs and the Sale of the
Gonzaga Art Collection (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015).

35
is to search for them in economic literature. Authors publishing versions of the law-merchant—a
sprawling, transnational compendium of customs, practices, and shared knowledge that all
merchants trading across the seas were expected to know—sometimes included discussions
about the insurable value of fine and applied artworks. I read this material alongside later
insurance treatises charting marine and fire insurances—the insurance fields that typically dealt
with fine and applied art—with the former dealing with works insured during the practice of
trade and the latter dealing with works insured within dwellings and other buildings. Handbooks
and insurance trade manuals reveal how art works and other luxury goods circulated in the
trading world. They show how these works were perceived by merchants, solicitors, instructors,
factors, and other agents.
At least 12,000 mercantile manual titles were published between 1470 and 1820. They
arose in tandem with double-entry bookkeeping and other record-keeping practices. Many texts
might contain mathematical tables, aphorisms, case studies, commercial data like national tariffs
and tolls, accounting techniques and other “how-to” information.
26
In her analysis of merchants’
handbooks, Natasha Glaisyer has shown that the goals of such texts might be to train the reader
(a student, apprentice, active clerk, or gentleman) to become a virtuous and rational man of
business.
27
But she also shows how these texts were sometimes full of obscure data like lengthy
lists of goods, as in auction catalogues or price catalogues. While their heft might undermine
their actual usefulness, she speculates that they offered merchant initiates “an unprecedented

26
Daniel A. Rabuzzi, “Eighteenth-Century Commercial Mentalities as Reflected and Projected
in Business Handbooks,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, no. 2 (Winter 1995–1996): 169-189.
For a nineteenth-century annotated list see also John Ramsay McCulloch, The literature of
political economy (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1845).
27
Rabuzzi, “Eighteenth-Century Commercial Mentalities,” 169.

36
sense of control over the intimidating universe of credit, debt, and cash-flows.”
28
For our
purposes, we want to know how these merchant texts conceived of artworks: their appropriate
handling and transport, and their broader conception, as this knowledge will enable us to
understand how the mercantile world factored artworks as risks.
Wyndham Beawes’ Lex Mercatoria Rediviva: Or, A Complete Code of Commercial Law
(1751) seems to show no evidence of fine art risks, although luxury risks of questionable value
play a role.
29
Beawes’ volume is one of the most well-known and republished mid-eighteenth-
century versions of the law-merchant: a type of guide document originating in the fourteenth
century.
30
The law-merchant could include technical seafaring information, types of cargo and

28
Natasha Glaisyer, “‘The compleat comptinghouse’: manuals for merchants,” in The Culture of
Commerce in England, 1660–1720 (London: Boydell & Brewer, 2006), 100-142.
29
Beawes’ full title provides a better sense of the populations this text solicited: Wyndham
Beawes, Lex mercatoria rediviva: or, The merchant's directory. Being a complete guide to all
men in business, whether as traders, remitters, owners, freighters, captains, insurers, brokers,
factors, supercargoes, agents. Containing an account of our trading companies and colonies,
with their establishments, and an abstract of their charters; the duty of consuls, and the laws
subsisting about aliens, naturalization and denization. To which is added, a state of the present
general traffick of the whole world; describing the manufactures and products of each particular
nation: and tables of the correspondence and agreement of the Europea coins, weights, and
measures, with the addition of all others that are known. Extracted from the works of the best
writers both home and abroad; more especially from those justly celebrated ones of Messieurs
Savary; improved and corrected by the author's own observations, during his long continuance
in trade. The whole calculated for the use and service of the merchant, lawyer, senator, and
gentleman. By Wyndham Beaws, merchant (London: Printed for R. Baldwin, 1751). For an
earlier version see also Gerard Malynes, Consuetudo, vel lex mercatoria, or The ancient law-
merchant […] (London: Printed by Adam Islip, 1622).
30
There are many active debates about the law-merchant’s origins and uses. For example, see
Nikitas E. Hatzimihail, “The Many Lives-and Faces-of Lex Mercatoria: History as Genealogy in
International Business Law,” Law and Contemporary Problems 71, no. 3, Transdisciplinary
Conflict of Laws (Summer, 2008): 169-190. For the purposes of this paper I drew upon Hannah
Farber’s doctoral work on the Lex mercatoria, and a presentation Farber made at the USC
Martens Economic History Forum, February 8, 2018. Hannah Farber, “Underwritten States:
Marine Insurance and the Making of Bodies Politic in America, 1622–1815,” PhD diss.,
University of California, Berkeley 2014. See also L. Stuart Sutherland, “The Law Merchant in
England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society 17 (1934): 149-176; Adrian B. Leonard, “London 1426–1601: Marine Insurance and the

37
commodities, descriptions of legal practices in different international jurisdictions, taxation and
tariff rates, information about currency conversion charts and bills of exchange, and bookkeeping
technicalities. As Hannah Farber has argued, insurance appeared as the Lex Mercatoria’s
quintessential topic, for as integral financial partners to the merchant, the insurers’ job was to
ensure that a vessel and its crew were good risks.
31
The insurer therefore had to be as adept and
knowledgeable about the seafaring world as the merchants themselves, effectively acting as a
member of each vessel, even if they remained on land in London. The Lex Mercatoria
underscored insurance’s decentralized, specialized nature.
If insurance featured prominently in printed versions of the law-merchant, as insurers
were the “consummate members” of what Farber calls the “merchant polity,” what presence did
cultural or art risks play in the law merchant’s insurance section?
32
In Beawes’ text, written at a
point when London was already the leading center of foreign trade, the insurance section
presents examples of cases in which insurances on ships were contested in courts. These cover
subjects like insurances of prohibited goods; insuring enemy ships like those belonging to French
traders; trade in enslaved people; insuring goods from the Americas; insurance during wartime;
how to judge the characters of a ship’s crew; and dealing with privateers.
33
He discusses special
insurances of luxury goods sent by sea, canal, or by land, but the examples he gives are of
jewels. He discusses an insurance case from 1747 in which a ship, the “Love and Unity,” was
bound between London and Lisbon by convoy. On the return trip from London, the freighter,

Law Merchant,” in Marine Insurance: Origins and Institutions, 1300–1850, ed. Adrian B.
Leonard (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 151-176.
31
Hannah Farber, “The Political Economy of Marine Insurance and the Making of the United
States,” The William and Mary Quarterly 77, no. 4 (2020): 581-612.
32
Farber, “Underwritten States,” 2014, 45.
33
Wyndham Beawes, “Of Insurances,” Lex Mercatoria Rediviva: Or, A Complete Code of
Commercial Law (London: Printed for R. Baldwin, 1751), 261-307.

38
Bateman Humphreys, decided to defraud insurers by packaging pieces of lead and glass in such a
way to give the impression that they carried gold and diamonds. He indicated as much in the bills
of lading that he sent back to London in order to be able to take out insurances on the packages,
as well as considerable sums on credit. As Farber has shown, bills of lading were precisely-
worded documents that traveled with a parcel of goods in transit.
34
They recorded the shipmaster
or supercargo legally responsible for the articles, the sender, contents, and destination. When
privateers and naval vessels captured merchant ships, these documents and other paperwork
aboard helped establish the vessel’s and cargoes’ nationality and legality, although shippers
could also falsify documents.
35
Humphrey intended to somehow scupper the ship to get an
insurance payout, but the ship’s captain checked the packages before the ship left Lisbon and
subsequently informed the English consul there.
36
Beawes relates this narrative, but he is clearly

34
On the bill of lading’s mechanics and in some cases as a form of folk art, see Hannah Farber,
“Sailing on Paper: The Embellished Bill of Lading in the Material Atlantic, 1720–1864,” Early
American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 17, no. 1 (2019): 37-83. Norman I. Miller, “Bills
of Lading and Factors in Nineteenth Century English Overseas Trade,” The University of
Chicago Law Review 24, no. 2 (Winter 1957): 256-291.
35
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal has identified the important role that epistolary information played in
eighteenth-century commercial maritime practices during wartime, when tensions might arise
around the neutrality of vessels carrying unreliable paperwork for goods or contraband. His work
addresses how privateers and jurists in admiralty courts faced difficulties when trying to
correctly identify enemy property on merchant ships. It provides a view on the legal side of the
story of art intermediaries like Buchanan, who were forced to provide dissimulating epistles and
other forged documents in order to navigate shifting mercantile conditions during the Napoleonic
conflicts. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, “Reading cargoes: Letters and the Problem of nationality in the
age of Privateering,” in A World at Sea: Maritime Practices and Global History eds. Lauren
Benton and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 75-
88.
36
Beawes, “Of Insurances,” 264. On the financial import of gems, Dickson also discusses how
jewels were sometimes used as financial collateral and loan securities, particularly by the private
Childs’ Bank, the oldest bank in England (est. 1664). P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial
Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756, rev. ed. (1967;
repr., London: Routledge, 2016), 437-438.

39
less concerned with the goods in transit than he is with the legal norms and precedents for
insurers. Fine art works therefore remain outside the purview of his description.
In some mercantile writings, fine and applied artworks are not construed as risks, but
subsumed within exhortations to adapt and expand trade, as in Malachy Postlethwayt’s (1707–
1767) Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce.
37
A London merchant who was an official
with the Royal Africa Company and a slave trade defender, Postlethwayt produced this reference
volume, which was a translation and reworking of the Dictionnaire universal de commerce
(1723), a text by the French economic writer, Jacques Savary des Brûlons (1657–1716).
38

Postlethwayt also incorporated more than 500 references to other pamphlets, treatises, and other
informative texts into nearly 1,500 alphabetically organized articles which were assemblages of
legislative precedent—insurance cases that had made it to the courts—relevant histories,
followed by sections of “Remarks” and sample documents like model insurance policies.
39
With
this, the largest compendium of commercial knowledge in Britain to date, Postlethwayt’s goal
was to challenge French imperial and commercial skill.
40
His book targeted as much the
“practical merchant and trader as […] the senator and private gentleman.”
41
He argued that the
British state should emulate the French Royal methods for overseeing trade.
42

37
Printed in installments between 1751 and 1755, subsequently as a two-volume work (1757;
fourth edition, reprinted in 1774).
38
Jacques Savary des Brûlons was a lexicographer and Inspector General of the Manufactures
for the King at the Paris Customs House.
39
Richard van den Berg, “‘A judicious and industrious compiler’: Mapping Postlethwayt’s
Dictionary of Commerce,” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 24, no. 6
(December 2017): 1167-1213.
40
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, “Postlethwayt, Malachy (1707–1767), writer
on economics and publicist,” by Peter Groenewegen, accessed September 3, 2021.
41
Malachy Postlethwayt, The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce. … , 2 vols.
(London, 1757), 23.
42
See also Jacob Soll, “For a New Economic History of Early Modern Empire: Anglo-French
Imperial Co-development beyond Mercantilism and Laissez-Faire,” The William and Mary

40
Fine and applied arts enter Postlethwayt’s compendium insofar as they are levers for
national mercantile competition. Postlethwayt recounts numerous export products from imperial
trading centers: paintings and tapestries from France; exotic woods and other textiles from
colonial centers like India; products from the Americas like cochineal. In entries on “Picture-
Painting,” ‘Tapestry,” ‘Machine,” and “Mechanicks,” he argues that Britain ought to emulate the
French government’s support for the arts that Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683) had pioneered
at the Gobelins tapestry factory. Before the founding of the British Royal Academy in 1768,
Postlethwayt argued that the court should support arts institutions.
43
In this respect he echoes

Quarterly 77, no. 4 (2020): 525-550, as well as Jacob Soll, “From Note-Taking to Data Banks:
Personal and Institutional Information Management in Early Modern Europe” Intellectual
History Review 20, no. 3 (August 2010): 355-375.
43
The entry for “Tapestry” features the following commentary: “An academy for the fine
arts…under a royal charter, with distinguishing honors and privileges for the higher members,
and small pensions for the lower, might give us the prospect of some perfection in the branches
of TAPESTRY-WEAVING, PAINTING, SCULPTURES, and STATUARY, and all the lower
trades of elegance depending on fine DESIGN. Without some such public institution, they never
yet were carried to a height in any country: no private fortune can stand out the time necessary to
train up hands enough to extend the ART into a TRADE: but when once sufficient number were
made perfect in this seminary, private adventurers would be found ready enough to take up the
business; for no place ever wanted a trade, that abounded with working hands well instructed
therein. In a word, the THEORETICAL ARTS and PRACTICAL TRADES thereon depending,
should go hand in hand.” His remarks on “Machine” are particularly curious, since they allude to
values afforded particular goods produced by different national manufactures, in which the trade
in paintings is compared to the trade in planed boards. He recounts a situation in which a Russian
Czar “purchases a painting in London for 100 guineas (finished probably in the space of one
day). This sum is more than one of his subjects would earn, in the above-mentioned way of
hewing planks, by the labor of sixty-nine years and fifteen days, or as much as 50,400 would
gain in one day. Should the returns of two nations be equal, whilst one traded in paintings alone,
and the other in planks, hewed in this method, it is evident there must be 50,400 subjects in the
latter for every single one in the former. An increase of wealth may attend a decrease of numbers
and real strength, for which reason the balance of money is less to be regarded. The exports of
our nation may, at present, exceed a million in the lower branches of bays, serges, druggets, and
flannels, and this may employ a million of hands. In a course of years we will suppose this trade
to be changed for that of wrought works, tapestry, painting, and statuary, in which our exports
might amount to two millions; for which a thousand hands, full employed, would be more than
sufficient. Here we see it possible that our wealth may be annually increased a million, whilst our
real strength is decreased in the population proportion of a thousand to one. There is nothing

41
Bernard Mandeville’s (1670–1733) and later Jonathan Richardson’s (1667–1745) perspectives
that an English school of painting ought to be established so that England’s cultural exports
might compete with other European goods.
44
As Berg notes, in one of his Dictionary’s longest
entries, Postlethwayt dilates at length—nine pages—on export porcelain from China.
45
But does
he talk about these items as insurable risks? In his sections on “Assurance” and on “Average” he
discusses particular commodities in passing. However, risks to fine art are only alluded to within
the compendium’s alphabetized arrangement. Postlethwayt’s disquisition on “Painting” appears
directly after the entry for “Packers”: a serendipitous placement that accents the merchant’s
conceptualization of paintings as movable commodities subjected to transport logistics.
46

incompatible in the arts of ingenuity and those of labor, and all the plainer trades may be
retained, notwithstanding the higher arts are introduced, in which case we should be both a richer
and greater people.” Postlethwayt, Universal Dictionary, 1757, 775-782 .
44
Bernard Mandeville makes this point in the Fable of the Bees (London: Printed for J. Roberts,
1714), while Richardson makes this point in his Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism as it Relates
to Painting and an Argument in Behalf of the Science of the Connoisseur (London: Printed for
W. Churchill at the Black Swan in Pater-noster Row, 1719), 49-51: “If our People were
Improved in the Arts of Designing, not only our Paintings, Carvings, and Prints, but the Works
of all our other Artificiers would also be proportionably Improved, and consequently coveted by
Other Nations, and their Price advanced, which therefore would be no small Improvement of our
Trade, and with that of our Wealth.” […] “Instead of Importing vast Quantities of Pictures, and
the like Curiosities for Ordinary Use, we might fetch from Abroad only the Best, and supply
other Nations with Better than Now we commonly take off their Hands: For as much a
Superfluity as these things are thought to be, they are such as no Body will be without, not the
meanest Cottager in the Kingdom, that is not in the extremest Poverty, but he will have
something of Picture in his Sight.” Jules Lubbock, The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of
Architecture and Design in Britain, 1550–1960 (New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in
British Art, 1995), 90-132.
45
Maxine Berg, “In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the
Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 182, no. 1 (February 2004): 85-142. See also, Maxine
Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007).
46
Postlethwayt describes packers as “a very reputable trade” “pressers of all sorts of bale-goods
(intended for exportation) for the great trading companies and merchants, for which they are
answerable, if they should happen to receive any damage through bad package; besides this,
several of them are considerable dealers.” Postlethwayt, Universal Dictionary, 1757, 393.

42
Paintings as commodities appeared in later specialist insurance manuals. By the latter
years of the eighteenth century, insurance had grown into a minimally regulated industry that
observed its own internal, erratic laws around liability. In response, insurance writer John
Weskett (1730–1800?) published A complete digest of the theory, laws, and practice of
insurance (1781, 1783) in part as a plea for the British government to institute changes to
insurance regulation: “We appear all to be adrift, without Pilot or Compass, driving before the
Wind of Accident, amidst Quicksand and Rocks so that if we long escape Shipwreck, we shall
have wonderful good Luck.”
47
An alphabetized compendium of articles about marine, fire, and
life insurances, his book informed insurers about pertinent subjects, here catalogued by literary
scholar Ian Baucom:
the knowledge of ship sailing and docking times provided for the London insurance
community by Lloyd’s lists and published for their Liverpool counterparts in Gore’s
General Advertiser; the knowledge of market conditions and commodity prices in the full
range of maritime entrepôts; the knowledge of the hazard levels associated with each of
the 100 or more commodities most commonly insured in the maritime trade; the
knowledge of both the particular domestic and foreign political events that might affect a
given commodity trade and of the broader historical trends impinging on Britain’s
involvement in international commerce; the knowledge of conditions of commodity
scarcity and oversupply prevailing at each of the port cities to which a cargo might be
brought for sale; the knowledge of currency exchange rates and the shifting value of a
cargo of goods as expressed in Spanish, American, Dutch, French, and British coin; the
knowledge of the trustworthiness of individual merchants consigning a cargo to the sea
and of their willingness to submit a fraudulent claim; the knowledge of the behavior of
captains, their willingness to sail in the company of a Royal Navy escort (when such was
provided) or to bolt escort in the interest of arriving first at an undersupplied market; the
knowledge of the incidence of privateering along particular trade routes and of the
weather hazards of these; the knowledge, in a word, of the full set of historical
circumstances which might operate as a given cargo’s situation.
48

47
John Weskett, A complete digest of the theory, laws, and practice of insurance (London: Frys,
Couchman, & Collier, 1781), viii.
48
Ian Baucom, “‘Madam Death! Madam Death!’: Credit, Insurance, and the Atlantic Cycle of
Capital Accumulation,” in Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy
of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 104; See also Saidiya Hartman, “The Dead
Book,” in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Macmillan,
2006), 136-153.

43

The first edition of Weskett’s volume appeared the same year as the events of the slave
ship, Zong, and the volume was meant to clarify and challenge inconsistencies in insurance
practice and law that the Zong case had exposed to the public. These events are by now well
known: a slave ship registered in Liverpool that journeyed to Jamaica from the African coast
veered off course and depleted its water reserves. The ship’s captain, Luke Collingwood, ordered
183 enslaved people onboard the ship to be cast overboard, retaining the remainder for sale in
Jamaica. The Zong’s ship owners, the William Gregson slaving syndicate, took their insurers–a
Liverpool syndicate led by merchant Thomas Gilbert–to court for the African people, who had
been insured as cargo at £30 each, and the resulting legal disputes (Gregson vs Gilbert) took
place in London court in 1783 under Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, the same year that the
second edition of Weskett’s book appeared.
49
The Zong case was a touchstone legal battle in the
history of abolition, relying on intelligence by a freed enslaved person, Olaudah Equiano (1745–
1797), and dramatically revealing to the British public the vast numbers of people routinely
killed in the course of the triangular trade, as well as the numbers of those who fought their
captors. In discussing this event, historians and literary scholars of slavery and insurance have
shown the routine and disinterested way in which insurance played a part in dehumanizing
enslaved people, in which living humans were subjected to a pitiless cash nexus, defined as
merely “cargo.” [Fig. 3] J. M. W. Turner’s picture, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the
Dead and Dying – Typhon Coming on), exhibited at the Royal Academy, 1840, is the most

49
Anita Rupprecht, “Excessive Memories: Slavery, Insurance and Resistance,” History
Workshop Journal 64, no. 1 (Autumn 2007): 6-28; James Walvin, The Zong: A Massacre, the
Law & the End of Slavery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Robin Pearson and David
Richardson, “Insuring the Atlantic Slave Trade,” Journal of Economic History 79, no. 2 (2019):
417-46.

44
frequently cited painterly representation of the trade (if not perhaps an explicit image of the
Zong, as some scholars have argued), and particularly of the cold, legal logic of a financial
endeavor whose financial backbone was insurance.
50
Weskett makes this abundantly clear in his
article on “Commodities,” organizing exportable commodities according to their hazard level or
perishability. These hazard levels distinguish “the greater or less risque, to which they are liable,
of sea damage: nevertheless, as much depends on the nature of the package, stowage, and sundry
other circumstances, it is impossible to form such classes with accuracy.” The four classes were
“Least Hazardous”; “Common Hazardous”; “More Hazardous” and “Most Hazardous.”
51

Contemporary scholars have understandably analyzed the second class, “Hazardous risks,” in
which Weskett includes enslaved people with livestock and inanimate goods, along with some
fine and applied arts and materials like china, silk, painters’ colors, and furniture:
Class 2: Common Hazardous. Brushes, Butter, Candles, Cards, Catlings, Cattle
(excluding the risque of natural death) Chariots, China, Coaches, Cochineal, Crockery,
Feathers, Glass, Glue, Hair, Hats, Hogs Bristles, Hops, Horse Furniture, Hosiery,
Household Furniture, Kelp, Leather Manufactures, Matts and Matting, Painters Colors,
Parchment, Plaister or Paris, Lime, Linens, Paris, Quills, Rice, Rofin, Sedans, Silks,
Slaves (usually insured “free from loss average trading boats, and from insurrection
under and sometimes under per cent.”) Soap, Tallow, Tarras, Tobacco Pipes,
Tortoiseshell, Toys, Vellum, Vermicelli, Wax, Wearing-Apparel, Whalebone, Woollens,
Yarn.
52

50
The literature on Turner’s Slave Ship is vast and grows vaster still. For a selection, see Marcus
Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865,
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 41-64. More scholarship appeared in 2007
with the centenary commemoration of Britain’s abolition of the slave trade. See Sam Smiles,
“Turner and the Slave Trade: Speculation and Representation, 1805–1840,” The British Art
Journal 8, no. 3 (2007): 47-54; Anita Rupprecht, “‘A Very Uncommon Case’: Representations
of the Zong and the British Campaign to Abolish the Slave Trade,” The Journal of Legal History
28, no. 3 (December 2007): 329-346; James Walvin, “A Painting and a Slave Ship,” in The
Zong: A Massacre, the Law & the End of Slavery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 1-
11; Leo Costello, J.M.W. Turner and the Subject of History (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). And most
recently from a political theory perspective, Laura Brace, “Fallacies of hope: Contesting
narratives of abolition in Turner’s Slave Ship,” Atlantic Studies 17, no. 4 (2020): 441-461.
51
Fire insurance companies also had a similar set of tiered categories to describe risks.
52
Weskett, A complete digest, 105.

45

Scholars use this list—described by one as nonsensically Borgesian—to show insurance’s
brutalizing equivalencies.
53
It is worth comparing Common Hazardous to More Hazardous
goods, and here we might be surprised to note that pictures and engravings are in the More
Hazardous category than human beings captured to be sold into slavery:
Class 3: More Hazardous. Flax, Hemp, Hides, Skins, Sugar, Tobacco (these six articles,
by the N. B. at the foot of the policy are “free from average under five per cent. unless
general or the ship be stranded:” but hides are now usually insured with a clause to be
“free from average, unless general, and except the charges of washing and drying if
damaged by sea-water”), Barilla, Brimstone, Books, Clock and Watch-Work, Cotton
Wool, Drugs, Grocery and Spices in general, Gums, Indico, Laces, Madder Roots, Maps
Charts and Engravings, Nails, Needles, Orcheal, Paper, Pictures, Powder, Rags, Salt-
Petre, Shumack, Skins (if not packed in casks) Smalts, Wool.

Weskett justifies these incongruencies to by stating that there are great differences in risk of
damage and average to commodities, but “in respect of the different natures of commodities,
consideration is due, not only as they are in themselves more or less subject to damage, but as
they are also liable to cause damage to each other: when this is the case, a strict enquiry should
be made as to their package, and especially their stowage; which may sometimes be even
fraudulently made”
54
Different classes of goods constituted different risk classes, and could even
pose risks to one another when they were jostled in a ship’s hold.
Weskett’s discussion of luxury commodities is not confined to this list. Like
Postlethwayt’s volume, he also provides examples of insurance policy language. He reproduces
company incorporation articles, and policies for fire offices including the London Assurance, the
Union Fire-Office, the Sun Fire Office, and the Hand-in-Hand Fire Office. All of these offices
excluded exceptional categories of goods from being insured. In examples of policy language for

53
Baucom, Specters, 111. Weskett’s equivalencies and included subjects can indeed sometimes
seem farcical, as for example the entire section devoted to “Pease” (peas).
54
Weskett, A complete digest, 106.

46
the London-Assurance and the Sun Fire Office, Weskett shows how insurances could be
established on most goods with the exception of “writings, books of accompts, notes, bills,
bonds, tallies, ready money, wearing apparel, jewels, plate, pictures, gun-powder, cattle, hay,
straw, and corn unthreshed; and also except glass, china, and earthen wares, hemp, flax, tow,
pitch, tallow, tar, and turpentine, unless such last-mentioned hazardous goods shall be specially
allowed, and acknowledged to be assured by indorsement upon this policy, signed by two or
more of the directors for the time being.”
55
Under the entry for Hand-in-Hand Fire Office
Weskett reproduced the society’s constitution, which included the directors’ and members’
duties, and premiums for different kinds of buildings, located in different parts of London: brick
buildings, timber buildings, windmills, sugar refineries, distilleries, lengths of time offered to
settle losses. Curiously the constitution’s last entry (number thirty-two) said, “The damage to
painting is to be made good, at not more than three shillings a yard; nor is more than thirty
pounds to be allowed for any chimney-piece.” What is unclear is whether the Hand-in-Hand
policy meant paintings by the yard, as in paintings on linen, valued by the yard, or house
painting; and further, what he means by “chimney-pieces” (likely in eighteenth-century Britain
to be paintings or relief sculptures, rather than mirrors, which were more common in France).
56

As the Hand-in-Hand’s constitution mentioned no other commodities, it earmarked painting as a

55
Weskett, A complete digest, 219 and 539.
56
The Oxford English Dictionary defines chimney-pieces as (1) “A picture, piece of sculpture, or
of tapestry, placed as an ornament over a fireplace” (and for this the OED provides seventeenth-
century examples) (2) “The ornamental structure, usually of stone or marble, with moulding,
carving, etc., over and around the open recess of a fireplace” (for this definition the OED
provides eighteenth–century examples). Oxford English Dictionary Online, “chimney-piece, n.,”
accessed December 2, 2021.

47
special category simultaneously contiguous with a building, yet understood to constitute a
separate, special classification altogether.
57

Further late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century insurance treatises would include
language excepting insurances on pictures and would make explicit that pictures constituted their
own category. In his alphabetized treatise, A system of the law of marine insurances with three
chapters on bottomry, on insurance on lives, on insurances against fire (1786), barrister and
legal scholar James Allen Park (1763–1838) reproduces the same kinds of exceptions around
certain hazardous goods detailed in Weskett.
58
For example, he included a model Royal
Exchange Assurance policy for goods against fire risks that left out the same categories
described above: “writings, books of accounts, notes, bills…jewels, plate, pictures,
gunpowder”
59
and he also discusses a category of insurances, “valued risks:”
60

Of policies there seems to be two kinds, valued and open policies; and the only difference
between them is this, that in the former, goods or property insured are valued at prime
cost at the time of effecting the policy; in the latter, the value is not mentioned: that in the
case of an open policy, the real value must be proved: in a valued policy it is agreed, and
is just as if the parties had admitted it at the trial.
61

57
Weskett, A complete digest, 269-271. See also Alastair Laing, “The Eighteenth-Century
English Chimneypiece,” Studies in the History of Art 25, Symposium Papers X: The Fashioning
and Functioning of the British Country House (1989): 241-254; H. A. L. Cockerell and Edwin
Green, The British Insurance Business: A Guide To Its History & Records (Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic Press, 1994), 18.
58
James Allen Park, A System of the Law of Marine Insurances with Three Chapters on
Bottomry; on Insurances on Lives; and on Insurances against Fire (London: Printed by A.
Strahan; For J. Butterworth, 1800, 1786, 4th ed., 1800). This book was published in six editions
in Park’s lifetime, with the ninth edition published in 1842. Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography Online, “Park, Sir James Alan (1763–1838), judge,” by J. A. Hamilton and Jonathan
Harris, accessed October 28, 2021.
58
Park, A System, 1.
59
Park, A System, 464.
60
Hamilton and Harris, “Park, Sir James Alan (1763–1838), judge.”
61
Park, A System, 1.

48
“Valued Risks” are especially key to my next chapter, but here it is instructive to note that they
emerge from a marine context. Park’s inclusion of this category of risk indicates a growing sense
that mercantile writers were starting to develop more specific contractual language about the
categories of goods in circulation, and also to indicate the ways in which particular goods
became constructed as certain kinds of tiered hazards. These categories would be important for
agents responsible for shipping artworks.

4. Insuring agents: art in transit

(I) Marine insurance history
In mercantile literature, writers inconsistently catalogued art risks, and often placed them
into hazardous or exceptional categories. It is important understand these risks in the context of
marine insurance. From around 3000 BCE merchants developed early insurance forms to cover
the transportation of goods in China and in Mesopotamia.
62
Charles Trenarry argued that the
Code of Hammurabi (1755–1750 BC) featured an early insurance form, the “bottomry”
agreement. In this form of merchant insurance, lenders made secure loans with high interest rates
on a ship’s keel or bottom, and if the ship sank the lender would lose their investment.
63
But
“premium insurance,” that is, marine insurance in which specific rates were calculated and
formalized in a contract based upon a voyage’s distance, route, weather, type of vessel, crew, and

62
Robin Pearson, et al., “Insurance,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, ed. Joel
Mokyr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
63
Charles F. Trenerry, The Origin and Early History of Insurance, Including the Contract of
Bottomry (London: P. S. King & Son, Ltd., 1926).

49
other potential hazards, developed in Genoa and then in Florence from the fourteenth to the
sixteenth centuries.
64

For British merchants trading overseas in the eighteenth century, premium marine
insurance provided a way to introduce financial protections on ships and cargoes against loss or
partial damage. Underwriters received premiums on particular risks, also called “lines,” and
insured “the ship-owner, ship-charterer, or merchant, for part of the whole value of a hull or
cargo.”
65
That is, insurance marshalled domestic capital from individuals who were not
themselves trading overseas, although in fact many merchants were also underwriters. With the
expansion of British commerce in the late seventeenth century, and the development of financial
institutions that serviced the national debt like the founding of the Bank of England in 1694,
financial service providers multiplied in London.
66
However, until the middle of the eighteenth
century, much overseas trade was uninsured (or self-insured), and other providers of capital were
themselves overseas merchants seeking to diversify their risk by increasing their exposure to risk
through a portfolio of different voyages by different ships in different markets.
London became the insurance world’s institutional center with business divided between
individual underwriters and, eventually, royally-chartered companies. At the center of the private
insurance establishment was Lloyd’s of London [Fig. 4]. From the 1690s, Edward Lloyd’s (d.
1713) coffeehouse in Lombard Street was the hub for commercial news and the site where ship
brokers, underwriters, merchants and stockjobbers informally gathered to share information, read
printed news reports, and place insurances upon ships and cargoes. By 1712, numerous brokers

64
Luisa Piccinno, “Genoa, 1340–1620: Early Development of Marine Insurance,” in Marine
Insurance: Origins and Institutions, ed. Adrian B. Leonard (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2016), 25-46.
65
Cockerell and Green, The British Insurance Business, 3.
66
Dickson, The Financial Revolution, 249-303.

50
listed Lloyd’s as their business address, and in 1734 a later proprietor, Thomas Jemson, began
publishing Lloyd’s List, a twice-weekly digest of commercial and shipping information, and also
Lloyd’s Register, which published lists of ships including information about their owners and
masters. By the 1760s, Lloyd’s—essentially now a marketplace where private individuals staked
their personal capital insuring vessels and cargoes—was criticized by the press for being an
unruly place rife with gambling and speculation.
67
In 1769, a small group of marine underwriters
left to create “The Society of Lloyd’s” at the Royal Exchange in Cornhill, establishing more
barriers to entry including a £15 subscribers’ fees (around £1,308.83 in 2017’s numbers) and by
1789 New Lloyd’s, led by underwriter John Julius Angerstein (1735–1823) became a central
market where individuals could underwrite risks through brokers working for merchants or ship
owners. In 1774 there were 179 subscribers at the New Lloyd’s. By the 1790s, with trade
volumes increasing, there were several hundred, and by 1810, around 1,500.
68

Individual private underwriters in markets like Lloyd’s did the largest volume of marine
insurance trade. Conventional, less hazardous “regular” insurances might cover ships traveling
the coastal routes between British ports, or directly between Britain and overseas locations.
69
But

67
Lorraine J. Daston, “The Domestication of Risk: Mathematical Probability and Insurance
1650-1830,” in The Probabilistic Revolution eds. Lorenz Krüger, Lorraine J. Daston, and
Michael Heidelberger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 237-260nn33-34.
68
Charles Wright and C. Ernest Fayle, A History of Lloyd’s: From the Founding of Lloyd’s
Coffee House to the Present Day (London: Macmillan, 1928), 159, 217; Brian Cowen, The
Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2005).
69
See John Julius Angerstein’s comments in his evidence to the 1810 Committee on Marine
Insurance. Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. The report of the select committee ...
appointed to consider of the act of the sixth of George the First, and of the state and means of
effecting marine insurances. Laid before the House the 18th of April, 1810. To which are added,
the minutes of evidence, with an appendix of account (London: Printed by W. Hughes, 1810),
120. See also Robin Pearson ed., The Development of International Insurance (London:
Pickering & Chatto, 2010), 3.

51
the private underwriters at Lloyd’s also frequently took affordable lines on more hazardous risks
like “cross risks,” which were ships or cargo traveling between two or more foreign destinations:
a type of risk that might include grain travelling from the Baltic, but especially came to be
associated with the lucrative triangular trade that I have already mentioned: that of enslaved
people from Africa and commodities between Europe, the East Coast of Africa, and the West
Indies or the Americas. Lloyd’s underwriters more frequently accepted these dangerous risks,
and so worked in contrast to the two Royal chartered marine companies, the Royal Exchange
Assurance (REA) and the London Assurance (LA). These two companies had won charters in
the 1720 Bubble Act to insure marine risks following the 1720 South Sea Bubble crisis. They
collectively paid a substantial sum (£600,000) to directly finance the national debt and became
the only joint-stock organizations allowed to operate.
70
Yet they insured cautiously, often
investing no more than £10,000 on any one risk and avoiding cross risks.
71
Correspondingly
these chartered companies commandeered only a fraction of the trade. At a House of Commons
Select Committee on Marine Insurance in 1810 that was effectively a referendum on Lloyd’s
market dominance, Angerstein speculated that in 1809 both the REA and the LA combined
undertook six million pounds in risks, less than five percent of the market, while private
underwriters carried £140 million in risks in the same period.
72
This expansive service industry
also grew in provincial ports like Bristol, Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow, and by the end of the

70
Christopher Kingston, “Marine Insurance in Britain and America, 1720–1844: A Comparative
Institutional Analysis,” The Journal of Economic History 67, no. 2 (June 2007): 384.
71
Wright and Fayle, A History of Lloyd’s, 240; Kingston, “Marine Insurance in Britain and
America,” 379-409.
72
Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. The report of the select committee ... appointed
to consider of the act of the sixth of George the First, and of the state and means of effecting
marine insurances. Laid before the House the 18th of April, 1810. To which are added, the
minutes of evidence, with an appendix of account (London: Printed by W. Hughes, 1810), 142.

52
eighteenth century, twenty associations of ship owners were also offering assurance.
73
By 1824,
Parliament repealed the REA’s and the LA’s monopoly privileges, which encouraged more joint-
stock companies and partnerships to form.
What were the marine risks that an insurer might be exposed to, and how did they
accordingly make decisions in response to these risks? Marine insurance might never involve full
coverage in case of loss. The terms of the contract specified the period for which the risk was
covered, that is, upon leaving port to the completion of a particular leg of the risk’s journey.
74

Christopher Kingston has identified three categories of risk that insurers faced pertaining to
“information asymmetries and agency problems.”
75
The first involved potential loss or damage
to a ship or cargo that might come about due to “the route, the season, the age and seaworthiness
of the ship, and the quality of its crew and armament, as well as, in wartime, the danger of
capture by enemy naval vessels and privateers.” An underwriter needed to understand these
risks, taking into account trade winds, as well as the seasons, noting for example winter storms in
the Atlantic.
76
The second set of risks included moral hazards relating to the insured, that is,
“excessive risk-taking, such as sending unseaworthy ships to sea or attempting to carry goods
into a blockaded port; to outright frauds, such as deliberately sinking an insured ship,
misrepresenting the value of the goods, insuring the same goods multiple times, or seeking to
insure a ship already known to have been lost.”
77
The third set of risks pertained to the
underwriters’ own financial security: merchants needed to work with stable underwriters who
would not die or abscond with premiums before paying out a claim. Information was key to

73
Cockerell and Green, The British Insurance Business, 6.
74
Wright and Fayle, A History of Lloyd’s, 159.
75
Kingston,” Marine Insurance in Britain and America,” 382.
76
Farber, “Underwritten States,” 38.
77
Kingston, “Marine Insurance in Britain and America,” 381-82.

53
insurers and merchants alike, and as I will discuss more below, individuals involved with
circulating artworks had to familiarize themselves with this information. Another important
element was the role played by the agent.

(II) Fortuna favet fortibus: art risks during the Napoleonic Wars
To discuss the insurance of artworks means dealing with a larger art logistics ecosystem,
but especially the agents that operate within that ecosystem. Scholars in art market studies, in
economic and political history, and in the history of science have dealt with the role and
significance of the agent from the early modern period to the late eighteenth century.
78
Marika
Keblusek notes that in English, French, Dutch and German, the word “agent” implies someone
who “acts for another, a deputy, steward, factor, substitute, representative, or emissary.”
79
An
agent denotes a position in a hierarchy in which a person brokers personal transactions between a
patron and a client. The term can describe a social function rather than a particular profession. In
the context of art markets, individuals occupying this function might mediate between buyers
and sellers, and ferry, vouch for, or represent art works. Writing about early-modern business
relationships, economic historian Peter Mathias emphasizes how developing interpersonal
relationships was a bulwark against the unexpected, and family intermediaries or face-to-face

78
Simon Schaffer et al., eds., The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–
1820 (Watson Publishing International LLC, 2009); Marika Keblusek and Badeloch Noldus,
eds., Double Agents: Cultural and Political Brokerage in Early Modern Europe (Leiden and
Boston: Brill, 2011); Charlotte Guichard, “Taste Communities: The Rise of the ‘Amateur’ in
Eighteenth-Century Paris,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 45, no. 4 (Summer, 2012): 519-547;
Adriana Turpin, Susan Bracken, Art Markets, Agents and Collectors: Collecting Strategies in
Europe and the United States, 1550–1950 (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).
79
Marika Keblusek, “Introduction: Profiling the Early Modern Agent,” in Your Humble Servant:
Agents in Early Modern Europe, eds. Hans Cools, Marika Keblusek, and Badeloch Noldus
(Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2006), 2.

54
communications could helped shore up credit: agents could also be family.
80
Agents may also
have peripatetic, improvisational livelihoods, and effectively live from contract to contract.
81

Agents were risk-takers who took advantage of operative conditions at any given time.
82
In an
intervention that appears in a recent volume on agents in the art market, Bénédicte Miyamoto has
argued that the triangle of “collector, dealer, and artist” historically discussed in art market
histories cannot account for what Stephen Greenblatt has called “mobilizers”: intermediaries
called upon to describe, evaluate, and perform other facilitating tasks to direct transportation of
pictures and other artistic goods across borders.
83

From the early eighteenth century to the Seven Years’ War, art imports to Britain were
frequent, facilitated by agent mediators for art collectors.
84
The painter, collector, and print

80
Peter Mathias, “Strategies for Reducing Risk by Entrepreneurs in the Early Modern Period,” in
Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurship in Early Modern Times: Merchants and Industrialists
within the Orbit of the Dutch Staple Market, eds. Clé Lesger and Leo Noordegraaf, (The Hague,
1995), 5-24.
81
Simon Schaffer et al., “Introduction,” in The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global
Intelligence, 1770–1820 (Watson Publishing International LLC, Year: 2009), 13.
82
Emily C. Nacol, “Insurance and the Language of Risk in Early Modern Political Thought,” in
The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk, eds. Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar
(London: Routledge, 2020), 27-45, 79-90. See also Emily C. Nacol, An Age of Risk: Politics and
Economy in Early Modern Britain (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2016).
83
Bénédicte Miyamoto, “Introduction: Hidden figures – agents in the long eighteenth century,”
in Art Markets, Agents and Collectors: Collecting Strategies in Europe and the United States,
1550–1950, eds. Susan Bracken and Adriana Turpin (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts,
2021), 87-101.
84
Iain Pears, The Discovery of Painting: The Growth of Interest in the Arts in England, 1680–
1768 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). Paintings were hardly the sole art commodities
imported into Britain. Using British customs ledgers at the Archives at Kew, Guido Guerzoni has
identified “more than forty categories of collectible goods and artistic manufacture” imported
into Britain, with paintings in this period being far from the most valuable category, a situation
which would change during the Napoleonic campaigns. Guerzoni also provides tabulations of
numbers of paintings imported into Britain from 1760 to 1832 with their source countries, with a
large number (1,005) passing through Germany in 1803, and the largest number being routed
through France in 1831 (3,976). These numbers, registered only at the point of arrival on British
soil, do not include information about how these works may have been trafficked through these
source countries from other locations to get around blockades or anti-export edicts. Guerzoni

55
publisher Arthur Pond (c. 1705–1758) was one of a number of agents engaged in this trade.
Informed by Jonathan Richardson the Elder’s aesthetic writings, Pond traveled to Italy in 1725
where he made contacts with Italian artists and entrepreneurs.
85
He became a successful pastel
portraitist and reproductive print seller, and he also promoted continental old master art. Louise
Lippincott has shown that Pond performed intermediary work for his clients, insuring and
shipping their goods.
86
He also bought paintings speculatively, shipping them back to London
unstretched, where his father served as his agent, a method for conserving funds.
87
After the end
of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, painting imports into Britain rapidly increased, while dedicated
art auctions also began. Simultaneously, within the resale sector, art works came to be clearly
distinguished within a distinct art market and separated from auctions and markets dealing with
furniture and interior fittings.
88

From the 1780s until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, maritime risks proliferated,
and the marine insurance market boomed. Luis Lobo-Guerrero has shown how Lloyd’s of
London was an important partner to the British government, collaborating with the British
Admiralty to extend its (private) special powers abroad, even as Parliament taxed British citizens

also provides dates when anti-export edicts were in place in Italian pre-unification states:
restrictions instituted to no avail, given the extensive sanctioned or illicit trade. Guido Guerzoni,
“The Export of Works of Art from Italy to the United Kingdom, 1792–1830” in London and the
Emergence of a European Art Market, 1780–1820, eds. Susanna Avery-Quash and Christian
Huemer (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2019), 67.
85
Louise Lippincott, “Arthur Pond’s Journal of Receipts and Expenses, 1734–1750,” The
Volume of the Walpole Society 54 (1988): 220-333.
86
Louise Lippincott, Selling Art in Georgian London: The Rise of Arthur Pond (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1983), 75-97.
87
Lippincott, Selling Art, 104.
88
Pears, The Discovery of Painting, 64.

56
for war funds at home.
89
In effect, the insurance world helped create a fiscal-military partnership
in which insurance was key to British political economy and to its “insurantial sovereignty.”
90

Practically this meant that underwriters at Lloyd’s managed an information monopoly with the
Admiralty Board to secure sea lanes, to protect their convoys, and to influence government
shipping policy during combat.
91
This was also important because between the 1770s and 1820s,
shipping costs to valuable trade ports, for example in Asia, fell significantly. Ship builders also
developed other methods to ensure safe passage, like hulls reinforced with copper to prevent
shipworm infestations: efforts that kept ships sailing longer.
92

Art works in transit played significant roles in the conflict. The French Revolution’s
upheavals and iconoclasms redistributed noble and ecclesiastical collections.
93
When the
Napoleonic armies invaded Italy, further dispersals took place at Napoleon’s instigation.
94
From
1798, when Napoleonic troops invaded Rome and the Pope was exiled and papal properties were

89
Luis Lobo-Guerrero, “Maritime insurance, the security of credit and the British state at war
during the Napoleonic period,” in Insuring War: Sovereignty, security and risk (London and
New York: Routledge, 2012), 21-55.
90
Lobo-Guerrero, Insuring War, 21.
91
Lobo-Guerrero, Insuring War, 42; Su Jin Kim and James Oldham, “Insuring Maritime Trade
with the Enemy in the Napoleonic Era,” Texas International Law Journal 47, no. 3 (Summer
2012): 561-586.
92
Peter Solar, “Opening to the East: Shipping Between Europe and Asia, 1770–1830,” Journal
of Economic History 73, no. 3 (2013): 625-661.
93
Robert Skwirblies, “The European Market for Italian Old Masters after Napoleon,” in Susanna
Avery-Quash and Barbara Pezzini, eds., Old Masters Worldwide: Markets, Movements and
Museums, 1789–1939 (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 39-54. See also Roberta Panzanelli, La
circulation des oeuvres d’art: 1789–1848 (The circulation of works of art in the revolutionary
era (Rennes: Presses Univ. de Rennes, 2007).
94
See Cecil Hilton Monk Gould, Trophy of Conquest: The Musée Napoléon and the Creation of
the Louvre (London: Faber & Faber, 1965); Tom Stammers, The Purchase of the Past:
Collecting Culture in Post-Revolutionary Paris c. 1790–1890 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2020); Cynthia Saltzman, Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast
(London: Thames and Hudson Limited, 2021).

57
seized, financial levies were also wielded against the Italian nobility.
95
Owners of precious
artworks who were formerly reluctant to part with their heirlooms converted their movable
property into ready cash. British and continental art market intermediaries working speculatively
or funded by landed commissioners flush with capital drawn from forays into mining, canal
construction, and railways, built networks and infrastructures to transport these newly mobile
artworks.
Recent scholarship has addressed the logistics behind these art agents’ endeavors: the
gritty details around packing and shipping that were formerly considered tedious or more
appropriate to antiquarian discussions about provenance and the formation of networks around
audacious dealers, artists acting as advisors, and auctioneers.
96
But little attempt has been made
to analyze the ways in which these associations’ corporate arrangements were more broadly
associated with a wider developing business world. I propose that collectors working
corporately, pooling and sharing art risks, clearly mirrored the small groups of private insurance
underwriters working outside of the royally-chartered, joint-stock companies (the Royal
Exchange and the London Assurance). For these art syndicates faced the same challenges and
needed access to similar intelligence that insurers did: art syndicates were reliant upon
commercial knowledge like the movements of ships or current conditions around international
conflict just as much as ship construction, information about wind and weather and other perils
of the sea. They also needed intelligence about moral hazards when dealing with potentially
unpredictable collaborators and clients, and artworks whose values could fluctuate depending

95
Gerald Reitlinger, “The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Period, 1792–1815,” The Economics of
Taste vol. 1 (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1961), 26-56.
96
Jennifer Warren, Jeremy Warren, Adriana Turpin, eds., Auctions, Agents and Dealers: The
Mechanisms of the Art Market, 1660–1830 (Oxford: Beazley Archive, Archaeopress, 2008);
Turpin and Bracken, Art Markets, Agents and Collectors, 1-20.

58
upon intellectual fashions. Further, they also needed to create a modicum of financial stability to
front funds to acquire works.
The Orléans collection constituted a key precedent in syndicated picture purchasing and
art circulation in Britain. Consisting of over 500 continental pictures dating from the Renaissance
to the early seventeenth century, and assembled in the early eighteenth century by Philippe II,
Duke of Orléans (1674–1723), the collection was displayed at the Palais Royal in Paris in the
1780s and sold in parts between 1791 and 1792 by Louis Philippe II, duc d’Orléans (1747–
1793). Self-styled “Philippe Égalité” to show his support for the Revolution, the Duke sold the
collection to fund his ultimately failed bid for the French throne, which ended with his execution
during the Revolution’s Terror. In 1798, a syndicate of three wealthy Englishmen—Francis
Edgerton the 3
rd
Duke of Bridgewater (1736–1803), Lord Gower (later the 2
nd
Marquess of
Stafford, 1758–1833), and the 5
th
Earl of Carlisle (1748–1825)—purchased a selection of French
and Italian pictures in from the collection for £43,000 (about £1,895,134.70 in 2017), keeping
102 of the most prestigious pictures for themselves and organizing an exhibition and sale of the
rest brokered through the British art dealer Michael Bryan (1757–1821).
97
Bryan displayed the
remaining 305 French, Italian, and Spanish works at his private gallery in Pall Mall and at the
Lyceum Theatre in the Strand between 1798 and 1799. The sale was underwhelming, with
pictures selling for lower prices, if they sold at all.
98

97
The pictures passed through many more hands than I have described here. For details see
Jordana Pomeroy, “The Orléans Collection: Its Impact on the British Art World,” Apollo
(February 1, 1997): 26-29. The 5
th
Earl of Carlisle did not keep his selection of the Orléans
pictures at Naworth Castle, but rather at Castle Howard. A fire also destroyed part of this
collection in 1940.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060929221022/http://www.castlehoward.co.uk/metadot/index.pl?i
id=3694&isa=Category
98
In March 1793, the Dutch, Flemish, and German works from the collection went on display at
125 Pall Mall, where many pictures sold quickly. This gallery was insured, although the indexed

59
The Orléans Collection introduced continental old master pictures to a stunned British
public unaccustomed to encountering so many old masters in person, and the syndicate inspired
emulators.
99
As Susanna Avery-Quash, Nicholas Penny, Jordana Pomeroy and others have
shown, prior to this event, it was difficult for the British to view old master pictures in private
collections, especially as the British state funded no national art institutions. The collection’s
exhibition and sale constituted a turning point for syndicated picture purchasing, spurring others
to join the field. One such syndicate formed around Scottish lawyer, William Buchanan (1777–
1864). The son of a successful Edinburgh hat manufacturer, Buchanan entered into business in
1802 with Rome-based Scottish artist, James Irvine (1757–1831), and with Arthur
Champernowne (1767–1819), a wealthy art enthusiast in Devon who commanded a family
mining fortune. Irvine was inspired by the Orléans’ Collection’s successes and traveled
throughout southern and northern Europe studying old master artworks.
100
He began working on

policy entry that I could access online does not contain details about prices insured or specific
pictures. It reads: “Insured: William Morland, esq. and Co., 57 Pall Mall, in trust. Other property
or occupiers: the Orleans Collection of Pictures, Royal Academy Pall Mall,” March 21, 1793,
MS 11936/392/612813, Sun Fire Policy Registers, London Metropolitan Archives.
99
Susanna Avery-Quash and Nicholas Penny, “The Dispersal of the Orléans Collection and the
British Art Market,” in London and the Emergence of a European Art Market, 1780–1820, eds.
Susanna Avery-Quash and Christian Huemer (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2019),
145-158; Jordana Pomeroy, “Conversing with History: The Orléans Collection Arrives in
Britain” in British Models of Art Collecting and the American Response: Reflections Across the
Pond, ed. Inge Reist (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), 47-60; Maureen McCue, British
Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793–1840 (Farnham and Burlington:
Ashgate, 2014), 25-62. See also Vanessa I. Schmid and Julia Armstrong-Totten, The Orléans
Collection (New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art, 2018). Francis Haskell would
characterize this period’s old-master-seeking collector generation as the “Orléans Generation,”
distinguished from a later generation keyed more toward collecting contemporary British art.
Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion, and Collecting in
England and France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 96.
100
Hugh Brigstocke, “James Irvine: A Scottish Artist in Italy. Picture Buying in Italy For
William Buchanan and Arthur Champernowne,” The Volume of the Walpole Society 74 (2012):
245-479.

60
commission buying pictures around 1789, with Buchanan’s brother-in-law Alexander Gordon
(1765–1849) as his first client.
101
Buchanan and Champernowne each invested £2,000 to
commission Irvine to find pictures, and these would include works by Anthony van Dyck, Peter
Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, and famously Giovanni Bellini’s St Francis in Ecstasy (1480, now in
the Frick Collection in New York). Later Buchanan would also import Diego Velázquez’s
Rokeby Venus (1647) into England.
Primary sources for the opportunistic trade in art during the Napoleonic Wars are limited
given that much of the trade was conducted illegally and surreptitiously to avoid export
restriction, capture by pirates or privateers, and import taxes.
102
William Buchanan’s
correspondence with Irvine and with his London agent David Stewart provides rare glimpses into
the era. Commentators like Philip Hook have rightly shown that Buchanan insisted upon calling
his syndicate’s work “speculations” rather than art dealing, and this term permeates Buchanan’s
correspondence.
103
Beyond Hook’s observations, the letters illustrate the way in which insurance
mediated the art circulating across borders during the Napoleonic Wars, revealing a pervasive
risk culture that linked the art trade to a wider world of economic risks.
104
The three categories of
marine risk that Kingston identifies in marine insurance–loss or damage to a ship or cargo, moral
hazard, and insurer’s financial security–were especially critical for these art agents.

101
Hugh Brigstocke, “James Irvine: Picture Buying in Italy for William Buchanan and Arthur
Champernowne,” in British Models of Art Collecting and the American Response: Reflections
Across the Pond, ed. Inge Reiss (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), 61-72.
102
Skwirblies, “The European Market,” 39-54.
103
Philip Hook, Rogues’ Gallery: The Rise (and Occasional Fall) of Art Dealers, the Hidden
Players in the History of Art (New York: The Experiment, 2017), chapter three.
104
A sheaf of 236 pages of letters between Buchanan and his agents from 1802 to 1805 are held
in the National Library of Scotland (call number MS.10275), but due to COVID-19 restrictions I
have been unable to access them.

61
During the Buchanan syndicate’s most well-documented period before and after the
Peace of Amiens from 1802 to 1806, the letters reveal how the syndicate members educated
themselves in mercantile matters in order to transport pictures.
105
Irvine purchased works for
Buchanan and Champernowne from Genoese collections, and in 1802 he acquired four pictures
by Peter Paul Rubens from the Balbi and Doria Palaces: Minerva protects Pax from Mars (Peace
and War) (1629–30), Autumn Landscape with a View of Het Steen in the Early Morning (c.
1636), A Roman Triumph (1630), and Rainbow Landscape (c. 1636) [Fig. 5].
106
Before these
pictures had even reached Britain, Buchanan was asking Stewart to inquire about fire insurance
rates for the pictures once they had arrived in Stewart’s safekeeping, and Buchanan and
Champernowne would split the insurance costs of £5,500.
107
After Irvine terminated his
partnership with Buchanan, Irvine would continue to advise his contacts to settle their insurances
in London, the standard center for insurance, even when insurance facilities might be available in
Continental cities.
108

The Buchanan syndicate members versed themselves in detailed insurance protocols. Sea
costs were expensive and land transit risked a picture being jostled in wagons over uneven

105
Hugh Brigstocke, William Buchanan and the 19th century art trade: 100 letters to his agents
in London and Italy (London: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1982).
106
The first three pictures are all at the National Gallery in London: Minerva protects Pax from
Mars (Peace and War) National Gallery Inventory #46; Autumn Landscape with a View of Het
Steen in the Early Morning National Gallery Inventory #66; A Roman Triumph National Gallery
Inventory #278. The Rainbow Landscape is at the Wallace Collection in London.
107
This is about £242,400.95 in 2017’s numbers. Letter five, Buchanan to Stewart January 25,
1803, 60-61. Buchanan later asks Stewart to “insure the Rubens pictures whenever they are
placed in your house to the extent of £5,500 on account of Mr Champernowne and myself. I
should wish you to insure them in your own name as Agent for Mr. Irvine of Rome - a power of
attorney can easily be had if necessary but your letters from him at all events put you in the same
situation with myself, and they can be insured as either in trust, or on Commission as you chuse.”
Letter nine, Buchanan to Stewart February 9, 1803, in Brigstocke 1982, 69-73.
108
Christopher Lloyd, “Picture Hunting in Italy: Some Unpublished Letters (1824–1829),”
Italian Studies 30, no. 1 (1975): 51, 52.

62
terrain, so Buchanan, Irvine, and Stewart investigated wagons, warehouses, and the structure of
barge holds to check that no damage would come to pictures before they arrived at their
destinations.
109
Buchanan read Lloyd’s List, a major intelligence source during the Napoleonic
Wars, as Lloyd’s often had first knowledge of ships’ arrivals and departures, and information on
sea battles and blockades.
110
Buchanan used this intelligence to track the movements of ships in
and out of Naples, Venice, Palermo, Genoa, and Livorno.
111
Along with Irvine and Stewart,
Buchanan also worked with a warehouseman in London, a man named Viney, who not only
provided him with intelligence about the movements and costs of convoys, but also managed the
pictures’ insurance and bills of lading. In 1804, after the Peace of Amiens had long been
terminated, and Britain and France had resumed hostilities, Buchanan reported that insurance
premiums on British ships traveling in convoys was lower (nine guineas) than seven to ten
guineas on neutral ships in convoys.
112
But if cases of artwork were marked as Italian property
and loaded on a neutral ship, they could be insured at five percent.
113
Buchanan suggested that
Irvine’s Italian contact, a man named Carracciolo, might sign the bill of lading, and over insure
the cargo to fully cover the cost of the pictures, and make further financial arrangements to
ransom the packages should the vessel be apprehended by privateers.
114

109
Investigating ships also meant that the syndicate members had to palm payments to captain
and crew to ensure their cargo’s special treatment: “Strachan [another operative] will give the
Captain a Guinea, the mate half a Guinea, a Clerk half a Guinea, to have it laid in a safe place of
the vessel where no weight will lay upon it and great care taken at the moving of it into the
vessel and that no one tramps upon the case - he will also measure the entrance of the hold of the
vessel (about getting it down there) also mentions he won’t insure “unless you think there is
much risk, in which case you might insure £800.” Letter thirty-nine, Buchanan to Stewart, March
19, 1804, in Brigstocke 1982, 203.
110
Wright and Fayle, A History of Lloyd’s, 203.
111
Letter forty-eight, Buchanan to Irvine, April 12, 1804, in Brigstocke 1982, 242.
112
Letter thirteen, Buchanan to Irvine, June 6, 1803, in Brigstocke 1982, 82-88.
113
Letter fifty-one, Buchanan to Irvine, April 17, 1804, in Brigstocke 1982, 256-257.
114
Letter fifty-one, Buchanan to Irvine.

63
Buchanan and his agents were also exposed to the moral hazards of sellers and other
intermediaries. In the case discussed above where Buchanan and Irvine planned to involve the
Italian intermediary, Carracciolo, to fraudulently mark bills of lading so that they appeared to be
Italian property, they also needed an agent to conduct a mock “sale” to return the pictures to
them on British soil. Buchanan acknowledged that this was risky, since the seller in the mock
sale needed to be trusted to not actually claim ownership of the works.
115
Further collaborators
were also suspect. Around 1804, when directing Stewart about the shipment of a painting
attributed to Parmigianino, Buchanan discovered that Viney the warehouseman and insurance
operative had been overcharging for services:
I find Viney has invariably charged Guineas to the underwriters and one quarter per cent
of Commission to himself – amounting the aggregate to about 30 Guineas for
Commission besides what may be overcharged as premiums. I hardly think it worth while
making a noise about it, but I should wish to know if you are acquainted with any
respectable Broker whose offices are conveniently situated in case it should be advisable
to leave cases there occasionally. This is my only inducement at present for continuing
Viney; the convenience of his situation.
116

While intermediaries might cause problems, the art agents themselves—Buchanan
included—could also present moral hazards when managing problematic capital flows.
Buchanan consistently solicited potential buyers, for example trying to bribe a female relative of
a British East India Company Director with a painting by Claude Lorrain (View of Delphi) in
exchange for Buchanan’s seventeen-year-old brother Tom getting a “Writership” (beginning
apprenticeship) in the East India Company.
117
Gambling terminology peppers Buchanan’s letters,

115
Letter fifty-one, Buchanan to Irvine.
116
Letter ten, Buchanan to Stewart, February 17, 1803, in Brigstocke 1982, 74-75.
117
Letter twenty-three, Buchanan to Stewart, February 2, 1804, in Brigstocke 1982, 135. To
become a “Writer” (apprentice) in the East India Company bureaucratic hierarchy, an applicant
had to be at least sixteen years old, and they had to also provide £500 in securities and a
nomination by an East India Company Director. They were then sent to work in the east for five
years, after which they could be promoted to “Factor” (a post held for three years), then “Junior

64
and he reveals his own capacity to engage in risky financial behavior. In a letter to Irvine,
Buchanan describes how the size and composition of pictures attributed to Van Dyck render
them “sure cards” (sure to sell, assuring victory, as in a card game).
118
In the letters he includes
the adage, Fortuna favet fortibus (“Fortune favors the bold”) at least twice in reference to their
speculations: adding a militaristic overtone to their conquest of Continental picture markets.
119

And in 1803, anticipating profits after successfully acquiring the Rubens pictures from the Balbi
and Doria palaces, Buchanan exuberantly instructed Stewart to make another purchase:
This month of January one way and another has brought me intelligence of more pieces
of good fortune than ever happened to be before in the course of any one year. I am
therefore determined to see if there is not a tide in fortune, as well as other matters, which
when seized at the moment it is passing may not turn out to advantage in more ways than
one, and shall therefore as the sum is of no great consequence run a risk I have hitherto
looked upon as the most absurd of all risks vizt. a Ticket in the Lottery.
120

State lotteries funneled funding through the Exchequer to British public works and military
campaigns, including the Napoleonic engagements.
121
Costing sixteen pounds and issued by
Licensed Lottery Office Keepers and stockbrokers, they were aimed at the wealthy, but
syndicates of smaller investors also pooled money to purchase them, leading them to be referred
to as “illegal insurances,” which Whig politicians sought to regulate in 1802, and investigated
further in 1808.
122
As Richard has noted, they constituted one such arena like stockjobbing,

Merchant” (held for another three years) before they could become a “Senior Merchant.” Philip
Lawson, The East India Company: A History (London and New York: Longman, 1993), 71.
118
Letter twelve, Buchanan to Irvine, June 6, 1803 in Brigstocke 1982, 82.
119
Hugh Brigstocke, “William Buchanan, his friends and rivals: the importation of old master
paintings into Great Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century,” Apollo 114 (1981):
76-84; Philip Hook, Rogues’ Gallery: The Rise (and Occasional Fall) of Art Dealers, the Hidden
Players in the History of Art (New York: The Experiment, 2017), chapter three.
120
Hugh Brigstocke, William Buchanan, 62.
121
Mark Clapson, “The Revival of the State Lottery in Britain,” Contemporary Record 8, no. 2
(1994): 321-342.
122
Mark Clapson, A Bit of a Flutter: Popular Gambling and English Society, c. 1823–1961
(Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), 14-15.

65
options contracts, horse racing, lending, and credit that depended on forms of wagers.
123

Buchanan’s self-conscious investment in them constituted yet another context in which a culture
of risk pervaded.

5. Fire insurance for middle-class and landed consumers

As was evident in eighteenth-century economic literature, insurers infrequently applied
special exceptions to underwriting fine and applied artworks. Marine insurers categorized these
risks in a second-class hazardous category compared to other kinds of risks. However, insurers’
categorizations could shift depending upon prevailing economic or political conditions, the role
played by competition between insurance companies, expanding markets, and shifting client
demand. The insurance of artworks also differed between insurance fields. If marine insurers
dealt with works in transit as mercantile commodities, fire insurers covered fine and applied
artworks in situ. But art risks were not initially recognized as distinct from other forms of
property risk. This is in part due to the way in which insurance markets and risks themselves
developed.

(I) Fire insurance history
Fire insurance’s foremost task is to provide contractual means for protecting property.
However, defining that property involves more than simple transactions. Twentieth-century
economist C. B. Macpherson highlights several misconceptions about property, one being that

123
Jessica Richard, The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011), 5.

66
property is “things” i.e. houses, land, or shops.
124
Macpherson argues that what is actually the
real property is a legal title, enforceable by laws and political institutions. Already in the
seventeenth century, property constituted a broad category like the rights to use land or the right
to farm taxes: it was a right that was legally enforceable, not a particular thing. But from the
seventeenth century and in the works of John Locke (1632–1704), the “distinction between the
thing and the right” was blurred.
125
Macpherson identifies a second misconception about
property, which is that it was always alienable and private, for a person to exclusively
appropriate and use as they wish. He presents examples of common feudal property, which was
undermined as capitalism spread. The modern conception of property “is a system of rights of
each person in relation to other persons” in which people can exclude others’ rights, while
common property “is the right of each individual not to be excluded from something.”
126
As I
will discuss below, fine and applied artworks as property held by members of the middle-class
and by owners of landed estates created operative difficulties for insurers. These difficulties were
related to the ways in which artworks were priced and valued. For fire insurance was a system
first established for the built environment, and only later adapted to cover movable goods.
In the premodern era, urban authorities made provisions to ward off fire risks that
included curfews and night watchmen, while mutual associations related to particular trades or

124
C. B. Macpherson, “Introduction,” in Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions (Oxford,
London, Toronto: Basil Blackwell and University of Toronto Press, 1978), 2. I am grateful to
Steve Edwards for suggesting this reference. Steve Edwards, “Making a Case: Daguerreotypes,”
British Art Studies 18 (2020). https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-
18/sedwards/abstract.
125
Macpherson, Property, 7-8.
126
Macpherson, Property, 4.

67
communities formed collective relief funds for conflagration victims.
127
The earliest fire
insurance appeared in Germany in the form of the cooperative mutual insurance company,
Hamburger Feuerkasse (Hamburg Fire Office), a seventeenth-century company modeled on
sixteenth-century municipal fire contracts, in which members collectively paid for losses out of
levied funds.
128
There is little to suggest that the concept transferred to London, but in Britain a
number of fire companies also started after the Great Fire of 1666. This conflagration that began
in a bakers’ shop in Pudding Lane in the City of London destroyed 13,000 buildings, and led
authorities to institute new legislation and building codes that restricted the construction of
timber buildings.
129
But in order for fire insurance to develop into a more regular practice and in
some ways supplant the public’s belief in Providential causes behind unforeseen disasters,
companies had to convince potential clients to trust them while at the same time creating
regulations and methods for evaluating fires and natural or manmade hazards.
130

It was only in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that fire insurance as a
corporate form developed. New companies included the “Insurance Office for Houses,” started
near London’s Royal Exchange in 1681 by London developer Nicholas Barbon (c. 1640–1698),
while in 1683, The Friendly Society for Securing Houses from Loss by Fire opened, followed in
1696 by “The Amicable Contributorship against Fire,” later the Hand-in-Hand Fire Office. The

127
Cornelius Walford, “Fires and Fire Insurance Considered Under their Historical, Financial,
Statistical, and National Aspects,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 40, no. 3
(September 1877): 347-432.
128
Cornel Zwierlein, Prometheus Tamed: Fire, Security, and Modernities,1400 to 1900 (Leiden
and Boston: Brill, 2021), 241-308.
129
Frank C. Spooner, Risks at Sea: Amsterdam Insurance and Maritime Europe, 1766–1780
(Cambridge University Press, 1983).
130
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, orig. pub. 1971 (London: Penguin Books,
1991), 90-132.

68
Sun Fire Office, which would come to dominate the field, opened in 1710.
131
As Peter Dickson
has shown, the funds of the great insurance companies served as lending tools for the state:
namely to underwrite the British state’s interests in imperial and martial endeavors.
132
Property
on a micro scale was leveraged to service macro-state needs.
Fire insurance thrived in London because the urban center offered opportunities to cover
diverse clients: from thousands of individual householders, to the Thames-side risks in the city’s
south-eastern edges. Here, dense residential zones abutted industrial areas for hazardous trades
like sugar manufactories, timber yards, breweries (a particularly hazardous trade), as well as the
expanding docklands, where a vast mercantile economy funneled increasingly costly trade goods
from the British empire.
133
In his study of fire insurance for the period 1681 to 1850, Robin
Pearson has shown that 169 offices were established, and the industry developed over several
definable periods, during which eighty-four percent of all offices opened in Britain.
134
These
periods included the heady speculative era around the South Sea Bubble in London (1717 to
1720); the era from 1782 to the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, during which provincial fire
insurance markets expanded outside of London; a boom period between 1818 and 1826; and a
period from the 1830s to 1850 in which labor unrest and economic recession led to economic
instability, during which larger metropolitan companies absorbed weaker companies.
135

By the early eighteenth century, fire insurance primarily developed to secure buildings
but not necessarily their contents. Insurable risk categories followed a model that reflected a

131
Dickson, The Sun Insurance, 17-61.
132
Dickson, The Financial Revolution, 7, 249-303.
133
Robin Pearson, Insuring the Industrial Revolution: Fire Insurance in Great Britain, 1700-
1850 (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 75.
134
Pearson, Insuring, 17-19.
135
Pearson, Insuring, 17.

69
building’s construction and the relative hazardousness of the trades and goods contained therein.
From around 1727 to the 1780s “common hazardous” risks referred to brick buildings that
contained non-hazardous goods. “Hazardous” risks included timber or brick buildings,
depending on the hazardousness of the trades and goods they contained. Of a riskier order, the
“double hazardous” category included thatched buildings and hazardous goods and trades in
timber building: basically, the more flammable, the higher the hazard, and therefore the higher
the premium. Pearson shows how insurance coverage was uneven, with inconsistent surviving
records showing that policies might cover more than one building for less value than the total
was worth. But even by 1740, many of metropolitan London residents had some form of
coverage, while by 1795 insurance had reached many middle-class clients.
136

Fire insurance for movable property emerged slightly later in the eighteenth century.
Cornelius Walford states that the earliest office “which systematically insured goods and
merchandise, including therein household furniture and stock-in-trade, was the Sun […]. It
exempted from [insurance] money, plate, jewels, pictures, china wares, tallies, and writings.”
137

Initially many companies only covered buildings and excluded buildings’ contents. The Hand-in-
Hand (founded 1696) insured buildings only, but from 1714 they partnered with the Union
Assurance Company to insure building contents including “furniture, stock-in-trade, and
movable effects” in London and Westminster (although the Hand-in-Hand began insuring
contents on their own from 1805). Insurable amounts often remained low.
138
In 1719 the Sun
insured property up to £1,000. After 1719, a policy could carry £500 on a house and £500 on

136
Pearson, Insuring, 74.
137
Cornelius Walford, The Insurance Cyclopaedia, vol. 3 (London: Charles and Edwin Layton,
Fleet Street, 1878), 398-402.
138
Cornelius Walford, The Insurance Cyclopaedia, vol. 5 (London: Charles and Edwin Layton,
Fleet Street, 1878), 634-644, but especially 640.

70
goods held within it.
139
However, Pearson notes that the insurance of domestic goods like
furniture, jewelry, pictures, and plate is inconsistently archived across British records, and it is
also difficult to make national estimates and presumptions about insurance practices for property,
rendering it challenging to understand how, for example, picture values were rising or falling
“relative to the value of houses during this period.”
140
But in the absence of large datasets that
represent insurance figures for fine and applied art objects, extant archives nonetheless offer
clues about how these risk classes posed challenges for insurance institutions, and also how those
insuring their collections made sometimes difficult decisions about classifying their property as
risks.

(II) Pictures in the Sun
If information across Britain about the insurance of fine and applied artworks appears
inconsistent, anecdotally at least there was a growing sense in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century that artworks were fragile and in need of new categories of protection. Publishing their
historical guide to British artists in 1866—the bicentenary year of London’s Great Fire—Richard
Redgrave and Samuel Redgrave pointed out the probable destruction of countless works in that
historic conflagration, and folded these losses into a broader destructive ethos in the history of
British art that also included iconoclasm, botched restorations, and artworks intentionally altered
for the sake of fashion. From their perspective, Britain’s artistic past was already incomplete,
obscured, or permanently damaged:
The fire of London did an amount of damage to works of Art which has never been
estimated, though we find many individual instances of it; for then the mansions of the
noble and wealthy were in its midst, not, as now, removed to the suburbs. Again, the

139
Dickson, The Sun Insurance, 39.
140
Pearson, Insuring, 43.

71
number of country-seats of old English families, filled with the treasures of Art which
have been destroyed by fire, either wholly or partially, is almost incredible; and
particularly in later years, when attempts were made to warm by modern inventions those
spacious medieval structures.
141

How many of these artworks were insured? Scholars have long used computational
methods to mine data from catalogues and inventories in order to capture related trends about
consumption patterns. Using extensive archives of probate inventories—an inventory of a
person’s movable goods made by neighbors shortly after the person’s death and before the
property is dissolved—Lorna Weatherill traced changing British ownership patterns from 1660 to
1760 in items like china, window curtains, mirrors, and pictures.
142
She highlighted how
conceptions of basic necessities and luxuries were shifting: the latter were considered things not
indispensable to life but desirable. She argued that ownership of particular commodities was
organized around income and occupation, with use of particular commodities—pictures, for
example—serving a purpose for middling classes.

141
Richard Redgrave and Samuel Redgrave, “Introductory Chapter,” A Century of British
Painters (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1866), 1-23; Julie Codell, “Righting the Victorian
Artist: The Redgraves’ A Century of Painters of the English School and the Serialization of Art
History,” Oxford Art Journal 23, no. 2 (2000): 95-119. On restorations see also Aviva Briefel,
The Deceivers: Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2006), 83-115.
142
See both Carole Shammas, “Changes in English and Anglo-American consumption from
1550 to 1800,” and Lorna Weatherill, “The meaning of consumer behaviour in late seventeenth-
and early eighteenth-century England,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, eds. John
Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997), 177-205, 206-227. Weatherill’s essay distills
her longer book, which provides a corrective to arguments that aristocratic emulation was the
driving force in the development of English consumer culture. Weatherill mobilizes extensive
probate data to show how bourgeois consumers of domestic goods were not explicitly following
the gentry’s consumer habits. Weatherill found, for example, that bourgeois collectors were more
actively acquiring pictures—and had more pictures on the walls—than members of the gentry.
See Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660–1760 (London
and New York: Routledge, 1988/1996).

72
But probate records were also limited by temporality and by class-selectivity. As common
documents until the 1720s, they were made for property owners with high-value possessions
conventionally considered worth inventorying. More recent studies have developed
computational tools to aggregate consumption information revealed in other archives. John
Styles uses simple text-based searches in the digitized records of London’s central criminal court,
the Old Bailey, in order to learn about the consumption habits and patterns of eighteenth-century
working-class people living in rented rooms.
143
More recently, Tim Hitchcock, William J. Turkel,
and Anne Helmreich have used XML coding methods to scan 35,540 trial accounts in the Old
Bailey Archive between 1740 and 1800 in order to aggregate and analyze consumption patterns
among the working classes based upon what people in this period desired enough to steal.
144
The
findings are partial, showing not a record of a person’s entire household possessions at death, but
a living record of the goods that individuals cared about enough to wear on their bodies in the
street, and, once stolen, valued enough to chase through the court system. These legal stories
document those “whose possessions might otherwise have escaped list-making processes and
historical reading.”
145

Like probate documents, the archives of insurance companies are linked to and
participate within a legal network of property documents. Also, like probate documents, they are,
class-wise, somewhat self-selecting in that in order to insure one’s property, a consumer must

143
John Styles, “Lodging at the Old Bailey: Lodgings and Their Furnishing in Eighteenth-
Century London,” in Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–
1830, eds. John Styles and Amanda Vickery (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 61-
80.
144
Handkerchiefs (linen, cotton, and silk) took the prize as the most stolen items. Tim Hitchcock,
William J. Turkel, and Anne Helmreich, “Rethinking inventories in the digital age: the case of
the Old Bailey,” Journal of Art Historiography 11 (2014): 1-25.
145
Hitchock, Turkel, and Helmreich, “Rethinking,” 2.

73
first have resources to pay for this secondary service. But in some ways the insurance archives
are also like the Old Bailey records, in that the insured need not be dead for this inventorying
service to be rendered (although, as I will show, this was sometimes the case). The insurances of
pictures are also partial, as an inventory might not include the sum-total of a collector’s insured
belongings, or even other insurances that collector may hold on other goods. The archives of
insurance similarly reveal a fluctuating world of anxious possessors attempting to fix their
possessions’ values in time, even as their possessions’ values (particularly pictures) might be in
continuous flux thanks to external market pressures and other influences.
Some archives do exist which provide references for the insurance of specific art risks,
especially pictures. The surviving policy registers of companies like the Hand-in-Hand and the
Sun Fire Office include such references. Insurance companies maintained these records to
organize clients and log payments and policy renewals. These registers typically contain
information including the insurance policy number, the agent’s name, the policy-holder’s name,
social status, occupation, and address, further information about the property insured and its
value, premium amounts and renewal dates, and any endorsements.
146
Polices may also include
other property covered under the insurance’s terms. It is under this “other property” category that
particular pictures were sometimes insured separately as a special category of insurable property.
But accessing these archives can be challenging. For example, with over 1,200 registers
containing upwards of 1,000 policy entries, the physical Sun Fire registers are unwieldy for the
single researcher. A collective project between the London Metropolitan Archives and British
National Archives, “A Place in the Sun,” has, however, indexed more than 380,000 policies from

146
A selection of the indexed registers is available here: Sun Insurance Office Limited Policy
Registers, Old Series, CLC/B/192/F/001, London Metropolitan Archives
https://search.lma.gov.uk/LMA_DOC/CLC_B_192.PDF

74
1782 to 1842 in over 220 policy registers, with the resulting searchable index available through
the National Archives website.
147

Performing targeted searches with terms “picture” and “insured” across the British
National Archives catalogue for the indexed Sun Fire Office Policy Registers, I could generate a
dataset of entries from the Sun Policy Registers that revealed the frequency with which people
separately insured pictures for the sixty-year period from 1782 to 1842.
148
A caveat of working
with this index, though, is its modern provenance, its provisional quality, and therefore its
selectivity: produced largely by volunteers, the indexed entries lack key information like the
premium amounts and value of the insured property, and renewals or endorsements.
149

An actual policy register would look like an example from the Hand-in-Hand Fire Office
[Fig. 6].
150
This register contains an unusual entry from November 30, 1815 for a “George Evans
Junior, Esq. of N21 in the Borough of Southwark” [Fig. 7].
151
Evidently a cultured client, Evans

147
These numbers are as of 2018 (out of 1,262 volumes for the Sun alone). This is meant as an
alternative source for social history compared to the census, which did not begin in Britain until
1801. See https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/. The digital archive, “London Lives,”
provides another example of the way in which these policy registers have been used by social
historians. This project aggregates data about insurance amounts from fire insurance policies, but
as its focus is more on “the role of plebeians in the evolution of social practices in the modern
metropolis,” it takes a census-oriented approach that focuses on individual occupations and
amounts insured, without mentioning specific property details.
https://www.londonlives.org/static/Project.jsp#toc2.
148
The search term, “Painting” coupled with “Insured” also triggered a further four entries,
although this term also introduced references to painting trades such as “painting-brush maker.”
A distinction would also need to be made between fine art painting and house painting. All told,
references to particular paintings appeared approximately fifty times over a sixty-year period.
149
Given the exigencies of the COVID-19 pandemic and restrictions placed upon visitors to the
London Metropolitan Archives, I was unable to consult the physical registers for the more the
fifty relevant entries described above but will do so in advance of publishing my research as a
book.
150
Hand-in-Hand Policy Register, MS08674-146, London Metropolitan Archives. I am grateful
to AVIVA Group Archivist Anna Stone for sending this image to me at the eleventh hour.
151
Dated less than two weeks after the Second Treaty of Paris and the end of the Napoleonic
Wars.

75
insured his home for £1,300, and this amount was divided between “Household Goods, Linen,
Printed books, Wearing Apparel, Plate, Wines & Liquors for private use” (for £400),
“Mathematical & Musical Instruments” (for £100), and “Prints, pictures, and drawings” (for
£800). The policy indicates that Evans’ dwelling where these items were located was “Brick” and
“Timber” and therefore considered a hazardous risk and probably charged more. In the right-
hand corner a note was made to indicate that Evans paid a £11 14s. premium for a seven-year
policy, as Hand-in-Hand policies typically lasted seven years.
152
But the reason this entry is so
unusual was that it included a full catalogue of thirty-four itemized pictures with their prices for
insurance. At least the first ten pictures likely came from John and Josiah Boydell’s Shakespeare
Gallery, as they were of Shakespearean themes by artists the publishers had commissioned,
including Thomas Stothard, William Hamilton, Robert Smirke, and James Northcote.
153
Further
landscapes and genre pictures by Robert Wilson, Richard Courbould, George Morland, and
Thomas Gainsborough were also included. But several important points can be made about the
register, the first being the register’s palimpsestic quality. A further note from April 29, 1817
indicated that all of the pictures and furniture had been moved to “Elmers End near Beckenham
in Kent,” underscoring the owner’s mobility, and a potential change to the contract’s terms as
insurances were contingent upon the location of the insured goods. The second key point worth
reiterating is that the register collapsed two categories of insurance documentation: register and
picture catalogue.

152
Approximating to 2017 numbers, the total amount covered was £60,482.76 with £544.34 paid
in premiums.
153
Rosie Dias, Exhibiting Englishness: John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and the Formation
of a National Aesthetic (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), 7-15.

76
The Sun index conceals the policy register’s granular detail, and particularly obscures
how these registers change over time with added inscriptions, renewals, signatures, and other
information. What it does show are the names and occasionally the occupations of people taking
out private picture insurances; in some cases the kinds of pictures insured; and the insurance start
dates. Across the policy registers in this sixty-year period, pictures (or occasionally picture
series) are only cited a tiny amount: at least forty-five times under the category, “Other
Property/Occupiers Mentioned.” These entries are often simple, indicating only the name of the
insured, the date, and any other property covered by the policy, but leaving out relevant
information like picture title, dimensions, and materials:
Insured: Rt Hon. George Charles, Earl of Lucan, of Laleham Middlesex
Other property or occupiers: picture by Fra Bartolomeo
Date: April 2, 1840
MS 11936/567/1325507.
154

But the entries can also be detailed. In 1793, Horace Walpole (1717–1797) at Houghton Hall in
Norfolk insured “Pictures by Cipriani; pictures of birds by Reineagle; picture of cattle by
Garrard; picture of Ghosts by Fuseli; picture by Opie.” This is one of the more expansive
descriptions of property, as it specifies authors and traceable titles, particularly if one has the
further provenance information that would allow one to trace the exact pictures by Opie or Fuseli
that Walpole had in his collection. William Buchanan, for example, had insurances placed at
least eight times between 1806 and 1810 in the Sun Fire Office registers, and his agents and

154
Sun Fire Office Policy Register, MS 11936/567/1325507, Records of Sun Fire Office,
London Metropolitan Archives. https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/0c8cfe73-
1092-4176-bb29-7a654e8312ed

77
clients like Lord Kinnaird also appear, alongside some of the pictures upon which the syndicate
was speculating.
155

Other kinds of private picture insurances in the registers relate to special exhibitions or
reproductions (engravings) of pictures. As Richard Altick has shown, in the late eighteenth-
century single-picture exhibitions joined the wider array of spectacles in London competing with
the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition.
156
Pioneered by John Singleton Copley (1738–1815),
who exhibited his 1781 picture, The Death of the Earl of Chatham in rented rooms to a fee-
paying public, many other artists soon followed with similar speculations, particularly showing
massive “battle-pictures” that enabled spectators to view topical heroic scenes risk-free at a
remove from the front.
157
With crowds of people paying entry fees to see such exhibitions,
exhibitors took out insurances to safeguard their pictures’ values. In September 1794, the father-
and-son reproductive engraving firm, Valentine Green (1739–1813) and his son Rupert (1768–
1804), in collaboration with Swiss printmaker Christian De Mechel (1737–1817), insured stock
at 13 Berners Street, specifying that that the policy also include a “Picture representing the Siege

155
For example: August 13, 1806, “Insured: The Right Hon Lord Kinnaird, Other Property /
Occupiers Mentioned: Picture by Morillo, 3 Cadogan Place Sloane Street (William Buchanan
Esq),” CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/437/792620; May 11, 1808, “Insured: The Right Honble.
Lord Northwick Other Property / Occupiers Mentioned: William Buchanan, Esq, behind 18
Oxendon Street,” CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/445/816490; May 11, 1808, “Insured: James
Campbell, esq Other Property / Occupiers Mentioned: Picture ‘The Brazen Serpent’ by Rubens,
in gallery of William Buchanan esq, behind 18 Oxendon Street,”
CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/445/816491; 1810 January 28, 1810, “Insured: William Buchanan,
3 Cadogan Place Sloane Street, esq.” CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/453/841201,
Records of Sun Fire Office, Policy Registers, Old Series, London Metropolitan Archives. For the
search terms “pictures,” “insured,” also return occupation-based entries, including lists of
tradespeople like carvers, gilders, print sellers, picture dealers, picture cleaners, and picture-
frame makers.
156
Richard Altick, “Art on Display,” in The Shows of London (Cambridge and London: Harvard
University Press, 1978), 99-116.
157
See also Harold E. Dickson, “Artists as Showmen,” The American Art Journal 5, no. 1 (May
1973): 4-17.

78
of Valenciennes in Mr. Bowyers Exhibition room 87 Pall Mall.” The picture described was The
Grand Attack on Valenciennes: an eight-by-twelve-foot historical painting by Philippe Jacques de
Loutherbourg (1740–1812) depicting a major British and Austrian victory against the French
Revolutionary army in July 1793 [Fig. 8]. Emulating successful historical print subscription
projects like William Woolett’s 1776 engraving after Benjamin West’s painting of the death of
General Wolfe, the Greens and Mechel had commissioned the painting in 1793 directly after the
battle’s events as a joint speculation and subscription project. Completed in 1794, the painting
eventually hung with another companion battle scene for three years at Robert Bowyer’s Historic
Gallery, as the syndicate sought public interest in the print subscription scheme. Unusually, as
Antony Griffiths has shown, a rare surviving contract laying out the scheme’s conditions
between the Greens and Mechel reveals how the three publishers shared the costs of painting,
engraving, exhibition, and even the potential for bad debts equally between them.
158
Clause four
of the contract specified that a “Mrs. Green” was tasked with having the painting “insured at
common expense, as well as the plates in their boxes, against the dangers of fire,” a clause
clearly honored, evinced by the Sun Fire policy register entry.
159
Griffiths emphasized the
contract was unusual because it was drawn up between British and Continental reproductive

158
Antony Griffiths, “The Contract for ‘The Grand Attack on Valenciennes,’” Print Quarterly
20, no. 4 (December 2003): 374-379.
159
The relevant passages in the contract read as follows: “Mr Loutherbourg’s painting will be
deposited after all the use made, either for exhibition or for engraving, with Mrs Green who will
have it insured at common expense, as well as the plates in their boxes, against the dangers of
fire. The painting will remain until it is sold as common property, and if an amateur offers a
suitable price for it, if one of the contracting parties then wants it at the same price he must have
the preference. Just as if during this time one of the contracting parties should wish or find
occasion to assign his share to a third party and of which he shall give notice to the other party,
that other party who retains his share by giving the same price shall have the preference in order
to become the owner of the whole. If at the end of all the accounts there are some bad debts, they
will be equally supported by both parties, except to bring them back afterwards, or to make the
best use of them as possible.” (my translation) Griffiths, “The Contract,” 379.

79
print publishers rather than between publishers and engravers. But for our purposes the nexus
between print contract and insurance agreement shows the ways in which insurance was another
contractual tie binding speculative projects—in this case speculative print projects—together.
160

Insurance provided yet another bulwark against the possible exigencies of an already fraught
trade in artworks.

(III) Rating art risks

While insurance registers provided one kind of document for studying how art works
came to be conceived of as insurance risks, other internal insurance company documents like
insurance rate books, instruction manuals, and policies printed with insurance rules all provided
guidance for a workforce of insurance office personnel. Depending on the company, this
workforce consisted of agents and walkers (who went out soliciting for new insurance
customers), and clerks who managed day-to-day operations in offices, separate from head
officials.
161
Originally at companies like the Sun Insurance Office, clerks, usually sixteen- and
seventeen-year-old boys, were casually nominated by company managers, and they might clerk
for many years, getting paid £80 a year by the 1760s, with the possibility of earning a maximum
amount of £200 to do this work.
162
By 1869 clerks had to pass a formal exam in the City of

160
As Griffiths also notes, all three of the project’s investors were eventually bankrupted when
the British export market for prints was decimated by the conflicts with France in 1798.
161
An insurance company’s personnel typically included: governors and directors (often the
figureheads of the institution who were successful merchants or City businessmen and would
hold shares of the company), managers, secretaries, agents and “walkers” who solicited new
business, clerks, messengers, and fire brigades (in London, the latter might be drawn from the
ranks of Thames watermen).
162
This would be £8,196.98 and £20,492.46 per year in 2017’s numbers. Dickson, The Sun
Insurance, 58.

80
London College in order to be appointed, and aside from their salaries they could earn
bonuses.
163
But clerks were by no means trained in art or aesthetics.
164

Insurance companies produced rate books as internal guides for the insurance clerks who
wrote policies, so that clerks would be able to specify correct amounts on policies brought to the
company by agents.
165
These risk booklets catalogued classes of buildings, mercantile goods, and
particular occupations and trades, and became successively more complicated over time as
industrialization and imperialism created new risk classes.
166
The London Metropolitan archives
hold copies of one such rate booklet produced for London clerks at the Sun Fire Office [Figs. 9,
10]. Dated July 18, 1803 and addressed to “the Clerks Who Write Policies,” the booklet begins
by discussing how insurance agents should comport themselves, and it indicates that they will be
sent fire marks to distribute to customers. These were metal markers that insurance companies
gave to customers to affix to their buildings so that fire brigades working in the company’s
employ would know which buildings were insured with the company.
167
The ratings book
describes categories of buildings (brick buildings, “hazardous buildings” and “double
hazardous”) and goes on to specify rates for buildings, trades, and goods in waterside quays and
docks on both banks of the Thames. It then proceeds to rates of “Other Special Hazards” like
cotton manufactories, distillers, sugar-refiners, theaters, and buildings with stoves or kilns. The

163
Dickson, The Sun Insurance, 125.
164
For work on “paperwork studies” (a burgeoning field between economic history,
communications studies, media history, and business history) see Lisa Gitelman, Paper
Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014);
Michael Zakim, Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2018), 1-46.
165
Pearson, Insuring, 286.
166
Lorna Weatherill, “The Meaning of Consumer Behavior in Late Seventeenth and Early
Eighteenth Century England,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, eds. John Brewer and
Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 206-226.
167
Brian Wright, The British Fire Mark, 1680–1879 (Cambridge: Woodhead-Faulkner, 1982).

81
next categories of rates include “Short Period Rates” which cover “Merchandise in Public
Warehouses, Goods on Wharfs and Yards; also Wholesale Dealers Stock.” The list for these
rates is extensive, making up much of the rest of the booklet. Three columns specify the rates for
each risk category depending upon the building within which a risk is contained, and the
columns also specify the maximum ceiling for insurable amounts. The list provides another
alphabetized view on the array of all of Britain’s productive trades, and is in a sense a parallel
working document to John Weskett’s earlier insurance digest in that it identifies particular
commodities and trades (from coffin-makers to inn-keepers to whale-oil refiners) as “hazardous”
or “doubly hazardous.”
168
These documents are also mutable: they include empty pages, inviting
the clerk to write in percentage rates, and other observations and notations to suit the
circumstances. Multiple copies of this same 1803 rate book held at the London Metropolitan
Archives display different clerks’ handwriting and notations.
Art objects and art trades are included in the above list. The later include “Figure-
Makers” (in “Wax, plaster, stone, and ‘automatical’”), and “Picture-Frame makers, prints (in
private use, insured without their glazing), printsellers’ stock only.”
169
Pictures and prints in the
booklet get special treatment. They are listed under two categories, with a separate category for
those sold “in trade.” A notation on the right-hand page indicates that clients insuring collections
priced above a certain limit should also deposit picture catalogues with the company:

168
Timothy Alborn, “Quill-Driving: British Life-Insurance Clerks and Occupational Mobility,
1800-1914,” Business History Review 82, no. 1 (2008): 31-58. Alborn’s article attends to the
data-processing side of the insurance business, and to the work and lives of the clerks who kept
fire offices’ books.
169
Rate Books [Uncatalogued], July 18, 1803, Records of Sun Fire Office, London Metropolitan
Archives.

82
Note—When pictures are insured for more than £1,000, in private use, and for £300 and
upwards, for sale, a catalogue, specifying the subject, and by what master, with the value
insured on each painting, signed by the insurer, must be deposited in the office.
170

A further notation points out that when people wish to apply for insurances on picture
collections, amounts insured below £300 will incur a fee of 3s. 6d. including the stamp duty,
which was an enforcement mechanism in form of taxes that the British state levied on marine
and fire insurance policies.
171
For those applying to cover more than £300 worth of pictures, the
policies are free. The rate book thereby reveals at least two important Sun Fire Office policies
towards painting collections. The first was that already by 1800, the company required their
clients to provide itemized picture catalogues in which not only were the pictures and their prices
named, but also the pictures’ subjects and their named “masters” had to be indicated, implying
that the company had some method for interpreting this data. The second point was that the
company created a barrier to entry for potential policy-holders in the form of a fee, while
incentivizing those wishing to insure more than £300 by offering the policy for free.
While rate books enabled insurance clerks to compare percentages on insurable risks,
agency instruction manuals gave a sense of what an “ideal” insurance client looked like. They
provided specimen “Example” policies for the types of clients an agent might expect to
encounter, with instructions on how to draw up their insurances. One Sun Fire Office agency
booklet from 1822 carried an unambiguous opening command: “You are, to the utmost of your
power, by all just means, to promote the welfare of the office, and particularly by procuring

170
A £300 policy would be £13,221.87 in coverage in 2017’s numbers. Rate Books
[Uncatalogued], July 18, 1803, Records of Sun Fire Office, London Metropolitan Archives.
171
Philip Rawlings, “Bubbles, Taxes, and Interests: Another History of Insurance Law, 1720–
1825,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 36, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 799-827.

83
insurances” [Fig. 11].
172
Apparently confirming both Margaret Hunt’s and Weatherill’s findings
about middle class consumers as achieving consumer habits that did not necessarily emulate
landed classes but managed to find comfortable ways to consume, the very first “specimen”
policy is for a moderately prosperous shopkeeper, carpenter, and wheelwright in York who takes
out a policy worth more than £300.
173
This individual’s insurances are subdivided between
household goods and apparel including printed books and music at £200. Pictures and prints, not
specified, are insured for £50 (although the premium amount on pictures does not include any
protective glazing).
174
This example is followed by insurances below £300 for a hat-maker, a
farmer and maltster, a pawn-broker and salesman, a cabinet-maker and an upholsterer. There are
additional “Example” policies for tradesmen, and a woolen manufacturer. But the point I am
making by discussing this document is that by dint of pride-of-place, the first “Example”
constitutes a kind of ideal policy, and the ideal policy-holder is shown to be a modest picture-
collector, as opposed to a lavish collector or connoisseur.
175

172
Instructions for the Agents of the Sun Fire Office (London: Norris and Son, 1822) [digitized
edition from University Illinois at Urbana-Champaign].
173
For discussions of consumer identities, especially in relation to gender, see Margaret R. Hunt,
The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England 1680-1780 (1996); Susan
Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660-1833 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1990).
174
In 2017 this would be £2,871.52.
175
Artists also insured their studios. As Matthew Hunter has shown, J. M. W. Turner had
frequent dealings with insurance companies and charities, carefully inventorying and insuring the
contents of his studio with the Sun Insurance Office. Matthew Hunter, “The Sun is God: Turner,
Angerstein, and Insurance” (working paper, February 2022), Microsoft Word file. It seems that
Turner was comfortable using multiple insurance forms. Sam Smiles has revealed how, aside
from his fire insurances, Turner also participated in a West Indian plantation investment life
annuity tontine, reliant upon the labor of enslaved people taken from Africa, in which investors
were promised a yearly dividend of fifteen percent, which increased for remaining members each
time a subscriber died. Turner’s annuity was always going to be modest, as many subscribers
were many years younger than he was. But he never received it, as this scheme eventually failed.
Smiles, “Turner and the Slave Trade,” 47.

84
(IV) Cataloguing art risks

Insurance rating practice is in evidence in a small selection of catalogues at the Phoenix
Alliance archive at Cambridge University.

A number of files contain picture catalogues deposited
with the Phoenix Insurance Company as supporting documents for corresponding insurance
policies.
176
This is an important point: the files contain no insurance policies to elaborate on the
insurance contracts’ terms or premiums. The archive only contains the catalogues listing pictures
and their values for insurance, and occasionally correspondence and hand-drawn maps of the
insureds’ premises.
177
For this chapter I surveyed seventy-three catalogues deposited with the
Phoenix Fire Office. These documents range from single-sheet lists drawn up by owners or their
intermediaries; to lavish, privately printed, bound volumes by moneyed landowners; to cultural
institutions insuring temporary exhibitions.
178

Insurance catalogues may be placed in a larger category of picture collection catalogues.
Giles Waterfield has charted how such catalogues trace shifting collecting patterns. In the early

176
In searching for larger caches of art insurance catalogues, I found examples at the Phoenix
Assurance Archive at Cambridge University Library, and at the AVIVA Group Archive in
Norwich Union. The latter archive holds the historical archives and records of more than eighty-
four substantive insurance companies that were absorbed into what is now AVIVA. The
following files at the Phoenix Assurance archive contained picture insurances: “Exhibition
catalogues with inventories of paintings, correspondence and other papers relating to fine and
decorative art or exhibitions (1840–1886)” PX 1501; “Schedules of paintings, sketches and
drawings privately owned (1838–1876)” PX 1510; “Schedules of pictures and decorative art
including pictures bronzes china and other works of art mainly in bound volumes within box
(1838–1930)” PX 1511; “Inventories contents of private dwellings mainly in bound volumes
(1895–1910)” PX 1512, Phoenix Assurance Archive, Cambridge University Library. As far as I
know, the majority of these documents have never been seen or used by art historians, likely
owing to the fact that the Phoenix Fire Office’s voluminous finding aid exists only as an
undigitized and unbound ream of typeset documents. Even within that finding aid, these art-
related documents are uncatalogued at a granular level.
177
Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic and to time constraints I was unable to visit private estates
or National Trust properties to consult privately held extant insurance policies.
178
Sixty-six of the catalogues were linked to individuals, while seven catalogues were related to
insurances for temporary exhibitions, the subject of my next chapter.

85
modern period, catalogues described objects as curiosities in princely cabinets, where an object
might be valued as a scientific specimen. From the mid-eighteenth century, object categories
were divided and scientific specimens were framed by the Linnaean taxonomic system, while art
works (paintings, prints, and sculptures) came under connoisseurial categories.
179
The catalogue
underscored a collection’s financial and cultural value, enabling its recorder to chart national or
regional schools and periodizations within their collections. Waterfield further identifies three
kinds of catalogue. The first and oldest form was the inventory, which might give only cursory
information like a work’s location in a display, with the artist and title, and sometimes even
dimensions. The second category was the expository guide, meant to be carried by a viewer and
read while looking at the artwork. This might include more commentary and might even be used
to entice possible buyers with brief passages about the work’s authority and provenance history.
The third category included elaborate presentation volumes, which might be printed in folio
format, and could include printed reproductions of the works.
180

At the turn of the nineteenth century, all three forms of cataloguing were operative.
181
In
this context, the insurance catalogue—also called a “schedule”—is something closer to an

179
Giles Waterfield, “The Origins of the Early Picture Gallery Catalogue in Europe, and its
Manifestation in Victorian Britain,” in Susan Pearce, ed., Art in Museums (London & Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Athlone Press, 1995), 42-73. On antiquarians and enthusiasts and the use of
catalogues see Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
180
The private collection catalogue first appeared in 1720 for Wilton House near Salisbury in
Wiltshire. It was followed in 1731 by A Description of the Earl of Pembroke’s Pictures, and then
in 1747 by Horace Walpole’s (1717–1797) Aedes Walpolianae: his picture catalogue for
Houghton-Hall in Norfolk. Waterfield, “The Origins of the Early Picture Gallery Catalogue,” 42-
73.
181
Waterfield, “The Origins of the Early Picture Gallery Catalogue,” 42-73. Auction catalogues
are another salient category, and the one most closely aligned with the insurance schedule.
Cynthia Wall argues that auction catalogues published by eighteenth-century professional
auctioneers like James Christie were textual methods for dislocating and reimagining collections
via new “narrative codes” meant to appeal to aspirational buyers. Cynthia Wall, “The English

86
inventory, as its main goal is to outline the items covered and provide basic prices for works.
Subtracting the Phoenix collections’ insurance catalogues for exhibitions and other catalogues
for institutional insurances, I assembled a sample of sixty-two catalogues for private collections
dating from the late 1830s until at least 1913.
182
This is admittedly a small sample size, which
may be accounted for due to losses in the archives, including incomplete records from agency
offices, agents neglecting to deposit catalogues with the head office, and other historical gaps.
183

Still, the catalogues reveal much about where, why, and how the Phoenix (and several other
companies) insured pictures, sculptures, and applied art works.
Of the catalogues that include identifying data like dates and locations, the largest
number date from the 1840s, with at least six catalogues deposited for the year 1845 alone. This
perhaps reflects a significant push on the part of the Phoenix Insurance Company to appeal to
owners with this type of insurance, or a particularly energetic agent. In terms of the insureds’
locations, this archive shows evidence that the Phoenix insured picture collections across
England and Scotland, with the largest number of catalogues for insurances in and around
London and its suburbs (sixteen) followed by the North West, especially Liverpool and
Manchester (fourteen), followed after this by Scottish insurances (eight), and diminishing
numbers across the rest of England.

Auction: Narratives of Dismantlings,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, no. 1, “In Circulation”
(Fall, 1997): 12.
182
At the AVIVA Group Archive in Norwich Union, Norfolk, I also consulted fifteen extant
picture insurance catalogues, all insured by Northern Insurance Company in Scotland (NU
Norwich Union and Subsidiaries Insurance Policies, 1856–1911). However, due to their regional
specificity, I have left that archive out of this draft. My in-progress data for the Northern
Insurance Company catalogues may be viewed here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h-
rmcFHguTQksDIZ0sQQwWpiki6mXADJm6C5Xql5sq0/edit#gid=0
183
Some significant insurance archives no longer exist due to accident, and many archives were
also discarded in the 1960s. See Cockerell and Green, The British Insurance Business, xii–xiii.

87
Class identities of the insured could be difficult to determine, but information about
social status can be gleaned from honorifics used by the insured, as well as amounts insured.
184

Out of the sixty-two catalogues surveyed, sixteen of the catalogues listed no honorific. But in the
largest category, twenty-six of the individuals depositing catalogues used the honorific, “esquire”
or “Esq.,” indicating this group’s varied professional or middle-class pretensions. There was only
one listed widow, three colonels, one baronet, and two lords. Other categories include tradesmen
(a jeweler and a linen-draper) and two artists. Professionals included doctors, solicitors, and
auctioneer/appraisers. A gallerist, Ernest Gambart (1814–1902), also registered several
catalogues, although it is unclear if these insurances were for stock-in-trade, or for pictures in
Gambart’s private possession.
185
The earliest insurance catalogue in the group dated from the late
1830s [Fig. 12]. This was an insurance valuation for the London home and wax museum
premises of Marie Tussaud (1761–1850): the total sum insured for this latter catalogue was
£1,600, with the most expensively insured items being a number of mirrors, insured for upwards
of £500.
186

184
Anthony J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit: 1850–1980
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 1-7; Peter J. Cain and Anthony G. Hopkins,
“Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas, I. The Old Colonial System, 1688–
1850,” in The Economic History Review 39, no. 4 (1986), 501-25; Harold Perkin, The Rise of
Professional Society: England Since 1880 (London: Routledge, 1989), 123-4; W. D. Rubenstein,
Capitalism, Culture and Decline in Britain: 1750–1990 (London: Routledge, 1994), 103.
185
Gambart’s business archive no longer exists intact, and scholars who write about the dealer
usually rely upon extant correspondence. These documents therefore offer a rare view onto the
company’ risk-mitigation strategies. Jeremy Maas, Gambart: Prince of the Victorian Art World
(London: Barrie & Jenkins Ltd., 1975); Pamela M. Fletcher, “Creating the French Gallery:
Ernest Gambart and the Rise of the Commercial Art Gallery in Mid-Victorian London,”
Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 6, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 38-62.
186
The total amount insured would be approximately £96,667.20 if it took place in the late
1830s.

88
Overwhelmingly, the population in this sample represented members of the middle class,
skewing to the upper-middle class. The amounts insured reflected this. The total sum insured for
all sixty-two catalogues was £234,752. The most modestly-insured picture catalogue was for a
collection dating from the late 1830s in Rotherhithe, South-East London, insured for £49,
indicating that unlike the Sun Fire Office, the Phoenix invited collectors to deposit picture
insurance catalogues with the company office, even if the catalogues were worth less than £300
[Fig. 13].
187
The most lavishly-insured catalogue belonged to banking scion and property
developer, Alexander Dennistoun Esq. (1789–1874), whose estate, Golfhill, was insured in 1874
for £30,000.
188
From the late 1830s until the late 1840s (represented by twenty-four catalogues)
the average total price on an insured catalogue was £1,390. But from 1850 to 1913 (thirty-eight
catalogues), the average total price on an insured catalogue was £5,300. Over the entire period
(late 1830s to 1913) the average amount insured was £3,800, although this number skews higher
thanks to large-scale insurances like Dennistoun’s catalogue.
Prices for individual objects shifted during the period, with a break in the 1850s in which
prices rose. The smallest amounts insured were frequently for items like prints or engravings,
valued as multiples and often insured en bloc for shillings and pence. But across all of the
catalogues, oil paintings (and sometimes watercolors) were insured for the largest amounts. From
the late 1830s to the 1850s, the average highest price for a single picture was around £170. But
from the 1850s to 1913, prices climbed dramatically higher, with an average high price for a
single picture at £516. The picture insured for the largest amount in all sixty-two catalogues

187
Similarly, the total amount would be about £2,960.43 in the late 1830s.
188
This would have been £1,878,270.00 in 2017. Several exceptions made for those rare
collections valued explicitly in guineas as opposed to pounds (frequently no such distinction was
made in the catalogues).

89
appeared in the lavishly printed and bound 1883 catalogue for Sir Thomas Lucas (1822–1902)
whose successful contracting company, Lucas Brothers, constructed consequential buildings like
the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (completed 1860) and the Royal Albert Hall
(1871) [Fig. 14]. Lucas’s catalogue is 113 pages long with decorative printed embellishments. It
contains forty-three categories, from Chinese carvings to marbles and sculptures. The painting
collection alone was insured for £27,139, and the lions’ share of this amount was taken by
“Pictures by Modern English Artists,” surpassing amounts insured on other categories such as
“Pictures by and After Old Masters.”
189
His highest insured picture was an oil painting of
“Bolton Abbey” by the British artist, Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding (1787–1855). It was
insured for £2,500, surpassing even a “Grand Landscape” by Dutch Golden Age painter,
Meindert Hobbema (1638–1709), insured by Alexander Dennistoun for £2,000 in 1874.
190
In a
small way these prices dramatize Gerald Reitlinger’s and Dianne Sachko Macleod’s findings that
in the Victorian era the values for living British artists rose dramatically compared to pictures by
Old Masters, which were sometimes of dubious origins or blatant fakes.
191

These points about relative and changing insurance prices for pictures underscore what
has always been well-known to scholars of the art market since Reitlinger published his three-
volume Economics of Taste (1961–1970): namely that insurance catalogues can provide
alternative sources for data on collectors’ habits, artists’ sales, and individual artworks’
valuations over time. These fragmentary records from insurance companies complement better-

189
£1,796,186.57 in 2017’s numbers.
190
£165,461.75 versus around £132,369.40 in 2017’s numbers.
191
Gerald Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste: The Rise and Fall of Picture Prices 1760–1960
vol, 1 (Barrie and Rockliffe, London, 1961), 143-174; MacLeod, Art and the Victorian Middle
Class, page. See also Susanna Avery-Quash and Barbara Pezzini eds., Old Masters Worldwide:
Markets, Movements and Museums, 1789–1939 (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

90
known and more frequently researched auction house and gallery records.
192
But, more crucially,
insurance records can also reveal how insurance, as a tertiary service, generated and altered
picture prices. The claim I am making here is that insurance markets, practices, and agents
intervened in art valuation methods. Their influence and effects upon prices should be considered
alongside techniques normalized by art markets, such as connoisseurial appraisals by artists or
gallerists. That is, collectors or insurance agents sometimes altered appraisals, shoe-horning (or
conversely, ballooning) picture prices to fit premium limits.
In some instances, the catalogues trace these valuation maneuvers over time. For
example, on four separate occasions from the mid-1840s until 1861, a Robert Craig of Glasgow
submitted valued catalogues on a dozen pictures in his collection, generally Dutch Old Master
painters [Figs. 15, 16 ].
193
While the works in the collection range in price from £75 to £150,
across each catalogue the most expensive picture is a landscape by “John and Andrew Both,”
likely a picture by the seventeenth-century Dutch brothers, Jan Dirksz and Andries Both.
194
In
Craig’s first insurance catalogue from the early 1840s, the painting is insured for £300. The next
three insurance catalogues have it priced at £350, accounting perhaps for changes in the artists’
prices on the market, or connoisseurial advising that Craig received. But these insurance
documents are interesting for the way they trace an individual object’s shifting prices, while
emphasizing the entire collection’s relatively static total price. For although individual pictures’
prices shifted from one catalogue to the next, Craig stated that he wished to continue paying the

192
Examples of such archives include the Getty Research Institute with its digitized Provenance
Index, London’s National Gallery with its archive of Thomas Agnew & Sons (see my chapter 4);
the Rothschilds’ Archives at Waddesdon Manor, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire.
193
Picture Catalogues for Robert Craig, 1840s, PX 1510/21; 1847, PX 1510/23; 1854, 1856,
1861, PX 1510/40, Phoenix Insurance Archive, Cambridge University Library.
194
Jan Dirksz Both (between 1610 and 1618–1652) and Andries Both (1612/1613–1642).

91
same amount for insurance coverage on the entire collection, £1,700, indicating perhaps that his
policy’s terms and price ceiling were driving his collecting choices over time, rather than these
being determined by particular pictures, with their prices arrived at through other interpretative
avenues.
Other catalogues reveal collectors’ desires to remain within a maximum insured limit.
An 1845 catalogue inventorying the property of a J. Anson in London originally listed thirty-four
items, mostly paintings and a few bronzes, for a modest total amount of £301 14s 6d [Fig. 17].
195

A large painting by Charles Le Brun (1619–1690), “Ajax and Ulysses,” is the highest-priced
picture, initially covered for £50.
196
But another hand has effaced the price, writing instead
“£45,” while twenty-five of the inventory’s other items show evidence of similar reductions. A
note at the catalogue’s top indicates “Each Item in the Inventory reduced by 2s/2d […] to make
the Total £300 only,” although some items have clearly been reduced by more than this amount,
for the final total insured price is £276 3s.
197
The catalogue’s restriction (“to make the Total £300
only”) underscores how insurance affected the prices assigned to artworks. The prices on these
pictures show a collector’s future-oriented willingness to underwrite their art collection at least

195
Picture Catalogue for J. Anson, 1845, PX 1510/17, Phoenix Insurance Archive, Cambridge
University Library.
196
This picture is traceable in the Getty Provenance Index, but the names attached to the sale in
1818 do not match these insurance documents. Getty Provenance Index, Sale Catalog Br-1732,
Lot 0224.
197
This was a firm of Phoenix agents at 19 Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square (as of 1847). Post
Office London Directory (London: W. Kelly & Co., 1847), 808. An accompanying letter reveals
that Phoenix Director Thomas Richter (b. 1777) communicated with Phoenix agents Jago &
Wagner about the shift in valuations: “Messr Jago + Wagner, Gents re: Fargues: From our
Surveyor’s report on Mr T’Ansons premises it appears that not less than 10/6 per cent will be
fitting for the risk, however, for your accommodations we confirm the arrangement you made,
for the first year only, at 5/1 percent, but the future annual premium will be £1 11s. 6d. say 10/6
per cent. Before we proceed with the policy we must trouble Mr Wagner to favor us with a call,
as the Sum in the Inventory does not agree with the sum insured. I am, Gent. Your Ob. Serv’t
Thos- Richter, Sr… Henry Selse/? October 11, 1845.”

92
for a particular duration. But the prices also potentially reflect economic pressures to remain
below a certain price ceiling, or adhere to company restrictions, as we saw outlined in the Sun
Insurance Company’s rate books. This tension—between the owner’s desire to ensure their
collection’s price, and external, potentially arbitrary pressures to price that art differently—
highlights how artworks and antiquities are economically exceptional commodities, a concept
theorized by classical economists and discarded by neoclassical economists.
As Dave Beech has shown, classical and neoclassical economic theorists argued
variously about how goods like fine French wines that commanded “exceptional” prices did so
due to factors like intractable supply (in which production could not be increased), or
competition between buyers willing to pay exorbitant prices. Nassau Senior (1790–1864) is
known for coining the term “fancy prices” to describe unusual prices attached to such rarities.
Prices were decoupled from costs of production because exceptional commodities like works by
deceased artists were not necessarily regulated by supply and demand. As in Thomas De
Quincey’s The Logic of Political Economy (1845), the prices for such commodities could be
determined by exceptional circumstances, like scarcity or a consumer’s own contingent judgment
and desires.
198
The point is that artworks were exceptional: unlike other goods, they did not
materially depreciate when they were “consumed,” i.e. viewed and enjoyed, although they could

198
De Quincey gives the example of a consumer who embarks on a ten-year journey out of
civilization into the wilds of the American West. On the brink of the journey, in which the
consumer will forego all luxuries, the consumer finds himself willing to pay sixty guineas for a
cheap yet desirable trinket: a musical snuff-box. Such an item would otherwise cost six guineas
in London, but the consumer’s willingness to pay is driven by its scarcity, and by the consumer’s
time-stamped urgency. Dave Beech, Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical,
Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (Leiden and Boston: Brill, Historical Materialism, 2015),
85.

93
physically deteriorate, and hence needed to be cared for and looked after.
199
These were
“commodities of a highly individual utility and/or speculative character.”
200

Insurances were often taken out on artworks in legal liminal states following their
owners’ deaths. One catalogue was deposited by solicitor Edward Spike, Esq. on behalf of his
father, William Spike, Esq., also a solicitor at Clifford’s Inn, London [Fig. 18].
201
Spike Senior
had worked for the European Life Insurance Company and had died aged seventy-two in
November 1845.
202
In December 1846 Spike the younger wrote to the Phoenix Insurance
Company agents Jago & Wagner to inform the company about how he wished the £1,000
insurance to be allocated between his father’s paintings listed in the catalogue, which contained
twenty-one items. The highest priced item was a “Landscape with Waterfall and figures” by
Jacob van Ruisdael, insured for £600, while the items insured for the smallest price were five
paintings covered en bloc for £5. Spike the younger warned the company that he would not pay
more for the principal cost, citing competitive rates from the Law Fire Office and other
companies, thereby revealing that despite its market dominance and size, the Phoenix also faced
competition within a broader environment of insurers who provided coverage for art works.
Other collections were insured by executors before the pictures were to come up for
auction. In the mid-1850s, a widow named Mrs. Elizabeth MacDonald living at The Poplars in
East Sparkbrook—an affluent, middle-class Birmingham neighborhood—had a collection of

199
Beech, Art & Value, 84.
200
Thomas M. Bayer and John R. Page, The Development of the Art Market in England: Money
as Muse, 1730–1900 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2016), 144.
201
Picture Catalogue for William Spike, 1845, PX 1510/22, Phoenix Insurance Archive,
Cambridge University Library.
202
“Deaths: London and its Vicinity,” The Gentleman’s Magazine 178 (January–June 1845):
104.

94
pictures insured for £3,235 [Fig. 19].
203
Three pictures were attributed to Rubens (including two
versions of the “Holy Family,” one insured for £400 and the other for £200), three Titians (one
of “Mars & Venus,” also insured for £400), two Rembrandts (one being a “Head of a Rabbi,”
insured for £50), a Van Dyck “Crucifixion” and other works by Canaletto, Poussin, and Sir
Godfrey Kneller. In 1855, possibly not long after this insurance was purchased, the Birmingham
Journal noted the auction of these paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck and Titian.
204
In this example,
insurance then seemed at once a pragmatic means for establishing prices for works in a
collection that may or may not have been genuine, but also a way to designate pictures newly
unmoored, tagged for a new transition between stops on what would become the pictures’
provenance histories.
205
In 1846, a collection of approximately seventeen pictures at Witton
Castle in County Durham belonging to Donald Maclean Esq. were insured for £3,000 [Fig.
20].
206
Maclean was an M.P. for Oxford and a director of the Marylebone Bank. He had
purchased Witton Castle in 1839 for nearly £100,000 from a former M.P., and then proceeded to
live and entertain lavishly before bankrupting himself and escaping to the Continent.
207
He left

203
Valued Picture Catalogue for Mrs. Elizabeth MacDonald, c. 1850s, PX 1510/33, Phoenix
Insurance Archive, Cambridge University Library.
204
The Birmingham Journal, February 10, 1855, Auctioneers: Fallows and Smith.
205
For discussions about the significance of provenance to the writing and researching of art
history see Anne Higgonet, “Afterward: The Social Life of Provenance,” in Provenance: An
Alternate History of Art, eds. Gail Feigenbaum and Inge Reist (Los Angeles: Getty Research
Institute, 2012), 195-209; See also Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: commodities and the politics
of value,” in The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 3-63.
206
Picture Catalogue for Donald Maclean, 1845, PX 1510/15, Phoenix Insurance Archive,
Cambridge University Library.
207
Maclean was evidently also interested in speculations and in establishing interesting material
equivalencies in lieu of monetary payments for paintings he desired, as described in a Durham
county history from 1857: “in 1846, [Maclean] agreed to pay to Mr. Brett, a picture dealer,
£7,000 for Titian’s picture called the ‘Six Caesars,’ and Murillo’s ‘Abraham and the Angels.’ An
arrangement was made, by which Mr. Maclean was to deliver, in payment of the money, 20,000
tons of coal, at 7s a ton, for a French railway, with which Mr. Brett was connected. Fortunately

95
behind a bank in disarray, angry creditors, and more than £40,000 in debt. In his absence, his
pictures—mostly Italian and Dutch old masters, including works by the Carracci and by
Meindert Hobbema—furniture, library, wines, and farming stock were all sold at auction on July
8, 1846.
208
In this sense, insurance was a valuable mechanism for price assessments alongside
appraisals by auctioneers. Additionally, perhaps in cases where an owner might have manifested
imprudent behavior, insurance could be seen as offering a stabilizing authority to a tarnished
collection. Maclean’s case also revealed the challenges that collections at stately homes posed
for insurance. These challenges surpassed issues related to individual moral hazard. A wider
British public’s view on private collecting and landed property was shifting, and the question of
stewardship was becoming nationally significant.

(V) “Already dedicated to Moloch”: art insurance and landed property

Of the insurance catalogues in the Phoenix archive, country house catalogues like Donald
Maclean’s collection were less common than the catalogues belonging to middle-class
consumers discussed above.
209
The country house catalogues in the collection, especially, dated

for the latter, he discovered the state of Mr. Maclean’s affairs before the paintings were
delivered, and consequently retained them.” William Fordyce, The history and antiquities of the
county palatine of Durham: comprising a condensed account of its natural, civil, and
ecclesiastical history, from the earliest period to the present time; its boundaries, ancient,
parishes, and recently formed parochial districts and chapelries, and parliamentary and
municipal divisions; its agriculture, mineral products, manufactures, shipping, docks, railways,
and general commerce; its public buildings, churches, chapels, parochial registers, landed
gentry, heraldic visitations, local biography, schools, charities, sanitary reports, population,
&c.. (London: A. Fullarton and Co., 1857), 625-626.

209
I am speaking only of collections insured in England and Scotland. Ireland’s complex history
with insurance is another story, as English insurers were often wary about insuring country
houses during periods of radical revolution against colonial oppression. As Terence Dooley has
shown, already in the 1880s, Irish estate owners faced mounting debts and insurance companies
called in mortgages on failing estates. But while English estate owners contended with changes

96
from the mid-1840s to the 1890s, although already from the 1750s, country house owners,
whether merchants or members of the gentry, took out insurances on their mansions, manor
halls, castles, and other large-scale private properties.
210
Smaller villas might be insured for only
a several thousand pounds while larger aristocratic piles might be insured for hundreds of
thousands of pounds.
211
Contradictorily, some features of country houses made them attractive
risks to insurance companies, while other features made them manifestly complex or even “bad
risks.” As architectural interventions, the smaller houses might be well built, but their
expensively furnished interiors might feature massive quantities of wood paneling in
combination with wide open fireplaces. They were often unattached to surrounding buildings
that might contain hazardous trades, but they were also distant from metropolitan centers where
the nascent fire brigades were coming into being, so assistance in the event of a fire might be
slow going.
212
Some landowners willing to shoulder the expense might hire private fire-fighting
teams and install fire-fighting equipment.
213
Still, fire risk would always be higher in dense urban
areas. For example, in the 1880s, the Phoenix limited amounts insurable on mansion houses to no
more than £15,000 in the countryside, while houses in urban areas could be insured for up to

in inheritance tax laws, Irish estate owners had the same problem plus real threats of radical
action. During the Irish revolutionary era from 1916 to 1923, at least 300 country homes were
seen as relics of English oppression and attacked by radical agitators. Terence Dooley, “The
Destruction of the Country House in Ireland, 1879–1973,” in Lost Mansions: Essays on the
Destruction of the Country House, ed. James Raven (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015),
44-62. Terence Dooley, Burning the Big House: The Story of the Irish Country House in a Time
of War and Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022).
210
Pearson, Insuring, 103.
211
Pearson, Insuring, 103.
212
Shane Ewen, “Governing Fire Protection: The Origins of Municipal Fire Brigades, c.1800–
38,” in Fighting Fires: Creating the British Fire Service, 1800–1978 (Hampshire and New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 11-29.
213
Pearson, Insuring, 102-107.

97
£20,000.
214
As Pearson has shown, in fires affecting provincial property insured by the Hand-in-
Hand between 1735 and 1800, the average number of buildings destroyed was 1.7 compared to
an average of 2.9 in London.
215
By 1800, many peers were insuring their mansions. The Hand-
in-Hand insured Lord Salisbury’s Hatfield House for £15,000 in 1781, while the Duke of
Bedford insured Woburn Abbey for £80,000.
216

Country houses were also radically underinsured. Assessing how owners financed and
built country houses from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Richard Wilson and Alan
Mackley use insurance policies to provide information about escalating costs relative to owner
income, company policies, and total coverage.
217
Wilson’s and Mackley’s study shows how
country houses were not as high-risk as industrial factories, but they were still considered large
risks that were also poor investments, as they were frequently demolished or burned down.
218

214
Clive Trebilcock, Phoenix Assurance and the Development of British Insurance, vol. 2: The
Era of the Insurance Giants, 1870–1984 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 15.
215
Trebilcock, Phoenix Assurance, 2:15.
216
Barry Supple, The Royal Exchange Assurance: A History of British Insurance, 1720–1970
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 75. But private estates were often insured for
much less than industrial clients. As Supple shows, truly giant policyholders in the early
nineteenth century were London breweries like Meux’s (£80,000), Clowes (£125,000), or
Hanbury’s (£115,000). Supple, The Royal Exchange, 73–77; Pearson, Insuring, 103.
217
Richard Wilson and Alan Mackley, “The Costs of the Country House,” in Creating Paradise:
The Building of the English Country House, 1660–1880 (London and New York: Hambledon
and London, 2000), 233-295.
218
Arguably the real destruction of the country house began in the twentieth century. The
Phoenix archive has a list detailing numerous losses related to landed properties. For at least 120
conflagrations during a fifteen-year period from 1895 to 1909, the insurance company listed
losses of £1,912,222 out of £5,056,845 insured on country houses. David Cannadine has noted
that at least 400 country houses disappeared in the decade after World War Two: destroyed as
relics of an outdated social structure. David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British
Aristocracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 644. In 1974, in the depths of economic
crisis and just before the 1974 UK general election in which a Labour government was running
with the intention to institute a “wealth tax,” the Victoria & Albert Museum held their wildly
popular exhibition, “The Destruction of the Country House,” to call attention to the ongoing
disappearance of landed properties since the nineteenth century. The exhibition’s intention was
to inject new life into the conservative preservation and heritage lobby. The exhibition was

98
They study fifty house insurances in East Anglia dating from the early eighteenth to the
nineteenth centuries, and find that across all of the policies, owners underinsured their properties
relative to the amounts they spent in construction and outfitting.
219
Most houses went
underinsured for full rebuilding costs should they burn down.
220
Wilson and Mackley account for
this because of total coverage limits and the fact that insurers might only provide partial
replacement costs, expecting that in the event of a disaster, some parts of a house like bricks and
stones could be salvageable and reused. In fact, insurance companies established salvage corps
by the 1840s.
221

One of the stately home’s more complex risks was the expensive fine art collection. It
was complex due to more than just the risk of fire. In an 1864 essay, “Lost Treasures,” art and

accompanied by a dramatically illustrated, strongly pro-patrician catalogue in which, for
example, Sir Oliver Millar lamented the “breaking up” of country house picture collections, the
“cream” of which might be skimmed to generate funds to “mend a roof.” Roy Strong, Marcus
Binney, John Harris, eds. The Destruction of the Country House (London: Thames and Hudson,
1974), especially 103-106, and 142-161. The general sense was a desire to maintain a collector’s
“vision,” in which it would be an anathema for collections to exist anywhere except sequestered
on distant private estates with restricted access. A more measured recent volume that is
nonetheless sympathetic to the politicized tenor of the 1974 exhibition is James Raven, ed., Lost
Mansions: Essays on the Destruction of the Country House (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2015). As Raven notes, with the Town and Country Planning Act of 1968, country house owners
had to seek permission to demolish their listed buildings, thereby bringing an end to the Post-
War destructive wave. The perspectives in the exhibition’s accompanying volume persist in
contemporary rhetoric about the role of the National Trust, which in 2020 has meanwhile
undertaken a major self-assessment attempting to investigate its properties for connections to the
eighteenth and nineteenth-century trade in enslaved people: an effort which has drawn
conservative vitriol to the foundation. “Interim report on the connections between colonialism
and properties now in the care of the National Trust, including links with historic slavery,” by
Sally-Anne Huxtable, Corinne Fowler, Christofili Kefalas, and Emma Slocombe, 2020,
https://nt.global.ssl.fastly.net/documents/colionialism-and-historic-slavery-report.pdf.
219
Wilson and Mackley use the Sun, The Royal Exchange, Norwich Union, and Suffolk Fire
Office registers for insurance information.
220
Wilson and Mackley, “The Costs of the Country House,” 287.
221
Shane Ewen, Fighting Fires: Creating the British Fire Service, 1800–1978 (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010), 57.

99
literary critic Francis Turner Palgrave (1824–1897) warned about the risks accompanying landed
collectors sequestering artworks in these great private residences across Britain. Palgrave
described how many such pictures were kept on estates under dismal conditions, ignored by their
aristocratic owners, and cared for by skeleton retinues of domestic servants. In his view, the risks
of destruction took on a national import:
Who, we ask next, are practically the guardians of treasures such as these? They are
practically under the guardianship of the housemaid. She is assisted in preserving them
by the plumber. Most of the houses, consecrated thus to mend of taste by contents for
which the gold of Australia have no equivalent, are of large size. […] Some of the richest
in art are of palatial extent. In every one are endless open fireplaces. In every one are
furlongs of repair-requiring gutter. In no one that we know of are the collections placed
within rooms fireproof in any valid sense. In most they are enshrined between floors of
the oldest and most invitingly combustible of timber. When we see Petworth or
Manchester House, Chatsworth or Blenheim, Hamilton Palace or Castle Howard, we are
always reminded of some delicate maiden who, in the old legends, walks abroad through
forests or cities at nightfall, presuming that she is under the protection of her guardian
angel. Housemaids, pages, and plumbers are the guardian angels of our national treasures.
The visitor looks with all his eyes, and vexes the housekeeper by returning once more to
study that exquisite bit of Raphael. For he thinks it may be a cinder before he comes
again […] Much as Europe has been robbed of by war, it may be doubted whether the
annual steady consumption of private houses through simple chance or negligence does
not equal war itself in the long run. England is crowded with wealthy or cultivated men
who are heaping up treasures–to their destruction. It is crowded with offerings which may
be said to be already dedicated to Moloch. We are resigned to the full conviction that
none of those who are guardians of what are really public monuments, and who read
these lines, will pay the slightest heed to our warning. We know that we are vox
clamantis. The fatal hour always comes at last, between Nothing can be more improbable
and Who would have thought it?
222

Palgrave considered the wealthy’s poor risk-management strategies as an actual war on
cultural patrimony. Visitors and domestic service workers—the housemaids, pages, and
plumbers—could only struggle helplessly against this indifferent and entitled offensive. He could
have been talking about the Elizabethan Crewe Hall in Cheshire, which burned down in 1866,

222
Palgrave, “Lost Treasures,” Essays on Art (London and Cambridge: Macmillan and Co.,
1866). 212-213. Originally published in the Saturday Review, March 12, 1864, 317-318.

100
although many other examples might take its place [Fig. 21].
223
The house had been
underinsured for £40,000 ten years prior.
224
In January 1866, a fire began from overheated pipes
in a room above the picture gallery, and although the building had two small fire engines and
hydrants spaced around the house, the water source was disconnected, and the house was
subsequently gutted in the blaze.
225
Some of the house’s oil paintings were salvaged, with special
efforts extended to save family portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds that went on display later that
year at the British Institution.
226
However, the Chester Chronicle noted the kinds of likely
uninsured precious items within the house: “the domestics had all their spare clothing destroyed,
and in some instances even their little savings, which they had deposited in their trucks […] so
that to them at least the loss is one of no small account.”
227
Between 1866 and 1871, Lord Crewe
went over budget paying the contractors William Cubitt & Co. £123,341 to rebuild the building
according to architect Edward M. Barry’s specifications.
228
After this conflagration, one would
think the lord would avoid underinsurance again. But although the hall was covered by at least
three insurance policies between the Sun, the Phoenix, and the Royal Exchange Assurance, the
actual one-year insurance coverage for the house and contents was £99,000 insurance, with

223
Samuel Carter Hall, “Crewe Hall,” in The Baronial Halls, and Ancient Picturesque Edifices
of England, vol. 2 (London: Willis and Sotheran, 136, Strand, 1858), 26-31.
224
£3,207,444.00 in 2017’s numbers.
225
Anon., “Destruction of Crewe-hall by fire,” The Times, January 4, 1866, 6.
226
Anon., “The Old Masters at The British Institution,” The Times, June 11, 1866, 5.
227
Anon., “Great Fire at Crewe,” Chester Chronicle, January 6, 1866, 5.
228
Wilson and Mackley, “The Costs of the Country House,” 267-268. Edward M. Barry was no
stranger to the challenges of expensive post-fire rebuilds. He partially finished the work his
father Sir Charles Barry had begun in rebuilding London’s Houses of Parliament after they
burned down in 1834: a project that also ran dramatically over budget. Caroline Shenton, Mr.
Barry’s War: Rebuilding the Houses of Parliament After the Great Fire of 1834 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016).

101
£7,000 insured on pictures alone.
229
Thirteen years later, an even more dramatic fire occurred at
the Duke of Newcastle’s estate, Clumber House, in Nottinghamshire, that underscored the lax
approach landed owners took to caring for and insuring their collections. In 1879, a fire swept
through the building, although at the time it was unclear what artworks, if any, were lost. But
then a correspondent wrote a tip in 1880 to the Manchester Guardian about the art losses: “It
oozed out in some way that the sum paid by the insurance office was about £20,000; but it was
known that many of the most valuable works had not been insured for a fourth of their worth.”
230

The total loss was speculated to be around £100,000, and in a collection of five hundred
paintings, more than one-fifth were destroyed.
231
The author framed it in particularly outraged,
nationalist tones: “The pictures which have thus been lost to the nation were in the breakfast-
room, which was literally covered with samples of many of the most celebrated Continental and
English masters.”
232
The lost works included a Borgogne, a Van Dyck, Rembrandts, Titians,
Ruysdaels, a Breughel, a Dürer, a del Sarto, paintings by Lely, Teniers, Weenix, Antonio
Caracci, a “forest scene” by Gainsborough, a picture of Voltaire (“for which the more cultured
visitors always inquired”), large pictures by Snyders (“It was said that the fame of these pictures
reached the ears of Napoleon the Great, who is stated to have declared that when he invaded
England he would bring them with him to France”).
233
However, the author commented that

229
Crewe Hall Catalogue, 1871, PX 1510/51 (an insurance paid for a year until 1872), £99,000
insurance on total house and contents, with £7,000 insured on pictures alone. Phoenix Insurance
Archive, Cambridge University Library. After renovating, Lord Crewe opened his house for a
fête to which he invited 400 local guests. Anon., “FETE AT CREWE HALL,” Cheshire
Observer, June 10, 1871, 7.
230
Anon., “The Art Treasures Lost at Clumber House,” Derby Mercury, February 4, 1880, 7. I
am grateful to Anna Stone for this reference.
231
Anon., “Clumber House,” 7.
232
Anon., “Clumber House,” 7.
233
Anon., “Clumber House,” 7.

102
twenty-four of the house’s works were saved precisely because at the time of the fire they were
on loan to the Nottingham Corporation: that is, saved by virtue of being sheltered temporarily
with a public exhibiting body.
234

Palgrave was articulating a Liberal, and perhaps even a Radical preservationist critique of
the country house. As Peter Mandler has shown, such critiques appeared especially in the 1870s
in concert with a litany of social stresses brought on by agricultural depression, the 1873
financial crisis, and legislative changes to landed inheritance laws.
235
Arts specialists, the press,
politicians, and the public reassessed the private nature and significance of country houses,
perhaps evident in the Manchester Guardian informant’s outraged tone regarding the Clumber
losses. Before this, from the 1840s to the 1860s, country-house tourism had accelerated due in
part to new tourist guidebooks, rising wages and expanded leisure hours, and increasingly
affordable railway tickets. Additionally, following radical agitation around the First Reform Bill
of 1832 and Chartist revolts, landed property owners decided to preempt public anger at
aristocratic privilege by opening their homes to visitors.
236
From the 1840s to the 1860s, some
landlords allowed select publics access to their private houses and the expensive collections
contained therein, although at the same time, as Mandler also underscores, the owners might be
quite indifferent to the cultural significance of their heirlooms, earning Matthew Arnold’s

234
These included works by “Murillo, Rubens, Teniers, Snyders, Canaletti, Rembrandt, Poussin,
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Vernet, Holbein, Van Dyck, Hogarth, Castiglioni, Lawrence, Lely,
Wouvermans, Claude Lorraine, &c.” They also included a painting by Gainsborough called The
Beggar Boys. Anon., “The Art Treasures Lost at Clumber House,” 7.
235
Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1997), 109-152, 153-192.
236
Accidental fire was one thing. Social unrest, such as 1831 Reform riots and later Chartist
agitation, was quite another. During this period, a mob burned down the Duke of Newcastle’s
mansion in Nottingham.

103
censure as rentier “barbarians” obsessed with land yields and blood sport rather than with high
art.
237

Insurers, meanwhile, were facing straightened times. Between the 1840s and 1870, an
industrialization boom overseas opened new markets, and then between 1873 and the 1890s the
British agricultural depression also impacted insurance businesses. Insurers navigated toward
insuring new fields like technology and construction. Changes to tax laws meant that strict
settlement (tax-exemptions) formerly applying to inherited property no longer held.
238
Although
some landlords prized their houses’ fittings and furnishings, under straightened economic
circumstances, collectors realized that their paintings and other objects were the most valuable
movable chattel which they might sell to avoid parceling up estates. In this context, the insurance
inventory joined older methods for cataloguing art collections. To do this valuation and
assessment work, landed owners brought in builders, auctioneers, tradesmen, valuers, agents,
clerks, and surveyors, which insurance companies kept on retainer. While scholars in sociology,
property studies, and urban studies have dealt with auctioneers and chartered surveyors—the
latter a service industry formalized in 1868 with the founding of the Institution of Surveyors,
now called the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors—I have found no corresponding studies

237
Matthew Arnold, Culture and anarchy; an essay in political and social criticism (London,
Smith, Elder, 1869), 100. Mandler especially discusses houses built in a Tudor/Stuart
amalgamation meant to evoke a mythical “Olden Time,” whose aesthetic effects—great
medieval halls, half-timbering—were publicly prized as more inherently “English,” and
embraced over houses in the Palladian style. The latter were perceived as colder, cosmopolitan,
and aristocratic.
238
Barbara English, Strict Settlement: A Guide for Historians (Hull: University of Hull Press,
1983), 111.

104
about the role this field played for the various branches of the nineteenth and early twentieth-
century art world.
239

Insurers also cooperated to “co-insure” landed properties: a practice in which multiple
companies would cover portions of a large risk so that no one company became liable for the
entirety, should there be a claim. Coinsurance became an important tactic in industrial
insurances. As Clive Trebilcock notes, co-insurances were now introduced in unusual contexts,
like splitting the risks on Liverpool Street Train Station (such that one company might only
insure the roof, while another might insure the iron structure).
240
In 1881, the trustees overseeing
the Duke of Bridgewater’s collection wished to insure the pictures for £179,000. This collection
was lodged at Bridgewater House in Westminster and consisted of over 300 pictures, including
many originally purchased from the Orléans Collection sales.
241
The Phoenix already covered the
house for £10,000, and agreed to take £39,000 insurance on the pictures, leaving other insurance

239
The Phoenix archive at Cambridge contains a large collection of bound volumes for valued
estates dating from after the First World War, and which therefore fall outside of my study’s
purview. However, it is worthwhile to note the names of the auctioneers and chartered surveyors
who performed insurance inventories on art collections. Examples include the following:
Chesterton & Sons (“Auctioneers, Valuers, Chartered Surveyors, & Estate Agents 116
Kensington High Street W, 15 Sloane Street SW, 52 & 53 Cheapside E.C.”); Maple & Co. Ltd.
Valuers London; Bousfield and Kevan (“Auctioneers & Estate Agents, Harpenden”); Messrs
Wetherall & Sons (“Chartered Surveyors, Hartley Wintney, Hampshire”); George T. Nicholl
(“Auctioneer, Surveyor, Valuer &C, Harrow on the Hill”); John Barker & Co. Ltd. (“Auctioneers
& Valuers, Kensington High Street. W.”); Reynolds & Co. Auctioneers (“Valuers & Estate
Agents, 27 & 29 High Street, Bognor”); W. F. Blackhurst (“Expert in Antique Silver and Dealer
in Antiques, Articles of Vertu. Commission Agent. Valuations Made., Birmingham”); Toplis &
Roberts, (“Auctioneers and Valuers, 143 Cannon St. E.C.”). For further material on surveying,
see Desmond Fitz-Gibbon, Marketable Values: Inventing the Property Market in Modern Britain
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2018), 40-86.
240
Clive Trebilcock, Phoenix Assurance and the Development of British Insurance, vol. 2: The
Era of the Insurance Giants, 1870–1984 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 15.
241
Peter Humfrey, “The Stafford Gallery at Cleveland House and the 2nd Marquess of Stafford
as a Collector,” Journal of the History of Collections 28, iss. 1 (March 2016): 43-55; See also
Peter Humfrey, The Stafford Gallery: The Greatest Art Collection of Regency London (London:
Unicorn Publishing Group, 2019).

105
companies to cover the rest. Similarly, Crewe was co-insured by three large fire offices, as was
Kinfauns Castle in Scotland. Insurance companies made decisions on whether to insure based
upon their own investments and available capital.

Conclusion

Before the nineteenth century, fine and applied artworks came to be insured by the
insurance industries, even as these industries were themselves coming into being and formalizing
their business cultures, their terms of engagement, and particularly their ways of categorizing
risks. Mercantile writers, occasionally aware of aesthetic debates, adopted positions toward fine
and applied artworks as commodities with potential economic and national value, although they
did not always explicitly conceive of artworks as exceptional insurance risks. Meanwhile,
artworks transited via maritime trade routes through European shipping centers. They were
rolled into barrels, were captured by privateers, were sunk in storms, were ransomed, were stored
in warehouses, were auctioned, were collected, and were incinerated in house fires. Art agents
familiarized themselves with insurance methods and techniques in efforts to protect these
commodities from risks, even as an artwork’s value might fluctuate thanks to outside influences
like market forces or legislative changes. As artworks steadily became exceptional, so too did
they start to be seen as exceptional risks. The insurance of art objects also constituted an
invisible backdrop to public debates about the value of national heritage and property rights. But
before the 1880s, no insurers specialized exclusively in art risks, as this property market occupied
a much smaller footprint than industrial markets. Furthermore, insurance for artworks was
largely the concern of private collectors, agents, dealers, and gallerists. But from the mid-
nineteenth century, large-scale industrial exhibitions brought art risks into the purview of

106
governments and private insurance providers alike, creating new problems to solve. This is the
subject of my next chapter.
107
Chapter 2. Circulating risks – insuring exhibitions

1. Introduction

On August 14, 1910, a fire erupted at the Brussels International Exposition, four months
into the exposition’s run [Fig. 22]. It was speculated that the flames began at the exposition’s
post, telegraph and telephone offices, and the blaze swiftly destroyed part of the Belgian section,
the British Applied Arts section, part of the French section, and a row of houses on a street
outside of the exhibition: thirty-seven acres in total, including the exposition’s menagerie [Figs.
23, 24].
1
The press noted that the firefight was prolonged because the firemen “could not find the
hydrants or the hoses were too short, there was no ladder on the spot, and the fire was spreading
while the firemen squabbled as to who should take command, and finally it is complained that
there were no explosives to be got for making gaps with a view to isolating the fire” [Fig. 25].
2

The international press covered the fire and its losses. The Illustrated London News
(hereafter ILN) produced photographic spreads documenting the material destruction: sublime
scenes filled with twisting metal and debris, massive pavilions reduced to ribbed shells, smashed
and jumbled café tables, and onlooking crowds [Fig. 26]. In one spread, the ILN published
photographs of lost objects from the British Pavilion and listed their values. These included
basalt Wedgwood vases, a wood-paneled room supplied by the decorators White & Allom that
featured carvings by Grinling Gibbons (1648–1721), and one of two copies of a twenty-by-nine-
foot-long Morris & Company tapestry, The Passing of Venus (1901–1907), designed by Edward
Burne-Jones (1833–1898) and valued at 1,500 guineas [Fig. 27].
3
The Victoria & Albert

1
Anon., “Bearing No Impression of the Thing It Was,” Illustrated London News, August 20,
1910, 281.
2
Anon., “Complaints Against the Fire Brigade Service,” The Times, August 17, 1910.
3
This tapestry was destroyed “despite a gallant effort on the part of one of the attendants to
rescue it, the attempt nearly costing him his life.” Report of His Majesty’s Commissioners for the
108
Museum also lost six cases of electrotypes and other borrowed works [Fig. 28]. Snobbishly, a
Burlington Magazine columnist speculated that these pavilions burned because of their
“avowedly commercial” nature, as the pavilions’ displays resembled “bazaars,” a term frequently
applied to expositions since 1851.
4
The journalist seemed to imply that applied art’s pursuit of
Mammon had invited the fire: a divine, retributory strike. The insurance press contested the
figures, but the overall losses were listed at around £1,750,000, or what would be about
£136,801,350 in 2017, with Lloyd’s of London underwriters estimating their own losses in the
area of £250,000, or around £19,543,050 in 2017.
5

The blaze’s impact reverberated through the international exhibiting world, as well as the
insurance world. Wishes of goodwill poured in from government representatives like the Belgian
king, and from exhibition organizers like Imre Kiralfy (1845–1919), Commissioner-General of
the 1910 Japan-British Exhibition, which was taking place simultaneously in Shepherd’s Bush,
London.
6
The British Committee—consisting of administrators from the Board of Trade,

International Exhibitions at Brussels, Rome & Turin, 1910 & 1911 (London: H. M. S. O., 1913),
53. The second tapestry is held by the Detroit Institute of Arts.
4
“Special precautions had […] been taken at Brussels to house the loan collections of works of
art, as such, in a separate building, where the risk of damage was practically non-existent.
Deeply as we must all regret the loss of treasures in the British and Belgian sections at Brussels,
it must be recognized that these sections of the Exhibition were avowedly commercial in their
intention, and partook of the nature of a great bazaar with all the concomitant risks of their
environment.” “International Exhibitions and Loans of Works of Art,” The Burlington Magazine
for Connoisseurs 18, no. 92 (November 1910): 69-70. In September 1850, W. E. Aytoun at
Blackwoods criticized the Great Exhibition as “a European bazaar.” Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The
Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999),
62.
5
Post Magazine and Insurance Monitor, January 7, 1911, 16.
6
Kiralfy wrote, “Deeply sympathize with you in your irreparable loss. It is an international
calamity. Sincerely hope extent of disaster not so serious as reported.” Simultaneously, The
Times issued reports on other exhibitions where more adequate precautions had been taken, like
Kiralfy’s Japan-British exhibition, where buildings were built solely of steel and concrete, and
were painted inside and out with fire-proof paint, and where woodwork less than one-inch-thick
was prohibited. The Times also emphasized that in Kiralfy’s display, “all buildings had clear fire
109
organizer Victor Bulwer-Lytton, second Earl of Lytton (1876–1947), and King George V (1865–
1936), pledged to rebuild and repopulate a new pavilion with fresh displays.
7
By August 23, 110
British firms had applied to exhibit in the rebuilt space. British transport companies agreed to
convey the replacement exhibits to Ostend, free of charge, while an engineering company,
Mather and Platt, supplied and installed 1,195 “Grinnell” automatic sprinklers into the new
British display.
8
The Victoria & Albert Museum offered to loan two further cases of electrotypes
similar to those destroyed, and supplied more cases to hold further exhibits. The King
triumphantly opened the new British pavilion a month later [Fig. 29, 30]. Magnanimously, the
British government decided that they would not claim compensation from the Belgian
government for British government property lost.
9
This was all well and good for an imperial
state with deep coffers that could afford to replace lost items. Other contributors were less
fortunate. When independent uninsured exhibitors whose displays had escaped the fire sought to
retroactively insure their exhibits with Lloyd’s of London for the exhibition’s remaining two
months, they found that premiums had doubled.
10

hydrants and facilities with fire hydrants and alarms.” “Fire Precautions at the Japan-British
Exhibition,” The Times, August 16, 1910.
7
“The King and Brussels Exhibition.” The Times, August 23, 1910, 6.
8
“John Cockerill Line placed their daily express service from Tilbury to Ostend at disposal of
British exhibitors for conveyance free of charge by grande vitesse service of all goods sent to
replace those destroyed in the fire, while the Port of London Authority agreed to charge half
rates between London and Tilbury Docks. The General Steam Navigation Company, Ltd., also
undertook to convey to Ostend freight-free any exhibits sent to replace those destroyed by fire.
The Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway offered free carriage from Goole to Antwerp for renewed
exhibits sent out by firms who shipped their original exhibits by that line, while Messrs. Thomas
Wilson, Sons and Company made a similar offer in regard to renewed exhibits shipped from
Hull. The Railway Companies agreed to carry renewed exhibits at half rates.” Report […] at
Brussels, Rome & Turin, 1910 & 1911, 58. Further provisions were supplied by customs staff
from Messrs Henry Johnson, Sons and Company who prepared export documents.
9
(From a Correspondent). “The Brussels Exhibition Fire.” The Times, September 13, 1910, 5.
10
“Some of the uninsured exhibitors at the Brussels Exhibition, who had been fortunate enough
to escape loss by fire, were making inquiries at Lloyd’s yesterday for the rates of premiums to
110
This event dramatized some of the risks that threatened art objects traveling the
nineteenth-century’s busy international exhibition circuit. Vast organizational and financial
juggernauts were erected to administer and build these ephemeral spectacles, which numbered
over 200 worldwide between 1851 and 1914.
11
The universal exhibitions and expositions
generated government acts, royal commissions, committees and sub-committees, trustees, juries,
subscription campaigns, and laboring armies tasked with logistics and construction.
12
But what
corresponding financial arrangements were made to pool and mitigate the risks that came with
these exhibitions, which millions of visitors attended?
In this chapter I look at how art insurance created challenges for the organizers of, and
lenders to, small and large-scale fine and applied art exhibitions in Europe and the Americas

from the mid-nineteenth century until the First World War. Where my previous chapter dealt
with stewardship and risk protections for privately insured art objects, this chapter shows how
the rise of exhibitions created a need for “art insurance” as a systematic financial service concept
and a knowledge practice based upon principles borrowed from fire, marine, and accident
insurance. The archives of insurance companies, of international expositions, and of lending
institutions provide rich veins for researching this kind of art insurance. Many grand expositions,

cover fire risks for the remainder of the season. The rates quoted were in every case very much
higher than those demanded before the fire, and generally it was a case of double premiums.”
“Rush to Insure,” Evening Telegraph, August 17, 1910, 4.
11
For a continuously updated bibliography on international fairs, see Alexander Geppert, Jean
Coffey, and Tammy Lau, “International Exhibitions, Expositions Universelles and World’s Fairs,
1851-2005: A Bibliography.” URL: http://www.lib.csufresno.edu/subject-
resources/specialcollections/worldfairs/ExpoBibliography3ed.pdf.
12
Patricia Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855
and 1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987/89); Robert Rydell, All the World’s A Fair:
Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987); Paul Greenhalgh, Fair World: A History of World’s Fair and Exhibitions,
from London to Shanghai, 1851–2010 (Winterbourne: Papadakis, 2011).
111
and even smaller provincial ones, included fine and applied art pavilions stocked with works that
were produced or loaned for the occasion, and sometimes traveled vast distances in order to be
displayed.
These art displays almost always suffered logistical dilemmas and delays. Insurance—its
presence or lack thereof—was a flashpoint for organizers, patrons, artists, and other lenders.
Internal organizational debates generated reams of committee minutes and correspondence,
while government reports always tabulated provisions made for art works’ safety and assessed
failures to do so. From the mid-nineteenth century into first decade of the twentieth, these
debates became more urgent as governments and organizers formalized requirements for
exhibitions, devised bureaucratic regulations, documents, and forms, and early private art
insurance schemes developed to meet the perceived need.
The chapter begins by looking at how insurance functioned for nineteenth-century
exhibitions before, and then following the Great Exhibition of 1851. British museum and
exhibition organizers attempted to make provisions against risks for fine and applied works of
art, and I show how gaps in official exhibition planning often opened doors for opportunistic
investors to establish new associations. I then introduce two British regulatory and administrative
bodies—one private and the other public—responsible for overseeing insurance for art objects in
Britain and abroad: the Fire Offices Committee, and the Department of Science and Art, figured
through South Kensington Museum (their names later changed to the Victoria & Albert Museum
and the Board of Education). I show how these two large institutions were mediators and
gatekeepers to smaller insurance and art institutions, and as such, controlled whether and how
insurance was taken out for fine and applied art works. I compare how risk assessment for art
operated differently between the insurance world and the art world: Where did their practices
112
converge? Where were they working at cross purposes? As field-defining institutions, they both
deployed agents to perform insurantial (if not always actuarial) tasks that involved developing
both textual and visual means to assess risks to artworks. Leveraging risk-assessments and
forensic reports, they could enable or hinder the circulation and exhibition of artworks
domestically and within the broader British empire. I argue that these cases reveal how even
before the twentieth century, insurance already constituted one of the art world’s most important,
yet most invisible institutional gatekeepers.

2. Insuring exhibitions before and after 1851

(I) Insurance before the Great Exhibition of 1851

In eighteenth century Britain, insurance companies considered cultural institutions and
entertainments hazardous risks. Theaters and playhouses were special fire hazards due to lighting
and crowds. Although fire insurance companies like the Royal Exchange Assurance and the Sun
Fire Office insured sites like the Lincoln’s Inn Play House, the Royal Opera House, or Covent
Garden Play House, as insurance scholars Barry Supple and P. G. M. Dickson have shown,
insurances on theaters, scenic exhibitions, and entertainments incurred quite high rates.
13
Before
the National Gallery opened, British art institutions were also already insuring artworks
temporarily suspended between exhibitions and sales. In 1789, John and Josiah Boydell
collaborated with the bookseller George Nicol to open the Shakespeare Gallery, for which they

13
Barry Supple, The Royal Exchange Assurance: A History of British Insurance 1720–1970
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 87; P. G. M. Dickson, The Sun Insurance
Office, 1710–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 76. J. M.W. Turner famously
painted the aftermath of a theater conflagration, and it was speculated that this fire was started
fraudulently in order to collect the insurance. See Leo Costello, “Power, Creativity, and
Destruction in Turner’s Fires,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 25
(2017) doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.791.
113
commissioned historical pictures on Shakespearian themes from many of their era’s major
painters. Although the project failed, the organizers still insured the exhibition [Fig. 31].
14
In
1823, following the death of Lloyd’s of London financier and founding underwriter, John Julius
Angerstein (1736–1823), Angerstein’s executors insured his collection of Old Master
paintings—which in 1824 became the nucleus for the new National Gallery–for a massive sum
of £33,000, which was split between five fire offices [Fig. 32, 33].
15

Insurance archives provide evidence for early temporary exhibition insurances. The
earliest itemized picture insurance catalogues at the Phoenix Insurance Archives at Cambridge
University Library are for exhibitions staged in the late 1830s and early 1840s at Mechanics’
Institutes and at early art and design academies: institutions that were spreading across Britain in
this period.
16
A hand-written 1839 catalogue for the Manchester Salford Institute itemizes
insurances for eighty-two paintings and thirteen engravings, with the exhibition cumulatively
insured for £1,180 [Fig. 34].
17
These catalogues already register the ways in which the British
insurance industry was beginning to apprehend exhibitions. One catalogue for the first

14
They took out an insurance policy on “Prints, Drawings and Pictures,” at £3,000 per year,
paying a further duty of £2.5. MS 11936/368/567494, Records of Sun Fire Office, London
Metropolitan Archives. See also Rosie Dias, Exhibiting Englishness: John Boydell’s
Shakespeare Gallery and the Formation of a National Aesthetic (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2013).
15
The equivalent in 2017 would be £1,895,203. H. A. L. Cockerell, Lloyd’s of London: A
Portrait (London: Woodhead-Faulkner, 1984), 20.
16
For a discussion of itemized art insurance catalogues, see my chapter one. Toshio Kusamitsu
has described the Mechanics’ Institutes as providing the base for British precursors to the large-
scale industrial exhibitions after 1851, although they were preceded by French national
exhibitions. By the 1840s, 200 towns had Mechanic’s Institutes and many of them held
temporary exhibitions whose goals were to educate working-class visitors. Toshio Kusamitsu,
“Great Exhibitions before 1851,” History Workshop, no. 9 (Spring 1980): 70-89. See also,
Trevor Fawcett, The Rise of English Provincial Art: Artists, Patrons, and Institutions Outside
London 1800–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).
17
In 2017 numbers this would be £71,292.
114
“Exhibition of the West of Scotland Academy of The Fine Arts” (1841) is annotated by an
insurance office agent—a “Mr. Stevens, Insurance Broker,” whose name is inscribed on the
catalogue’s right-hand corner [Fig. 35].
18
The catalogue cost sixpence, and it lists at least 114
artists with 302 pictures and eight sculptures. Included were many little-known Scottish artists,
along with prominent artists like the painter John Fleming (1792–1845) and pictures by members
of the Norwich School of Painting like John Berney Crome (1794–1842, known as “Young
Crome” to distinguish him from his well-known painter father, John Crome). The exhibition was
insured for £6,108 6s 6d.
19
Works were insured for two or three pounds extra if they were
insured with their frames [Fig. 36]. It is striking to imagine how Mr. Stevens used this exhibition
catalogue in a way quite distinct from a member of the exhibition-going public, like the attentive
crowd depicted in George O’Neill’s picture, Public Opinion (c. 1863) [Fig. 37]. Was Mr.
Stevens simply handed a complementary itemized catalogue, without visiting the exhibition? Or
did he tour the gallery, perhaps led by an Academy representative? Or did Mr. Stevens visit the
exhibition alone, marking insurance prices and carrying over the tally to each page as he went?
Unlike art critics, who, as Kate Flint has shown, taught audiences how to see artworks in

18
[Valued Catalogue for West of Scotland Academy], 1841, PX 1501/2, Phoenix Insurance
Archive, Cambridge University Library. The West of Scotland Academy of the Fine Arts was an
exhibiting society established in March 1841 by Scottish artists wishing to form a fine art
academy like those in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh. Its president was portrait painter and art
collector, John Graham-Gilbert (1794–1866). In its constitution it stated it would consist of
“Artists and Honorary Members who paid membership fees,” and it would hold annual art
exhibitions, which it did until the early 1850s when it failed due to lack of funds. This institution
is not to be confused with the Glasgow School of Art, which was founded in 1845 as the
Glasgow Government School of Design. “The West of Scotland Academy and the Corporation
Halls Committee,” Glasgow Herald, February 16, 1857. See also, “West of Scotland Academy
of the Fine Arts, Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851–
1951,” University of Glasgow History of Art and HATII, online database 2011,
[http://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/organization.php?id=msib6_1232379181, accessed September
12, 2021]
19
In 2017, the relative price worth of £6,108 6s 6d. from 1841 is £369,046.67.
115
exhibitions—the insurance underwriter’s annotations were solely pecuniary, contingent on
vision, but a vision that tried to perceive invisible, prospective things: namely the ways in which
art exhibitions could be factored as risks.
20

What is important to know about exhibition insurance prior to the 1850s is its modest
scale. Aside from Angerstein’s insurances, I have found no evidence for multiple insurance
companies sharing risks, and it appears that companies went about underwriting these insurances
as they might insure a collection belonging to a single proprietor.

(II) Insurance after the Great Exhibition of 1851

Modeled on French national exhibitions, The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry
of All Nations, held at Hyde Park in London in 1851, is often the foundational locus for
discussions about international exhibitions. Sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918) has
described these spectacles as spatially unique, sociological concatenations of commodity culture
and nationalist sentiment.
21
One of the Great Exhibition organizers’ primary goals was to
improve British engineering and industrial manufactures—as products and educational tools—by
assembling and assessing them under one roof. In the exhibition’s planning phases observers
admired and disdained it as both a paean to commercial capitalism as well as a financially risky
investment.
22
It was also materially risky. The exhibition hall designed by Joseph Paxton was the

20
Kate Flint, “The rôle of the art critic,” in The Victorians and the Visual Imagination
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 167-196. See also, Kate Flint, “How Do We
See?” Victorian Network 9 (Summer 2020), 1-12.
21
Georg Simmel, “The Berlin Trade Exhibition,” Theory, Culture & Society 8, no. 3 (August
1991): 119-23; Michael Leapman, The World for a Shilling: How the Great Exhibition of 1851
Shaped a Nation (London: Headline Book Publishing, 2001); John R. Davis, The Great
Exhibition (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999), and Louise Purbrick, ed., The Great Exhibition of
1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).
22
Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851, 35.
116
largest structure in the world, and it held more than 19,000 exhibits. The official regulations set
out by the Royal Commission and the Executive Committee underscored in capital letters that
“Exhibitors must be at the CHARGE OF INSURING THEIR OWN GOODS, should they desire
this security. Every precaution will be taken to prevent fire, and to extinguish it, should it
unfortunately occur, but the Commissioners cannot be responsible for losses which may be
occasioned by this, or any other accident whatever.”
23
The exhibition commission went on to
describe the anti-conflagration provisions made, including details of Royal Sappers (military
engineers from the British army) and firemen who patrolled the building, extinguishing lights at
night, the cisterns, waterpipes, hydrants, and “fire annihilators” (a patented firefighting tool) on
hand.
24
These material provisions were laid out in the ground map of the exhibition, one of the

23
“APPENDIX No. II. DECISIONS of HER MAJESTY'S COMMISSIONERS, and
REGULATIONS of the EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE: 12. Exhibitors must be at the CHARGE
OF INSURING THEIR OWN GOODS, should they desire this security. Every precaution will
be taken to prevent fire, and to extinguish it, should it unfortunately occur, but the
Commissioners cannot be responsible for losses which may be occasioned by this, or any other
accident whatever. 13. The Commissioners are prepared to take the greatest care in their power
of all objects sent ; but they are not prepared to incur a degree of responsibility unusual with
regard to public Exhibitions. For this reason, it has been already stated that Exhibitors must be at
the charge of insuring their own goods, and that the Commissioners cannot be responsible for
losses which may be occasioned by fire, or any other accident. They will spare no pains in
making such POLICE and other arrangements as may appear adequate for the protection of the
Exhibition, and the security of the articles exhibited. They will, of course, give all the aid in their
power for the legal prosecution of all persons guilty of robbery or willful injury of any of the
articles in the Exhibition, should such unfortunately occur in spite of the precautions which will
be taken. [The words ‘or damage of any kind’ ought to have been inserted after losses, but still
the successful operation of this rule in leaving the responsibility for security to rest with the
exhibitors them selves, was shown by the small amount of losses which actually took place.]”
Great Britain, Spencer H. Walpole, and Charles Stedman, First report of the Commissioners for
the Exhibition of 1851, to the Right Hon. Spencer Horatio Walpole, &c. &c. one of Her
Majesty's Principal Secretaries of State: presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of
Her Majesty (London: Printed by W. Clowes & Sons for H. M. S. O., 1852), xlvii.
24
Walpole et al., First report of the Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851, 131. For the
American context see Amy S. Greenberg, “Insuring Protection: Fire Insurance and the Era of the
Steam Engine,” in Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century
City (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998), 125-151.
117
many plans available even prior to its opening [Fig. 38]. Such pragmatic views—geared toward
futurity—are distinct from popular commercial representations of the Crystal Palace, which
focus upon the space as luminous architectural innovation, containing colorful displays and
crowds.
The London fire insurance companies co-insured the exhibition, as too much capital
would have been required to cover the entire structure should there have been a loss.
25
The
Phoenix Assurance Company covered one fifth of the Crystal Palace, a liability of £30,000,
likely for the buildings only. As Trebilcock notes, the Phoenix, “in a typical stroke of paternal
generosity, allowed their clerks two days’ holiday to visit the display and 10s. pocket-money ‘to
defray the costs of viewing’– but they betrayed absolutely no interest in what it symbolized. The
[Phoenix] Minute Books contain not even the briefest mention of the technological marvels on
show inside and not the least inkling that Phoenix might one day need to extend cover to such
contraptions.”
26
The Sun Insurance Office took £10,000 on the buildings, with a total limit cover
of £60,000, and they also offered and one and a half day’s holiday for clerks and 10s. to visit the
exhibition.
27
While the building itself was insured, individual exhibitors were left to insure their
own goods. However, as Priti Joshi shows, the government made special arrangements to insure
the Indian exhibits, brokered by the East India Company, “[authorizing] the remission of export
duty on all articles that might be sent by private individuals’ as well as assumed insurance

25
Cornelius Walford states that the Great Exhibition’s building and contents were insured “for
very considerable sums at tariff rate of 21s. per £100.” This expense is also likely why many
exhibitors eschewed insurance. Cornelius Walford, The Insurance Cyclopaedia, vol. 3 (London:
Charles and Edwin Layton, 1871–1880), 577.
26
Trebilcock, Phoenix Assurance, 1: 431.
27
“Exhibitions” Scrapbook, 1851–1893, CLC/B/192/DD/029/MS38841/003, 1-7, Records of
Sun Fire Office, London Metropolitan Archives.
118
costs.”
28
The Exhibition Commissioners commented that “the [anti-conflagration]arrangements
adopted by the Commissioners ultimately proved so satisfactory that many who had at first
intended to take [private insurance] abandoned it as unnecessary.”
29
But some exhibitors were
worried about their stock, and evidence shows that the Sun Fire Office provided individual
insurance policies on furniture, furs, gold and hair ornaments, silk goods, and cigars.
30

Considering the Great Exhibition’s scale and scope, it seems a small number of exhibitors
individually sought insurance.
While the Great Exhibition outlined the individualistic tendency in British exhibitions, it
lacked cohesive art insurance, for, aside from sculpture, the Great Exhibition explicitly omitted a
fine art component in its displays “except when sent as illustrative of new processes, or new
materials.”
31
As Patricia Mainardi has shown, there was never an exhibition of paintings at the
Great Exhibition, although twenty-eight French artists, the Comité de l’association des artistes,
led by the philanthropist and travel writer Baron Taylor (1789–1879) petitioned the French
government to support one, a request which was refused due to “the cost of shipping the work to
London, the only expense France would incur.”
32
Insurance goes unmentioned in Mainardi’s

28
Priti Joshi, “Miles Apart: the India Display at the Great Exhibition,” Museum History Journal
(2016): 152.
29
Joshi, “Miles Apart,” 12.
30
In the Sun Fire Office’s “Exhibition Scrapbook,” Sun Fire Office official and the scrapbook’s
compiler, Francis Boyer Relton, comments that the Sun offered £700 cover for George Trollope
and Sons (furniture); £400 cover for Smith & Sons (fur); £600 for A. Forrer (gold and hair
ornaments), and further coverage on silk goods, and cigars.
31
Walpole et al., First report of the Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851, xliii.
32
Patricia Mainardi, “The Unbuilt Picture Gallery at the 1851 Great Exhibition, Journal of the
Society of Architectural Historians 45, no. 3 (Sept 1986): 294-299; Mainardi, Art and Politics,
29.
119
account, although it would have been bundled in with the costs of shipping.
33
But by deciding
not to hold a more comprehensive fine art display, the organizers and commissioners at the Great
Exhibition of 1851 emphasized manufactured and designed goods, and avoided difficult
discussions about art insurance that would become endemic at later art exhibitions.
Exhibition finance was almost always complex and nationally determined. As Paul
Greenhalgh has shown, exhibitions were driven by diverging purposes, including Free Trade
ideals, philanthropy, and imperial capitalism. For these reasons, he argues that “ideologically and
technologically, the exhibitions could not have happened in any other age, the politico-economic
situation being crucial to their growth and the form they took.”
34
Yet different funding structures
existed from one national exhibition to the next. In Britain, Royal Commissions formed to
organize exhibitions, and private or public funds were found to support administrative labor and
build infrastructure, but exhibitors were left to set up their own displays. In the French context,
the universal expositions in Paris were paid for out of government funds and directed by city
councils, with large banks guaranteeing the remaining capital.
35
Public lotteries were also drawn
up to support expositions, and contributions were taken from the French colonies. In the United
States, funding for exhibitions was piecemeal, strung between state and federal authorities, and

33
Whitney Walton also makes no mention of insurance arrangements in her account of the
French delegation’s exhibit. Whitney Walton, France at the Crystal Palace: Bourgeois Taste
and Artisan Manufacture in the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, 1992).
34
Paul Greenhalgh, “Funding, politics and society,” in The Expositions Universelles, Great
Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988),
27-51.
35
Felix Lacointa, Les expositions internationales, universelles ou speciales, au point de vue du
droit (International, Universal or Special Exhibitions, From a Legal Point of View) (Paris: A.
Rousseau, 1896). Lacointa was a journalist and poet based in Toulouse who later became a
Catholic fascist. This dissertation provides a legal view on the French approach to exhibition
organizing. Lacointa later founded several reactionary right-wing journals: Le Bloc catholique
(1902) and Le Bloc anti-révolutionnaire (1927 to 1941).
120
exhibitions were also supported by citizens and large corporations.
36
These differences in fiscal
approaches necessarily also affected insurance arrangements.
Insurance at exhibitions after 1851 varied depending upon whether a display was
produced by an industrial manufacturer, or was a collection of fine art. At later exhibitions with
fine art displays, host country organizing committees defined insurance terms in the printed
General Regulations provided to participants. For British industrial displays at exhibitions,
individual exhibitors often had to insure their own displays themselves, a cost bundled with
shipping, freight, and packing, depending upon the objects’ location and destination.
37
But the
organization for the insurance of fine and applied art exhibits sometimes called for more drastic
government interventions. In the 1856 report to the Board of Trade on the British portion of the
Universal Exhibition of 1855 (which boasted a substantial beaux-arts section), South Kensington
Museum Director Henry Cole (1808–1882) noted that while the British Parliament voted for the
Treasury to supply £50,000 to support the exhibition, “on the understanding that a rigid economy
should be exercised,” costs for the transport of goods and for the exhibition of the fine art
exhibits were exceeded, “chiefly from the great value of the works of Art sent, which was fixed
by the proprietors who lent them, the insurances being made according to their own

36
Greenhalgh, The Expositions Universelles, 27-51.
37
British exhibitors tended towards individualism, as administrators admitted: “As a rule, a
British manufacturer will only exhibit if he can select his own goods and display them in his own
way and in his own show case. He is impatient of advice; he will not submit to dictation; he will
not share: a show case with others; nor will he join with others to adopt a uniform plan of
arrangement. In many instances he regards his exhibit as of much more importance as an
advertisement and a competition with rivals at home than as a comparison of his productions
with those of other countries. For these reasons it is exceedingly difficult to organize collective
exhibits.” Great Britain, and Alfred Edmund Bateman, Report of the Committee appointed by the
Board of Trade to make enquiries with reference to the participation of Great Britain in Great
International Exhibitions, together with the Appendices thereto (London: Wyman and Sons,
1907), 12.
121
valuations.”
38
At the Vienna International Exhibition of 1873, the British government paid the
insurance risks, “for a sum of £100,000, such insurance covering all risks from the time each
work was removed from the residence of its proprietor till the time of its return thereto.”
39
At the
Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878, the British committee desired to produce a representative
display of British art, and they strategically convinced the Commission President, Albert
Edward, Prince of Wales (1841–1910) to work on their behalf to persuade art collectors to lend
works for the exhibition.
40
To sweeten the deal, the Commission provided insurance coverage for
all risks from the time each picture left the owner’s house until it was safely returned at the
Exhibition’s completion: what would now be called “wall-to-wall” or “nail-to-nail” insurance.
41

As large-scale international exhibitions grew more frequent, the British government kept
a tab of its expenditures on incidental expenses at each exhibition and found that insurance for
goods in transit often constituted one of the more onerous costs. Henry Cole compared expenses

38
Reports on the Paris Universal Exhibition (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode for H. M. S. O.,
1856), 411-412. Cole thought that two-thirds this amount would suffice to cover the costs. But
the high price for picture insurances dashed that idea. “The total value of the works sent
amounted to £137,560, and the amount paid for insurance, at rates varying from 50s. to 60s. per
cent, reached the sum of £2,715.” Henry Cole, Diary, Wednesday, November 15, 1854, 411-412.
In 2017’s numbers this would mean a value £11,030,399.92, with the amount paid for premiums
being £217,705.26. Insurance on the art exhibits was paid to William Wilson Saunders FRS
(1809–1879). Saunders was a British insurance broker with Lloyd’s of London for thirty-two
years, as well as an entomologist and botanist. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online,
“Saunders, William Wilson (1809–1879), entomologist and botanist,” by Yolanda Foote,
accessed February 15, 2022.
39
In 2017, this would be about £6,260,900.00. Vienna International Exhibition, Reports of the
Vienna Universal Exhibition of 1873, 4 vols. (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, for H. M. S. O.,
1874).
40
They succeeded in convincing collectors to lend 338 pictures along with nineteen pieces of
sculpture, while individual artists lent 136 pictures and twenty-seven sculptures.
41
“Much valuable assistance was also rendered by the Royal Academy, the Royal Institute of
British Architects, and the two Water Colour Societies.” Great Britain, Report of Her Majesty's
Commissioners for the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878, to the Queen's Most Excellent
Majesty: presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty, 2 vols. (London:
Eyre and Spottiswoode for H. M. S. O., 1880).
122
at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London to the Universal Exposition of 1855 in Paris and noted
that it cost more to send British works to Paris in 1855 than it had cost to send French works to
London in 1851 [Fig. 39]. He argued that while the higher expense could have resulted from a
larger and heavier volume of British goods shipped abroad in 1855, a main expense stemmed
from the exhibition of pictures: “Making this deduction, the cost to the public of the British
Exhibition in Paris will have been under £34,000, or just half that of the Paris Exhibition in
London to the French Government.” The insurance for damages at the exhibition of 1855 related
to breakage of marble and plaster sculptures, and damage to the glazing on large watercolor and
architectural drawings.
42

While risk assessment for goods in transit provided one problematic expense, committees
also encountered trouble with risks onsite once they reached their allotted space on the exhibition
grounds. At the 1855 Paris exposition, Richard Redgrave (1804–1888), artist, administrator,
surveyor of the Crown Pictures, and a Commissioner for the British Art Section, was shocked to
discover that while Britain had sent “three or four hundred of the rarest pictures of our British
Schools […] valued, as far as money can represent them, at above £100,000,” upon reaching the
exhibition grounds they saw that the “huge timber and paper construction which has been built to
contain them, is separated only by two feet from a sugar refinery!—that most dangerous of all
manufactures; and the French do not even think it necessary to insure! Trouble upon trouble! It
seems overwhelming, just as one is working fourteen hours a day, and serving upon committees,
sometimes until ten o’clock at night.”
43
Redgrave clearly recognized the fact that sugar refineries

42
The cost reclaimed from the insurance company was £555 3s. 8d., or in 2017 around
£44,517.99.
43
Frances Margaret (F.M.) Redgrave, Richard Redgrave, C.B., R.A.: a memoir, compiled from
his diary (London: Cassell & Co., 1891), 121-122; See also, Richard Redgrave, R.A, “REPORT
on the ARRANGEMENTS for CONTRIBUTING a COLLECTION of WORKS of FINE ART
123
were dangerous risks, something acknowledged by insurance companies such as Phoenix
Assurance, which was started in Britain in the eighteenth century especially to cover the sugar
industry.
44
At the South Kensington Loan Exhibition of 1862, the Commissioners were anxious
about the “quantity of combustible materials employed in the construction of the building, and its
great size,” and cited the fact that New York’s Crystal Palace had burned down in 1858, after
being constructed only six years prior for the New York’s 1853 Exhibition of the Industry of All
Nations [Fig. 40].
45
In the organization for the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867, between
exchanges about the ways in which machines would be displayed in the English section and the
construction of flooring and ceilings in different galleries, Henry Cole (this time as British
Executive Commissioner) wrote to the French Commissioner General of the Exhibition, Frédéric
Le Play (1806–1882) to complain about both the minimal provisions made for risk mitigation for

to the PARIS UNIVERSAL EXHIBITION,” in Reports on the Paris Universal Exhibition, 1855,
3 vols. (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode for H.M.S.O, 1856), 77-78: “…the Board ordered an
examination to be made by the surveyor to the London insurance companies. On receiving his
report and suggestions, requisition was made to the French Government for an increased supply
of water, that it should be laid on outside the building for the Fine Arts, as well as inside, and
that the cases and waste packages should be removed from the vaults beneath. This the French
Government most readily undertook to do, and also, in order to screen the danger from the sugar
refinery, to build on the narrow strip of ground between it and the Palais a wall of great length,
forty feet high, towering above both buildings. During the time the pictures were being packed in
London, Mr. Braidwood, of the Fire Brigade, was requested to give the building containing them
continuous supervision, as also the wharf whence they were to be shipped, to assure their safety
as far as was possible.”
44
Sugar refiners founded one of the nineteenth-century’s largest fire insurers, Phoenix
Assurance. See my chapter one and Clive Trebilcock, Phoenix Assurance and the Development
of British Assurance, vol. 1. 1782–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
45
Great Britain, Report of the Commissioners for The Exhibition of 1862 to the Right Hon. Sir
George Grey, Bart, G C B (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode for H.M.S.O, 1863); As for the
American Crystal Palace, its damages were also considerable: “Hundreds of workingmen,
inventors, artists, and manufacturers exhibiting their work at the annual show of the American
Institute were completely ruined nonetheless. Estimates of the loss in property exceeded one
million dollars, equal in 2015 to as little as $22 million and as much as $4.4 billion.” Edwin G.
Burrows, The Finest Building in America: The New York Crystal Palace, 1853–1858 (USA:
Oxford University Press, 2018), xi.
124
art works, and the sparsely designed exhibition spaces that exhibitors were expected to outfit
with floors, partitions, and furnishings. He highlighted the trouble and risk of borrowing
invaluable modern and antique works from reticent collectors, and described the French
treatment of the British as un-neighborly:
In the case of British fine arts, artists of distinction worthily representing the
British school, have no interest whatever in exhibiting; and if picture and statues are to be
obtained, they must be borrowed from the proprietors of them, who certainly prefer to
keep these works in their own houses, rather than stripping the walls of them to expose
them to all the risk of travel, &c. These two collections, if made at all, can only be made
by the State, and the cost of collecting, packing, transporting, insurance, returning, &c.,
will be quite as much, in my opinion, as the State is likely to undertake. These remarks
apply still more forcibly to the works of early art. These are more difficult to be
borrowed, and they cannot be replaced if lost, and even greater precautions in respect of
fire and security are necessary than with modern works. In 1862, well-built galleries,
lined with wood, and papered and decorated, having wooden floors covered with matting,
blinds, seats, &c., were provided at the risk of persons in their private capacity, and
placed at the disposal of the foreign guests.
To invite people to show works of art when there is no commercial or indeed any
other kind of motive but simply the desire to meet the wishes of a good neighbor, and to
ask the lenders to place them within bare walls, seems to me like inviting guests to come
to see you in their best clothes, jewels, and velvets, putting them in a temporary shed, and
telling them to furnish it at their own cost, and make themselves comfortable if they
can.
46

Cole’s point also underscored how many artworks in Britain existed in the hands of private
collectors, and the tight reins that the British government and Treasury held over their national
displays abroad.
Administrators played important roles as professional liaison officers. They often became
very familiar with the insurance companies, lobbying on behalf of the exhibitors or organizers,

46
Mr. Cole to Mr. Le Play, (extracts) South Kensington Museum, London, W., May 8, 1866.,
COPIES “of all Correspondence between the Treasury, the DEPARTMENT of SCIENCE and
ART, and the COMMISSIONERS for the PARIS EXHIBITION, relative to the EXPENDITURE to
be incurred in connection with that Exhibition, and the SUMS to be provided in the Estimates or
Supplementary Estimates for 1865, 1866-7, and 1867-8 (London: Treasury Chambers. H. M. S.
O. June 18, 1867), 75-77.
125
and in the process learned details about the insurance trade. As Jeffrey Auerbach has argued,
while Royal Commissioners Prince Albert and Henry Cole are often given credit for conceiving
of London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, the funding for the exhibition came from broad-based
public financing, and the organizational groundwork was carried out by sub-committees like the
Executive Committee, made up of manufacturers, engineers, and members of the military with
appropriate expertise who liaised with other committees, “solicited and collected contributions,
exhibits, arranged them, regulated spectator admissions, provided for safety of building and
contents) and correspondence.”
47
Such committee members like Lyon Playfair (1818–1898) and
Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820–1877) would have been in charge of working to insure the exhibits.
Richard Redgrave frequently assessed exhibition risks and liaised with insurance agents in
markets like Lloyd’s of London, a position he assumed at the Expositions universelles in Paris in
1855 and 1867, and in Vienna in 1873.
48
Civil engineer, art connoisseur, and inveterate
exhibition organizer, Isidore Spielmann (1854–1925), brother of the art critic, Marion Harry
Spielmann (1858–1948), was also an important insurance liaison officer. When Spielmann
appeared before the British Parliament in 1906 to provide evidence for a new committee that was
created to assess Britain’s participation in international exhibitions, and determine national
policy moving forward (the “Exhibitions Branch of the Board of Trade,” discussed below), he

47
Burton, Vision & Accident, 33.
48
“The insurance was effected at Lloyd’s, the underwriters agreeing to accept Mr. Richard
Redgrave, R.A., Surveyor of the Queen's pictures, as the sole arbitrator. We desire to express our
acknowledgments for the valuable advice and attention given by Mr. Redgrave. Mr. F. B.
Barwell, as the executive officer charged with the preliminary duty of collecting the Works of
Art and arranging them for exhibition at Vienna, rendered us good service throughout. The total
claim on the underwriters, which was for damage done in transit to a group of sculpture,
amounted only to 6s. 6d. per cent, on the whole sum insured.” Vienna International Exhibition,
Reports of the Vienna Universal Exhibition of 1873, 4 vols. (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode for
H. M. S. O., 1874), 10-11.
126
argued that a government commission should be assembled to cover insurance, packing, and
transport costs.
49
He arrived at this perspective after serving in numerous positions on British
exhibition committees for Brussels 1897, Paris 1900, St Louis 1904, and New Zealand 1906-
07.
50
He was often in charge of organizing the insurance of art works, and he also was in a
position to provide intelligence on other nations’ organizational methods.
51
He would later
become the Honorary Art Director of the new Exhibitions Branch of the Board of Trade, and he
became Britain’s Commissioner for Art for the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition, and also was
responsible for establishing a British Fine Art Section at the Argentine Centennial Exhibition in
Buenos Aires of 1910. For the latter exhibition, he noted the difficulty in getting coverage for the
trans-Atlantic shipment of art objects, and “[devised] a scheme by which those artists desiring to
participate should themselves contribute a sum sufficient to defray the cost of collection,

49
Sir Isidore Spielmann evidence, June 13, 1907, Great Britain, Minutes of evidence taken by the
committee appointed by the Board of Trade to make enquiries with reference to the participation
of Great Britain in great international exhibitions: with appendices and index (London: Wyman
and Sons for H. M. S. O., 1907), 285-291. See also, Great Britain, and Alfred Edmund Bateman,
Report of the Committee appointed by the Board of Trade to make enquiries with reference to the
participation of Great Britain in great international exhibitions: together with the appendices
thereto (London: Wyman and Sons for H. M. S. O., 1907).
50
His appointments included: “Honorary Assistant Secretary of the Royal Commission for the St
Louis Exhibition 1904; Honorary Secretary of the Fine Art Section of the British Commission
for the Brussels Exhibition 1897; Director of the Fine Art Section of the Royal Commission for
the Paris Exhibition 1900; Honorary Secretary for the Art Committee of the Royal Commission
of the St Louis Exhibition of 1904; Director for Art in connection with the British Government
Exhibit at New Zealand International Exhibition,” November 16, 1906, Report of the Committee
appointed by the Board of Trade to make enquiries with reference to the participation of Great
Britain in Great International Exhibitions, together with the Appendices thereto (London:
Wyman and Sons for H. M. S. O., 1907).
51
Collections of his correspondence at Oxford and the National Art Library attest to his
extensive involvement as agent and intermediator in art insurance. Sir Isidore Spielmann
Correspondence, 32 boxes, 86.PP.15, National Art Library, London; Isidore Spielmann Letters
From Artists MS/ENG/d/87/A-K and MS/ENG/d/88/L-X, Oxford Bodleian Libraries.
127
packing, insurance, and transport on the outward journey.”
52
He adds that he therefore “resolved
to invite the Royal British Colonial Society of Artists, who seemed especially fitted for the
purpose, to assist me in the crisis. After some negotiations, the Council of this Society undertook
the responsibility of raising a fund from among the artists to defray the cost of organization on
this side.”
53
Here, Spielmann had learned from his past experiences dealing with insurance
companies to essentially form a kind of artist’s mutual association, albeit one that lasted only for
the exhibition’s duration.
In short, the increasing logistical challenges posed by international expositions led British
organizers to think more systematically about insurance. Richard Redgrave’s comments in the
official report for the Paris Exhibition of 1855 are instructive, for they detail many of the
potential dangers that might befall a work in transit. They serve as a warning about repeatedly
exhibiting valuable and fragile objects, and reveal Redgrave’s intimate understanding about
exhibition logistics:
It is impossible, however, not to have seen, in the course of these duties, the great risk of
injury to which invaluable works of Art,—works which no money can replace,—are
exposed by these distant voyages; risk not only arising from the natural dangers of the
road, from transition from rail to ship-board, and from ship-board again to rail, but, in the
case of these exhibitions, aggravated by the confusion caused by sudden and extreme
pressure on the usual accommodations of the transit; the provisions for which, more
especially on the return of the works, are clogged by a sudden and overwhelming
increase of freight, wherein the heaviest machinery and the bulkiest merchandise are of
necessity mingled with statues and pictures, without proper arrangements for their
separation and safety; while the very ports of shipment, perhaps, are wholly unprovided
with sufficient means of lading and unlading. In the face of these dangers, it would hardly
be prudent to recommend that these continental exhibitions of works of Art should be

52
“The Fine Arts Exhibition,” Great Britain, Report of the Argentine Centennial Exhibitions:
presented to Both Houses of Parliament by Command of His Majesty (London: Eyre &
Spottiswoode for H. M. S. O., 1911), 18.
53
“The Fine Arts Exhibition,” Great Britain, Report of the Argentine Centennial Exhibitions:
presented to Both Houses of Parliament by Command of His Majesty (London: Eyre &
Spottiswoode for H. M. S. O., 1911), 18.
128
repeated except at very distant intervals, or that, in any case, Government should again
undertake the risk and responsibility of transporting such fragile and precious objects as
marble statues, or works covered by glass, whose breakage may at once destroy a
priceless labor.
54

3. The Fire Offices Committee: the trouble with valued policies

In Britain, legislative changes from the mid-nineteenth century created an environment
that was more conducive to specialized art insurance schemes. In the late 1820s, fire insurance
companies in England cut rates on middle-class residential policies to encourage consumption in
that sector, and institutional growth increased in the 1840s.
55
In order to promote laissez-faire
capitalism, the British Parliament passed mid-century acts that legalized Limited Liability
Companies and loosened incorporation restrictions in place since the South Sea Bubbles of the
1720s. In 1844, British President of the Board of Trade, William Gladstone (1809–1898)
introduced the Joint-Stock Companies Act, which enabled companies to be viewed as legal
entities instead of as aggregates of individual partners who were separately vulnerable to
litigation, and many new companies incorporated and reported profits and losses to the Board of
Trade.
56
Further Parliamentary interventions at the mid-century advanced the cause of business.
57

These Acts included the Joint Stock Companies Act of 1856, and The Companies Act of 1862
for insurance, which introduced limited liability, so that companies could form in which
investors only stood to lose the amount they initially invested, should the company fail. The

54
Richard Redgrave, “REPORT on the ARRANGEMENTS for CONTRIBUTING a
COLLECTION of WORKS of FINE ART to the PARIS UNIVERSAL EXHIBITION.”
February 12, 1855, Great Britain, Board of Trade, Reports on the Paris universal exhibition,
1855, 3 vols. (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode for H.M.S.O, 1856), 84.
55
Pearson, Insuring, 31.
56
Timothy Alborn, Conceiving Companies: Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England (London:
Routledge, 1998).
57
Liz McFall, Devising Consumption: Cultural Economies of Insurance, Credit and Spending,
(New York and London: Routledge, 2014), 37-38.
129
insurance press also grew in this period, with the Post Magazine appearing in the 1840s, the
Assurance Magazine from the 1850s (later The Assurance Magazine, and Journal of the Institute
of Actuaries) and the Insurance Record appearing from 1864. In the later nineteenth century, as
continental European states and the U.S. challenged Britain’s industrial predominance, and
Britain’s colonial investments intensified, London became more important as a finance hub for
so-called “invisible sectors.”
58

Some of the newly established companies after mid-century dealt explicitly with art
insurance. In his colorful, baggy, unfinished compendium, the Insurance Cyclopedia (1871–
1878), insurance writer Cornelius Walford (1827–1885) noted that in 1872 an association called
the Artistic Insurance Trust proposed to “[indemnify] artists in every branch of the Arts for loss
sustained by them from accident of any kind that may happen to works of art lent for the purpose
of exhibition.”
59
The new trust’s secretary, Morton Edwards (1834–1917), was described as a
sculptor, and the company would be verified by Royal Charter with a guarantee fund of
£250,000 to be invested with trustees. The Art-Journal also reported on this scheme but
dismissed the new trust: “If there were the least likelihood of the ‘society’ advancing a single
step beyond the issue of the prospectus, we should have much to say on the subject. At present it
will suffice to notice it as one of the many things that mean nothing.”
60
Perhaps due to art world

58
Invisibles today include commodity services like “insurance, services of airlines and shipping,
hotels and other tourist facilities, banking, medical services and education, and various forms of
consultancy. John Black, Nigar Hashimzade, and Gareth Myles, eds., A Dictionary of
Economics, “invisibles.” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Robert Floud and Paul
Johnson, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain. Volume II: Economic Maturity,
1860–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 121.
59
Cornelius Walford, The Insurance Cyclopaedia, vol. 3 (London: Charles and Edwin Layton,
1871–1880), 299.
60
“Artistic Insurance Fund,” The Art-Journal 34 (1872): 95; Journal of the Society of
Arts, March 8, 1872, 322.
130
doubts, this project remained only a projection, and the Art-Journal reserved its commentary on
indemnities for artists. Their reticence perhaps also extended from mistrust about overheated
schemes in a heady speculative period that would culminate disastrously in the 1873 European
and American financial crisis.
61
In October 1882, The Fine Arts Insurance Company, a British
limited company, announced its incorporation with seven directors and a nominal capital (capital
designated explicitly for shareholders) of £1,000,000 divided into 200,000 shares at £5 each
[Fig. 41]. Its first two goals were to:
(A) carry on the business of Insurers against loss or damage by fire, including explosions
of gas and damage by lightning, to paintings, drawings, pictures, engravings, statuary,
marbles, bronzes, articles of vertu et de luxe, and works of art, and all other property of
every sort or kind.”
(B) To insure the same, either for a fixed sum in case of total destruction, or for
compensation in case of partial injury, and that whether in situ or in transit.”
62

This company presented its goals in very optimistic terms. To further shore up shareholder
confidence in its position and expertise, it enlisted two Royal Academicians on its board of
directors: a mezzotint engraver, Thomas Oldham Barlow (1824–1889), and the painter, Edward
Poynter (1836–1919).
63
To be a director, one had to have purchased forty shares, and the
directors collectively could—it was projected—anticipate earing £3,000 per annum in payment

61
The crisis’s first effects appeared as financial failures in Vienna, but the causes were more
widely endemic across the globe, and included the fallout from the Franco-Prussian War (1870–
71); rampant railroad speculation; currency demonetization in Europe; postbellum inflation in
America; as well as major fires in financial centers Chicago (1871) and Boston (1872). See
Catherine Hannah Davies, Transatlantic Speculations, Globalization and the Panics of 1873
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). By the 1880s, Britain’s permissive business
culture enabled at least 1,500 companies to form each year. See Mary Poovey, “Review of
Conceiving Companies: Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England,” Victorian Studies 44, no. 2
(2002): 287-288.
62
“Fine Arts Insurance Company Ltd.” Company Archive, BT 31/3060/17414, Company no.
17414, Board of Trade Records, National Archives, London.
63
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, “Barlow, Thomas Oldham (1824–1889),
engraver and etcher,” by Susanna Avery-Quash, accessed March 7, 2020.
131
for their service, which would be divided amongst them.
64
But by February 10, 1883, the
company had only sold one hundred shares and had not yet issued more shares for allotment. By
September 14, 1889, the British Registrar of Joint Stock Companies—the government agency
where all joint stock companies were required to file annual financial statements and company
returns—inquired whether the company was actually functioning. They warned that that the
company would be struck from the Registrar and dissolved if could not prove itself operational,
and finally carried out this threat in March 1890.
The Fine Arts Insurance Company apparently made little mark upon the art world.
Barring other archival information, one might speculate that it failed perhaps because it was too
small, its network too weak, and its directors too inexpert to steer a fledgling company in a
competitive market.
65
Investor confidence was also probably shaken when in 1887, Parliament
and the international press publicly shunned another one of its directors, Lieutenant-Colonel
Francis Charles Hughes-Hallett (1838–1903)—a Tory M.P. for Rochester and a notorious
spendthrift—when it was revealed that he had impregnated his step-daughter and had
simultaneously attempted to swindle her out of her £41,000 fortune.
66
Still the company’s advent
affirmed that some participants in the art world saw a need for specialized art insurance. This
need would uniquely be met in Britain, where the conventional insurance establishment also

64
The Furniture Gazette (November 4, 1882): 313.
65
The full list of the Fine Arts Insurance Company directors included: The Right Honorable
Lord Robert Montagu, P.C.; Thomas Oldham Barlow, Esq., R.A.; Lieutenant-Colonel Francis
Charles Hughes-Hallett; Edward John Poynter, Esq., R.A.; Harvey Ranking Esq.; Henry Edward
Ransom, Esq.
66
“A House of Commons Scandal: Revolting Accusation Against a Tory MP: Colonel Hughes-
Hallett and his Victim: Alleged Whitewashing by the Whips,” Pall Mall Gazette, September 20,
1887, 8.
132
made art insurance challenging.
67

An important insurance establishment edifice was the British Fire Offices Committee
(hereafter the F.O.C.). In a self-published centenary commemorative volume it referred to itself
as a “voluntary self-disciplining organization,” but it was basically a cartel that formed first in
the 1840s to lobby the government, police the fire insurance profession, share knowledge about
new risks, and regulate premiums or “tariffs” on hazardous commercial risks like wharves,
cotton mills, and warehouses for perishable commodities.
68
After its official incorporation in
1868, it was led by the largest competing fire offices—the Sun Fire Office, the Royal Exchange
Assurance, and the Phoenix Fire Office. At the outset it included over fifty insurance offices in
Britain and several overseas, and it continued to expand its reach throughout the century.
69

While the F.O.C.’s primary work was industrial, it also assessed numerous exhibition
risks. Memos and committee minutes in the Phoenix Insurance Collection at Cambridge
University Library and at the London Metropolitan Archives show evidence that the F.O.C.

67
Specialist art insurance schemes were unique to Britain. Late in the nineteenth-century, the
American insurance press and the American art press were still commenting that no comparable
provisions existed in the United States for art insurance: “FINE ART insurance, Burglary
insurance, Mortgage insurance, Registered Post insurance and other applications of the insurance
principle appear to be successfully conducted in England, while little or no attention is paid to
them in this country. That we have abundant field for such organizations here is obvious, and the
wonder is that with such outgrowth of American enterprise as we witness in every direction,
there has been so little manifestation of effort in these new fields.” Baltimore Underwriter,
September 6, 1893, 203.
68
F.O.C. Commemorative Volume, 1868–1968, Privately Printed (June 1968),
CLC/B/017/MS29485A, London Metropolitan Archives.
69
Oliver Westall, “Marketing Strategy and the Competitive Structure of British General
Insurance, 1720–1980,” Business History 36, no. 2, 1994, 20–46. The F.O.C. was not the first
fire insurance cartel to form. Between the 1780s and early 1800s, the Sun, the Royal Exchange
Assurance, and the Phoenix formed a cartel that contributed to stagnant growth in the industry,
but this was broken in 1805. Pearson, Insuring, 28.
133
regulated premiums for at least thirty large-scale exhibitions from the 1880s onwards.
70
The
extraordinarily energetic Sun Fire Office Secretary, Francis Boyer Relton (c. 1820–1897),
compiled an “Exhibitions” scrapbook for the years 1851 to 1893, and this document shows that
F.O.C. companies covered many exhibitions.
71
They covered at least thirty-six in Britain and
abroad, although there were more if one considers that British insurance companies sometimes
partnered with foreign companies to insure exhibitions collectively.
72
It also issued directives on

70
The Phoenix also insured smaller institutional exhibitions, with the earliest extant valuation
catalogue in the archive being for the 1841 West of Scotland Academy Exhibition. See my
chapter two.
71
There are twelve scrapbooks in the Sun archive covering individual subjects like insurance for
docks and theaters, and Acts of Parliament. This “Exhibitions” scrapbook is cross-indexed to
numerous other memorandum books, some for insurances effected on exhibitions that took place
in foreign cities. There are over three hundred such memorandum books for foreign locations
and agencies of the office. Each is two- to three hundred pages long and contain maps, notations,
photographs, newspaper clippings and observations by insurance inspectors, particularly by
Relton himself. Cornel Zwierlein describes how these volumes—many still untapped by
scholars—constitute a rich “form of global economic memory.” Before I turn this dissertation
into a book, I plan to revisit these memorandum books to research more of these foreign
exhibition insurances. Cornel Zwierlein, “The Burning of a Modern City? Istanbul as Perceived
by the Agents of the Sun Fire Office, 1865–1870,” in Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration
and the Making of the Modern World, eds. Greg Bankoff, Uwe Lübken, Jordan Sand (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 87.
72
As Relton describes it, the Sun insured numerous exhibitions, and strikingly many abroad:
Great Exhibition, 1851; Dublin, 1853; Paris Universal Exposition, 1855; Manchester Art
Treasures, 1857; Dublin, 1864–5; Southampton Loan Exhibition, 1866; Paris International
Exhibition, 1867; Leeds, 1868; Copenhagen, Scandinavian International Exhibition, 1872;
Berlin, 1872; Lyon, 1872; South Kensington Museum, 1873; Burlington Fine Arts Club Loan
Exhibition of Porcelain, 1873; Burlington House Winter Exhibitions, 1872–73 and 1880–81;
Santiago, Chile, 1875; Wrexham Fine Arts, 1876; Philadelphia, 1876; Munich Jubilee Picture
Exhibition, 1876; Antwerp Rubens Exhibition, 1877; Amsterdam Exhibition of Art and Industry
in the Volks Palais, 1877; South Kensington Caxton Exhibition, May 1877; Margate, Kent,
Surrey and Super Dog, Cat & Rabbit Show (Cats! Rabbits!), 1878; Paris Universal Exhibition,
1878; Sydney New South Wales, 1879; Copenhagen Arts & Industry Exhibition, 1879; Brussels,
Exhibition in Commemoration of 50th Anniversary of Belgian Independence, 1880; Amsterdam,
Palais for Volkslide, 1880; Melbourne, 1880; Amsterdam International Colonial Exhibition,
1883; Calcutta, 1883–84; Antwerp, 1885; Paris Exposition Internationale de Meurnie, 1885;
Brussels Universal Exhibition, 1888; The Hague, 1888; Melbourne, 1888. “Exhibitions”
Scrapbook, 1851–1893, CLC/B/192/DD/029/MS38841/003, Records of Sun Fire Office, London
Metropolitan Archives. Undoubtedly the biggest exhibitions for the Sun were the Paris
134
providing insurance coverage for municipal art galleries, and for loan collections sent from South
Kensington Museum to the Albert Institute and other institutions in Dundee, Scotland.
73
The
F.O.C. also dictated the tariffs for committee-insured sites like the Royal Albert Hall, and the
Crystal Palace at Sydenham from June 1854 until the Crystal Palace’s destruction by fire in
November 1936.
74

As a governing body, the F.O.C. deployed collective oversight and directed policy about
the kinds of risks its members covered. These policies were delivered to all of the participating
F.O.C. member companies, who were expected to abide by the head committee’s and sub-
committees’ proclamations.
75
The F.O.C.’s tariffs were also proprietary, and they guarded them
from other associations. For example, in November 1899, letters from a Mr. Lechartier were read
at an F.O.C. General Meeting. He inquired about whether the F.O.C “might supply a complete
set of the Committee’s current and old tariffs so that they could be included in a collection of
Insurance documents to be sent to the Paris Exhibition of 1900.” The F.O.C. committee rejected
this request.
76
This was important because the F.O.C. was constantly at work fending off
incursions into its field by non-British and non-tariff offices, discussed more below.
The F.O.C.’s procedure for investigating proposed exhibition risks often featured
distinctly visual and schematic components, requiring an agent’s hand-eye coordination and
spatial knowledge. One visual procedure is illuminated in a hand-drawn map that was produced

Exhibition universelles of 1855 and of 1867, as these took up considerable real estate in Relton’s
scrapbook. I will attend to them in more detail before turning this dissertation into a book.
73
Fire Offices’ Committee Rules and Exhibition Rates, PX 1634, Phoenix Assurance Archive,
Cambridge University Library.
74
Albert Hall, 1900–1956, PX 1634/2, Phoenix Assurance Archive, Cambridge University
Library.
75
Member companies also sent representatives to board meetings.
76
Fire Offices Committee General Meetings Minute Book, 1899, CLC/B/017/MS29452/035,
London Metropolitan Archive.
135
for the 1907 Irish International Exhibition in Dublin [Figs. 42, 43].
77
In some ways the map
follows structures for civic fire maps, such as those by the Charles Goad Company, which
produced early fire maps in North America and Britain from the 1880s and continued to operate
into the twentieth century.
78
These maps enabled companies to assess a neighborhood’s risks
based upon building types and adjacent constructions, with detailed map keys indicating wall
heights, window locations, types of doors and roof tiles [Fig. 2.24].
79
In the F.O.C.’s 1907
Dublin map, structures and attractions are marked with the recommended tariff rates, while
separate notes assess distances between buildings, the composition of building materials, the
number and location of fire hydrants and water mains, the availability of handheld firefighting
equipment, and the number of constables and firemen at hand.
In assessing an exhibition, agents might encounter obstructions on site, but they might
also be swayed by contemporaneous journalistic sources. Francis Boyer Relton describes his
difficulties when visiting the 1872 Exposition universelle et internationale of Lyon in order to
make assessments for the Sun, which was sharing coverage with other European insurance
companies.
80
When Relton was given no site map, he attempted to sketch one himself—

77
The Charles Goad Company started in Canada in 1875 and produced fire maps from 1878.
78
Other companies include the Sanborn Map Company, which operated in the western United
States until the 1960s, when insurance companies ceased depending upon fire maps to assess
urban risks. See https://www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/sanborn/
79
Gwyn Rowley, “British Fire Insurance Plans: The Goad Productions, c.1885–
c.1970,” Archives 17, no. 74 (October 1985): 67; A. Feintuck, “Constructing cartographic
authority: the conceptualization and mapping of urban spaces in Edinburgh, c. 1880 – c. 1920,”
Urban History 46 no. 3 (2019): 464–92; G. Rowley, British Fire Insurance Plans (Old Hatfield:
Chas E. Goad, Ltd, 1984); Niels van Manen, “Les Plans d’assurance Incendie de Goad:
Cartographie des Risques d’incendie et Normalisation des Risques Industriels (1885–1903),” La
Découverte “Le Mouvement Sociale” 4 (2014): 249, 163-185. See also the British Library’s
exhibition of Goad Maps here:
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/firemaps/fireinsurancemaps.html
80
The Sun covered about £115,500 of the exhibition’s £1,600,000 estimated value including
buildings, furs, silks, musical instruments, and the cafe. Francis Boyer Relton comments in
136
effectively acting as a surveyor, architectural draftsman, and even landscape artist—but he was
deterred by exhibition authorities. This intervention appeared to be a breach of agreement, as
presumably insurers were entitled to visual plans of the insured property. Subsequently, Relton
and another agent found the whole exhibition liable to burn and a “bad risk,” despite the
presence of two fire engines on site and abundant water available at the nearby river and park.
81

To seemingly support his critical view of the Exposition, Relton also pasted a negative Times
article into the scrapbook that described how recent politics had undermined the exposition’s
organization. Lyon—a prominent industrial silk-weaving city with a militant working class—
was still fresh from the Franco-Prussian War and its own revolutionary Commune.
82
The Times
correspondent noted the exhibition’s disarray and incomplete state, commenting that this was so
because although several private citizens had planned the event prior to the war, the French
government had since commandeered the exhibition “not to promote industrial enterprise, but to
strengthen the Government of [Adolphe] Thiers” (the new President of the French Republic, but
also the brutal suppressor of the Parisian Commune).
83
How this article affected Relton’s
perspective on the exposition is unclear, but Relton did comment that the exhibition organizers
also failed to pay their insurance premium, and hinted disapprovingly at overall losses.
84
The
example illustrates how an insurer’s visual assessments and oversight, while sometimes required,
might be unwelcome to exhibition organizers. Insurance agents might also be somewhat attentive

“Exhibitions” Scrapbook, 1851–1893, CLC/B/192/DD/029/MS38841/003, 57–59, Records of
Sun Fire Office, London Metropolitan Archives.
81
Relton, “Exhibitions” Scrapbook, 57.
82
Louis M. Greenberg, Sisters of liberty: Marseille, Lyon, Paris, and the Reaction to a
Centralized State, 1868–1871 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 214-261.
83
Anon., “The Lyons Exhibition,” Times, 1872. In “Exhibitions” Scrapbook, 59.
84
Relton, “Exhibitions” Scrapbook, 58.
137
consumers of cultural criticism, relying on qualitative news coverage (along with quantitative
data and returns) to form their assessments.
As Relton’s scrapbook shows, the F.O.C.’s insurance assessors main work concerned
preparing written reports on fire risks, and such reports also extended to art risks. These
assessors rarely possessed professionalized art expertise, yet non-F.O.C. industry members still
deferred to the F.O.C.’s tariffs. This was evident in an 1886 letter to the F.O.C. head committee
from the Association of London Underwriters: a marine insurance knowledge-sharing
association established in 1884 that operated outside of the Lloyd’s market. The letter
acknowledged the F.O.C.’s industry dominance, and begged the F.O.C. to share important
knowledge about exhibition insurance with the marine underwriters:
The attention of my Committee has recently been directed to the great disparity existing
in the rates charged by Fire Offices and by Marine Underwriters for certain risks, the
nature of which are partially Marine and partially Fire, notably in the case of articles
insured for the transit to and from Exhibitions and the risk of fire while there.
It is probable that this difference in Premium arises from the want of technical knowledge
[my emphasis] among underwriters sufficient to enable them to properly estimate the
intermediate risk between the carrying of the articles to and fro. My Committee hope,
that, in the interests of both sets of Underwriters, the Fire Offices Committee will so far
relax their rate with regard to the diffusion of information as to supply me with the rates
fixed in such cases, and the data which guide them in arriving at a decision [my
emphasis]. It seems to be of mutual importance that attention should be directed to the
differences existing in the rates for these risks. The result of so doing can only be that due
weight will be given to the fact that the tariff settle by you, is fixed upon the advice of
experts well skilled to estimate such risks at their proper value, rates will become
approximate and competition return to a more healthy state.
85

The F.O.C. secretary underlined the word, “competition,” and, considering the marine context,
wrote a cheeky pun in the margin: “The underwriters are evidently at sea here.” This letter

85
The Institute of London Underwriters, Royal Exchange Buildings, March 16, 1886, Addressed
to the Secretary, Fire Offices Committee, 63 Watting S., Fire Offices’ Committee General
meetings minute book 1886, CLC/B/017/MS29452/022, London Metropolitan Archives; Robin
Pearson, et al. “Insurance,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, ed. Joel Mokyr
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
138
provides further evidence that the F.O.C. strictly guarded its rates, and it also highlights how
other insurance sectors like marine insurance were simultaneously struggling to manage the
volume of objects transiting between exhibitions.
86
Whether on sea or on land, exhibition
insurance was an industry-wide problem.
But how F.O.C. underwriters arrived at their premium prices, the “data” alluded to in the
above letter, seemed unclear. A copy of the Sun Insurance Office’s 1803 printed booklet
“Directions for Clerks Who Write Policies” reveals how the tariff offices had difficulty codifying
specific rates or practices for exhibitions [Fig. 45, 46].
87
Although this document—an internal
guidebook to assist clerks in assigning the correct premium accounts to diverse risk classes—was
printed in 1803, someone was evidently using it well into the 1880s, for it features a hand-
scrawled extra category for “Exhibition” which includes partially filled-in examples and
premium percentages. The first undated entry appears to be for buildings in Dublin, alluding to a
“building in Iron and Glass” that “will be used again for entertainments.” This might have been
the 1853 Dublin Exhibition, which featured an iron and glass building after the Great Exhibition
of 1851. Additionally, there is an entry for Bristol, “Pictures with catalogue,” evidentially a
picture exhibition. But the provisional nature of these inscriptions reveals how insurers faced
difficulties designating exhibitions as risk classes.
Exhibitions were heterogeneous built environments featuring displays ranging from
architecturally ambitious pavilions, food vendors, animal menageries, and working machinery:
what Georg Simmel described as “an entirely new proportion between permanence and

86
Robin Pearson and Takau Yoneyama, Corporate Forms and Organizational Choice in
International Insurance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1-28, 114-141; Robert Donald,
“Municipal Fire Insurance,” The Contemporary Review 68 (December 1895): 839-852.
87
I also discuss this booklet in chapter one. See page 80.
139
transience.”
88
Insurance companies were generally preoccupied with assessing conventional risk
categories, such as heavy machinery, flammable liquids, and hazardous construction materials
used in an expositions’ buildings. When it came to assessing risks to fine and applied art
displays, however, assessors generally lacked training in art, aesthetics, or exhibition design. But
the F.O.C.’s agents nonetheless made revealing aesthetic judgements in their reports. Assessing
the risks posed at the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition (the aforementioned exhibition of
comparative nationalism that Imre Kiralfy organized at Shepherd’s Bush in London), the F.O.C.
agent produced parallel hand-drawn sketches of both the British and French display strategies at
the Applied Arts Pavilions, noting:
The French system is to so place [their showcases] that the gangways form a sort of
maze, along which you twist and turn about, and always seem to be running headlong
into the glass fronts. Of course, the object of this is to make you look into the cases, and it
is, no doubt, satisfactorily achieved. But, the arrangement does not improve the fire-risk,
because the eye cannot sweep over big spaces as it can where the usual English system of
long straight corridors prevails. [Hand-written in the margin: Also very difficult to throw
jets of water effectively from hydrants] [Fig. 47].
89

Evincing perhaps a subtle scopic chauvinism, the assessor pragmatically recommended the
British model of display corridors. [Fig. 48] The Victoria & Albert Museum adopted this display
model in its major restructuring campaign in 1909, which reorganized the collection around long
corridors lined with cases. This strategy would be criticized in art circles for subjecting foot-
weary visitors to a fatiguing spatial organization known for its “pitiless logic,” and for “too much
[resembling] Metropolitan railway stations.”
90
Considering the swift sketchiness with which the

88
Georg Simmel, “The Berlin Trade Exhibition,” Theory, Culture & Society 8, no. 3 (August
1991): 121.
89
F.O.C. Rules, Exhibitions, Franco-British Exhibition 1908, PX 1635, Phoenix Assurance
Archive, Cambridge University Library.
90
Raymond Koechlin and Sir Claude Phillips, both quoted in Burton, Vision & Accident, 166.
This display strategy was introduced under the Victoria & Albert Museum’s new director, Cecil
Harcourt-Smith (1859–1944).
140
insurance agent drew the British exhibition design in comparison with his more painstaking
sketch of the “maze-like” French section, the insurance agent seemed to arrive all on his own at
long-standing aesthetic debates in design about French ornateness contra British simplicity and
pragmatism, and yet also appeared to grudgingly appreciate the French ability to capture
viewers’ attention.
91
After discussing the exhibition layout, the assessor observed the ways in
which the French exhibitors used wood in their cases (too much wood to be fire-safe, he thought)
and asked the French builder on site if they treated the wood with fire-resistant materials. Not
trusting the French builder’s affirmative reply, the agent went on to report that he independently
tested the fire-resistance of samples of wood taken from the French cases, and admitted they
were fire-resistant. In this assessment, the agent’s viewpoint underscored how insurance could be
in part a subjective activity that took account of aesthetic forms, but that additionally, an
underlying chauvinism about national perceptions of risk-preparedness colored the F.O.C.’s
vision.
While its approach to construction and building insurance relied on relatively
standardized rules, the F.O.C. had a harder time fixing tariffs on a building’s contents when they
were art exhibits. Arts professionals viewed these tariffs as too high, and the F.O.C. mostly
refused to write what were called “valued policies.” These are policies that are found in maritime
insurance, where company and policyholder agree on a set value for a payout should a claim

91
Such debates were certainly being rehashed in the art press. British reviewers of the Franco-
British exhibition for The Burlington Magazine criticized both nations’ Applied Arts displays
and highlighted a French propensity towards “intricacy.” Characteristically, they dismissed both
displays’ “wholly commercial” nature, noting the “meretricious pomposity” of the British court
that was based upon seventeenth- and eighteenth-century designs, and the French “old, and
possibly moribund, ideal of minute, skillful finish” within what was overall a “slipshod
emporium.” Charles Ricketts and Robert Ross, “The Franco-British Exhibition,” The Burlington
Magazine for Connoisseurs 13, no. 64 (July 1908): 192–201, 203–205.
141
arise, preventing the insurance company from assessing any potential losses themselves. Such
policies had a contentious history. Cornelius Walford located their origin with early seventeenth-
century Dutch markets and saw this contract category as an easy target for fraud, akin to
gambling.
92
The average adjuster and marine insurance broker, Manley Hopkins (1818–1897,
who was also father to the Victorian poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844–1889) described value
in such policies as “arbitrary,” agreed upon for certain purposes, and such agreements “being
intended to avoid any after discussions as to value.”
93
In a January 11, 1888 address to the
Faculty of Actuaries in Scotland (one of two such professional organizations in Britain meant to
train and certify underwriters), John McCandlish (1821–1901), the Faculty’s first president who
also worked for several Scottish insurance companies, explained the dilemma in the context of
fine art:
If we agree to pay one man £1,000 if a certain picture were burnt, because we knew its
value, and were sure the owner would take the utmost care of it, how could we refuse to
insure another man in similar terms, though we might suspect both his valuation and his
carefulness? Values change too, and what was worth £1,000 yesterday may come by the
turn of the market to be worth only £700; so that if the owner were entitled to get £1,000
for it in case of its being burned, such an accident would be a thing not to be regretted or
very carefully guarded against.
94

His point was that for insurers accustomed to valuing standardized risks like warehouses or
machinery, idiosyncratic picture values posed a problem, not least because they were subject to
the changeable art market’s mysterious movements. Valued policies were also undesirable
because they locked the insurer into an inflexible contract with a client who may or may not pose

92
Walford, The Insurance Cyclopaedia, vol. 2, 108.
93
Manley Hopkins, “Appendix II: On the Value of a Ship,” in A Manual of Marine Insurance
(London: Smith, Elder, 1867), 480. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, “Hopkins,
Gerard Manley (1844–1889), poet,” by Norman White, accessed September 24, 2021.
94
John McCandlish, “The Economics of Insurance,” in Transactions of the Insurance and
Actuarial Society of Glasgow, Second Series (London: Charles & Edwin Layton, 1885–1890),
203, 189-217.
142
a moral hazard. That is, the client may or may not convey the object’s correct value to the
underwriter when applying for a contract. This did not necessarily imply that an ethical
judgement was being passed upon the client: it was possible to be considered a “moral” hazard
without this negatively reflecting upon one’s own “morality,” as historians of moral hazard have
argued.
95
Today, a context in which the underwriter and the client possess divergent knowledge,
or misunderstand the risks involved is considered a situation in which knowledge is
“asymmetric.”
96
So when the commissioners of the 1888 Glasgow International Exhibition of
Science, Art and Industry requested that the F.O.C. assent to having valued policies be written
upon the exhibition’s picture exhibits, the F.O.C.’s internal sub-committee on the subject debated
and then refused, arguing that it would be “highly inexpedient” to do so. The F.O.C. would often
hold this line on Valued Policies, for example refusing to issue them for the Glasgow
Corporation Art Galleries in 1895.
97

95
Tom Baker, “On the Genealogy of Moral Hazard,” Texas Law Review 75, no. 2 (1996–1997);
Robin Pearson, “Moral Hazard and the Assessment of Insurance Risk in Eighteenth- and Early-
Nineteenth-Century Britain,” The Business History Review 76, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 1-35; Adam
Leaver, “Fuzzy knowledge: an historical exploration of moral hazard and its variability,”
Economy and Society 44, no. 1 (2015): 91-109.
96
Economist George A. Akerlof is often cited for his paper which uses the example of used cars,
in which buyers may find themselves victims of information asymmetry. George A. Akerlof,
“The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” The Quarterly
Journal of Economics 84 no. 3 (1970): 488-500. For this concept applied to the certification and
valuing of American art, see Diana Seave Greenwald, “Used Cars and Canvases: Information
Economics, Art History, and the Art Market,” American Art 33, no. 3, (2019): 5-9.
97
“In connection with the insurances of the Glasgow Corporation Art Galleries the question was
raised as to the issue of Valued Policies and it was. Resolved to affirm the Resolution passed at
the General Meeting held on the 18th Dec 1891 to the effect that the committee is strongly of the
opinion that it is undesirable that such policies should be issued.” Fire Offices Committee
General meetings minute book, 1895, CLC/B/017/MS29452/031, London Metropolitan Archive;
See also Perilla Kinchin and Juliet Kinchin, Glasgow’s Great Exhibitions: 1888, 1901, 1911,
1938, 1988. (Wendlebury, Bicester, Oxon: White Cockade, 1988).
143
Exhibition insurance continued to generate administrative problems for the F.O.C. into
the twentieth century. In March 1910, a special sub-committee was assembled to assess
“Exhibitions and ‘All Risks’ Policies including Transit for Exhibitions in the United
Kingdom.”
98
While the records for this committee’s meetings do not appear to have survived in
the archives, the fact that exhibition insurance persisted as a problem for the F.O.C. dovetails
with the fact that art world actors struggled to manage the same sets of problems on their own
terms.

4. Contracting art risks: South Kensington Museum as gatekeeper

Valued policies also posed a problem for another “administrative behemoth” charged
with offsetting art risks: The Department of Science and Art, whose functionaries managed the
South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria & Albert Museum).
99
Following Michel Foucault,
many scholars of imperialism and the history of exhibitions have shown how this institution
practiced forms of administrative and colonial “governmentality,” exercising bureaucratic
authority over exhibiting cultures, both domestically and also worldwide.
100
But until now, no
one has discussed how insurance contributed to the ways in which the V&A exercised this
authority.

98
The committee consisted of members of the Commercial Union, Employer's Liability,
Guardian, London and Lancashire, Norwich Union, Ocean, Phoenix, and Royal.
CLC/B/017/MS29452/043, General Meetings Minute Book, 1909–1910, Fire Offices
Committee, London Metropolitan Archive.
99
I borrow Arindam Dutta’s term from, The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of Its
Global Reproducibility (London: Routledge, 2007), 4.
100
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–79
(Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 215-238.
144
The organizers of the Great Exhibition of 1851 built the South Kensington Museum from
the Great Exhibition’s monetary surplus, and under the museum’s first director, Henry Cole, and
his associates Richard Redgrave, Owen Jones and others, it rose as a central pedagogical engine
driving art and design education, first in Britain, and then, as other nations emulated its model,
worldwide.
101
Constructed in the 1840s as a scrappy collection of teaching aids for students of
design at Marlborough House, the “Museum of Manufactures” collection later swelled with
objects selected and purchased from the 1851 Exhibition, and with ready-made collections like
the Bandinel ceramics collection, the Bernal collections of objets d’art, the Soulages Italian and
French art collection, the Sheepshanks Collection of British pictures, and sections from the East
India Company’s India Museum.
102
In 1853, the overseeing department’s name was changed
from the Department of Practical Art to the Department of Science and Art, and by 1855,
Parliament agreed to allot £15,000 to fund the museum’s first galleries. It opened in 1857 in a
temporary South Kensington space, the much derided “Brompton Boilers” (so-named by the ILN
because observers thought the building’s barrel-vaulted construction resembled boilers) and then
in a more permanent building designed by Aston Webb in 1899, when it was renamed the
Victoria & Albert Museum.
As Louise Purbrick has shown, the South Kensington Museum’s aims were fourfold: to
promote general elementary instruction in art to improve national consumers’ taste; to advance

101
South Kensington’s pedagogical import in India is discussed in Dutta. See also Mahrukh
Tarapor, “John Lockwood Kipling and British Art Education in India,” Victorian Studies 24, no.
1, Victorian Imperialism (Autumn, 1980): 53-81; Julius Bryant and Susan Weber, eds., John
Lockwood Kipling: Arts & Crafts in the Punjab and London (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2017).
102
For images of some of these collections, see Richard Dunn and Anthony Burton, “The
Victoria & Albert Museum: An Illustrated Chronology,” in A Grand Design: The Art of the
Victoria & Albert Museum, ed. Brenda Richards and the V&A (London: V&A Publications,
1997), 49-75.
145
instruction in art; to apply technical art principles in order to improve manufactures; and to
influence the formation of provincial museums.
103
However, the South Kensington Museum also
operated according to “the Liberal Laws of Supply and Demand,” in which the state museum
was meant to “diffuse useful knowledge through a market mechanism” by teaching its visitors to
identify and purchase objects of utility.
104
The museum distinguished itself from other British art
institutions in that it became a clearing house through which thousands of art and design
manufactures transited from the 1850s onwards. For unlike the British Museum, which never
lent its collections, or the National Gallery, which lent more discriminately until the 1880s on
terms determined by the Treasury Department, the South Kensington Museum was reliant upon
an internal and external loan system to bolster its collections.
105

Loan conditions figured prominently in the South Kensington Museum’s administrative
discussions. Administrators started discussing insurance because the British Treasury and Select
Committees in the House of Commons scrutinized the museum’s funding and stewardship.
Private lenders and civic borrowers also exerted pressure on the museum, while risk categories
shifted with changes in transit logistics. Information about this work is kept in the V&A’s
labyrinthine administrative records containing minute papers, regulatory forms, reports,
clippings, photographs, and other documents.
106
These documents reveal how from the 1860s to

103
Louise Purbrick, “The South Kensington Museum: The Building of the House of Henry
Cole,” in Art Apart: Art Institutions and Ideology Across England and North America, ed.
Marcia Pointon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 69-86.
104
Purbrick, “The South Kensington Museum,” 84.
105
Aside from examples like the Portland Vase, which not incidentally was smashed by a vandal
in 1845, the British Museum rarely had loans onsite, and it never lent its own collections. David
Wilson, The British Museum: A History (London: The British Museum Press, 2002), 112. The
National Gallery also lent works on a much smaller scale. See the National Gallery’s “Loans Out
Books” (1850–1994, Series NG18), which contain information on loans and insurance.
106
Insurance information in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s archive is distributed across
numerous administrative files, with several concentrated files addressing the museum’s insuring
146
the 1880s, loans to the museum accounted for a third of its displays, while as a part of its
pedagogical mandate to inculcate the principles of good design in British artisans and general
public, the museum’s Circulation Department also lent extensively to the British Government's
Schools of Design, municipal museums, and temporary exhibitions. In 1871 it lent 4,000 objects
to the government art schools alone. As Ann Eatwell has noted, the museum relied upon
numerous private donors to strengthen its fiscal and cultural position, not least because from its
very start, it repeatedly came under fire from Government commissions for mishandling funds.
107

practices. The first file, ED 84/385, pertains to the insurance of works of art between 1874 and
1953. Works insured in these files were primarily acquired by art referees who purchased works
abroad for the museum. It also addresses the insurance of works that have been gifted or loaned
temporarily to the museum. The second large file is ED 84/126, and this file documents logistical
arrangements for the Museum’s Circulation Department between 1897 and 1931. This
department oversaw the loans to provincial museums, the Government Art and Design Schools,
and temporary exhibitions within the UK, and the file documents numerous insurance debates.
The third file is MA/35 https://www.vam.ac.uk/archives/unit/ARC23961. This file is the most
extensive and diffuse, as it contains more than 158 sub-files organized geographically and
nationally, with documents on hundreds of temporary exhibitions, held both domestically and
worldwide. For some of these exhibitions, the V&A assented to making loans, but for others they
declined to lend for political, tactical, and practical reasons. Many, but not all of the files contain
information about insurance and logistics. For this chapter I consulted all of the loan files for
temporary exhibitions in the nineteenth century and in the first decade of the twentieth: about
fifty sub-files. As will be evident in my analysis, there is much work still to be done in this
archive. There were further relevant V&A administrative files, but I was unable to access them
due to COVID-19-era travel restrictions. “Inventories intrinsically valuable exhibits,” ED 84/413
(1909–1915); “Damage to objects reports of accidents caused by careless students and visitors,”
ED 84/417; “Registers of loans in Archive department,” MA/31; “Minutes and papers relating to
the issue of, and changes in Museum regulations,” ED 84/191; “List of objects in the Art
Division, South Kensington Museum, acquired during the year ... : arranged according to the
dates of acquisition,” VS.0002 Copy [F] 1868-1870, which includes insurance valuations;
VS.0002 Copy [D] 1882-1887, which also includes insurance valuations.
107
Ann Eatwell, “Borrowing from Collectors: The Role of the Loan in the Formation of the
Victoria & Albert Museum and its Collection (1852–1932),” The Journal of the Decorative Arts
Society 1850 - the Present 24, Decorative Art Collecting: passion and fashion (2000): 20-29;
Burton, Vision & Accident, 80, more extensively in Chapters 8, 9, 10. See also July 5, 1860,
question 540 in Report from the Select Committee on the South Kensington Museum; Together
with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix (London: House of
Commons, 1860).
147
The South Kensington Museum discussed and implemented art insurance in three
contexts discussed below: the insurance of government property and loans on the museum’s own
premises; insured loans exhibited domestically; and loans that traveled internationally. The
museum’s insurance policies had concrete ramifications in the art world. The museum initially
took a utilitarian approach to art objects: that is, they invested objects with practical value within
a pedagogical framework, making them essentially uninsurable. They were uninsurable simply
because they were teaching aids, copies, doubles, or samples, or simply “art manufactures.” But
around the 1880s, when the museum began to aggressively collect “fine art,” and simultaneously
came under government scrutiny for its practices, so too did the museum’s policies towards
insurance start to shift, so that insurance increasingly became a controversial necessity. While
the museum’s insuring policies enabled many exhibitions to take place, they also prevented
collections from being sent, particularly abroad to Britain’s imperial dominions, underscoring the
constraints the museum placed on its collections.

(I) Property on the premises
In its infancy, the Department of Science and Art’s collections were idiosyncratic. These
included ornamental art objects, building materials, and animal products.
108
While in its first
home at the “Brompton Boilers,” Cole lamented that the museum was “a temporary refuge for
destitute collections.”
109
Writing in the 1870s in his letters to workmen, Fors Clavigera, art critic

108
The full list as described by Purbrick included (1) Objects of Ornamental Art applied to
manufactures, with an art library (2) British Pictures, sculpture and engravings (3) Architectural
examples (4) Appliances for Scholastic Education (5) Materials for building and construction (6)
Substances used for food (7) Animal products (8) Models of patented inventions (9)
Reproductions by means of Photography, electrotypes, and casting.
109
Henry Cole, Fifty Years of Public Work, vol. 2 (London: George Bell and Sons, 1884), 292.
148
John Ruskin (1819–1900) grumbled about the arrangements and types of objects in South
Kensington: “fragments of really true and precious art are buried and polluted amidst a mass of
loathsome modern mechanisms, fineries, and fatuity, and have the souls trodden out of them, and
the lustre polluted on them, till they are but as a few sullied pearls in a troughful of rotten pease,
at which the foul English public snout grunts [sic] in an amazed manner, finding them wholly
flavourless.”
110
Ruskin was however opposed to serial manufacture so his criticism was hardly
impartial. Many of these collections would be hived off to form the nascent Science Museum,
and by the 1880s the museum was more assiduously pursuing art objects above other categories.
In the Department of Science and Art’s early years, insurance for art objects was
confined to occasional works sent to the museum to be appraised for potential purchase. Works
purchased or sent from abroad for inspection, as was the case with items sent from Florence,
were also insured.
111
But in keeping with a state-wide policy against insuring government
property, the museum did not insure works on its own premises unless they had been purchased
abroad by its network of art referees, and instead made its own security provisions for fire and
theft.
112

The museum’s miserly approaches to art insurance provoked complaints. In 1862, the
museum’s art curator and later Art Referee, John Charles Robinson (1824–1913), organized the
“Special Exhibition of Works of Art on loan of the Medieval, Renaissance, and more recent

110
John Ruskin, “Discriminating in Art Teaching,” in Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen
and Labourers of Great Britain (London: George Allen; New York: Longmans, Green, & Co.,
1907), 560.
111
See Sir John Donnelly’s answer to Mr. Acland’s question 134, Minutes of Evidence Taken
Before Select Committee on Museums of the Science and Art Department, March 12, 1897, 8.
112
Clive Wainwright, edited for publication by Charlotte Gere, “The Making of the South
Kensington Museum III: Collecting Abroad,” Journal of the History of Collections 14, no. 1
(2002): 45-61.
149
epochs” on the South Kensington grounds [Fig. 49]. This exhibition was meant to provide a fine
art component to the 1862 London International Exhibition.
113
Through Robinson’s interventions
at least 553 lenders sent 10,000 Medieval and Renaissance objects on loan. The exhibition was
so popular that visitor numbers to the museum rivaled those who attended the international
exhibition proper.
114
However, the Art-Journal documented complaints from fine art lenders who
found that the Royal Commission took out no insurance whatsoever for loaned works. Lenders
complained that the British government worked at odds with foreign governments, who seemed
to be insuring their own commissions’ displays:
The same unjust policy of throwing the burden of the Exhibition on those who have to
form its material is evidenced by the determination of the Royal Commission not to
insure the works lent for exhibition from liability to loss or damage by fire or other
accident. In the case of pictures by English artists this determination will have a most
unfortunate influence and will result in the absence of many fine works which otherwise
would have lent additional and national interest to the attractions of the building. Surely
the loan of such works was concession enough without taxing the owners or artists with
the costs of insuring their safety. The foreign commissioners are authorized by their
governments, we believe, in all cases (we know they are in some) to pay the entire costs
of insurance, freight, &c., for all works intended for the Exhibition.
115

Cole reported further:
Responsibility in taking precautions to insure the safety of the valuable pictures sent to
the Exhibition, was repudiated. “R. Redgrave came to me in grief about the pictures, for
which, if damaged, the Commissioners would not be responsible.” By the end of
February, the frictions between the various bodies engaged in the Exhibition had become
so frequent, that “unless there was a radical change the Exhibition would not be opened.”
A change was effected, and Mr. (now Sir Francis) Sandford was appointed sole manager,
to consult Mr. Cole as occasion might require.
116

113
This was a world’s fair held between May 1 and November 1, 1862.
114
See the contributions to the special issue of The Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 1850-
the Present, “Almost Forgotten: The International Exhibition of 1862,” 38, 2014.
115
“Insurance of Exhibits,” The Art-Journal 24 (1862): 21-23.
116
Henry Cole, Fifty Years of Public Work, vol. 1 (London: George Bell and Sons, 1884), 245-
246; Minutes concerning Art Museum Exhibition 1862, ED 84/41; International Exhibition
1862, MA/35/88; Newspaper Cuttings (March 1862–June 1862), MA/49/1/25; Newspaper
Cuttings (January 1863–March 1865), MA/49/1/28, V&A Administrative Archive, London.
150
The fact that the government would assume no risks for loaned artworks at South Kensington did
not apply to architectural risks. The Norwich Union (a tariff office with the F.O.C.) proudly
advertised that it provided “THE LARGEST SINGLE INSURANCE ON RECORD” for the
1862 International Exhibition’s building (for £450,000): a boast made to underscore Norwich
Union’s deep coffers that could offset such a large loss, should a fire damage the building [Fig.
50]. To further emphasize their market dominance, Norwich Union reproduced the insurance
policy as a poster: a black, white, and gray image edged with ornamental borders. In it, the
underwriters’ handwriting lends the policy a solemn, monumentalized quality, like a revered
civic document. But no such documents were made to celebrate blanket insurances upon the loan
exhibition’s contents, in spite of the objects’ prestige, or the cultural capital they represented.
The South Kensington Museum’s insurance protocols remained fairly constant until the
1880s. However, in 1897 and 1898, the House of Commons scrutinized the museum’s workings
in a “Select Committee on Museums of The Science and Art Department.”
117
Anthony Burton
has described this Committee and detailed the critical dissent toward the South Kensington
Museum’s policies in the 1890s which led to this inquest. Museum opponents John Charles
Robinson, Marion Harry Spielmann, and several House M.P.s attacked what they saw as
Circulation Department mismanagement and museum staffing issues, notably the problem that
many senior positions in the Department of Science and Art were staffed by military members
and Royal Engineers officers, and not by arts professionals.
118
On July 10, 1896, a House debate

117
See Anthony Burton, “The Purgation of the Department of Science and Art,” in Vision &
Accident: The Story of the Victoria & Albert Museum (London: V&A Publications, 1999), 142-
153.
118
A socialist M.P. accused the V&A administrators of being too economically motivated, and
famously described the organization as “a jungle of jobbery.” Burton, Vision & Accident, 142-
145.
151
threatened to cut the South Kensington Museum’s budget because it appeared to be circulating
too few loans to the provinces.
The Committee that was “appointed to inquire and report upon the Administration and
Cost of the Museums of the Sciences and Art Department” first met in early 1897.
119
It held
twenty-seven sessions through 1898, which led to the publication of two reports.
120
The
investigation addressed the building’s space, and especially, in the First Report, the risk of fire to
the South Kensington building itself. An extensive architectural analysis was performed by
Edward Street, an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects, who investigated the
entire South Kensington complex for fire risk.
121
In his first three points about the South
Kensington Museum’s art galleries and schools, Street commented on the beauty and “the value
of the collection brought together […] and with the knowledge that, as regards many of the
exhibits, if lost they could never be replaced; and this must not be lost sight of in considering the
buildings in which such a priceless collection of beautiful objects is housed.” The museum’s
approach to housing this collection—in “wood and lath-and-plaster, and in many instances [with
walls] covered with tarred felt,” and its aggregation of temporary, very flammable buildings—
was out of step with averting the risk of fire, smoke, and water damage. He further stated, “that
this danger should have been aggravated by the erection of a further series of large temporary
buildings constructed of fir framing, and covered, it is true, on the outside with iron, but lined

119
Great Britain, Parliament, House of Commons, Select Committee on Museums of the Science
and Art Department, Second report from the Select Committee on Museums of the Science and
Art Department; together with proceedings of the Committee, minutes of evidence, and appendix
(London: Eyre and Spottiswoode for H. M. S. O., 1897), A2.
120
Burton, Vision & Accident, 146.
121
I found no relation between Edward Street and the architect, George Edmund Street (1824–
1881).
152
internally with varnished match-boarding.”
122
In his assessment he immediately highlighted the
risks of fire to the Circulating Collection and other art collections:
The building accommodating this valuable property is constructed of fir framing, boarded
outside, and boarded and canvassed and papered inside, and it is heated by close stoves
standing on stone or concrete slabs on the floor.
And, further, if these places and their contents should be consumed, the great chance is
that the damage or loss would not end here; large volume of embers and sparks would,
with a fair breeze, be wafted on to all roofs within the radius of a furlong ; and amongst
other accessible places open for their reception would be the top lights and openings for
ventilation in the roofs of galleries in the north-east corner of site, in which are placed the
Cartoons, the Sheepshanks and Jones Collections, and the Chantrey Bequest and Water-
colour Collections.
123

He proceeded block by block to advise the removal of flammable buildings; the reconstruction of
dividing walls, doors, and ceilings; the clearing of clutter; and the application of fire-resistant
treatments to surfaces, and to warn the institution about installing electric lights, as it was
“generally considered by fire insurance offices that the installation of the electric light upon
premises increases the risk of their destruction by fire, and this is more especially the case where
such installation has been carried out under the system of competition.”
124

Street’s fire safety assessment was just the starting point for the Committee’s deeper risk
assessments, a point about the inquiry that Anthony Burton downplays in his history of the
museum.
125
That is, the Committee was preoccupied with risk, and insurance questions

122
Appendix 3: “Correspondence and Report on Risks from Fire to the Buildings of the Science
and Art Department at South Kensington,” Great Britain, Parliament, House of Commons, Select
Committee on Museums of the Science and Art Department, Second report from the Select
Committee on Museums of the Science and Art Department; together with proceedings of the
Committee, minutes of evidence, and appendix (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode for H. M. S. O.,
1897), 552-560.
123
Second report from the Select Committee on Museums, 552. Further appendices in the report
targeted “the Number of Flues in the Imperial Institute” (Appendix 20), “the Number of
Domestic Chimneys at South Kensington Museum” (Appendix 23).
124
Second report from the Select Committee on Museums, 552.
125
Burton, Vision & Accident, 146-151.
153
frequently appeared across its inquiry. At the very start of the investigation, Sir John Donnelly
(1834–1902), the Secretary and head of the Science and Art Department from 1884 to 1899, was
questioned about insurance in the Circulation Department. When pressed by the Committee
Chairman, Sir John Gorst (1835–1916) as to why the Museum refused to insure works lent to
them, Donnelly reiterated comments first introduced by Cole in an 1860 inquiry, “when we get
things sent us, say, from Florence, if we ask a dealer to send the things to the Museum to be seen,
as very often happens, then we have the right to insure against risk in its passage, because if
anything happened to them we should have to pay, and there would be no Vote we could pay it
out of.”
126
The Chairman redoubled his effort: “But you do not insure your own objects?” to
which Donnelly replied, “We do not insure our objects, nor do we ever insure loans made to the
Museum. The lender to the Museum takes his risk, even in these largest collections.” Fortunately
for Donnelly, few disasters had struck the museum’s collections, either from fire, larceny, or
breakage, as evinced by the report’s Appendices 28 and 30 [Figs. 51, 52], detailing the latter two
cases, where only 170 items had been broken between 1870 and 1897, and seventeen items
stolen between 1859 and 1857. These were remarkably small numbers considering the scale of
the museum’s collections. However, Donnelly commented that the museum did not always
observe the insurance moratorium:
[Question from Sir Henry Howarth]: …is it altogether wise in your view that collections
should be exhibited on loan for an interminable time, and that exhibition space should be
allotted to them, and that they should be able to be advertised, as it were, unless there is
an intention eventually that they should become part of the Museum property. I am
speaking now with regard to one great critical collection which takes up an immense
room in the Museum; it belongs to a great friend of mine, and we are all delighted to see
it there, Salting’s collection?
[Sir John Donnelly]: I believe that the Jones’ collection, which I suppose is worth at the
very least 300,000l, came to the Museum because he was so gratified by the way some of

126
Burton, 135.
154
his collections had been exhibited there. Well, I think if you can get a few collections of
that kind, it is well to be as polite to people as possible.
127

That is, Donnelly conceded that the museum was not beyond introducing insurance for loans as a
measure to flatter and appease collectors, “being polite as possible,” and insuring loaned works
in the hopes that the collections would be donated to the museum. But Donnelly also qualified
his remark by commenting that collectors might abuse this “politeness”:
if you insure when you have got a loan, you will have to insure it at what the person puts
the value at, and then he might go afterwards and say, “This picture or object of art was
insured by the South Kensington authorities for £5,000,” or something of that kind.”
128

Donnelly was worried that collectors would take advantage of the museum’s position as assessor
and risk validator to boost the value of their own collections.
129
When Sir Mancherjee M.
Bhownaggree asked Donnelly if the general policies against insuring loans to the museum had
not deterred collectors from making loans, Donnelly acknowledged there may have been some
cases, but did not find them significant enough to change the museum’s policies towards not
insuring anything: “I think the thing works very well now, and on the whole I do not think it
would be a good thing. I do not think there is any call for it.”
130

The department would however change its insuring policies again in connection with the
shifting role of its Loan Court (so-named in 1909): Sir Aston Webb’s new “Octagon Court.” A

127
Burton, Vision & Accident, 70.
128
March 23, 1897, question 1235. House of Commons, Second Report from the Select
Committee on Museums of the Science and Art Dept; with the Proceedings of the Committee
(London: Eyre and Spottiswoode for H. M. S. O., July 23, 1897).
129
Flaminia Gennari-Santori, “An Art Collector and His Friends: John Pierpont Morgan and the
Globalization of Medieval Art,” Journal of the History of Collections 27, no. 3 (2015): 401-411.
With thanks to Nizan Shaked, who shared this article with me.
130
Major General Sir J. Donnelley, March 16, 1897, Great Britain, Parliament, House of
Commons, Select Committee on Museums of the Science and Art Department, Second report
from the Select Committee on Museums of the Science and Art Department; together with
proceedings of the Committee, minutes of evidence, and appendix (London: Eyre and
Spottiswoode for H. M. S. O., 1897), 35.
155
major feature of the museum from the 1860s to the 1880s, the Loan Court was a flexible space
for exhibiting loans and, as Eatwell has argued, an unconventional feature among comparable
museums.
131
Collections such as the 1878 Heinrich Schliemann collection were displayed there:
4,420 items excavated in Turkey, thought to come from Troy. At its height in 1879, nearly
18,000 loaned items had been displayed there—although inconsistently insured—but by 1910 the
museum’s policy toward insuring loans was hardening. In 1910, the Department shifted in its
approach about expenditure on insurance. By 1913, with the threat of suffragist iconoclasm, the
museum considered spending perhaps £100 per year on insurance against all risks for loaned
objects in the museum, although the insurance companies also took advantage of this threat to
quote higher tariffs.
132
The Treasury did not sanction this expense.

(II) Loans out in Britain, or “a holy dread of porcelain”
The South Kensington museum first assembled an eclectic teaching collection in the
1840s for students at the Government School of Design. This school was founded in 1836 after
the 1835 Select Committee on Arts & Manufactures argued that British design education was

131
Ann Eatwell, “Borrowing from Collectors,” 20-29.
132
“all articles not of a fragile nature at 1s. 6d. per cent and china and glass and easily broken
articles at 10/- per cent.” The insurance companies again got wind of this potential new source of
business. A minute on August 8, 1913 stated, “Mr. Bellamy, of the Royal Insurance Co., called
on the 26th inst., stating that he had heard a rumor that there was a proposal to insure part of the
exhibits in this Museum. He seems to have had some conversation with a lender of an object,
who had talked to a ‘high official’ here. I told him that, so far as I knew, the invariable rule at
present was not to insure objects in the Museum, though we do occasionally insure loan objects
in transit. He left his card and asked that his firm might be borne in mind, should there be any
proposal to take out an insurance. He added that the firm was already known to the Board, as it
was one of the four or five firms insuring Circulation loans in the provinces.” Minute Paper
13/3909M, Insurance of Works of Art (1874–1953), ED 84/385, V&A Administrative Archive,
Blythe House London.

156
weak compared to rivals in the export market, particularly the French. Aside from establishing
municipal art schools around Britain, the 1835 Committee’s report recommended that a
circulating museum be established to provide educational examples to provincial institutions.
This concept had detractors. Economist William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) found the
museum’s disparate displays to be “a nightmare of incomprehensible machines, interminable
stairs, suspicious policemen, turnstiles, and staring fish.”
133
And yet he observed that making
loans to the provinces would not solve the central museum’s overarching problems:
But then come a number of zealous, well-meaning men who urge that these drawers and
cellars full of expensive articles ought to be offered to the provinces, so that fifty
Museums might be filled out of what is unseen in one. Such suggestions, however,
proceed upon an entire misapprehension of the purposes of a great collection, and of the
way in which the mysteries of the past, the only key to the mysteries of the present, are
being unfolded by the patient putting together of link and link.
134

Nonetheless, in a circular Cole and Playfair signed from August 11, 1854, the Lords of the
Committee of Privy Council for Trade offered assistance to Schools of Art by sending them
loans: “if articles belonging to the Central Museum were circulated among the schools of art, and
publicly exhibited, the instruction given in the schools would be aided, the formation of local
museums encouraged, the funds of the schools assisted, and the public taste generally
improved.”
135
The circular’s four conditions for this new loan department were:
(1) That adequate provision be made by the committee of the local schools for exhibiting
the collection, during a limited period, to the students and the public, both in the daytime
and the evening.
(2) That the committee of the school endeavor to add to the exhibition by obtaining loans
of specimens from the collections of private individuals in the neighborhood.

133
William Stanley Jevons, “The Use and Abuse of Museums” (1881–2), in Methods of Social
Reform and Other Papers (London: Macmillan, 1883), 53-81.
134
Jevons, “The Use and Abuse of Museums,” 60.
135
Great Britain. Department of Science and Art, South Kensington Museum, Report on the
System of Circulation of Art Objects on Loan for Exhibition as carried on by the Department
from its first establishment to the present time (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode for H. M. S. O.,
1881).
157
(3) That the students of the schools be admitted free; but that all other persons, not
students, pay a moderate fee for admission, which should be higher in the morning than
the evening. To enable artisans, and others employed in the daytime, to share in the
benefits to be derived from the collection, the fee on three evenings in the week should
not exceed one penny each person.
(4) That any funds so raised should be applied, —1st, to the payment of the transport of
the collection to the school, and other expenses of the Exhibition; and 2nd, that the
balance be appropriated in the following proportions, namely; one quarter to the masters’
fee-fund; one-half to the purchase of examples for a permanent museum, &c.; and one
quarter to the general fund of the school. Committees of schools desiring to receive the
collections are requested to make application in the accompanying form.
136

The circular emphasized that civic leaders seeking loans for their local schools must first provide
“adequate provisions” reliant upon local rate-payers’ expropriations. Further, to be eligible for a
loan, collectors in the neighborhood had to be convinced to share their works with the school;
and students should be admitted free.
137
The fourth article noted that the funds generated—from
the first and third conditions, presumably—would have to serve for the museum objects’
transportation and safekeeping. Insurance, stewardship, and police forces, however, were not
mentioned in these early loan stipulations.
All works sent from the South Kensington Museum’s Circulation Department to
municipal museums, temporary exhibitions, and government schools of art were insured at the
borrower’s own expense, and from the beginning these conditions were unproblematic. The first
circulating collection was sent out in February 1855.
138
Queen Victoria lent a collection of
Sèvres porcelain in order to encourage other collectors to loan their collections.
139
In an 1860

136
South Kensington Museum, Report on the System of Circulation of Art Objects, 4.
137
All others had to pay a fee, with reduced fees for working-class visitors.
138
In the first collection, 430 specimens, 150 framed drawings, and photographs were sent on
loan to Birmingham. The second collection sent in 1860 included, “600 examples of art
manufactures illustrating each of the classes in the South Kensington Museum, together with 300
framed drawings, photographs, &c.” South Kensington Museum, Report on the System of
Circulation of Art Objects, A3.
139
South Kensington Museum, Report on the System of Circulation of Art Objects, 6.
158
report before the House of Commons, the department noted: “Although the most fragile articles,
such as Sèvres porcelain and glass, have been transmitted at least 2,690 miles by railway, &c.
and been packed and unpacked more than sixty times, no specimens have been broken or
damaged.”
140
This commentary seemed to imply that beyond the museum’s own logistical
expertise in packing and handling, few other risk-mitigating elements need be added, and
certainly not insurance. A second circulation collection was sent June 1860, and traveled for
three years except in 1862, when it was retained for the 1862 Loan Exhibition. Between 1864
and 1880, the museum loaned 258 collections to museums and other institutions, and in 1880
alone it lent 5,217 objects and 5,872 framed pictures to schools of art.
In the museum’s early days, insurance was seen as an excessive cost, so administrators
relied upon personnel and logistical infrastructure to provide for the collections’ safety in transit.
As an 1881 Report to Parliament on the “System of Circulation of Art Objects on Loan for
Exhibition” described it:
The art treasures of the South Kensington Museum are not insured against fire, either
when at home or when on loan. The premiums charged for the insurance of such fragile
objects would doubtless be very high, and the sum total would be a heavy permanent
charge on the Department, while no money could possibly replace many of the objects. It
has, therefore, been thought best to spend this money in guarding as far as possible
against all risks. Within the museum all possible precautions are taken, and when the loan
of a collection is applied for by a provincial institution, careful inquiries are made, and in
any case of doubt an experienced museum officer is sent to report on the nature of the
building in which the exhibition is to be held, and on the precautions against fire, before
the loan is finally authorized by the Department.
141

Each loan collection was overseen by a Circulation officer, “who remained in charge during the
period of exhibition in each town.” The collection was shipped in twelve-by-six-foot glazed

140
“Circulation of Objects of Art in the Provinces” at South Kensington, March 29, 1860,
reproduced in South Kensington Museum, Report on the System of Circulation of Art Objects, 5.
141
South Kensington Museum, Report on the System of Circulation of Art Objects, 9.
159
cases that doubled as exhibition stands and as shipping containers. When on display, these cases
were double-locked, and the Circulation official retained the key. A special carriage or truck was
constructed to transport the displays and was adapted for the railways [Fig. 53]. The museum
was able to send circulating collections in part thanks to railway and canal-building across
Britain, which lowered freight rates and transport times, even as the railways were also strongly
associated with accidents between the 1840s and 1870s.
142

Until 1897, provincial governments were not required to insure loans from the Central
museum. But then in 1897, nearly simultaneously with the “Select Committee on Museums of
The Science and Art Department,” the Cardiff Museum authorities wrote to the Circulation
Department to inquire about the V&A’s receipt form, which included a line stipulating that
borrowers “undertake to preserve them [the V&A’s loan objects] from injury whilst in our
custody” [Fig. 54]. The Cardiff Museum staff wrote to ask the museum’s Circulation
Department if such custodial duties included providing fire insurance. They commented that the
Cardiff Corporation did not take risks, “but that objects lent were insured against all risks by the
Corporation.”
143
Sir John Gorst, the V&A’s Vice President, wrote in internal department

142
From the very beginning, Henry Cole was alert to the importance of transport and temporality
to museums and ephemeral exhibitions. As Dutta shows, during the railway boom of the 1840s
and 1850s, Cole had been involved as an official working to consolidate the fragmented British
network. Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty, 53-58. On transport development in Britain, c. 1700
to 1870, see Dan Bogart, “The Transport Revolution in Industrializing Britain: A Survey” in The
Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, eds. Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 368-391. On nineteenth-century literary
perceptions of railways as risky, unpredictable, and accident-prone, and correspondingly, the rise
of accident insurance, see Paul Fyfe, “Chaos and Connections on the Victorian Railway,” in By
Accident or Design: Writing the Victorian Metropolis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015),
170-210.
143
1894 March, Entry 14423, Circulation Loans: Documents relating to loans to provincial
museums and the insurance of objects on loan (1897–1931), ED 84/126, V&A Administrative
Archive, Blythe House London.
160
minutes, “I think we should ask them to insure and that paragraph ‘C’ [in form number 605]
should be so altered in future editions as to require insurance specifically as a condition of loan”
[Fig. 55].
144
The Secretary of the Science and Art Department, John Donnelly, responded by
pointing out “that by calling upon each locality to insure, much difficulty and irritation was
likely to arise, and he suggested that a floating policy be taken out by or for the Department to
cover all risks whilst the objects were out on loan, and that the Department should recover from
each locality their proportionate amount of the total premium.” Administrators applied to
Lloyd’s for a quotation on these lines, and Lloyd’s responded with a quote of 5/1 per £100 for a
period of twelve months. The V&A administrators thought this amount was excessive and wrote
a letter to the Treasury forwarding the proposal from the Museum Director, Caspar Purdon
Clarke (1846–1911), that the Department should establish an insurance fund of its own to which
civic borrowers would contribute at a lower cost than that required by Lloyd’s. This was a
significant proposal, for it was perhaps the first instance in which a British government
department floated something resembling a public indemnity scheme for loaned artworks: a
distant antecedent to the twentieth-century Arts Council England’s Government Indemnity
Scheme (GIS), albeit one that put the onus on smaller provincial institutions to pay into the plan

144
Circulation Loans: Documents relating to loans to provincial museums and the insurance of
objects on loan indexed, ED 84/126 (1897–1931), Victoria & Albert Museum Archive, London.
161
in order to receive works on loan.
145
The result was that the V&A requested that localities insure
V&A loans against fire.
146

Soon, external events were again leading the V&A to make alterations to its insurance
requirements. On November 29, 1900, Able T. Briscoe, an official at the Passmore Edwards
Museum in East London, wrote to the Science and Art Department to notify them that a thief had
broken into the museum the previous night and had stolen items on loan from the V&A.
147
The
V&A had sent the institution one of the V&A’s traveling glass cases containing a number of
objects, including electrotypes and silver objects. The items stolen were a silver beaker, a cup, a

145
The English Arts Council’s Government Indemnity Scheme was established in connection
with the 1980 National Heritage Act, the point of which was to “establish a National Heritage
Memorial Fund for providing financial assistance for the acquisition, maintenance and
preservation of land, buildings and objects of outstanding historic and other interest; to make
new provision in relation to the arrangements for accepting property in satisfaction of inheritance
tax and estate duty; to provide for payments out of public funds in respect of the loss of or
damage to objects loaned to or displayed in local museums and other institutions; and for
purposes connected with those matters.” See Lorraine A. Stuart, “The role of libraries, archives
and museums in the cultural economy: Perception, documentation, and vision for the future,” in
Economic Considerations for Libraries, Archives and Museums,” eds. Lorraine A. Stuart,
Thomas F. R. Clareson, Joyce Ray (London: Routledge 2022), 197-211; Nan Morris, “State Art
and Artifacts Indemnity: A Solution Without a Problem?” Hastings Communications and
Entertainment Law Journal 12, no. 3 (1990): 413-422.
146
Sir John Donnelly articulated Clarke’s proposal in a letter to the Treasury: “To obviate the
trouble which would be caused the locality and to lessen the expense the correspondence would
entail were separate insurances insisted on, it has been suggested that a floating policy should be
taken out at Lloyd’s, by the Department, and the localities charged with the premiums pro rata
with the value of the loan. But on enquiry it appears that the premium asked by Lloyd’s is 5/- per
cent. This is obviously so high in comparison with the loss that has actually occurred that it is
proposed the Department should establish an insurance fund of its own and call upon the
Localities to contribute a much smaller percentage that that required by Lloyd’s, say 1/- per cent,
and yet sufficient to cover the risk of loss from damage or fire while the collection remains at the
local Museum.” Letter from J. F. D. Donnelly to The Sect. HM Treasury, June 9, 1897, ED
84/126 (1897–1931), Circulation Loans: Documents relating to loans to provincial museums and
the insurance of objects on loan, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House London.
147
The Passmore Edwards Museum was a small museum associated with the County Borough of
West Ham Municipal Technical Institute. Funded by the philanthropist, James Passmore
Edwards, the museum had only just opened in October 1900.
162
casket, and a cup with a cover.
148
The West Ham authorities had insured these items against fire
for £600, but not against theft.
149

The theft took place at a period when discussions about larceny and the politics of
material copies were particularly heated. In 1901, social researcher and reformer Charles Booth
had observed that burglary was London’s “most characteristic crime,” one which, as historian
Eloise Moss has shown, insurance companies had begun to capitalize upon in the 1880s by
marketing new burglary insurance schemes to middle-class clients.
150
In the Passmore Edwards
case, the thief had worked at night, athletically scaling a wall, breaking into the museum, and
then jamming open the glass case that the V&A had lent. The thief had enough sense to steal the
more valuable silver objects and leave the electrotype objects behind, underscoring that while
electrotypes were viewed as copies or sometimes forgeries, their gleaming resemblance to goods
in solid precious metals had a risk-averting, insurantial function.
151
The theft was all the more

148
The catalogue of the stolen items with their numbers and brief condition report at the time
they were stolen reads as follows: “570-97-1894: Beaker Dented; 6821-1860: Cup dented with
portions of leaves missing; 240-1879: Casket; 530-1893: Cup & Cover rim dented with portions
missing.” Circulation Loans: Documents relating to loans to provincial museums and the
insurance of objects on loan indexed, ED 84/126 (1897–1931), V&A Administrative Archive,
Blythe House London.
149
Entries for 1900, Circulation Loans: Documents relating to loans to provincial museums and
the insurance of objects on loan indexed, ED 84/126 (1897–1931), V&A Administrative
Archive, Blythe House London.
150
Cited in Eloise Moss, Night Raiders: Burglary and the Making of Modern Urban Life in
London, 1860-1968 (Oxford University Press, 2019), 14.
151
See also John Evans, “The Forgery of Antiquities,” Longman’s Magazine (December 1,
1893): 142-155. For research on electroplating in the French Second Empire, see Amy Ogata,
“Aluminum, Orfèvrerie, Industry, and Allegory in Second Empire France,” Art History 42, iss. 3
(June 2019): 482-509; Brita Brenna, Hans Dam Christensen, Olav Hamran, Museums as
Cultures of Copies: The Crafting of Artefacts and Authenticity (London: Routledge, 2018);
Tapati Guha-Thakurta, “Conceits of the Copy: Travelling Replicas of the Past and the Present,”
in Partha Chatterjee, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, and Bodhisattva Kar, eds., New Cultural Histories
of India: Materiality and Practices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 180-220; David A.
Scott and Donna Stevens, “Electrotypes in science and art,” Studies in Conservation 58, no. 3
(2012); Malcolm Baker, “The Reproductive Continuum: Plaster Casts, Paper Mosaics and
163
poignant given that a V&A official had initially visited the Institute after the V&A had received
the loan application, and that even then, the V&A official had recommended against sending
valuable objects to the Passmore Edwards Museum. The central museum had apparently made a
tactical misstep.
The V&A sent Robert F. Martin (1862–1941), an Assistant Keeper in the Art Branch, to
investigate the crime scene the same day. Martin worked alongside William Walter Watts (1856–
1920), the Head of the Circulation Department between 1896 and 1908.
152
As was customary
practice with Circulation Loans, a museum officer—Martin himself—had been responsible for
arranging and locking the items in the circulation case. At the Passmore Edwards Museum,
Martin produced a report and a sketch of the crime scene [Fig. 56]. His sketch was a swift pencil
drawing of the case viewed head-on in tentative perspective, with markings on the left indicating
the location where the thief had forced off the lock and jammed the case open, and only the most
minimal dashes and irregular ovals to delineate the objects’ placement inside the case, with red
“X’s” to mark the stolen items’ positions.
In his written report, Martin’s forensic observations approximated those of an attentive
insurance claims-assessor. Martin described how the items chosen in October 1900 for West
Ham constituted a case “composed of objects suitable as examples for the art industries of the
district, and among them were certain silver and silver-gilt articles.” He described the position

Photographs as Complementary Modes of Reproduction in the Nineteenth-Century Museum,” in
Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present, ed.
Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand (Berlin; New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 485-500; Bilbey
and Cribb; Allan Wallach, “The American Cast Museum: An Episode in the History of the
Institutional Definition of Art,” in Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the
United States by Alan Wallach (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 38-56.
152
Sally M. Foster, “Circulating Agency,” Journal of the History of Collections 27, no. 1 (2015):
73-96.
164
and the case’s condition, the way the lock had been dislodged, and even surmised that the thief
was “[clearly] a youth, for the youth left bare footprints inside of the case.” Some of the objects
stolen had not been photographed by the V&A’s documentation department, which was a
standard practice that they implemented in order to mitigate against total loss. This practice was
not unusual, for as recent scholars on forensic objectivity in the nineteenth century have shown,
the era saw the beginning of crime photography, the use of diagrams and models intended for the
courtroom to enable jurors to be “virtual witnesses,” and further new methods for recoding and
encoding crime to render it legible in legal contexts.
153
In The Pencil of Nature (1844–46),
William Henry Fox Talbot already argued that photography could serve a documentary and
forensic purpose, and he used the potential pilfering of a hypothetical case of porcelain objects to
illustrate this function [Fig. 57]:
From the specimen here given it is sufficiently manifest, that the whole cabinet of a
Virtuoso and collector of old China might be depicted on paper in little more time than it
would take him to make a written inventory describing it in the usual way. The more
strange and fantastic the forms of his old teapots, the more advantage in having their
pictures given instead of their descriptions. And should a thief afterwards purloin the
treasures—if the mute testimony of the picture were to be produced against him in
court—it would certainly be evidence of a novel kind; but what the judge and jury might
say to it, is a matter which I leave to the speculation of those who possess legal
acumen.
154

In this case, I would argue that the V&A administrators were developing their own
administrative, insurantial forensics, perhaps not intended initially for a courtroom, but rather for
the accurate deployment in insurance claims and assessments. Following the Passmore Edwards

153
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s early work on objectivity has led to a new focus on
forensic objectivity in policing and crime studies. Lorraine Daston, and Peter Galison,
Objectivity (Zone Books 2007/2010); Alison Adam, A History of Forensic Science: British
Beginnings in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2016); Alison Adam, ed., Crime and
the Construction of Forensic Objectivity from 1850 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
154
William Henry Fox Talbot, “Plate III. Articles of China,” The Pencil of Nature (London:
Longman, Brown, Green & Longman’s, 1844), 20-21.
165
theft, the first change the V&A’s Circulation administration made was to insist that no object
should be sent out on loan before it had been photographed.
Civic institutions’ relative fitness to receive Circulation Department loans continued to be
a problem for the central museum, and outside observers also noted this fact. In a February 12,
1901 letter addressed to John Gorst, Francis S. Powell, a Tory M.P. who was visiting the Harris
Museum in Preston, Lancashire, complained about inadequate loan conditions at the museum:
My Dear Gorst,
I visited the Harris Museum, etc., at Preston to-day. Nothing could be better than the
mode in which the S. K. loan was exhibited as regards light, freedom from damp, etc. But
I did not see any attendants, and it struck me that unless there is better supervision in
ordinary cases the objects sent on loan are exposed to very considerable risk if skilful
[sic] hands desire either to inquire or to appropriate. This is really a very grave question
having regard to the value and importance of many objects sent on loan.
Francis S. Powell
155

These events: the robbery, the assessments by Martin, and further letters of complaint from
interested parties led Caspar Purdon Clarke to write to the acting Director of the Science and Art
Department, William Abney (1842–1920) to request that more restrictive measures be
established when making loans of valuable objects to municipal institutions. While no such
explicit restrictions had been in place from the 1850s to the 1870s, now they would be
introduced. In his letter, Clark stated that because the provincial museums he had visited were
“somewhat deficient in their arrangements for the guardianship of objects lent to them” the
museum would “[restrict] the issue of valuable original objects to Museums in which the
galleries +c are patrolled by attendants, and that institutions which cannot bear the cost of this

155
Letter February 12, 1901, ED 84/126 (1897–1931) Circulation Loans: Documents relating to
loans to provincial museums and the insurance of objects on loan, V&A Administrative Archive,
Blythe House London.
166
surveillance should receive only reproductions of valuable metal work and ivories in addition to
ordinary loans, which, in stone, wood and leather +c might still be original objects […].”
156

After the Passmore Edwards Museum robbery, the Board debated internally about how
provincial borrowers should take precautions with V&A loans, a holdover debate from the House
Committee investigations that scrutinized the museum’s workings in 1897 and 1898. While its
mandate was to share works with the provinces and inculcate design education and art
appreciation and facility in the British populace, any changes to insurance protocols could also
materially burden provincial borrowers.
157
On June 13, 1901, William Abney issued circular
number 474 to all museums and schools that the V&A had dealings with, which decreed that
“collections to be lent by the Board must be insured by, and at the cost of the institution applying
for them, not only against fire but also against theft, for the period of their absence from the
Victoria & Albert Museum, which will include the periods of transit to and from the institution”
[Fig. 58].
158
Valuable objects would in large part no longer be lent unless the borrowers could
demonstrate their fitness as stewards via precautions like attendants patrolling the galleries.
In line with circular 474, the central museum altered an important bureaucratic document
that provincial borrowers completed to be considered for a V&A loan: application form 605,
“Conditions and Regulations under which Collections are Circulated to Permanent Museums”
[Fig. 59]. This was a standard request form on blue administrative paper in use since at least the

156
Minute February 22, 1907, ED 84/126 (1897–1931), Circulation Loans: Documents relating
to loans to provincial museums and the insurance of objects on loan, V&A Administrative
Archive, Blythe House London.
157
Adrian Rifkin, “Success Disavowed: The Schools of Design in Mid-Nineteenth-Century
Britain (An Allegory),” in Communards and Other Cultural Histories: Essays by Adrian Rifkin,
ed. Steve Edwards (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017), 272-296.
158
Circular 474, Board of Education, South Kensington, London S.W., June 13, 1901 [Reprinted
in Museums Journal 1 (1901–2): 345-346.
167
early 1880s, although similar circulars preceded it dating as far back as 1854.
159
It asked for
details about the museum or exhibition space where the prospective loan was to be sent,
including the building’s construction and wall constructions, lighting and heating methods. But it
also asked about provisions to allow students and artisans admission to the museum, or
exhibition, and to what purpose the receipts were to be applied (the committee tended to favor
loan requests that stated they would apply exhibition income towards purchasing art for
municipal museums). It also asked about custodial arrangements for the objects, and about the
precautions taken against theft and fire. The document ended with a list of “Conditions and
regulations under which collections are circulated to permanent museums and temporary
exhibitions.” Any applicant, should they wish their application to be successful, would do well to
closely read these conditions and regulations before filling out the form, as they were explicit
about what the museum wished to see in an application—one major point being that the V&A
did not lend to private borrowers, associations, or charities.
After the Passmore Edwards affair and the distribution of Circular 474, a new clause “d”
was inserted in form 605’s conditions which stated, “That they [the objects lent by the Board] are
insured against fire and theft.” Soon, “fire and theft” was replaced by “All Risks.” A further
clause was also added that stated, “Valuable original objects will only be lent to Institutions in
which efficient arrangements are made for their safe custody and one or more attendants are
employed to patrol the galleries during the hours that the Institutions are open to the public”
[Fig. 60].
160

159
The earliest example I have seen of this form is for an exhibition initiated by the Cardiff
Corporation in 1881. United Kingdom loans, 1869–1888, MA/35/130, V&A Administrative
Archive, Blythe House London.
160
United Kingdom loans, 1901–1905, MA/35/132, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House
London.
168
The change to V&A provincial insurance protocols elicited responses from the insurance
world and from the art world that were respectively enthusiastic and outraged. In the first
instance, insurance companies immediately got wind that the V&A was now going to be
requiring further insurance coverage from its borrowers, and they opportunistically maneuvered
to capture this new market. Less than a week after the circular’s transmission, the Assistant
Manager of the Fine Art & General Insurance Company, Ltd.—the first successful art insurance
company in Britain—wrote to the V&A stating that one of their policy-holders had notified the
company about the museum’s new insurance requirements. The Fine Art boldly asked if the
V&A might promote the Fine Art’s services by printing and distributing a document to all of the
V&A’s dependent provincial museums [Fig. 61]. The Fine Art’s draft document stated that the
company was providing a “comprehensive form of policy insuring loan collections against Fire
& Theft in transit to and from and whilst at the museums, as required by the Board of
Education.”
161
It listed premium percentages based upon the duration of insurance required, up to
six months. In citing the “Board of Education” the company was making a bid to be perceived as
a government contractor. Alan S. Cole (1846–1934, Henry Cole’s son, an Assistant Secretary at
the V&A) wrote back rejecting the proposal, but soon the Fine Art & General Assistant Manager
wrote again, citing an interview he had with the V&A Circulation Department Head, William

161
The note read as follows: “Special Notice. Your attention is directed to the fact that the Fine
Art & General Insurance Company Limited, of 90 Cannon Street, London, E. C. has arranged to
issue a comprehensive form of policy insuring loan collections against Fire & Theft in transit to
and from and whilst at the museums, as required by the Board of Education, at the following
rates:
For a period not exceeding one month = 2/6%
For a period exceeding one months but not exceeding two mos = 3/-%
For a period exceeding two months but not exceeding three mos = 3/6%
For a period exceeding three months but not exceeding six mos = 4/-%
For a period exceeding six months but not exceeding twelve mos = 5/-%”
169
Walter Watts, and offering further special provisions to entice the V&A, namely that the
company was “willing to delete the clause in its policy which gives it the power to pay the
amount insured in respect to the article damaged or destroyed and to retain the salvage.”
162
This
indicated the insurance company’s confidence in the government’s influence upon provincial
institutions, as the Fine Art was allowing the government to retain its own property should there
be a loss, instead of claiming it for salvage, wherein the objects in question would become
company property.
163

The second response came from British art institutions, who condemned what they saw as
a top-down financial constraint from the central lending museum. The backlash was articulated
by members of the Museums Association. Established in 1889 as the world’s first association for
arts curators and administrators to share intelligence about the museum sector, establish
governance and training protocols, and manage the field, the association boasted representatives
from major institutions as well as independent members. Its conference proceedings appeared in
its professional organ, Museums Journal (begun in 1901). As J. Lynne Teather has shown, the
association’s origins could be traced to interventions by writers such as economist William
Stanley Jevons, who in an 1881–82 article, “The Use and Abuse of Museums,” argued for the
creation of an effective museum bureaucracy, featuring a partnership between curators and
energetic “men of action” like engineers or bankers.
164

162
A similar letter came from H. B. Sedgwick & Co., a syndicate of Lloyd’s insurance brokers,
who wrote offering similar insurance rates and asking for a list of provincial museums. They also
noted that as the collections came from a Government Department, “Lloyd’s underwriters are
prepared to forego the usual formality of a detailed list of the objects sent out on circulation.”
163
See chapter three for examples of the way in which, as a part of its salvage clause, the Fine
Art & General Insurance Company, Ltd. occasionally took possession of artworks when there
was a loss.
164
W. S. Jevons, “The Use and Abuse of Museums,” Methods of Social Reform (1881), 80-81; J.
Lynne Teather, “The Museum Keepers: The Museums Association and the Growth of Museum
170
Museums Association members protested the V&A’s new insurance protocols at the
Association’s 1901 conference in Edinburgh. Museum and library administrator John
Maclauchlan (1838–1907) articulated this protest in a paper he presented entitled “Museum and
Art Insurance,” later published in the first issue of the Museums Journal. Chief librarian at the
Dundee Free Library from 1874 until his death in 1907, Maclauchlan had cut his teeth working
in the Perth Mechanics’ Library and had definite radical leanings: he was a Sunday-opening
advocate, and ardent proponent of public reading-rooms and art galleries, which he described as
“the people’s parlor[s].”
165
He also spent thirty years as the curator at the Albert Institute in
Dundee: an outpost for design education that frequently borrowed loan collections from the
V&A.
166

In his Museums Journal article, Maclauchlan argued that an apparently remote subject
like insurance was a “practical and pressing” concern to his colleagues, for as curators they
needed to understand its “mysteriously elastic doctrine of averages.”
167
High insurance was
endemic in the museum field, he argued, citing his work insuring artworks for forty years at
Dundee.
168
However, “during all these long years we have never had one accident, and so all the

Professionalism,” Museum Management and Curatorship 9, iss. 1 (1990): 25-41. In 1890, the
Museums Association featured twenty-seven institutions and fifty members, but by 1945 it
would grow to 472 institutions, 347 individuals, and 7 life members.
165
For references about the Sunday opening debate (wherein museums introduced Sunday hours
to target working-class populations) see my chapter four, p. 199, ff1. “Testimonial to Mr. John
Maclauchlan,” Dundee Courier, May 6, 1891.
166
The Fire Offices Committee was also involved in setting “All Risks” and “Transit” rates for
exhibits lent from the V&A to Dundee between 1908 and 1911. See Fire Offices’ Committee
Rules and Exhibition Rates, PX 1634, Phoenix Assurance Archive, Cambridge University
Library.
167
John Maclauchlan, “Museum and Art Insurance,” Museums Journal 1 (1901): 345-357.
168
For example, Maclauchlan stated that he once had to pay £50 to insure William Holman
Hunt’s The Shadow of Death (1873) which was valued at £10,500. Without knowing the exact
date this picture insurance took place, but averaging inflation costs between 1870 and 1900, this
is roughly £758,664 in 2017’s numbers: a massive sum.
171
money we have paid has been absolute profit to the companies.”
169
He was motivated to write
the paper due to two events: the aforementioned Board of Education Circular number 474
requiring all borrowing institutions to insure government property, and the Glasgow International
Exhibition of 1901, where Maclauchlan served as a committee member, and where insurance
companies charged high tariffs for the art and historical sections. Insurers charged rates four or
five times higher than regular rates, even though the Exhibition’s buildings were “absolutely
fireproof, and patrolled day and night by picked constables and experienced firemen, in charge of
the most up-to-date appliances,” these rates seemed to rise, “from some kind of necessity,”
unhinged from the artworks’ values.
170
For example, as he indicated with a supplementary table,
insurance rates on sculpture could rise as high as 10s to 25s percent, while fragile objects like
glass and china could require premiums at 10s percent [Fig. 62].
171

Maclauchlan argued that the unreasonable costs of exhibition insurance could potentially
be explained by the relative infrequent and exceptional nature of art exhibitions, and the

169
Further: “For over a generation I have been sending and receiving pictures by rail, sometimes
several thousands in a year, and never having had one destroyed or injured, never, of course,
received any compensation. Many of these were uninsured, and the immunity from accident was
so complete, that I came to regard the risk for which so much is frequently paid as perfectly
imaginary; and so, when sending my own property, or that of friends whom I advise, I never
insure, and, after special enquiry of all the curator members of this Association, I find the general
experience is the same as mine.” Maclauchlan, “Museum and Art Insurance,” 347.
170
He described that “it had been necessary to provide £350,000 all risks coverage on pictures
and £120,000 on historical and art objects at 4s. 6d. per cent.” Maclauchlan, 347. These numbers
were high. In a 1901 Fire Offices Committee circular outlining “Rules for the Regulation of
Insurance of Certain Public Property,” an annex included “Pictures, prints, paintings,
manuscripts, sculptures, articles of Virtu, Musical and Philosophical Instruments, Museum
Specimens” at 2/6 percent, the same amount listed for Gas Works and Car shed. Circular draft
dated May 17, 1901, PX 1566, F.O.C. Standard Policy Conditions (1900–1940), Phoenix
Assurance Archive, Cambridge University Library.
171
In the end the amounts insured for the Exhibition were valued at £1,179,233 13s 5d, with the
premium paid of £3,073 2s. In 2017 this would be a value of £92,183,290.36, and a premium
payment of £240,230.99 respectively. Transit insurance on objects received and returned to
owners cost £1,878 12s, or approximately £146,854.29 in 2017’s numbers.
172
insurance industry’s monopolistic control: “by the sporadic character and comparatively small
total of art insurances, which prevent that competition which is the great reducer of price in all
things.”
172
In a sparsely populated art insurance market, small companies—and here he cited the
industry’s main specialist company, the Fine Art & General Insurance Company, Ltd.—could
charge double fees, and prices could remain high regardless of an artwork’s values.
173
But,
Maclauchlan’s position as a member of the Museums’ Association enabled him to consult
colleagues working at natural history museums, and from them he learned that “the rates for
buildings, fittings, and natural history specimens are about the normal, and also that some
curators have been able to obtain very favorable terms for art insurances, which says much for
their business aptitude.”
174

Maclauchlan ended his account by making six recommendations. One was to argue that
municipalities should construct a “mutual alliance for the insurance of all civic property-
buildings, and general purposes, as well as museums, galleries, and libraries,” creating a “Mutual
Municipal Assurance Society.”
175
Membership would be extended to civic buildings in “good
standing” (presumably meaning that they were sturdily constructed and their administrations

172
Maclauchlan, 350.
173
Referring to the Fine Art & General Insurance Company, Ltd., Maclauchlan noted that it had
been “founded upon the right principle, for an expert examines works of art before insurance,
and, after a value is mutually agreed upon, the company binds itself to pay that amount in the
event of loss. But the premiums charged are, I must respectfully submit, quite double what they
might be, and I hope will soon become. I should very much like to see a profit and loss account
of the business of insurance companies, discriminating between their art, and ordinary fire
insurance.” Maclauchlan, 353.
174
Maclauchlan, 348.
175
This was to replace a specialist company like the Fine Art & General Insurance Company,
Ltd. Municipal insurance schemes on government property were rare, but increasingly under
discussion. In fact, in 1903 The Fine Art & General Insurance Co. Ltd. attempted to initiate a
Municipal Insurance Company scheme. Scheme for public insurance, CLC/B/055, London
Metropolitan Archive.
173
were economically solvent) and could borrow on as favorable terms as the government. Such a
scheme could charge favorably tailored premiums to different institutions depending upon their
risks. He did not indicate how the municipalities would run this alliance—that is, who would
lend personnel and capital to managing its operation—but confidently stated that “with capital at
command, if disasters did come in the early years, the money necessary would be available, and
would be gradually repaid.”
176

Maclauchlan’s third point pertained to the values of art objects, and was self-regulatory,
directed at his Museums Association colleagues positioned at larger institutions with more
capacious and potentially expensive collections. He argued that museums ought to systematically
get their art collections appraised at “real, and not fancy prices.” His point here—made perhaps
from the perspective of a radical library man—was to state that while some works were “unique,
and so priceless,” he thought that works of art were often insured for inflated values, “and it is
supreme folly to go on paying heavy premiums for prices [of lent works] which can never be
recovered.” The fourth point was to lobby for the regulation of the railway companies so that
they would have to pay for damages in transit:
They charge you a very high rate for the conveyance of your art objects, and then they
want you to pay them a further sum to prevent them injuring the things you pay them to
carry. An ordinary museum, or a private person, cannot fight them, for they always take
you to law, having a wealthy organization behind them, and, even if you win, your extra
judicial expenses probably amount to more than your claim. It is a system of immoral
persecution which these great companies wage against the humble citizen. They should
be grappled with.
177

His fifth and sixth points pertained to the Board of Education and the V&A Museum and argued
that the V&A’s insurance policies would create a tax burden for the provincial administrations

176
MacLauchlan, 355.
177
MacLauchlan, 355.
174
seeking to borrow loaned exhibits. Here, he highlighted the tension between the metropolis and
the provinces:
178

It does seem a little hard that the citizen who has the misfortune not to live in London,
Dublin, or Edinburgh, should pay for loss which is not charged against the dwellers in
these fortunate capitals. Robberies may occur in London museums, although guarded by
the elite of the London police, but when they do take place it is not the Common Council
of the City, or the County Council of Greater London, which is held responsible, or
compelled to pay heavy rates for insurance. Such rates might not press heavily on these
great and wealthy corporations, but they are rather hard on the smaller country museums,
whose chronic condition is starvation. Anything likely to cause the withdrawal of these
invaluable South Kensington loans will be really a national misfortune […] To patrol
efficiently a small country museum by day and night in the suggested by the Council of
the Board of Education will cost at least £150 per annum, an outlay prohibitory in many
cases.
179
[…] It is fortunate that the Board of Education have not asked us to insure
against breakage in transit. Insurance companies have a holy dread of porcelain—Lloyd’s
actually wanted 25s. per cent to insure that risk, and Glasgow actually paid that excessive
premium for statuary.
180

His sixth and last point, more controversially, suggested that regional museums might potentially
avoid appraising and insuring their goods altogether. Insurance was not described as a prudent,
paternal gesture, but as something distinctly venal—a way for museums to gain a monetary
windfall should a loss occur, and a claim need to be filed. His position here seemed to run
counter to perspectives on the art market where institutions, collections, and collectors had no
such compunctions about affixing monetary values to works as speculations:
If your city has got a charter, or your ancestor a patent of nobility from William the
Conqueror or Malcolm Canmore, lend these most interesting documents by all means,
and see that they are properly safeguarded, but do not vulgarize them by commercial
appraisement. Although you get the unfortunate museum, or exhibition, to insure them
for any number of thousands, what sum, however great, can restore them to you if lost,
and to insure such essentially uninsurable objects savors of gambling.

178
For tensions in the mid-nineteenth-century British “museum movement” between London as
central metropolis and later civic institutions in industrial metropolises, see Amy Woodson-
Boulton, Transformative Beauty: Art Museums in Industrial Britain (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2012), 17.
179
This would be approximately £11,725.83 in 2017.
180
Maclauchlan, 355-356.
175
Maclauchlan’s discourse to his colleagues may have had the desired effect, for between his
delivery of this paper, and its publication in Museums Journal, the Board of Education had
already relented. While they still seemed to require formally that provincial museums insure
V&A loans, this policy was hardly enforced. At the article’s printing it bore an opening footnote
that stated the Board of Education was not insisting upon insurance.
181
It appeared that the Board
of Education’s and the V&A’s insurance regulations were toothless.
Borrowing institutions and exhibitions still made provisions to insure V&A loans—or
said that they so did in the official loan form 605. The loan form became a flashpoint for
discussions about insurance of the government’s art property. Many examples of successful and
unsuccessful applications exist in the archive, and insurance was frequently a determining factor
in the committee’s decisions.
182
In examples of the latter, borrowers sometimes only partially
completed the application form and barely mentioned the provisions for insurance they would
introduce at their exhibition or institution, while other applicants were more conscientious.
183
For
example, the organizers of the 1901 “Croydon Needlework Exhibition” prominently wrote that

181
“Many of the grievances pointed out in this paper, which was written a year ago, have already
been removed. The insurance fire rate on art objects has been reduced from 4s. 6d. to 2s. 6d., and
the risks of fire and burglary combined are readily taken for 4s. — for burglary alone 5s. had
been asked. Then the Board of Education did not insist on their loan collections being insured
against theft in transit, and it is believed that the rule regarding night patrol will not be enforced,
if none of the objects are unique, and the collection is insured against burglary. The special
attention called to the subject at the Edinburgh meeting has thus been amply justified and has
resulted in a very large saving in insurance in which all museums can share.” Maclauchlan, 345.
182
Examples of form 605 may be found in the following files under “United Kingdom loans,
various”: MA/35/130 (1869–1888); MA/35/131 (1890–1899); MA/35/132 (1901–1905);
MA/35/133 (1911–1937); MA/35/134 (1904–1909), V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe
House London. In total I found at least thirty-five examples across the UK files, with the greatest
number (seventeen) in MA/35/131 UK various (1890–1899). However, this is just a fraction of
the number of loan applications, as many applicants also dispensed with the form entirely, using
more personal or provisional appeals to the central museum.
183
United Kingdom loans, various (1901–1905), MA/35/132, V&A Administrative Archive,
Blythe House London.
176
they would effect £10,000 insurance on loans: their application was successful [Fig. 63]. The
applicants for the 1904 “Arts & Crafts Exhibition” at Port Sunlight agreed to insure, and their
loan request was also successful, although this seemed a strange endorsement given that Port
Sunlight was not a civic municipality per se, but a model company village, which the Lever
Brothers built to house workers at their soap factory within the Municipal Borough of Bebington
in Cheshire [Fig. 64].
184
By contrast, the organizers requesting loans for the 1901 “Birmingham
Japanese Art Exhibition” were refused, for although the organizers indicated they would insure,
the fact that they were a “charity” meant that they fell outside of V&A lending regulations [Fig.
65]. Sometimes one of the administrators would write back with directions that the museum
would send loans only if the borrower took out a particular amount of insurance.
185

In 1909, form 605’s legal inconsistences created new problems for the V&A and the
discussion in the department minutes quickly shifted from administrative record-keeping and
appropriate forms to the peculiar ontological status and insurance of art objects. That year, a
Government School, Willesden Polytechnic in North-West London, neglected to return their
copy of the V&A’s standard receipt form six for borrowed items back to the central museum on
time. The school’s administration appealed because they were a small district and it was a simple
bureaucratic matter: no one was present from the Local Committee to sign the loan receipt in
time, which was one of the V&A’s regulatory requirements. What started out at the V&A as a

184
William H. Lever not only collected and curated contemporary art. He also amassed an
ethnographic collection: a byproduct of Lever Brothers’ palm oil plantations in the Belgian
Congo. See Brian Lewis, “So Clean”: Lord Leverhulme, Soap and Civilization (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2008); Andrew West, “The Business of Ethnography: W.H. Lever,
Collecting and Colonialism," Journal of Museum Ethnography 9 (May 1997): 101-114; D. K
Fieldhouse, Unilever Overseas: The Anatomy of a Multinational 1895–1965 (Stanford, CA:
Hoover Institution Press, 1978).
185
Administrators who sanctioned these loans included J. C. G. Sykes, A. S. Cole, and F. G.
Ogilvie.
177
somewhat tedious internal discussion about bureaucratic protocol and documentation
transformed into a bigger question about legal indemnity and insurable risk. Administrators
debated whether form 605 and form six were legally binding. Could the Central Museum seek
damages from a provincial institution on the strength of these loan documents alone? The V&A
Museum Director, Cecil Harcourt-Smith appealed to the museum’s Legal Department for
answers.
186
In a typed report from May 6, 1909, a V&A legal advisor argued that the V&A’s
administrative regulation forms for insurance and stewardship were not legally binding
documents. Form six, they argued, merely logged an objects’ receipt and stipulated that
borrowing institutions observe deadlines and preserve the items “from injury.” It was “clear that
the Regulations, if they formed part of a contract, would be quite useless for the purpose of
enforcing any obligation against the Museum Authorities.”
187
The sentence, “Their security and
safe return are guaranteed” could have no legal meaning, since no amount of guarantee would in
fact secure or provide for the safe return of goods, which may be irrevocably lost or destroyed.
The basic point was that due to the form’s wording, the museum would be unable to secure any
damages, should there be some kind of loss. Further, the legal counsel commented that the
Regulations did not clearly indicate the kinds of liabilities the Provincial Museum Authorities
should expect to cover, should there be a loss:
the conditions relating to the art loans were “peculiar” and it is not easy to say with any
certainty what the Common Law liability of the Provincial Museum Authorities is in
respect of articles lent to them as distinguished from their liability under contract. I am
inclined to think however that a Court would hold that they are not in the position of
insurers of the articles lent to them. I think the true view is that they would only be liable

186
Circulation Loans, Documents relating to loans to provincial museums and the insurance of
objects on loan, ED 84/126 (1897–1931), V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House London.
187
Circulation Loans, Documents relating to loans to provincial museums and the insurance of
objects on loan, ED 84/126 (1897–1931), V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House London..
178
for the loss or destruction of articles lent to them if negligence could be proved, and that
negligence is a question of fact which would have to be decided by a jury.
188

The legal advisor made a further point against insuring objects that were not considered
“valuable originals,” although the V&A administrator contended that all items were valued.

188
Some of the Legal advisor’s numbered observations are striking in the way that they draw
attention to the relative value of the items to be insured: “(8) If it is intended to base any claim
against the Provincial Museum on the common law and to rely on proof of negligence for the
recovery of damages in respect of the loss or destruction of articles, it is a little dangerous to
insert in the regulations any special provisions for the safe custody of the articles. The natural
conclusion to be drawn from Regulation 85 (III) is that it is not necessary that efficient
arrangements should be made for the safe custody of articles which are not both valuable and
original. No doubt what is intended is that arrangements which might be regarded as efficient for
articles, which are not valuable and original, would not be regarded as efficient for articles which
are valuable and original. If, however the case went to the jury at common law they would no
doubt say and consider that the nature of the arrangements to be made [so as to avoid a charge of
negligence] depended on the nature of the articles. IF, however, the Board make certain
requirements as to safe custody, it would naturally be argued [with considerable force] that there
could be no negligence if the standard laid down by the board itself was observed."
(9) If, however, it is not intended to rely on the common law but to rely on a special contract, it is
necessary to decide what exactly is to be the term of the contract. Is it intended to place the
Provincial Museum in the position of a common carrier and to hold them it liable for the articles
even in the absence of negligence? [Written response in margin: Yes. They are required to insure
against all risks] This is a very serious liability to impose on a Museum Authority. The matter is
made all the more difficult by the entire uncertainty as to the extent of the liability. Opinions as
to the value of a “valuable original” vary very considerably, and it is not easy to say what
damage would attach to its loss. [Written response in margin: Each object is valued before it
goes out.]
(10) It appears to me that there are four elements in the regulations:
(a) Precautions against fire, loss, and damage
(b) Inasmuch as in the event of loss, damages which are the only proper possible remedy [may]
afford an inadequate consolation for the loss of valuable original articles, it is necessary to take
special precautions that the objects are adequately safeguarded.
(c) Certain administrative arrangements are necessary for the adequate exhibition of the articles.
(d) Certain payments must be made by the Museum in respect of the carriage of the articles.
(11) With regard to (a) no doubt the Board satisfy themselves at present before the articles are
lent that they are insured against fire and theft to their full value, that the policy is in proper form
and that the proceeds of the policy will ensure to the benefit of the Board of Education.”
Circulation Loans, Documents relating to loans to provincial museums and the insurance of
objects on loan, ED 84/126 (1897–1931), V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House London.
179
These debates about the legality of bureaucratic documentation animate the fact that the
V&A was telling institutions to insure, but not actually enforcing these dictates. The V&A
inadvertently created a legal gray area in which, should a breakage or some other problem occur
at the provincial museum, the V&A and the government might have no recourse to seek
damages. Further, from a legal perspective, casts or copies were of questionable insurable value,
while ancient objects showing sign of wear, cracks, or breaks were uninsurable from a legal
point of view since they were already “damaged,” despite the age of their damage and the work’s
valued status.
189

So why was the V&A so anxious about seeking prospective damages, especially since so
few items had been broken or stolen over the V&A’s institutional history? It was perhaps due to
the constant threat of funding cuts, but also the changing status of the art objects in the
government’s collections, as well as increasing demands upon the state to send objects overseas.

(III) Insuring loans abroad

As we have seen, the Department of Science and Art inconsistently leveraged insurance
to apply pressure in its loan dealings with dependent institutions. From the 1890s into the first
decade of the twentieth century, the V&A’s insurance discussions became more frequent and
intense. The central museum’s position as powerful government body in charge of a large mass
of circulating artworks meant that its decisions had a global impact. In its loans abroad, it
grudgingly prioritized loans to some prestigious international exhibitions, and to Britain’s
predominantly white settler colonies, but tended to strictly limit (if not curtail entirely) loans to

189
A debate in 1910 about the Museum’s potential insurance policy underscored this problem.
Insurance of Works of Art (1874–1953), ED 84/385, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe
House London.
180
countries in the broader British Empire. It used higher-level administrators as well as lower-level
functionaries to make insurance arrangements and perform assessments that approximated
insurance protocols, but it also outsourced these functions to a series of different insurance
companies. For the V&A, insurance became an important, invisible, soft power implement for its
colonial governmentality.
190

In the 1890s and early 1900s, the V&A fielded many requests for loans to international
exhibitions. However, its reasons for assenting to some but not to others were often unclear. For
example, in 1891, Charles Washington Eves (1838–1899), British merchant trader in Jamaica
who had represented Jamaica at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London sent a
request for loans on behalf of the 1891 Jamaica Industrial & Manufacturing Exhibition.
191
Held
at the Kingston Racecourse just twenty-six years after the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion—the
explosive protests by black Jamaicans against continuing British colonial brutality and inequality
even after slavery’s formal end—and inspired by the Great Exhibition of 1851, this was to be the
first major international exhibition in the West Indies, intended to stimulate trade and tourism to

190
The literature on the colonial and imperial import of international exhibitions is vast. While
there are too many articles to cite, early volumes include Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient:
Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992); Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe, eds., Theorizing Museums: Expressing
Identity and Diversity in a Changing World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Ivan Karp and Steven D.
Levine, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn, eds., Colonialism and the
Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (London: Routledge, 1998); Patricia A.
Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition,
Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History
and Cultural Display (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007).
191
Eves was the Exhibition’s Committee Chairman stationed in England. Jamaica Exhibition of
1891, MA/35/62, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House London..
181
the colony.
192
Assuring the board that transit time would be brief, and safe passage would be
guaranteed, but making no mention of insurance, he stated, “We understand that it is the practice
to lend such objects for Exhibition in different parts of the United Kingdom and we trust that the
same course may be adopted in regard to Jamaica.”
193
But in the V&A internal minutes, Philip
Cunliffe Owen and John Donnelly tersely agreed that “the proposed Exhibition does not come
within the scope of the Museum’s Regulations. We can only lend to Museums and Exhibitions in
connection with the Department.”
194
Their decision made little sense, given that they frequently
lent to other exhibitions with no explicit link to the V&A. For example, just three years prior,
they assented to loan four cases of fictile ivories, electrotypes, and drawing examples to the 1888
Exhibition of Arts and Industries in Copenhagen.
195
They also lent to America, Ireland, but less
extensively to Australia.
196
So even though reformers worked to introduce Arts & Crafts

192
Wayne Modest, “‘A Period of Exhibitions,’ World’s Fairs, Museums, and the Laboring Black
Body in Jamaica,” in Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer, eds. Victorian Jamaica (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2018), 523-550.
193
Jamaica Exhibition of 1891, MA/35/62, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House London.
194
Jamaica Exhibition of 1891.
195
A fictile ivory is a plaster cast made from an existing ivory carving. The cast is then dipped in
stearine, an animal byproduct that mimics ivory’s waxy surface. Diane Bilbey and Ruth Cribb,
“Plaster Models, Plaster Casts, Electrotypes and Fictile Ivories,” in The Making of Sculpture, ed.
Marjorie Trusted (London: V&A, 2007), 152-171. This loan caused an internal insurance debate,
as the Danish committee was prepared to pay the freight from Hull to Copenhagen and back, as
well as the insurance (£1,650 or roughly £135,381.35 in 2017), and then to assist in unpacking,
arranging, and repacking the loans at the Exhibition site. However, the British Treasury insisted
that the British taxpayer incur no costs whatsoever for the loan and requested full insurance
coverage for all risks on land and sea, and also full freight coverage from London to Hull.
Copenhagen Exhibition of 1888, MA/35/17, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House
London.
196
From the 1872 Exhibition of Arts, Industries, and Manufactures in Dublin, South Kensington
was in the practice of sending loan collections to Dublin. However, for the 1872 exhibition, they
refused to send any ceramic objects, leading the Chairman of the Irish Committee to send a
begging letter for such examples. A much larger selection of items was sent to the 1907 Dublin
International Exhibition. Ireland, Dublin (1872–1917), MA/35/49, V&A Administrative Archive,
Blythe House London. In March 1904, the collector Hugh Lane notified the V&A that the
“Historic Loan Collection of Irish Art” intended for St. Louis, Missouri was cancelled because of
182
education to Jamaica, perhaps the V&A denied the request because the colony was primarily
seen as a producer of agricultural raw commodities rather than manufactures: the workforce
therefore was assumed to be insufficiently industrial.
197

While the V&A’s decision to deny loans to the 1891 Jamaica Industrial & Manufacturing
Exhibition was opaque, but potentially rested at least in part upon concerns about risks to the
objects, the V&A administrators explicitly leveraged insurance concerns in their responses to
loan requests from India. In June 1902, the Viceroy of India, George Curzon (1859–1925,
serving from 1899 to 1905) wrote through the India Office to request loans of Indian Art
manufactures for the Delhi Durbar Indian Art Exhibition, to be staged by the Government of
India’s Department of Revenue and Agriculture. This was one of the three coronation
celebrations for British Monarchs.
198
Curzon cited a drain of objects out of India, “with the result
that approved master-pieces of many varieties of Indian Art are now no longer obtainable in the

“the difficulty of building a really fire-proof building at such an Exhibition, and the great
expense,” and so instead a Loan Exhibition was put together for the Guildhall Gallery in London,
and ten paintings from the V&A were loaned and insured for a total of £5,000. Irish Art Loans
Exhibition, MA/35/103, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House London. See also Morna
O’Neill, Hugh Lane: The Art Market and the Art Museum, 1893–1915 (London: Paul Mellon
Centre for Studies in British Art, 2018), 191-227.
197
Modest, “A Period of Exhibitions,” 538. While this 1891 request was denied, later requests
from Jamaica were honored, but only grudgingly. A similar request came in from South Africa in
1907. The V&A administrator mentioned that they had just lent a collection to Jamaica earlier
that year, and a similar collection might now be sent to South Africa under the same
circumstances: the V&A would lend no original works to the colonies, only the Museum’s least
valuable items: copies of student work, defunct casts taking up space in South Kensington, and
other objects including “casts and photographs of wood carvings; colored drawings and
photographs of embroideries; pottery and tiles; electrotype reproductions of repoussé work.” And
yet, somewhat incongruously, given the low value of the collections, the administrator in charge
insisted, “The colony would, I take it, pay all expenses of insurance and transit.” St Petersburg
and South Africa Exhibitions, MA/35/77, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House London.
198
The other two Durbars were for Edward VII, Prince of Wales in 1877, and for King George V
in 1911.
183
country.”
199
The Department agreed to send a loan collection in traveling cases, including
applied arts such as inlay and metalwork, and a set of twelve paintings in two frames [Fig. 66].
These were so-called “Company Paintings”: watercolor paintings produced by native Indian
artists for East India Company employees around 1845 and purchased by South Kensington in
1871. These paintings depicted seventeenth-century inlaid marblework or pietra dura tablets
from the central wall behind the throne in the Hall of Audience within the Red Fort at Delhi: a
massive seventeenth-century complex built by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan [Fig. 67].
200
In the
Indian Mutiny of 1857, the fort had been a stronghold for Indian rebels, but they were crushed
and the fort was heavily looted and then transformed into a British Army garrison.
201
During the
Mutiny, a British Colonel, John Jones looted twelve panels of flowers, birds, and the central
panel above the Emperor’s throne depicting Orpheus singing to the beasts, and sold them to the
British Government for £500, after which they ended up in the South Kensington Museum.
202
As
a part of his project to renovate the Hall of Audience in time for its use in the 1903 Coronation
Durbar, Curzon requested these panels be returned: a self-serving request, for as Grand Master
for the Durbar ceremonies, it was planned that he should sit below the marble throne where the
original inlays were to be reinstalled, and the optics of holding such a ceremony under shoddily
reconstructed inlays would have been poor.
203
The V&A sent the inlays with the larger loan

199
Letter May 8, 1902, India, Delhi: Exhibition of Indian Art (Delhi Durbar exhibition),
MA/35/48, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House London.
200
As it was known in Italian, pietra dura means “hard stone.” See also Anisha Shekhar
Mukherji, Red Fort of Shahjahanabad (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), chapters
seven and eight.
201
Mrinalini Rajagopalan, Building Histories: The Archival and Affective Lives of Five
Monuments in Modern Delhi (University of Chicago Press, 2017), 7, 27-57.
202
Two of these inlays were turned into tabletops. Derek Linstrum, “The Sacred Pasts: Lord
Curzon and the Indian Monuments,” South Asian Studies 11, no. 1 (1995): 1-17.
203
“On such an occasion it would appear singularly desirable that the background of the throne
should represent to the assembled spectators, by a careful restoration to its original condition, not
184
collection in eight cases to Delhi that November 1902 [Fig. 68]. By July 1903, the museum sent
an enquiry to the India Office asking about when the loan would be returned. In May 1903, the
official shipping agents Thomas Cook & Sons sent the eight cases back to London, insuring them
for £3,100.
204
The loan collection arrived back in Britain in July and administrators were
annoyed to note damages to the loans in their reports, including stones missing from jeweled
cases and environmental damages to ivories that were so minor that minimal amounts of
insurance could be claimed: £7 13s [Fig. 69, 70].
205
A dented silver plate was repaired by
Elkington & Co, a firm of electrotypers and metalsmiths.
206

Adding to the V&A’s irritation, the government in India decided to retain the two frames
containing the company paintings. The Calcutta Department of Revenue and Agriculture wrote
to the V&A to inquire if the watercolors could be kept as references to help restore the Hall of
Audience. Assistant keeper of the V&A’s Indian Section, C. Stanley Clarke (the eldest son of the
V&A Director, Caspar Purdon Clarke) noted in response to this request, “these drawings are
historical documents of some value and would be better preserved here than in India. But we
have no power to give away objects acquired through the Parliamentary Vote, and I recommend
that we inform the Calcutta Gov’t so and suggest that they should have copies made by native
artists and then return the originals.”
207
The Indian government returned the pictures.
208

the vandalism of an earlier generation, but the generous enlightenment of a later and more
cultured age.” Dispatch to Secretary of State (Revenue No. 61) September 18, 1902, in
Rashtrapati Bhavan, Indian Archaeology (1899–1905) (Privately Printed, 1905), 386.
204
This would be about £242,333.82 in 2017.
205
About £598.02 in 2017.
206
India, Delhi: Exhibition of Indian Art (Delhi Durbar exhibition) MA/35/48, V&A
Administrative Archive, Blythe House London.
207
Clarke, minute of August 8, 1904, India, Delhi: Exhibition of Indian Art.
208
Julie F. Codell, “On the Delhi Coronation Durbars, 1877, 1903, 1911” Branch,
https://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=julie-codell-on-the-delhi-coronation-durbars-
185
The request and the V&A’s response highlighted several key points about the V&A’s
custodianship that echo familiar arguments against restitution of other British-looted objects by
institutions like the British Museum, but also reveal how forms of insurance were leveraged in
these loans.
209
First, the British government sent works originating in India back to its own
government in India only grudgingly, citing a familiar argument that local trustees were unable
to provide the level of custodianship that the V&A thought it best could supply, even as the
British had ravaged the Hall of Audience in the first place. Second, the dizzying circulation of
imperial displacements: looting of original inlays; restitution of inlays; loaning of watercolors;
and denial of request to gift/retrieval of watercolors. We might also say that the original
purchasing of the Company Paintings could be a first act of imperial appropriation.
210
Third, that
photographs were never suggested as a stand-in by either side; and fourth, that insurance losses
(no matter how minor) were leveraged to support the V&A’s case.
The Delhi Durbar loan debate was consequential in another sense, for it would later be
used as evidence for denying another Indian loan request, this time in 1910 from Allahabad (now
Prayagraj, in Uttar Pradesh).
211
In 1910, the Secretary of the Executive Committee of the United
Provinces Exhibition wrote to the V&A to ask for a loan of objects of “historical and artistic
value” to display in the massive international exhibition to be held in Allahabad [Fig. 71]. They

1877-1903-1911. See also, Julie F. Codell, Power and Resistance: the Delhi Coronation
Durbars, 1877, 1903, 1911 (Ahmedabad: Mapin, 2012).
209
Arguments for restitution and reparations of looted nineteenth-century colonial objects
continue to mount, with the most recent and most frequently cited intervention being Dan Hicks,
The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (London:
Pluto Press, 2020).
210
Mildred Archer, assisted by Graham Parlett, Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the
British Period (London: Victoria & Albert Museum and Mapit Publishing Pvt. Ltd, Ahmedabad,
1992): Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 133-170.
211
Allahabad 1910, MA/35/47, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House London.
186
assured the V&A administrators that “the exhibits sent out by you would be insured by Lloyd’s
or some other firm at the expense of the Exhibition Funds” and they added that shipping
concessions were already being negotiated, while railway and customs concessions were already
obtained.
212
Further, a permanent sub-committee was already based in London in the same
building with Thomas Cook & Sons, who were again the organizing shipping agents.
On March 8, 1910, C. Stanley Clarke drafted a ten-point response to explain why the
Allahabad request should be denied. First, he noted that the Indian Section of the V&A was in
the process of rearrangement, and that department was also understaffed. To remove the
collections would disrupt the rearranging schema and,
the India Museum will be deprived of a magnificent series of objects from October 1910
to probably May or June 1911. This would prove disastrous both to the work in hand and
to the appearance and interest of the New Rooms. Cases exhibiting apologetic labels in
place of important objects away on loan, would, I am afraid, create an unfavorable
impression both with the press and the public.

But more forcefully he stated,
Our magnificent loan of Indian objects issued, at Lord Curzon’s special request, to the
Delhi Durbar Exhibition, in 1903, should not be taken as a precedent in judging the
application…This 1903 Durbar loan collection was returned from Delhi, after an absence
of eight months, badly packed, in dirty condition, with glass frames broken, a silver
vessel buckled and dented (necessitating repair by Messrs Elkington Ltd.), and our best
inlaid panel of the Moghul period damaged–its ivory laminae warped and curling–
probably through exposure to strong sunlight. Altogether our first India loan result is
neither encouraging nor an incentive to lend again.
213

Director Cecil Harcourt-Smith approved Clarke’s report and the loan request was officially
denied.
*

212
Allahabad 1910, MA/35/47, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House London.
213
Allahabad 1910.

187
In the first decade of the twentieth century, the V&A’s international lending and
insurance policies shifted. Economic, political, and legislative changes in Britain were in part
responsible for these changes. In the early 1900s, the Tory Colonial Secretary Joseph
Chamberlain (1836–1914) campaigned to institute a counter-Free Trade doctrine of “Imperial
Preference,” in which British Imperial states would be brought together through relaxed trade
agreements: a means to unify the British Empire against protectionist economic rivals like
Germany, who were introducing new restrictive import duties.
214
This policy was not adopted, as
stronger British confederated states like Canada protested its oversight. Although the trade goods
that “Imperial Preference” would have regulated were agricultural and commercial, it would
have also affected shipping contracts, and in general it revealed the shifting approaches to tariffs
and overseas trade. In 1906, a striking general election upset brought a new Liberal government
into power. Between 1906 and 1914 the new government instituted unprecedented welfare
reforms leading the Old-Age Pension Act of 1908, and later the “People’s Budget” of 1909.
215

These reforms also coincided with reforms to art institutions and to arts policy around
international exhibitions. As Alexander Geppert has described, and as I have mentioned above,
from the 1880s, European nations began to form special associations to manage representation at
international exhibitions. France already had the Comité d’initiative des expositions françaises à
l’étranger, a private association, while a private association formed for Germany in 1907: the
Ständige Ausstellungskommission für die deutsche Industrie /Ausstellungs- und Messeausschuß

214
Eric Evans, The Shaping of Modern Britain: Identity, Industry, and Empire, 1780–1914
(London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 389.
215
The “People’s Budget” included redistributive taxation on British landed wealth to fund
social welfare programs. The proposal was temporarily blocked in the House of Lords before the
Parliament Act of 1911 removed the House of Lords’ power to veto money bills proposed in the
Commons. Neal Blewett, “The franchise in the United Kingdom 1885–1918,” Past & Present 32
(1965): 27-56.
188
der Deutschen Wirtschaft (AUMA).
216
The British also formed an association, although in
contrast to the usually private nature of British exhibition organizing, their association was
publicly run. In October 1906, then-President of the Board of Trade, David Lloyd George (1863–
1945), appointed a committee to review Britain’s participation in international exhibitions. Its
mandate was as follows:
To inquire and report as to the nature and extent of the benefit accruing to British arts,
industries and trade, from the participation of this country in great International
Exhibitions; whether the results have been such as to warrant His Majesty’s Government
in giving financial support to similar exhibitions in future, and, if so, what steps, if any,
are desirable in order to secure the maximum advantage from any public money
expended on this object.
217

The committee met thirty times and put 8,022 questions to fifty-six witnesses. An ensuing 377-
page report discussed the effects of exhibitions on British arts, industries, and trade; analyzed
British participation in previous expositions, and gave recommendations for more effective
organizing. The committee determined that fewer exhibitions should be organized, registering
what Geppert has identified as an international “exhibition fatigue” plaguing organizing nations
and visitors to exhibitions alike.
218
Comparing British support for exhibition organization with
other European nations like Austria-Hungary, France, Belgium, Italy, and Germany, the
commission underscored that British exhibitors generally shouldered costs themselves, and

216
Alexander Geppert, Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (London
and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 217-221, 280. As Geppert notes, further committees
were formed in Belgium (1903), Italy (1905), Hungary (1907), Denmark (1908), Switzerland
(1908), Austria (1910). It would be instructive to compare all of their approaches to insurance for
art works, but unfortunately that is beyond the scope of this project.
217
Report of the Committee appointed by the Board of trade to make enquiries with reference to
the participation of Great Britain in great international exhibitions, together with the appendices
thereto [and Minutes of evidence ... appendices and index] Presented to both houses of
Parliament by command of His Majesty (London: Wyman and Sons for H. M. S. O., 1907), iv.
218
Alexander Geppert, “Conclusion: Exhibition Fatigue, or the Rise and Fall of a Mass
Medium,” Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (London and New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 201-247.
189
pointed out that British sections at exhibitions were frequently organized too late to secure
desired installation spaces and—highly relevant for the purposes of my argument—they also
were unable to secure lower insurance premiums, especially on Fine Art Sections, as other
countries had already obtained blanket insurances. This belated organizing often caused the
insurance market for blanket exhibition coverage to temporarily inflate, taxing government
budgets.
219

The new Exhibitions Committee would put its recommendations into practice after this
report. In 1910 and 1911 it organized British displays for three exhibitions: the Brussels
Exposition universelle, the Turin International, and the International Exhibition of Art in
Rome.
220
As it would turn out, the vital role that the V&A would play in organizing the British
section at the Brussels Exposition, and the display’s unfortunate outcome, determined how
organizers planned the other two exhibitions, with a profound impact upon insurance and risk
policies.
The V&A’s personnel, space, and collections were enmeshed in the exhibitions’
organization. The Royal Commission was overseen by the Prince of Wales, while the Earl of
Lytton and Swire Smith (a Liberal manufacturer) were Chairman and Vice-Chairman. The
Commission collaborated with the Board of Trade’s Exhibition Committee to prepare a loan
collection of English furniture, china, tapestry, and fabrics covering the sixteenth to the

219
Report of the Committee appointed by the Board of trade to make enquiries with reference to
the participation of Great Britain in great international exhibitions, together with the appendices
thereto [and Minutes of evidence ... appendices and index] Presented to both houses of
Parliament by command of His Majesty (London: Wyman and Sons for H. M. S. O., 1907), 15,
22.
220
Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Bruxelles (Wereldtentoonstelling te Brusse) April
23 to November 1, 1910; Turin International (Esposizione internazionale dell'industria e del
lavoro), held from April 29, 1911 to November 19, 1911, and the International Exhibition of Art
in Rome (Esposizione internazionale d'arte) held from April 29, 1911 to November 19, 1911.
190
eighteenth centuries and organized into period rooms: subjects calculated to interest Belgian
viewers, given Belgian specialties in textiles and because this British material was evidently
little-known on the Continent. At the urging of Commissioner-general for Fine Arts Sir Isidore
Spielmann, V&A Director Cecil Harcourt-Smith chaired the Loan Collections’ sub-committee,
along with John Gill as Vice-Chairman.
221
In April 1910, Smith wrote a letter appealing to
British collectors to lend examples of “Tapestries of Mortlake and Soho; British Needlework and
Textiles; British Furniture and Gold and Silver Plate; and a few pieces of characteristic British
Porcelain and Pottery.” Smith stated that the committee was:
empowered by the Board of Trade to assure those who are good enough to lend objects
that every care will be taken by the Board of any article which may be entrusted to them
for Exhibition purposes. All expenses of collecting, packing and transport to and from the
Exhibition will be defrayed from the grant sanctioned by H.M. Treasury, as well as the
cost of insuring each object against all risks from the time it leaves the owner’s
possession until its return upon the termination of the Exhibition. For this purpose, it is
desired to know the value of each article.
222

He further stated that articles lent could be sent to the Victoria & Albert Museum where they
would be received for trial assembly, and packed and shipped at the government's expense.
They managed to assemble a large collection, and the North Court at the Victoria & Albert
Museum was used as a trial staging space, packing ground, and shipping depot for works
collected from lenders.
When the exhibits began arriving in Brussels, the V&A administrators soon realized that
security at the site was a problem. The Brussels exhibition was held in the city’s southern

221
The full Loan Collection Committee included Sir Cecil H. Smith, Chairman, John H. Gill,
Vice-Chairman, Charles Carrick Allom, Esq., Frank Warner Esq. (silk manufacturer), W. H.
Romaine-Walker Esq. (architect). There was also a separate “Decoration and Installation
Committee,” where Spielmann and U. F. Wintour were representatives. Report […] at Brussels,
Rome & Turin, 1910 & 1911, 16-19.
222
Belgium, Brussels 1909–1910, MA/35/10/1, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House
London.
191
Solbosch district, where it covered 220 acres partly on the grounds of the 1897 Brussels
Exposition, and at the Palace of the Colonies in Tervueren. It featured twenty-six participating
countries. At the exhibition site, 4,580 square feet were reserved for the Applied Art exhibit. The
Belgian hosts offered this amount of space to offset the lack of the British Fine Art on display.
Cecil Harcourt-Smith wrote in alarm to Edmund Wyldbore-Smith to state that Mr. Torrens and
the attendant Norman had unpacked and arranged electrotype exhibits there and reported:
that a certain number of thefts have already taken place from the British Section, and that
a condition of general insecurity obtains there which alarms me very much for the
valuable objects which have been collected for the Loan Exhibition. […] Should any
disaster occur to any of the objects lent I feel that some responsibility attaches to me
personally vis-a-vis the lenders, not only as Chairman of the sub-Committee, but also as
having signed the letters of application. I am very sorry to do anything which may add to
the anxieties which I know you and Mr. Wintour are having in connection with this
Exhibition, but I am sure that you will agree that under the circumstances, I cannot accept
this responsibility unless a guarantee can be given me by your Board which will relieve
me of all serious ground for anxiety. Pending this, I feel that I am not justified in
dispatching [sic] to Brussels the few small loans of value, which are in my hands here:
these are, the two silver potato rings belonging to Lord Newlands, and a covered vase
belonging to Lord Swaythling.
223

Wintour wrote back to assure him to assure him that they had reliable guards including a chief of
police and a good dog to guard them. Cecil Harcourt-Smith responded with further fears that
thieves were even breaking into the exhibits through the floors: “in fact, it was even stated to me
that there were trap doors, which facilitated their access in this way. It was, further, stated to me
that when the Police caught one of these marauders, they merely inflicted summary chastisement
and ejected him, but took no further steps towards punishing him.”
224
He agreed that a London
Policeman “would probably be as efficient in such a case as the local man, who would be better
accustomed to local ways and personalities.”

223
Belgium, Brussels 1909–1910, MA/35/10/1.
224
Belgium, Brussels 1909–1910.
192
The above points were important because when the exposition fire took place, the V&A
worried that as it had served as a mediator for lenders, and had also provided insurance coverage,
it would be liable for damages. They sent Robert F. Martin, the Circulations officer frequently
tasked with assessing claims, to investigate the scene of the fire. On August 18, 1910 Martin
reported on the Board’s loan to the Exhibition. After meeting with Ulrick Wintour of the Board
of Trade, and with Lord Lytton, the three traveled to Brussels where Martin learned that one of
the loaned tapestries had survived, along with twelve of the electrotypes. These were all being
kept at Wintour’s residence and Martin inspected them and noted, “As far as I could judge, the
tapestry is not damaged by fire or smoke.” Martin arranged for the objects to remain there until
the insurance companies permitted the objects to be removed. Martin then proceeded to the
exhibition grounds to view the British section’s remains. What he saw seemed mainly
unsalvageable:
After a careful examination of a great part of the original space, I concluded that it would
be practically impossible to salve any of the objects; some few pieces of Wedgwood
some Toby jugs were picked up and put aside as curiosities, they having been completely
baked, and now appearing only as the “biscuit” without color; they are all damaged, and
will probably crumble to pieces when moved, being mostly cracked.
With respect to the electrotypes, I could just recognize parts of them, they all
having been completely baked, and now only the copper parts of some few pieces being
left, it will be hardly worth attempting to gather the fragments together.
The whole of the ground is one mass of tangled ironwork, everything that could
burn has gone; the ground consists of broken glass and ashes, most of it being burnt
pottery ash; the glass has fused and melted, and then congealed into large irregular
masses, some attached to the few remains of baked pottery, some to the copper of the
electrotypes.
The ashes vary in depth from two inches to twelve inches in places, an average
probably of five inches at the places where the Art objects were exhibited; these ashes
were still hot when we were there.
It would take some weeks to rake over the ground, and even if such a course were
practicable, I do not think that anything of value would be found. The whole place is an
absolute ruin.
The locks of the cases being of brass, probably melted when the cases were burnt.
193
The electrotypes which have been saved are in some instances damaged, and a claim will
have to be made on these objects for repairing them, as also for the total loss of the
others, and the burnt Tapestry of Lord Newton.
The attached cards give a good idea of the state of the ground.
225

His descriptions—salvageable articles, average depth of ashes, varied states of the building’s
remains, “fused,” “congealed” etc. approximated observations that an insurance assessor might
produce, with notable differences in the professional precision of Martin’s language: rather than
describing the mass of remains in general terms as a “total loss,” or “salvageable,” he used terms
like “biscuit” (or bisque), the correct word for unglazed pottery.
Like an insurance adjuster, Martin also provided visual evidence for the Board’s losses.
But rather than attach a drawing of the scene, as he had done in 1901 in his forensic analysis of
the stolen objects from the Passmore Edwards Museum, this time Martin supplied a halftone
news photograph of the ruins of the British section, and two photographic postcards of the ruins:
one representing the remains of the Food Palace, and the other showing the ruins of the Belgian
section [Fig. 72]. Postcards were often provided at fairs in line with international exposition
advertising strategies. As Amy Ogata and Britt Salvesen have shown, such pictorial mementos
generally promoted an exhibition’s magnificent architecture, piquant attractions, famous
attendees, choreographic landscaping, and strolling crowds.
226
Like many world’s fairs, the
Brussels exhibition’s overall publicity scheme was aggressively visual, incorporating omnibus
advertising, posters, and especially postcards.
227
The Exhibition Committee had pitched the
postcard’s mobility as an economic engine for Belgium’s graphic industries:

225
Belgium, Brussels 1909–1910.
226
Britt Salvesen, “ ‘The Most Magnificent, Useful, and Interesting Souvenir’: Representations
of the International Exhibition of 1862,” Visual Resources 13, no. 1 (1997): 1-32.
227
For examples of world’s fairs souvenirs including optical devices, fans, lithographs, and even
jewelry, see Amy Ogata, “Viewing Souvenirs: Peepshows and the International Expositions,”
Journal of Design History 15, no. 2 (2002): 69-82.
194
The Brussels exhibition will further stimulate the activity of our engravers and our
designers. The postcard will triumph once again, and through it our World’s fair will be
known to the ends of the world.
228

It is estimated that over 5,000 different postcards of the Brussels Exposition were produced by
the official committees and private exhibitors, although numbers may have been higher.
229
So it
is perhaps no surprise that the exhibition authorities produced postcard views of the fire’s
destruction [Fig. 73]. The logic was to show that the fire had not consumed the entire exhibition,
and to also stimulate interest for potential fairgoers in the exposition’s last two months. In some
cases authorities had pre-existing postcards painted over with colorized flames [Fig. 22].
230
In
another striking meta-image, a stand for a leading Scottish picture-postcard manufacturer,
Valentine & Sons, was photographed against a backdrop of the wreckage [Fig. 74]. It is almost
as though the postcard captured and grimly sharpened the exposition’s inherently transient
nature.
231
And yet, while these images were unusual for exposition advertising, the disaster

228
L’exposition de Bruxelles va stimuler encore l’activité de nos graveurs et de nos dessinateurs.
La carte postale va triompher une fois encore et par son intermédiaire notre World’s fair sera
connue aux confins du monde. Cited at
http://users.telenet.be/expo1910/expofirst.html?htm/expocp.html. See also “La publicité,”
Exposition Universelle 1910. Le Livre d’Or de l’Exposition universelle et Internationale de
Bruxelles en 1910 (Bruxelles: Em. Rossel, 1910), 291-294.
See also https://www.worldfairs.info/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3273
229
http://users.telenet.be/expo1910/expofirst.html?htm/valentine.html
230
Exposition Universelle 1910, Le Livre d'Or de l'Exposition universelle et Internationale de
Bruxelles en 1910 (Bruxelles: Em. Rossel, 1910).
231
At least one grisly photograph taken in the menagerie’s ruins depicted two deceased
crocodiles. This, too, was made into a commemorative postcard. On postcard literature, see
Sandra Ferguson, “‘A Murmur of Small Voices:’ On the Picture Postcard in Academic
Research,” Archivaria 60 (2006): 167-84. Eric J. Evans and Jeffrey Richard, History of Britain in
Postcards 1870–1930 (London: Longman, 1980). Julia Gillen, “The Picture Postcard at the
Beginning of the Twentieth Century: Instagram, Snapchat or Selfies of an Earlier Age?” in
Literacy, Media and Technology: Past, Present and Future, eds. Becky Parry, Cathy Burnett and
Guy Merchant (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 11-2.; David Prochaska, “Thinking
Postcards,” Visual Resources 17, no. 4 (2001): 383–99; Saloni Mathur, “Collecting Colonial
Postcards: Gender and the Visual Archive,” in India By Design: Colonial History and Cultural
195
postcard was hardly novel, as numerous postcards depicting the wreckage of the great Paris
Flood of 1910 were produced earlier that year.
232

But more unusually, V&A assessor Robert F. Martin provided these memento images as
insurantial forensic proof for the V&A’s material losses, despite the fact that they did not depict
the British pavilion. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “chronotope,” Geppert has argued
that after the 1880s, international exhibitions’ transitory and fictional spaces were means for
depicting and re-presenting “frozen time.”
233
That is, by including model villages or “Old” towns
meant to invoke, for example, an ancient British street, they imaginatively transported visitors to
other eras within the fair’s circumscribed space. While in such contexts insurance was ostensibly
practical, given unknown variables like natural disasters or visitor numbers, the concept of
insurance, geared as it is towards “futurity” created a tension with an exhibition’s transience.
The Brussels Exhibition fire spurred further panic in the international exhibition circuit.
For the subsequent exhibition in 1911 at Turin, the British Exhibitions Committee had
fortunately already negotiated a blanket insurance cover in 1909 which individual exhibitors
could buy into at a third of the going rate, but costs rose precipitously for the uninsured.
234
At the

Display (University of California Press, 2007), 109-132; and recently, Lydia Pyne, Postcards:
The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Social Network (London: Reaktion Books, 2021).
232
Jeffrey Jackson, Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 161; Ronald W. Perry and E. L. Quarantelli, eds, What
is a Disaster? New Answers to Old Questions (United States: International Research Committee
on Disasters, 2005).
233
Alexander Geppert, Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (London
and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
234
“Another notable instance of economy effected for exhibitors at the Turin Exhibition was in
the case of insurance. Owing to the disastrous fire which occurred at the Brussels Exhibition,
insurance premiums for Turin rose to panic rates. The Royal Commission realized the necessity
of taking special precautions against the recurrence of a serious fire, and by publishing an
explicit statement of the steps which they had decided to take they obtained at about one-third of
the rates quoted to individual firms a large amount of insurance cover, from which exhibitors
were enabled to take small policies to cover all risks of loss or damage to their goods from the
196
Rome Exhibition, where Sir Isidore Spielmann organized a special fine art display, all of the
British exhibits sent to Rome except plaster sculptures were fully insured against all risks for
about £600,000.
235
Later, V&A administrators would cite the Brussels fire when refusing
requests from Dominion countries seeking valuable art loans. For example, in an internal
department minute of December 1910, Museum Director Cecil Harcourt-Smith suggested using
the Brussels fire as an excuse to refuse loans of pictures from the Sheepshanks Collection of
British pictures to the semi-annual Toronto Exhibition, to which in recent years the museum had
assented to picture loans.
236
In reality, the Museum simply wished to discourage Dominion
countries from repeatedly borrowing the V&A’s collections:
it occurs to me that a loan of pictures of this kind for five successive years to the
Government of Canada is rapidly sliding us into the position of having to continue the
arrangement permanently and of sliding the Dominion Government into the position of
looking to our Museum as a certain source of loans every year. And this seems to me
extremely dangerous, if for no other reason because if other of His Majesty’s Dominions
were to hear of it, or were to make the same proposals of their own motion, we should
have great difficulty in refusing them while granting it to Canada; and still greater
difficulty in attempting to meet the many different claims that might thus arise. An
occasional loan for very special circumstances would be on a different footing. It is this

time of leaving this country until their return at the close of the Exhibition.” Report […] at
Brussels, Rome & Turin, 1910 & 1911, 33.
235
Roughly adjusted to 2017’s numbers this was an astonishing £46,903,320.00. The policies
were taken out in November 1909, “before the insurance market for the Italian Exhibitions was
affected by enquiries from other countries, the rates against all risks being seven shillings and
sixpence per cent for pictures and fifteen shillings per cent for sculpture. Owing to the increased
dimensions of the collection and the great value of the works lent it became necessary to cover
an additional amount and this was effected and the moderate rate of ten shillings per cent as
compared with the rates of forty shillings per cent and fifty shillings per cent which were being
charged at the time to other countries. Had negotiations not been opened in 1909, it would have
been impossible to effect the insurance of the British exhibits at so low a figure, and the great
difference in the rates charged was owning to the special care arranged for the exhibits and also
to the fact that the British building was isolated and thoroughly fire-proof.” Report […] at
Brussels, Rome & Turin, 1910 & 1911, 110.
236
Canada Toronto, MA/35/14, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House London.
197
continued recurrence for so many successive years that seems to me to constitute a
serious danger.
237

Conclusion
Insurance was an integral presence that framed the conditions of circulating objects in the
nineteenth century. Surveying the insurance work of the Fire Offices Committee and the South
Kensington Museum (and subsequently the V&A) reveals only a fraction of the nineteenth-
century debates about exhibition insurance.
238
What is important to know is the way in which
these organizations centralized their risk-assessment services to operate and control fine and
applied art exhibitions. They leveraged concepts of risk and value to make decisions about
exhibitions domestically, and in the broader empire, even if these decisions were arrived at in
ways that were less quantitative than qualitative. An important part of their work was top-down,
instigated from a shrouded administrative hierarchy, as museum curators liaised with
government officials and insurance representatives to broker deals in order to make exhibitions

237
Administrative minute from senior civil servant Robert Morant to V&A Director, Cecil
Smith, July 19, 1909. On July 21, 1909, Morant wrote a further following minute to Smith:
“Since writing the above I have seen the President and he thinks that it is preferable for you to
make a break this year, as he feels strongly opposed to the loan + thinks its continuance will
make it excessively difficult to stop it. He would like some reason or other invented as an excuse
for refusing this year, perhaps the re-organization of the Museum might be brought in.” Cecil
Smith writes back July 27, 1909: “Plz write: Dear Mr Temple, In reply to your letter of the 4th
Inst asking for a loan of four pictures for the Toronto Exhibition, I am directed to inform you that
the Bd regret their inability to comply with your request. In pursuance of the general scheme of
reorganization of this museum, the Coll. of Paintings will shortly come under review, and it is
important that the whole of the material should be available for consideration. Cecil Smith.”
Canada Toronto, MA/35/14, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House London.
238
This is a fraction of the Anglophone debates and discussions. I relied upon British
Parliamentary reports that reproduced French correspondence (for the cases of the French
Expositions Universelles), as well as French government reports available on
https://gallica.bnf.fr, https://www.hathitrust.org/. While Britain staged some of the nineteenth-
and early-twentieth-century’s large exhibitions, and also sent capacious national displays to other
exhibition sites, a broader project would also consider efforts by, for example, French, German,
Austrian, American, Egyptian, and Japanese organizers (to name just a few).
198
possible, or, conversely, to prevent them from taking place. Yet, functionaries and agents like
Robert F. Martin also played major roles, even if they often went unmentioned in official reports.
They served as insurantial foot-soldiers who were tasked with performing forensic assessments
that were both visual and textual. As a modern technology, insurance concretized transient
exhibitions, even as its own methods and technologies went largely unnoticed by the greater
public.

199
Chapter 3. Ars longa, vita brevis – The Fine Art & General Insurance Company, Ltd.

1. Introduction: a business of art’s impermanence

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, institutions, dealers, collectors, artists, and
critics sought to develop new protections against physical risks that threatened artworks. Some of
these risks burst into view in 1886 and 1887, when a public controversy raged in the London
Times about the evanescent qualities of watercolor paintings, and about public museums’ duty to
care for them. The controversy began in 1886, when John Charles Robinson (1824–1913), acting
Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, and former Chief Curator and Art Referee at South
Kensington Museum, waded into a related public debate about whether the National Gallery in
London should introduce evening opening hours expressly for working people, with attendant
changes to nighttime lighting in the galleries.
1
In a letter to the Times, Robinson supported
evening openings, but also used his platform to argue that the South Kensington Museum
curators displayed their watercolor collections under damaging light conditions that caused the

1
Due to restrictive work schedules and long hours, working people were generally unable to visit
galleries during the daytime, so reformers across Britain agitated for evening hours, a debate
connected to agitations for Sunday openings. On the shifts wrought by artificial illumination, see
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth
Century (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: The University of California Press, 1995); Geoffrey
N. Swinney, “The evil of vitiating and heating the air: Artificial lighting and public access to the
National Gallery, London, with particular reference to the Turner and Vernon collections,”
Journal of the History of Collections 15, iss. 1 (May 2003): 83-11; Amy Woodson-Boulton,
Transformative Beauty: Art Museums in Industrial Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2012), 54-82. On Robinson see Helen Elizabeth Davies, “Sir John Charles Robinson (1824–
1913): His Role as a Connoisseur and Creator of Public and Private Collections,” PhD diss.,
University of Oxford, 1992; Helen Elizabeth Davies, “John Charles Robinson’s Work at the
South Kensington Museum Part I: The creation of the collection of Italian Renaissance objects at
the Museum of Ornamental Art and the South Kensington Museum, 1853-62,” Journal of the
History of Collections 10, no. 2 (1998): 169-188; Helen Elizabeth Davies, “John Charles
Robinson’s Work at the South Kensington Museum Part II: From 1863 to 1867: consolidation
and conflict,” Journal of the History of Collections 11, no. 1 (1999): 95-115; Elizabeth A
Pergam. “John Charles Robinson in 1868: a Victorian Curator’s Collection on the Block.”
Journal of Art Historiography 18 (2018): 1-30.

200
pictures to fade, such that the pictures were “but the pale ghosts of their former selves.”
2
This
was a graver problem of stewardship, as the pictures “suffered for the delectation of one
generation only, and we ourselves have practically used them up.”
3
By comparison, Robinson
argued that the British Museum curators preserved their watercolors better by keeping pictures in
portfolios away from the light. Robinson ended his letter by recommending that watercolors be
exhibited only at night “under glass, hermetically sealed, so to speak, so that no amount of
deleterious effluvia could affect them,” adding a comment about London’s famously polluted
air.
4

Robinson’s letter touched a nerve. Soon, a watercolor painter and the president of the
Royal Institute for Painters in Water-Colours, James D. Linton (1840–1916), countered with his
own letter in the Times. Linton interpreted Robinson’s charge as a critique of watercolor
painting, and, by extension, a critique of watercolor painters who recklessly adhered to a fickle
medium, producing “impermanent merchandise.”
5
Linton denied that the works had faded,
arguing that watercolors were often originally monotone to begin with and tinted later, and that
daylight even helped to “deepen” some pictures’ colors.
6
As a respected practitioner who saw
himself as an expert, Linton questioned Robinson’s authority and suggested that readers visit
Thomas Agnew & Sons’ Gallery to see a display of watercolors by Old Masters, which, despite

2
J. C. Robinson et al., Light and Water-Colours: A Series of Letters Addressed to the Editor of
“The Times” (London: G. Parnell, 1887), 2.
3
Robinson et al., Light and Water-Colours, 2.
4
For more about debates concerning London’s atmosphere, and its effects upon paintings, see
Nicholas Robbins, “Ruskin, Whistler, and the Climate of Art in 1884,” in Ruskin’s Ecologies
eds. Kelly Freeman and Thomas Hughes (London: Courtauld Books Online, 2021).
5
Norman S. Brommelle, “The Russell and Abney Report on the Action of Light on Water
Colors,” Studies in Conservation 9, no. 4 (November 1964): 4.
6
Robinson et al., Light and Water-Colours, 3.

201
their age, remained in good condition.
7
Linton’s counter-attack inflamed Robinson, and furious
letters continued to appear in the Times for months, with other artists, collectors, critics, and
commentators like John Ruskin weighing in to side with Linton or Robinson. Readers were
recalled to contexts where watercolors had suffered environmental damages, like at the Art-
Treasures Exhibition of 1857 in Manchester.
8
Collectors bragged about the excellent state of
watercolors in their own collections.
9
Scientists like the Royal Academy’s professor of
Chemistry, Arthur Herbert Church (1834–1915), also offered professional perspectives,
describing how some watercolor pigments like indigo, gamboge yellow, or cochineal carmine
(colors that tracked to Britain’s imperial activities) were more fugitive than others.
10
The auction
house Christie’s allegedly experienced a drop in watercolor sales.
11
Meanwhile, sensing that the
criticisms were possibly true, the South Kensington Museum curators surreptitiously removed
some of the pictures in their galleries in question from direct sunlight. Eventually Linton
retracted his assertions about light’s beneficial effects upon watercolors, but not before he
organized an “Exhibition of Water-Color Drawings by Deceased Masters” at the Royal Institute
of Painters in Water Colors, in order to support his claims about watercolor’s durability.
12

7
Robinson et al., Light and Water-Colours, 6-8.
8
Robinson et al., 42-43.
9
Robinson et al., 51-52, 56-57.
10
See Jordanna Bailkin, “Indian Yellow. Making and Breaking the Imperial Palette,” Journal of
Material Culture 10 (2005): 197-214.
11
Brommelle, “The Russell and Abney Report,” 141.
12
In 1886, a Parliamentary “Committee to Investigate the Action of Light on Water Colors”
convened, while scientists carried out extensive experiments to test various pigments’ reactions
to light. In 1888, the committee scientists published a report finding that South Kensington had
not unduly contributed to its pictures’ fading, but it confirmed the fugitivity of some watercolor
pigments. William James Russell and William de Wiveleslie Abney, Report to the Science and
Art Department of the Committee of Council on Education on the Action of Light on Water
Colors: Presented to Both Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty (London: Eyre
and Spottiswoode for H. M. S. O., 1888).

202
The watercolor debate concluded in a government investigation in 1888, but it
underscored some of the risks that stalked artworks and other works of cultural heritage. The
debate also galvanized the art world to develop more protections against such risks that extended
beyond display tactics or restoration methods. In this period, specialist art insurance also
appeared as an amalgam between the art and insurance worlds as a response to irreparable
damage or outright loss. Indeed, while James D. Linton tackled art’s impermanence in theory in
this late-1880s controversy, he would soon tackle impermanence in his practice. For less than
four years after the Times watercolor debate concluded, Linton became an art insurance director
and underwriter for the Fine Art & General Insurance Company, Ltd. (henceforth “Fine Art”): a
unique, boutique firm created when the City of London and its interests became imbricated with
an increasingly international art world [Fig. 75].
13

While my previous two chapters show how the insurance of art created problems for
conventional fire and marine insurance industries, and for public institutions attempting to assess
and value artworks, this chapter demonstrates that by the 1890s, members of the art world and
certain sections of the private insurance industry realized that the conditions were right for the
development of a dedicated art insurance company. Aside from environmental risks like
pollution, or human risks like deliberate destruction, more art was traveling and changing hands.
Huge exhibitions were appearing across the world, and risks to art in transit were becoming more
complex thanks to new transport and exhibiting methods. The insurance industries were also
beginning to cover new risk classes, while new legislation appeared that made company
incorporation easier. In this period, the Fine Art was formed as the British art world’s first

13
Linton joined the Fine Art’s board of directors in 1892 at the invitation of Times art critic and
company director, Thomas Humphry Ward (1845–1926). He would serve the Fine Art for
twenty-four years, until his death in 1916.

203
successful private art insurance company for offsetting risks to traveling or stationary artworks
and exhibitions. Like the art institutions it served, including the Royal Academy, the Victoria &
Albert Museum, regional and international museums, temporary exhibitions, and private dealers,
this insurance company was a specialized gatekeeper, albeit one whose operations were much
less visible to the public. Because its work was selectively visible, its effects upon the nineteenth
and early twentieth century art world have until now remain unmapped by scholars. The
company’s importance lies precisely in its gatekeeper status: in assessing the company’s social
selectiveness; in analyzing the ways in which it evaluated and priced art; in exploring its
management and investing structures; in showing how it provided coverage for certain artworks
and certain exhibitions, but not for others.
14
The Fine Art—as another kind of art steward within
a broader landscape of art stewards—could prohibit or permit a work’s public visibility, both in
Britain and abroad, thus shaping our very idea of the period’s art history.
To provide its specialist services, the Fine Art relied upon the expertise of art workers
and of insurance personnel. Company directors like James D. Linton mobilized their professional
and material knowledge in their roles as financial service providers. This needs to be understood

14
Alborn discusses different forms of gatekeeping—methods for excluding customers who
might be high risk—associated with life and fire insurance. In fire insurance, insurers surveyed
property after the policy had been issued to assess the policy holder’s potential for moral hazard.
By contrast, nineteenth-century life insurers instituted gate-keeping techniques before the policy
was issued (through medical examinations, for example) as a form of adverse selection.
Depending on the insurance agent’s decision, a potential insured could be denied coverage.
Timothy Alborn, Regulated Lives: Life Insurance and British Society, 1800–1914 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2009), 220-222. For insurance gatekeeping based upon race in
America, see Michael Ralph, “‘Life…in the midst of death’: Notes on the Relationship Between
Slave Insurance, Life Insurance and Disability,” Disability Studies Quarterly 32, no. 3 (2012) 1-
27. About how travel factored into adverse selection in British life insurance, see Timothy
Alborn, “Taxing Journeys: British Life Insurance and the White Man’s Burden, 1840–1914,” in
Risk and the Insurance Business in History eds. Jeronia Pons and Robin Pearson (Madrid:
Fundación MAPFRE, 2020), 35-54.

204
in a broader critical context: the artist construed as a service provider undertaking alternative
work to supplement their art practices has become an increasingly salient topic in art history.
Scholars like Janet Wolff, Howard Becker, Marina Vishmidt, Gregory Sholette, and Dave Beech
have in different ways discussed how an artist’s work should be viewed holistically, to include
the supplemental (or in some cases, primary) work artists perform to reproduce themselves.
15
In
the Fine Art’s case, artists collaborated with other art workers including writers, curators,
contractors, and dealers. But they also collaborated with insurance personnel, who brought
specialist training and insurance industry knowledge and contacts to the company. The insurance
industry personnel advised the company about new risks, and about financial ventures to embark
upon, and provided the company with a different kind of professional backbone.

15
Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (New York: NYU Press, 1981, 1993); Howard
Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982); Dave
Beech, Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist
Economics (Leiden and Boston: Brill, Historical Materialism, 2015); Gregory Sholette, Dark
Matter Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (London: Pluto Press, 2015); Marina
Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital.
(Leiden and Boston: Brill/Historical Materialism, 2018); Anne Verplanck, “How We Might
View Artists as Businesspeople,” American Art 33, no. 3 (Autumn 2019): 10-13; Dave Beech,
Art and Labour: On the Hostility to Handicraft, Aesthetic Labour and the Politics of Work in Art
(Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020). Anne Verplanck argues that we should see artists “as
businesspeople” essentially working entrepreneurial side-jobs to survive. Speaking in a more
radical register about inequity in the contemporary art world, Gregory Scholette argues for
viewing the mass of unsung artists excluded from a mainstream “art star” system as the art
world’s “dark matter” that performs the art world’s service work (like gallery assistant work or
transport logistics), as providing the art world’s moral gravity. This metaphor is based upon the
concept in astrophysics that galactic dark matter makes up most of the matter in the universe but
is overlooked because of its invisibility relative to objects in the visible spectrum. In Scholette’s
analysis this term can be used to refer to multitudinous classes of artists working invisibly at the
borders of the more visible realms of the market. The more visible realms are populated by
acclaimed artists, institutions and mediators. For Sholette, writing on twentieth and twenty-first
century art, this artistic “dark matter” includes amateurs, underrepresented, and underemployed
artists forced into forms of wage labor, collectivity, or entrepreneurialism. In some senses, by
virtue of becoming collectivized service providers, the artists working for the Fine Art & General
Insurance Company are analogous to Sholette’s notion of “dark matter,” even though most of the
artists I discuss achieved visibility, status, and success in the field at different times.

205
By focusing upon a single, specialist insurance company, this chapter combines, but also
counters, scholarly approaches in both art market studies and insurance history.
16
In both
research areas, scholars map the cultural networks and practices of specific businesses. In the
latter field, early insurance company histories were often written in-house and tended to eulogize
their subjects.
17
When scholars in business history, economic history, or the history of science
produced insurance histories, these were often larger scale surveys that aggregated information
from many companies in order to present normative statements about industry-wide tendencies.
18

In studies of nineteenth-century life insurance, where data sets are voluminous and the industry
is clearly regulated and defined by the use of standardized mortality tables, a scholar might draw
many offices into an analysis.
19
Unlike those insurance sectors, art insurance was more

16
Giovanni Ceccarelli briefly but helpfully taxonomizes the different scholarly approaches taken
in insurance history, with its intersections in business history, the history of science, histories of
capitalism, histories of risk and disaster, and histories of slavery. Giovanni Ceccarelli, Risky
Markets: Marine Insurance in Renaissance Florence (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021), vii-x.
17
An example of this kind of hagiographic self-narrativizing is a 1905 volume published for the
Caledonian Insurance Company. Caledonian Insurance Company, A History of a hundred years,
1805 to 1905 (Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, 1905). Antony Brown writes another about
Lloyd’s. Antony Brown, Hazard Unlimited: From Ships to Satellites: 300 Years of Lloyd’s of
London: an Intimate Portrait (London: Lloyd’s of London Press, 1987).
18
For a discussion of these issues in insurance history, see the introduction to Geoffrey Wilson
Clark et al. The Appeal of Insurance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 3-15; Oliver
Westall ed., The Historian and the Business of Insurance (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1984). See also volume, Jerònia Pons and Robin Pearson eds., Risk and the Insurance
Business in History (Madrid: Fundación MAPFRE, 2020).
19
On this point, I am grateful for my discussions with Theodore Porter, who was skeptical that a
single art insurer’s records could yield data to frame comprehensive claims about an
idiosyncratic sub-industry like art insurance. In some ways he turned out to be correct, as the
numerical data I consulted was indeed fragmentary and limited. Nonetheless, as this dissertation
claims, in other ways it turned out to be possible to extrapolate about art insurance’s cultural
impact. See Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public
Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, 2020), 33-48, 89-113; Liz McFall, “The Rules
of Prudence: Political Liberalism and Life Assurance in the Nineteenth Century” in Geoffrey
Wilson Clark et al. eds., The Appeal of Insurance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010),
127-150; Dan Bouk, How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical
Individual (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015).

206
idiosyncratic: a specialist service, based upon principles culled from marine, accident, and fire
insurance practices, and appealing to more affluent consumers in society. Anne Verplanck notes,
indeed, that historians concerned with larger datasets allow such businesses to fall through
interpretive cracks.
20
The Fine Art is an example of just such a company, discussed usually en
bloc with what might be called “General Insurance” companies, smaller than the industrial-scale
companies that dominated the nineteenth-century market.
21
In this regard, my study tracks
closely to art market studies scholarship, which often work on a case-by-case basis, tracing the
personnel, practices, or particular agents working for art dealers or other institutions.
22

In what follows I first outline the Fine Art’s socio-political context, which is partly
synchronic with my second chapter’s context and content. I then discuss the company’s
personnel, including its leading trustees, directors, agents, staff, and contractors. The third
section describes some of the company’s clients and insuring practices as gleaned from the
company’s extant business records. It reveals the company’s roots in British informal imperial
capitalism in East Asia. It also shows how the company visualized its services for its clients
through its marketing practices. My fourth section more extensively discusses elite fine art
objects and particularly the Fine Art’s entangled relationship with one of the most powerful
nineteenth-century art dealers, Thomas Agnew & Sons, Ltd. My fifth section explores a case
involving a damaged painting by Henry Raeburn, and it shows how the company’s practices as
an art insurer blurred with practices associated with art dealers. This case exemplifies some of

20
Anne Verplanck, “How We Might View Artists as Businesspeople,” American Art 33, no. 3
(Autumn 2019): 10-13.
21
Other forms of general insurance include agricultural insurance, or plate-glass insurance.
Cockerell and Green, The British Insurance Business, 47-59.
22
Samuel N. Behrman, Duveen (New York: Random House, 1952); Jeremy Maas, Gambart:
Prince of the Victorian Art World (London: Barrie & Jenkins Ltd., 1975).

207
the problems about pricing, valuation, cultural heritage, and stewardship that art insurance
introduced into the art world’s working equations. This chapter’s goal is to show how this
company—a unique collaboration between insurers and arts professionals—played an important
role for both public and private art stewards in the nineteenth century.
23

2. “A damaged picture is a destroyed picture”: art insurance in the 1880s and 1890s

Late-nineteenth-century Britain underwent dramatic social and political changes that
prepared the ground for new methods of risk management. An agricultural depression in wheat
yields led to a broad crisis in the 1880s.
24
This depression overlapped with the worldwide global
depression that began in the 1870s, and a recession of international manufacturing until 1896,
with falling prices and profits, and slowed growth, particularly in relation to American and

23
Aside from passing comments in Geoffrey Agnew’s monograph, Agnew’s 1817–1967
(London: Bradbury Agnew Press, 1967), 23-38, the company has escaped all notice from art
historians and scholars of the art market. Insurance trade literature contains limited
commentaries about the company, and its remaining archives are briefly described in Cockerell
and Green, The British Insurance Business, 88. However, insurance archives frequently change
hands, and the locations stated in that volume are no longer up to date. Now the company’s
archives—including annual reports, chairman’s agenda books, journals, ephemera—are held at
the London Metropolitan Archives and at the AVIVA Group Archive in Norwich, Norfolk.
Further ephemera is catalogued in the John Johnson Ephemera Collection at Oxford University’s
Bodleian Libraries, as well as at the British Museum’s Heal and Banks collections. Eloise Moss
briefly mentions the company in her 2019 monograph on burglary in nineteenth-century London:
Night Raiders: Burglary and the Making of Modern Urban Life in London, 1860–1968 (London:
Oxford University Press, 2019) chapter 10; Eloise Moss, “Burglary insurance and the culture of
fear in Britain, c. 1889–1939,” Historical Journal 54, no. 4 (December 2011): 1039-1064. In her
monograph, it is evident that Moss (no relation!) never actually accessed any of the company’s
extant archives listed above. The present chapter therefore constitutes the first thoroughgoing
analysis of this company’s archives.
24
Richard Perren, Agriculture in Depression 1870–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), 7-30; Robert Floud and Paul Johnson, The Cambridge Economic History of
Modern Britain. Volume II: Economic Maturity, 1860–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), 141.

208
German manufacturing.
25
Rising social pauperism and political instability also coincided with a
Liberal ethos that emphasized how personal responsibility was foundational to society, finding
overt expressions in the Second and Third Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884.
26
In the 1890s, a crisis
around Barings Bank created a panic in the City of London. From 1896 to 1913, the markets
somewhat recovered, leading to a period of bank amalgamations.
27
This period coincided with a
boom in housing, aided by suburban railway building.
28
Further industries expanded including
the chemical industry, electrical engineering, bicycle manufacturing, and automobile
construction. Legislative changes building upon the agricultural depression led to the declining
political and economic power of the aristocracy, who, after Parliament passed the Settled Land
Acts of 1882, could apply to courts to sell their heirlooms to support their declining land yields,
jettisoning their movable property in a series of “asset sales” to elide these changes to
primogenitor tax laws.
29
Simultaneously, American and Continental magnate collectors from the
upper bourgeoisie introduced new pressures on the expanding market for Old Masters pictures,
rapaciously purchasing pictures out of British aristocratic collections.
30
As Peter Mandler

25
Hannah Catherine Davies, Transatlantic Speculations. Globalization and the Panics of 1873
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), xi.
26
For a discussion of the visual culture of the Reform Acts, see Janice Carlisle, Picturing Reform
in Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
27
Robert Floud and Paul Johnson, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain. Volume
II: Economic Maturity, 1860–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 141.
28
Helen Long, The Edwardian House: The Middle-Class Home in Britain 1880–1914
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 64.
29
David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven and London:
Penguin, 1991), 25–34; Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven and
London 1997), 119–132.
30
In her discussion of a 1909 public furor around Hans Holbein’s portrait of Christina of
Denmark (1538), Jordanna Bailkin animates how international collectors stimulated nationalist
fears that Britain would lose its cultural inheritance when the picture’s private owner nearly sold
it away. A very public campaign was marshalled to keep it. Jordanna Bailkin, The Culture of
Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 2004), 118-158.

209
explains, art was thrust into motion and simultaneously came to be valued in different ways
under these legislative and social shifts.
31

The period also saw rising incomes, and with them the expansion of Britain’s “invisibles”
sector: a term used today to describe commodity services like “insurance, services of airlines and
shipping, hotels and other tourist facilities, banking, medical services and education, and various
forms of consultancy.”
32
Between 1871 and 1900, the number of workers in personal services
doubled in size to support the growing middle class. For example, through this period, one in
three women worked in domestic service.
33
Twentieth-century economists have described a
three-sector model in economics whereby economic sectors shift from (primary) extraction of
raw materials to (manufacturing) or secondary sectors, to finally an economy focused upon
services (tertiary sector).
34
The late-nineteenth century was a prime moment for the expansion of
these tertiary services. Between 1896 and 1905 new insurance offices developed to offset costly
hazards like railway and motor car accidents, plate glass breakage, boiler explosions, and
engineering risks. It was key in this period to systematize insurance sectors.
35
As I discuss in my

31
Peter Mandler, “Art, death and taxes: the taxation of works of art in Britain, 1796–1914,”
Historical Research 74, no. 185 (August 2001): 271-297.
32
John Black, Nigar Hashimzade, and Gareth Myles, eds., A Dictionary of Economics,
“invisibles.” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Robert Floud and Paul Johnson, The
Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain. Volume II: Economic Maturity, 1860–1939
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 121.
33
Nearly 853,000 men and women worked in domestic service in 1851. By 1871, the number
reached 1,341,000. Eric Evans, The Shaping of Modern Britain: Identity, Industry, and Empire,
1780–1914 (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 241. See also Ellen Jordan, The Women's
Movement and Women’s Employment in Nineteenth Century Britain (London: Taylor & Francis
Group, 1999).
34
A. G. Fisher, “Production, primary, secondary and tertiary,” Economic Record 15, no. 1
(1939): 24-38; Colin Clark, The conditions of Economic Progress (London: Macmillan & Co.,
1940); Jean Fourastié, L’Économie française dans le monde (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1945).
35
Craig Turnbull, A History of British Actuarial Thought (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), 275-310.

210
second chapter, organizational control was particularly consolidated in the fire insurance market
by the Fire Offices Committee (F.O.C.). This association restricted tariff rates and controlled the
flows of information about the industry, and reinsurance facilities. Its reach was so extensive that
by the 1890s all of the largest companies had been induced to join the tariff agreements. Lloyd’s
of London—an association of private underwriting syndicates rather than a single company—
also re-emerged as an important market force in this period, after recovering from a slump in the
1880s and the early 1890s.
36
In particular, Lloyd’s syndicates broke out of the marine market to
introduce “composite” insurance, by which they offered numerous and diversified insurance
products including what was termed “general insurance.” By this method Lloyd’s underwriters
appealed to a new client base in the professional and middle-class. As more laws were created to
cover liability in the 1890s, the rise in the number of domestic policies led to further market
expansion.
37

The Fine Art was not the first company to broker art insurance for art institutions in
Britain, or even the first company to do so internationally. Already by the 1840s, forwarding
agents working in collaboration with the post office and customs departments transported
artworks across borders, often making customs-house arrangements, and managing shipping,
warehousing, and especially insurance. One such company was J. & R. McCracken. This was a
prominent London agency that served the Royal Academy, the National Gallery, and the
Government Department of Science & Art.
38
Taking advantage of an expanding mid-nineteenth

36
Oliver Westall, “David and Goliath: The Fire Offices Committee and Non-Tariff Competition,
1898–1907,” in The Historian and the Business of Insurance, ed. Oliver Westall (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1984), 433.
37
Dickson, The Sun Insurance, 140.
38
The company’s addresses included 38, Queen Street, Cannon Street, City (as of 1856) and No.
7, Old Jewry, London E. C. (as of 1860). See correspondence in the National Gallery Research
Centre, London.

211
century tourist culture, this company placed advertisements in many of John Murray’s
“Handbooks for Travelers”: a series of travel guides produced by a generation-spanning
publishing business.
39
J. & R. McCracken described themselves as “Agents generally for the
Reception and Shipment of Works of Art, Baggage &c., To and From all Parts of the World.”
40

As agents, J. & R. McCracken maintained a warehouse where they stored goods in transit, and
they also managed insurance, especially on works purchased abroad for the National Gallery.
They were not, however, an insurance company per se, and they instead served as agents in a
brokerage capacity. For example, in 1860, the company wrote to the National Gallery to
announce the total loss of a steamer from Genoa to London. The ship had been carrying a
Lunetto of “the Madonna with the Dead Christ” by Italian Renaissance painter Ambrogio
Bergognone that had been purchased for the National Gallery. But the ship foundered off the
coast of Lisbon when it collided with another steamer.
41
In this case, J. & R. McCracken had

39
For information about the rise of tourist and adventuring publications and especially the
Murray family, see Innes M. Keighren, Charles W. J. Withers, and Bill Bell, Travels into Print:
Exploration, Writing, and Publishing with John Murray, 1773–1859 (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2015); Brian Cooper, Travel, Travel Writing, and British Political
Economy: “Instructions for Travelers,” circa 1750–1850 (New York and London: Routledge,
2022).
40
For example, they featured on at least eight pages of advertisements in “Mr. Murray’s
Handbook Advertiser,” at the back of art critic Anna Jameson’s volume, Handbook to the public
galleries of art in and near London (London: John Murray, 1845). Stating that they undertook
“to execute Commissions, for the purchase of Pictures, Statuary in Marble and Alabaster,
Bronzes, &c., being in direct correspondence with Artists, Agents, and Bankers, throughout the
Continent” they also pitched their services to “British Artists resident abroad, having occasion to
send home their Works for Exhibition, or to be passed by the Academy.” They listed numerous
corresponding agents and agencies in France, Italy, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Netherlands,
Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. They were also dealers in French and Italian wines.
41
This painting was one of ten pictures from around 1480 to 1490 that Bergognone produced for
the Charterhouse in Pavia. https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/research/research-
resources/exhibition-catalogues/building-the-picture/place-making/bergognone-virgin-and-child

212
brokered insurances with the Indemnity Mutual Marine Insurance Company, and the art agents
assured the National Gallery that they would recover the £150 insurance claim [Fig. 76].
42

The Fine Art was also not the first limited liability art insurance company to open in this
period. An earlier company, The Fine Arts Insurance Company, formed in 1882, but was
dissolved by 1890.
43
There are several revealing elements about this first company, the first
being that it appeared to incorporate in respond to a need for something like specialized art
insurance. This need was occasionally expressed in trade literature such as the Post Magazine
and Insurance Monitor: a Fleet Street Saturday standard that was published and distributed
continuously after the Penny Post’s advent in 1840.
44
In 1896 the Post Magazine and Insurance
Monitor published an anonymous article, “Insurance of Works of Art,” which highlighted the
difficulties involved in art insurance, particularly the difficulty in conferring value upon cultural
objects:
Risks on paintings, prints, and other objects of art are, generally speaking, accepted by
insurance officers without appraisement or inspection, in the same way as upon all
ordinary goods and merchandise, and usually with the proviso that they are not covered
for more than their cost. But cost and value in the case of objects of art are often as wide
as the poles asunder, and, as many of our readers well know, not infrequently it is
difficult to establish the cost of a picture. How then to appraise its value after it has been
destroyed by fire?
45

The author—whose moniker was “Art Amateur”—gave the example of an East Coast American
artist who had recently publicly exhibited their own work, taking fifty-cent entry fees, with the
picture that was on display being insured for some thousands of dollars against fire. The picture

42
Letters to Ralph Wornum and Charles Eastlake from J. & R. McCracken, October 30 and
November 10, 1860, NG5/138/9-10, National Gallery Research Centre. See also Susanna Avery-
Quash, “‘A gallery of art’: fresh light on the art collection of Sir Charles Eastlake (1793–1865),”
British Art Journal 15, no. 3 (Spring 2015): 11-37.
43
See my chapter two, ff62.
44
https://www.postonline.co.uk/static/posthistory
45
“Art Amateur,” Post Magazine and Insurance Monitor, April 6, 1896.

213
was subsequently burned (although the author does not elaborate how), and the “Art Amateur”
then rhetorically asked the Post Magazine and Insurance Monitor readers how an appraiser
ought to settle the claim of the policy. The author went on to recommend that collectors should
make sure their policies were worded, “so that the exact value you place upon them is accepted
by the insurance office as the amount to be paid by them in the event of their loss by fire and
remember also that there can be no partial loss of a picture by fire.” The author concluded,
“Speaking generally, a damaged picture is a destroyed picture.”
46

Not long after the Fine Arts Insurance Company failed, another art insurance company
appeared, this time in the industrial north. In November 1890, The Pall Mall Gazette reported
that an insurance company had been created that year expressly to insure artworks. The impetus
lay with art collectors participating in the Corporation of Manchester Art Gallery’s Seventh
Autumn Exhibition (1889) who had found it difficult to insure valuable pictures with
conventional fire offices. The Pall Mall Gazette related,
There was some talk last year of meeting a difficulty felt by the owners of valuable
pictures in obtaining insurance. Existing fire offices undertake to insure pictures as they
do other goods, but owing to the peculiar character [my emphasis] of the property,
arbitrary conditions are imposed, such as make business practically impossible. When the
Manchester Exhibition was being drawn together, the difficulty was met by the formation
of a sort of special private insurance corporation composed of a few wealthy men, who
insured all the pictures at an equitable rate. Out of this accident grew the idea of
establishing an insurance company that should deal exclusively with fine art property. No
appeal was made to the public for funds (says the London correspondent of the Liverpool
Post) but a capital of a quarter of a million has been subscribed.
47

Art dealer William Agnew (1825–1910) was the driver behind this enterprise [Fig. 77]. Head of
the picture-dealing firm, Thomas Agnew & Sons—which he had inherited from his father
Thomas in 1861—William was instrumental for the family business’s expansion from

46
“Art Amateur,” April 6, 1896.
47
The Pall Mall Gazette, Saturday, November 15, 1890.

214
Manchester to London, and as Barbara Pezzini has shown, forged important partnerships with
institutions like the National Gallery in selling Old Master pictures.
48
The firm employed
numerous artisans and contractors to carry on tertiary activities in framing, glazing, and packing,
but by the late 1880s, Agnew saw a gap in an important service sector: insurance.
49
An active
participant in civic life, William Agnew was Chairman of the Fine Arts Committee in
Manchester, and the 1889 exhibition there was designed to be a loan exhibition of Victorian
pictures to emulate the successes of the Manchester Arts Treasures Exhibition of 1857. However,
during the organization process, Agnew noted that the insurance companies quoted him steep
premiums. To circumvent this difficulty, he shrewdly canvassed figures in his network to float an
insurance scheme.
50
In his Agnew’s company biography, Geoffrey Agnew notes that William
“persuaded a number of his friends to give him guarantees and in effect formed his own
insurance company. As there were no claims, he was able, out of the proceeds of the exhibition,
to pay his guarantors five percent on the money they had never had to advance, and the surplus
was used to purchase watercolors for the Whitworth Institute.”
51

Following on this success, Agnew decided to establish a company in London, the British
insurance world’s historic center. The insurance company began as “The Fine Art Insurance
Company,” and was at the outset an outlier in London’s insurance environment. By the mid-
nineteenth century the largest competing fire offices—the Sun, the Royal Exchange, and the

48
Barbara Pezzini, “Making a Market for Art: Agnew’s and the National Gallery, 1855–1928,”
PhD diss., University of Manchester, 2017.
49
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, “Agnew family (per. 1817–1986), art
dealers,” by Dennis Farr, accessed March 7, 2020.
50
Evidence about how William Agnew went about soliciting participants is scant, but a letter
addressed to Agnew from one of the Company’s first trustees, Lord de Grey, does exist in the
Agnew’s Archive, Letter from Earl de Grey to Mr, Agnew, June 27, 1890 NGA27/32/2/63,
National Gallery Research Centre. With thanks to Barbara Pezzini.
51
Geoffrey Agnew, Agnew’s 1817–1967 (London: Bradbury Agnew Press, 1967), 38.

215
Phoenix—had formed The Fire Offices Committee (F.O.C.). This cartel policed the profession,
shared knowledge about new risks, and regulated insurance premiums or “tariffs” on commercial
risks. All tariff office members agreed to charge these base rates to their customers, who sought
insurance for risks like cotton mills, breweries, or warehouses for corn, flax, and wool. The
organization included nearly fifty companies by the 1860s, and it worked to establish base
premiums on hazardous commercial risks to which all members agreed to adhere to. These risks
included cotton mills, and warehouses for corn, flax, and wool.
52
As discussed in my second
chapter, the F.O.C. also assessed exhibition risks. However, the F.O.C. often placed restrictions
on such cultural spectacles, refusing to write what were called “valued policies” in which
company and policyholder agreed on a set value for a payout, should a claim be filed. Such a
policy would prevent the insurance company from assessing any losses themselves, and force
them to accept the flat rate that had first been agreed upon.
53
Accustomed to sending their own
specialists to assess straightforward risks like warehouses or machinery, companies would have
had to trust the art assessor’s judgement at the outset. For insurance companies, it was
inexpedient to adhere to idiosyncratic, subjective picture values: values in which an ordinary
insurance assessor who had no dealings with the art world would in all likelihood be unfamiliar.
It was in this context that a new company like the Fine Art could step in to write short-
term insurance for these “peculiar,” and “non-hazardous” risks like artworks and exhibitions.
54

52
Westall, “David and Goliath,” 131-154.
53
Fire Offices Committee Circular, January 10, 1888, PX 1634, Phoenix Assurance Archive,
Cambridge University Library, Cambridge.
54
Fire insurance risks were assessed according to three categories of risk level: (1) Non-
hazardous, “consisting of residential and small-scale commercial property,” which carried “low
premium rates and small sums insured,” (2) Hazardous, which “constituted large-scale industrial
and commercial risks [that] generated large premiums because of high sums insured and high
premium rates,” and (3) Doubly-Hazardous insurance, effected for timber and plaster buildings,

216
As participating in the F.O.C.’s tariff was cost-inefficient and restrictive for the Fine Art, the
company framed itself as a “non-tariff” limited liability office. From its inception its directors
decided that when the tariff offices set minimum rates for picture and Fine Art Risks at 4s 6d
percent, the Fine Art would go lower and set their minimum rates at 3s 6d percent.
55
To make up
for potential losses, the Fine Art would heavily reinsure their own insurances with other offices,
spreading their risks even wider in order to circumvent financial decimation should they have to
pay out a major claim.
56
In order to further control their capital flow they eventually started their
own reinsurance offices—the Alpha and the Omega. Like many insurance companies they also
established investment funds to manage company profits. As will be shown below, they made
sure that they only invested in trustworthy securities to offset potential losses. The Fine Art was
not only distinguished from its short-lived predecessor company by its name (a singular “Art”
instead of a plural “Arts”) but also by its cautious policies, its financial savvy, and ultimately by
its longevity.

3. Formation, branches, personnel

In its first three years the Company followed conventional insurance protocol to establish its
business, but it also tactically situated itself at the heart of financial and art world centers. It
opened branches throughout Britain, but located its head office in the City of London.
57
Its West

and for hazardous trades like “sugar-bakers, distillers, china and glass manufacturers, and
others.” Westall, “David and Goliath,” 131-154.
55
Board Minute Book, September 30, 1890; June 15 and August 24, 1896,
CLC/B/055/MS14044/001, Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London
Metropolitan Archives, London.
56
Niels Viggo Haueter concisely explains the principle of reinsurance: “Insurance protects
against losses of goods, health, or lives. Reinsurance protects insurance companies against
abnormal financial losses.” Niels Viggo Haueter and Geoffrey Jones, eds. Managing Risk in
Reinsurance: From City Fires to Global Warming (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1.
57
They were first located at 28 Cornhill, and then at 90 Cannon Street.

217
End London office was located at 25 Bond Street, in shouting distance from Thomas Agnew &
Sons’ West End location [Fig. 78].
58
It was through this West End branch—whose director was
Lord William Neville (1826–1915), a Tory peer—that the company frequently gained important
art insurances for private collectors and for arts institutions.
59
The Fine Art also opened branches
in European and North African financial and shipping centers, including Hamburg, Paris,
Brussels, Dublin, and Alexandria,

although it faced difficulties with its overseas branches. The
Alexandrian agency, overseen by a Mr. Jacques Negreponte, closed for unknown reasons by
1898.
60
The company would close its Paris branch in 1897 on account of outstanding debts and
reportedly unreliable French staff. However, one of the main issues for the company in France
was that French insurance regulations made it difficult for English companies to conduct
business there.
61
For although the free trade agreement signed in 1860 between Britain and
France enabled British insurance companies to open branches in France, only a handful of
companies introduced branches by 1896, and French investors were leery about foreign
competition to their own insurance services.
62

The company’s collective operations—managed by the Head Office—included bi-
monthly Director’s meetings, yearly Shareholder’s meetings, and less frequent Extraordinary

58
Located at 39 Old Bond Street, later 43 Old Bond Street.
59
Branches opened in Belfast (1891), the West End (1892), Leeds (1893), Bristol (1893),
Manchester (1893).
60
See entries in Board Minute Book 1, July 2, 1894, CLC/B/055/MS14044/001; Board Minute
Book 2, March 14, 1898; Minute Book of General Purposes and Special Committees, March 1,
1895, CLC/B/055/MS14045, Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London
Metropolitan Archives, London.
61
Minute Book of General Meetings 1891–1969, May 25, 1897, CLC/B/055/MS16826,
Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives.
62
André Straus, “France: Insurance and The French Financial Networks,” in World Insurance:
The Evolution of a Global Risk Network, eds. Peter Borscheid and Niels Viggo Haueter (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012), 126.

218
General Meetings, which were intended for discussing matters of great urgency.
63
In the
directors’ meetings, the chairman, secretary, and directors established internal committees and
boards, discussed personnel remuneration and investments, and exceptional or outstanding fine
art claims. During one of these meetings, the minutes of the previous meeting were agreed upon
and the bank passbook or register for financial transactions was examined. In the first few years,
the business discussed included sales and transfers of shares in the company, and purchases of
stocks and consols: government-issued debt, often called “gilts” or “gilt-edged” securities which
were generally considered safe investments.
64
Later, when the company gained more business—
and also experienced more losses—they would discuss new entries to the company’s loss
register, which was an account of client’s losses and premiums paid out.
65
As further branches
were opened domestically and internationally, sometimes the minutes from the meetings of those
branches or local boards were also discussed—emphasizing the head office’s oversight over
these distant branches. By 1909, the Irish Board (overseen by the director Algernon Greville. J.
P) was itself overseeing branches in Dublin, Belfast, and Dundee.
66
A further board was
established at Middlesbrough in North East England in the 1900s, and the Middlesbrough
accounts were read in the Head Office Director’s meetings.
International branches included the company’s Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Brussels
branches, established respectively from 1893, 1894, and 1895. The Hamburg Branch was

63
There are five extant volumes of Head Office Directors’ meetings and one volume of
Shareholders’ meetings.
64
A Dictionary of Economics, “gilt-edged security,” eds. John Black, Nigar Hashimzade, and
Gareth Myles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
65
Unfortunately, these loss registers do not survive, but if they did one would get a sharper
picture of the range of insurances offered, and the kinds of losses the company suffered.
66
By 1900 other Irish board members included the Earl of Mayo, the Lord Bellew, Percy B.
Bernard, and John Olphert. Fine Art Report of the Directors for the Year 1899, May 9, 1900,
AVIVA Group Archives, Norwich.

219
overseen by representatives of Christ Schroder & Co.: members of a Hanseatic Hamburg family
connected to a commercial banking corporation. This branch would oversee agents in Bremen
and would be responsible for lucrative insurances, insuring amounts or “lines” upwards of
£15,000 on free ports in Hamburg from 1901 onwards.
67
The Amsterdam agency was principally
overseen by Willem Adrianus Hienfeld and Johann Friedrich August Rapp, from a firm of
established insurers that dated to 1874. For the Fine Art, Hienfeld and Rapp would insure the
Liège Cathedral Treasure and valuable objects at the Liège Exhibition and the Brussels
Exposition of 1897.
68
The Head Office vested Hienfeld and Rapp with power of attorney to
establish sub-agents Johannes Antonius Gerardus Dominicus Seeuwen and Petrus Johannes
Seeuwen in Rotterdam.
69
However, these sub-agents were eventually terminated because they
“had acted contrary to [the Head Office’s] instructions in signing a certain Exhibition policy.”
70

The Fine Art’s confidence in Heinfeld and Rapp however remained strong and they only ceased
their connections with the agency 1900.
71

67
During the First World War, contact with this branch would cease, but at the end of hostilities
they would resume. Board Minute Book, October 15, 1906, CLC/B/055/MS14044/003,
Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.
68
Board Minute Book, June 15 and August 24, 1896, CLC/B/055/MS14044/002, Commercial
Union Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.
69
Board Minute Book, June 6, 1895, CLC/B/055/MS14044/002, Commercial Union Assurance
Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.
70
Board Minute Book, March 29, 1897, CLC/B/055/MS14044/002, Commercial Union
Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.
71
In 1898 the Fine Art moved to close the Brussels branch, which was formerly overseen by art
critic Maurice Siville. The Head Office Directors had disagreed with Siville’s policies and
actions (although these are not explicitly described in the company meeting minutes), and so the
directors had the account transferred to Heinfeld and Rapp. The closure that was less than
amicable and included a £400 payout to Siville. Heinfeld and Rapp still exists today, now under
the name Heinfeld, and they still specialize in selective markets, particularly fine art. For
scholars of nineteenth-century Dutch art markets, a study of these insurers would yield
fascinating information—provided that the company would agree to grant access to remaining
archives. Given language limitations, such a discussion is beyond the scope of this current
project. Board Minute Book, February 14, 1898; February 28, 1898; March 28, 1898; May 2,

220
Fine Art Insurance Company directors included members of the aristocracy, who joined
with men from the professional classes including insurance men, solicitors, and politicians.
David Cannadine and Peter Mandler have discussed such collaborations between classes as
linked to a decline in the British aristocracy and to a corresponding rise in the bourgeois
aspirational classes.
72
As Cannadine describes it, British patricians dominated Britain’s social
and political life until the 1880s when the landed nobility faced changes to primogeniture tax
laws.
73
This was thanks in part to the work of Liberal leaders, who sought to extract resources
from the wealthy and their landed estates for civic and military projects. By the 1880s, patricians
were selling their moveable goods from their estates to continue upkeep on their lands. This
corresponded to a new rise in picture prices for the market in Old Masters driven by American
and Continental plutocrats.
74
At the same time, the elites’ younger sons were being crowded out
of hereditary professions like the civil service, law, and the Church thanks to new meritocratic
appointing policies.
75
To augment their incomes, they joined company ranks in the City as so-
called “guinea-pig directors”: ornamental directors who allowed their prestigious names to be
printed on company letterhead in exchange for director’s fees.
76

1898; January 8, 1900; December 10, 1900, CLC/B/055/MS14044/002 and 003, Commercial
Union Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.
72
David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1990); Peter Mandler, “Art, death and taxes: the taxation of works of art in
Britain, 1796–1914” Historical Research 74, no. 185 (August 2001): 271-297.
73
Cannadine, The Decline and Fall, 54-71.
74
Mandler, “Art, death and taxes,” 271-297.
75
Meritocracy is an anachronistic word in this context, as it was only introduced by the 1950s.
For a recent take upon British meritocracy in modern education, see Peter Mandler, The Crisis of
the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2020).
76
By 1904, Fine Art directors earned £1,000 per annum and an additional £100 for each one
percent over ten percent paid in company dividends.

221
The Fine Art’s City directors were drawn from the insurance sector as well as from the
ranks of merchant capitalists.
77
A key director on the Fine Art’s board was Lloyd’s of London
underwriter, Cuthbert Eden Heath (1859–1939), colloquially known by insurance historians as
the “Father of Modern Lloyd’s of London” [Fig. 79].
78
The son of a high-ranking Royal Navy
officer who was also a director with the Hand-in-Hand insurance company, Heath was born with
family money and connections. His father underwrote Heath’s early insuring career with a
£7,000 loan, so that by age twenty-four Heath was able to establish his own insurance
underwriting insurance with Lloyd’s.
79
He came to be known in the insurance world for
opportunistically identifying new insurable risks, principally as the main underwriter to induce
Lloyd’s of London to branch out of the marine sector—where it had been stagnating—into other
insurance lines. In 1889 he introduced insurance against burglary, which dramatically expanded
his market to the middle classes, and he wrote the first “all risks” policies for property against
accidental loss.
80
After conducting studies of meteorological and geological data, he “invented”
hurricane and earthquake insurance in 1894 and 1895, respectively.
81
In 1901, during a smallpox
epidemic in London, he introduced smallpox insurance, insuring individuals against getting the
disease at 2s 6d percent, “with the proviso that the assured must [be] vaccinated. Anyone who

77
Minute Book of General Meetings 1891–1969, May 11, 1904, CLC/B/055/MS16826,
Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.
78
Antony Brown, Cuthbert Heath: The Maker of Modern Lloyd’s of London (London: Newton
Abbot: David and Charles, 1980); Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, “Heath,
Cuthbert Eden (1859–1939), underwriter and insurance broker,” by Robin Pearson, accessed
February 22, 2022.
79
Brown, Cuthbert Heath, 62.
80
An “all-risk” policy covers the insured’s possessions by only listing risks that are excluded
from the policy. As this leaves a wide margin for potential insurable risks, these policies are
typically very expensive and are often applied to particularly valuable goods. “all-risks policy.”
in A Dictionary of Business and Management, ed. Jonathan Law (Oxford University Press,
2016). Brown, Cuthbert Heath, 68-97.
81
Brown, 84–87.

222
paid £1 in premium would, if he got the disease, receive £800.”
82
He is best known as the
underwriter who ordered his Lloyd’s syndicate to pay out all outstanding claims for the 1906 San
Francisco Earthquake and fire: a devastating event in the insurance world that forced many other
companies to pay out massive claims, and which led many companies to shutter or be absorbed
as subsidiaries of larger companies.
83
By paying out his insureds’ claims, Heath scored a public
relations coup, elevating Lloyd’s standing in the global market.
Heath advised the Fine Art from 1891, and then formally served as a Fine Art director for
thirty-five years, from 1893 until his death in 1928. Within the company he was the insurance
expert on deck, their man on the ground inside of Lloyd’s, keeping the Fine Art directors
apprised of competitors, ventures to avoid, and new classes of exploitable risk. Soon after he
joined, the board changed the company name to the Fine Art & General Insurance Company,
Ltd.
84
As Heath was considered the daring general insurer, the appended “& General”
underscored the Company’s willingness to take on new classes of insurance aside from art risks.
These classes were myriad and included burglary and library insurances from 1891 (in this case,
their clients included the Oxford Bodleian Libraries and the London Guildhall library), bicycle
accident insurance from 1892, small lines on theatre insurances from 1898 (and on this point,
they relied on expertise supplied by novelist and theater assistant, Bram Stoker [1847–1912]),
and more conventional lines of insurance like municipal dock buildings in Amsterdam, free port

82
Brown, 90.
83
Heath’s other insurance interventions included “trade credit insurance” and “all risk” jewelry
policies for jewelry in transit. From 1919 to 1921 he ventured, unsuccessfully, into aviation
insurance, and during the First World War he was involved in air raid insurance. In 1926 Heath
also helped to introduce a cheaper system of establishing premium rates for reinsurances. Brown,
Cuthbert Heath, 68-97.
84
Board Minute Book, December 4, 1893, CLC/B/055/MS14044/001, Commercial Union
Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.

223
warehouses in Hamburg, and department store warehouses in Paris run by the Pereire family.
85

Heath also empowered the company to refine its art insuring practices and diversify its securities
portfolio. One of his many tasks involved heading a “Standing General Purposes and Finance
Committee,” which introduced a division of intellectual labor within the company.
86
Insurance
companies often formed committees like these, on which specialist directors exercised their
strengths in fields like investing.
87
The artist directors were rarely present at its meetings, and the
topics for debate concerned the company’s numerous reinsurance contracts and discussions on
how to wisely invest and distribute the ever-expanding Company dividends.
Heath’s sensibility about art objects’ symbolic existences extended beyond his work as an
art insurer. In 1910, Heath led a group with the Corporation of Lloyd’s to present Lloyd’s with
seven pieces of eighteenth-century silver plate from Admiral Lord Nelson’s “Nile” and
“Copenhagen Services” [Fig. 80]. In the early nineteenth century under John Julius Angerstein’s
chairmanship, the Committee at Lloyd’s had organized £500 to commission the silver services
given to Lord Nelson to commemorate his victories in 1798 and 1801.
88
The items recovered in

85
Board Minute Book, May 10, 1897 (CLC/B/055/MS14044/001, Commercial Union Assurance
Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London. For insurance on Compagnie des
Entrepôts et Magasins Généraux De Paris see minutes for May 2, 1904,
CLC/B/055/MS14044/001, Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London
Metropolitan Archives, London.
86
Committee for the year 1893 to 1894. The other members included John Matheson
MacDonald and solicitor Arthur Anderson. This committee would continue into the 1930s.
Board Minute Book, June 5, 1893, CLC/B/055/MS14044/001, Commercial Union Assurance
Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.
87
Timothy Alborn, Regulated Lives: Life Insurance and British Society, 1800–1914 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2009), 80.
88
There is some debate about the true cost levied, as some items were much more expensive than
£500 would suggest. These sets were commissioned from a London gold and silversmith’s firm,
Rundell & Bridge. After being reacquired, the silver was kept in the “Nelson Room” at the old
Lloyd’s Building: “a strong-room specially fitted for their safe custody and display,” inaugurated
in 1930. In 1918, Heath would also present another silver vase to Lloyd’s that had originally
been offered “by Lloyd’s Patriotic Fund to Captain Edward Rotheram of the Royal Sovereign for

224
1910 included four inscribed soup plates, and a two entrée dishes with covers featuring handles
shaped like Nelson’s chelengk: a multi-sprigged diamond military decoration that Ottoman
Sultan Selim III awarded Nelson after the Nile battle in 1798, which Nelson wore in his hat ever
after.
89
Silver plate has a long history in business culture. As Farber describes in the context of
American insurance, insurers “communicated both their devotion to, and their independence
from, territorial polities” by publicly gifting costly silver items as a way to reward “merchant
shipmasters and naval captains who had gone to significant trouble to rescue insured ships and
property.”
90
Such gifts—common in Holland and England in the sixteenth centuries, particularly
in religious contexts—could in an insurance context constitute secular celebrations of the
insurer’s financial solidity. As Heath led the charge to recover and re-gift these items, he
symbolically aligned himself with John Julius Angerstein’s heroic tenure at Lloyd’s.
91

Like Angerstein, Heath was another powerful Lloyd’s insurer linked to the British art
world, only unlike Angerstein, little is known about Heath’s proclivity toward art collecting, with
some exceptions. For Heath was also an amateur watercolor painter. Antony Brown describes
how Heath brought a box of watercolor paints whenever he went travelling and was fond of
painting landscapes.
92
An early domestic interior executed in a delicate wash depicts Heath’s
first married home at Cadogan Mansions in Chelsea, London [Fig. 81]. It presents an image of

his services at Trafalgar, together with the only known portrait of that officer.” Warren Royal
Dawson, The Nelson collection at Lloyd’s; a description of the Nelson relics and a transcript of
the autograph letters and documents of Nelson and his circle and of other naval papers of
Nelson’s period (London: Printed at Lloyd’s for the Corporation of Lloyd’s and Pub. by
Macmillan & Co., 1932), i, 7.
89
Dawson, The Nelson collection at Lloyd’s, 9-14.
90
Farber, “Underwritten States,” 2014, 154.
91
I am grateful to Lloyd’s Archivist, Victoria Lane, for inviting me to view this silver and for
allowing me to consult materials related to Heath in Lloyd’s collection.
92
Brown, Cuthbert Heath, 78.

225
an Aestheticist mantlepiece display: vases, candlesticks, ormolu clock, framed pictures, and
japoniste painted fan, all set against patterned wallpaper reminiscent of those designed Charles F.
A. Voysey (1857–1941), or advertised by Jeffrey & Co.: swirling forms referring to the natural
world which were sold at department stores like Liberty of London.
93
With its shallow depth of
field and its curious cropping (the awkward portrait orientation creating too much space above
the mantle, and too little at its left and right borders), the picture discloses Heath’s amateur
compositional skills, but also underscores his own bourgeois investments in aesthetic display and
preservation, for the picture’s prime focus is essentially an inventory of insurable goods, many of
which were drawn from Britain’s imperial investments. Furthermore, unlike the artist Walter
Crane’s (1845–1915) analogous and well-known image of an Aestheticist interior, “My Lady’s
Chamber” (frontispiece to American author and critic Clarence Cook’s The House Beautiful
[1878]) [Fig. 82], Heath has cropped an important element from this display which is also the
scene’s source of danger: the fireplace itself.
94
Instead he leaves visible only some patterned
tilework. Compositionally, the picture enacts a protective subtracting of danger that is
metaphorically analogous to Heath’s work as art insurer.
The company’s imbrication with informal imperial capitalism—that is, with forms of
imperialism that are carried out largely through economic means rather than through extension of

93
Sonia Ashmore, “Liberty and Lifestyle: Shopping for Art and Luxury in Nineteenth-Century
London,” in Buying for the Home, eds. Margaret Ponsonby, David Hussey (London: Routledge,
2008), 73-90; Karen Livingstone, Max Donnelly, and Linda Parry eds., C.F.A. Voysey: Arts &
Crafts Designer (London: V&A Publishing, 2016).
94
Doreen Bolger Burke, In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement (New
York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986), 412-19; Deirdre MacMahon and Janet Myers, The
Objects and Textures of Everyday Life in Imperial Britain (London: Routledge, 2016), 1-2, 16-
17.

226
sovereignty backed by force—also began at its inception.
95
Serving as company chairman for
thirty years, from 1890 until his death in 1919, was John Matheson Macdonald, a shadowy figure
born in India around 1841, who listed himself as a “merchant” in the company’s share allotment
book, and who worked simultaneously with Matheson & Co., the London-facing branch of
Jardine Matheson, a China trading company that in the early nineteenth century had
circumvented the British East India Company’s monopoly in the far east, and later played a
coercive role as traders in the Opium Wars.
96
By the 1890s, the Mathesons were exporting raw
industrial materials as well as consumer goods to China, and they also imported tea, silk and
many other commodities.
97
They also gathered together British capital for purchasing Chinese
government railway loans, and recruited staff for China from Britain. Members of Matheson &
Co., their families, and Jardine Matheson employees snatched up large numbers of Fine Art
Insurance Company shares in the company’s first few years, especially the firm’s two leading
members, William Keswick (1834–1912), a great nephew of one of the founders, and Robert
Jardine (1825–1905), head of the company and a Scottish Liberal M.P. in Devon [Fig. 83].
98
For
his part, John Matheson MacDonald was respected for his “many years’ of experience of trade
with China,” and in 1899 was brought as an expert witness before a “Parliamentary Committee

95
Gareth Austin, “Economic Imperialism,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
96
Board Minute Book, October 23, 1919, CLC/B/055/MS14044/005, Commercial Union
Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London. See Peter Borscheid and
Niels-Viggo Haueter, “Institutional Transfer: The Beginnings of Insurance in Southeast Asia,”
Business History Review 89 (Summer 2015), 207-228.
97
W. E. Cheong, Mandarins and Merchants: Jardine Matheson & Co., A China Agency of the
Early Nineteenth Century (Malmo and London: Curzon Press, 1979), 12; Maggie Keswick, ed.,
The Thistle and the Jade: A Celebration of 150 Years of Jardine, Matheson & Co. (Matheson &
Co.: London, 1982), 63.
98
Robert Blake, Jardine Matheson: Traders of the Far East (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1999), 144.

227
on Indian Currency” to discuss the competition between India and China related to the opium
and tea trades; the competition between Indian and Japan in the cotton trades; and the Indian
currency system.
99
In our own age of multinational companies who tactically invest in cultural
affairs (or in this case, fund financial services to the arts) there is little that may be surprising in
all of this, but it is important not to overlook the barely visible economic backbone upholding
cultural institutions and their attendant services.
The above point about the company’s investors may be magnified by the fact that the
Fine Art’s investors played a decisive role in the company’s affairs. As the notes from the
company’s yearly shareholders’ meetings reveal, investors issued demands and exhortations to
company directors related to distributions of funds and company insuring policies.
100

Shareholder meetings provided condensed synthetic accounts of the company’s workings over
the previous year, and were attended by the chairman, directors, secretary, and usually a number
of shareholders. These meetings were places to take into account the company’s position relative
to its competitors in its various classes of insurance, points in which the shareholders were often
well versed, as some shareholders were insurers and actuaries themselves. Shareholders
frequently objected to what they saw as excessive branch expenses, and every year demanded
higher dividend payouts.
101
Their complaints ultimately affected what risks the company would

99
Great Britain. Indian Currency Committee, 1898, Report of the Committee Appointed to
Inquire into the Indian Currency ... (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode for H. M. S. O., 1899),
216–222.
100
Minute Book of General Meetings 1891–1969, CLC/B/055/MS16826, Commercial Union
Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.
101
The company shifted from paying 3 1/2 percent dividends to shareholders in the 1890s to
twenty-five percent dividends by 1914, although percentage increases did not always mean that
the company’s income was materially higher. Rather, the shareholders had agitated enough to
rattle the directors into appeasing them with higher percentages. See Minute Book of General
Meetings 1891–1969, May 25, 1897, CLC/B/055/MS16826, Commercial Union Assurance
Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.

228
cover, although the director repeatedly pointed out that the company had “avoided the rock on
which new insurance companies generally foundered, namely, that of getting business at any
price.”
102
By this he meant that the company focused on its exclusive and “non-hazardous”
business in art insuring. This business was nevertheless affected by falls in picture prices, as in
the 1893 economic downturn.
103

In the Fine Art’s early days, the company forged partnerships through its chairman and
directors. They shared offices, staff, and expenses with another Matheson subsidiary, the Hong
Kong Fire Insurance Company, and at one point debated acquiring this business.
104
This
insurance company in some cases formed a precursor company for the Fine Art, and the Fine
Art’s later collaborator, Thomas Agnew & Sons, brokered insurance for their clients with the
Hong Kong.
105
Other partnerships were forged through company director and amateur artist,
Archibald Stuart-Wortley (1849–1905) who had connections with the Fine Art Society (a New
Bond Street gallery founded in 1876) and effected insurances on behalf of the Society of Portrait
Painters, where he was the founder member and president, and also forged a connection with the
Grafton Galleries under director Francis Prange (b. ca. 1843) [Fig. 84].
106
This connection

102
Minute Book of General Meetings 1891–1969, January 11, 1894, London Metropolitan
Archives, CLC/B/055/MS168/26, Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London
Metropolitan Archives, London.
103
Minute Book of General Meetings 1891–1969, April 12, 1894, CLC/B/055/MS16826,
Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.
104
Discussions about the Hong Kong’s closure occur through 1894. Board Minute Book,
CLC/B/055/MS14044/002, Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London
Metropolitan Archives, London.
105
For example, J. Cunliffe Lister was an Agnew’s collector who purchased Hong Kong Fire
Insurance Company policies on his artworks (November 5, 1890: Day Book 12, 270). He
subsequently switched to Fine Art Policies.
106
See the Royal Society of Portrait Painters Meeting Minutes (1891–1898). Contained within is
a December 1891 balance sheet revealing that the Royal Society paid the Fine Art £32 13s, 3d.
on insurances for the 1891 exhibition season, or £2,679.94 in 2017’s numbers. The Grafton
Galleries was another private gallery, operational from around 1893 until 1930. It was where the

229
proved something of a headache for the company, as throughout the 1890s the Grafton Galleries
neglected to pay their premiums on time, as evinced by commentaries in over sixteen Fine Art
Directors’ meetings from 1895 to 1900. The Grafton Galleries continually accrued bad debts, in
spite of Stuart-Wortley’s mediations. Yet the company still agreed to underwrite £250,000 on the
Galleries’ George Romney Exhibition in the summer of 1900, perhaps because of Romney’s
prestige, but also because a number of Fine Art associates were lenders to that exhibition.
107

Beyond its branches, the company archives show that from 1891 to 1918, the Fine Art
paid commissions to around 14,700 independent agents (with at least 2,500 agents bringing in
business by 1896 alone), although these agents cease to be individually named in the Board
Meeting minutes after 1893, and so this number should probably remain approximate to account
for re-instatements of agents.
108
These agents were stationed everywhere from Scandinavia to the
United States. As was common in insurance markets, they carried out primary work in other
service sectors as solicitors, estate agents, or retailers in luxury trades, and earned commissions

first group exhibition of French Impressionists was held, under the curatorship of French dealer,
Paul Durand-Ruel (1831–1922). Grafton Galleries, Bond Street: Minute Book, 1891 March–
1898 July, AAC/3489/001, Royal Society of Portrait Painters, London Metropolitan Archives,
London. For assistance in this research I am grateful to former President of the Royal Society of
Portrait Painters, Alastair Adams PPRP.
107
Algernon Graves, a Fine Art contractor, lent many engravings, while Thomas Humphrey
Ward, a Fine Art director, lent a collection of Romney’s personal objects and effects like
copperplates, memorandum books, and a passport issued to Romney in Paris in 1775 that was
signed by Louis XVI. These were hardly costly items compared to the paintings displayed. “The
premium to be paid in three equal installments, on the 15th May, 15th June and 15th July.”
Board Minute Book, April 30, 1900, CLC/B/055/MS14044/003, Commercial Union Assurance
Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London. See also Grafton Galleries,
Exhibition of a Special Selection From the Works by George Romney, Including a Few Portraits
of Emma, Lady Hamilton by Other Artists: the Grafton Galleries, Summer Exhibition, 1900
(London: The Galleries, 1900). The National Gallery preserves the insurance copybook for both
Romney exhibitions that lists all of the insurances. The Second Romney Exhibition: Insurances,
1900, NGA27/21/4, National Gallery Research Centre, London.
108
Minute Book of General Meetings 1891–1969, June 1, 1896, CLC/B/055/MS16826,
Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.

230
on insurances which could be up to twenty percent, as was the case for a New York agent in
1895.
109
They could also earn retaining fees to keep them in the company’s employ. Other
partnering agents included Barker & Neale, a firm of surveyors and auctioneers.
110
The
company’s Library Specialist was Cecil T. Davis, who worked at the public library in
Wandsworth. For statuary, the Fine Art’s agents were Bellman, Ivey & Carter in Piccadilly (for
marble sculptures) and Messrs. Brucciani & Co. for plaster sculptures.
111
This latter company
was well known in London for producing important casts for the British Museum and especially
for the South Kensington Museum’s Cast Courts.
112

Well-connected private citizens and professionals associated with dealerships and
galleries filled out the contractor’s ranks. The Fine Art contracted other specialists and
connoisseurs, and often refused to accept any insurance on pictures or objects unless one of these
experts endorsed the object’s authenticity, as well as the owner’s social standing. That is,
expertise was used to establish and confirm an artwork’s value.
113
In 1892, the company paid

109
The company contemplated opening an agency in New York but instead decided to appoint
independent agents: “Mr. Gorst’s application to be appointed the company’s New York
representative was discussed. The Secretary was instructed to inform Mr. Gorst that the Board
not prepared at the present time to open an Agency in America but that the Company would be
prepared to consider any proposals which he might submit and if accepted, to grant him twenty
percent commission.” Board Minute Book, December 6, 1895, CLC/B/055/MS14044/002,
Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.
110
They were located at 25, Motcomb Street, Belgrave Square.
111
Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851–1951,
“Bellman, Ivey and Carter Ltd.,” University of Glasgow History of Art and HATII, online
database 2011 http://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/organization.php?id=msib1_1240314667, accessed
July 16, 2021.
112
The company’s picture packers included R. Dolman & Son at 6, New Compton Street, W. C.;
Bradley & Co. at 81, Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, W. C.; and Dicksee & Co. at Rose &
Crown Yard, King Street, St James’s, S.W.
113
Bénédicte Miyamoto, “Making Pictures Marketable: Expertise and the Georgian Art Market,”
in Marketing Art in the British Isles, 1700 to the Present: A Cultural History, eds. Charlotte
Gould, Sophie Mesplède (London: Routledge, 2012), 119-134; Board Minute Book, August 24,

231
Francis Prange a retaining fee of £100 a year for approximately two years to share information
about art collectors with the Fine Art: that is, to basically to provide intelligence on potential
clients. Prange received a commission for every new client he gained for the company.
114
In one
case, Prange catalogued and set insurance values on the collection belonging to Lord Marquess
of Lothian at Newbattle Abbey, Midlothian, Scotland, for a fee of £50, which the Lord Marquess
found excessive, and complained to the directors, setting off a debate among the board about
how experts’ fees ought to be fixed.
115
In 1893, the Company hired the art writer and dealer,
Algernon Graves (1845–1922) as prints and engravings expert.
116
The son of publisher and
auctioneer Henry Graves (1806–1892), Algernon Graves trained in his father’s gallery and
publishing firm, and eventually took over the family business. As an aid to his gallery work,
Graves wrote numerous volumes that were essentially lists of British artists and artworks, and
histories of loan exhibitions around the British Isles.
117
These books show how more than anyone
of the era, Graves tracked artworks’ movements from place to place, and from owner to owner,
and his work has become one essential cornerstone for provenance research in British art and
collecting.
118
Graves’ participation in company matters is particularly significant, for he was

1891, CLC/B/055/MS14044/001, Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London
Metropolitan Archives, London.
114
Board Minute Book, March 28, 1892, CLC/B/055/MS14044/001, Commercial Union
Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London. Prange’s earnings from
the Fine Art would be about £8,204.93 per annum in 2017’s numbers.
115
Board Minute Book, October 9, 1893, CLC/B/055/MS14044/001, Commercial Union
Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.
116
Board Minute Book, January 16, 1893, CLC/B/055/MS14044/001, Commercial Union
Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.
117
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, “Graves, Algernon (1845–1922), writer on
art,” by Susanna Avery-Quash, accessed February 22, 2022.
118
See Algernon Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts: A Complete Dictionary of Contributors
and their Work from its Foundation in 1769 to 1904 (London: Graves & Co., 1906); Algernon
Graves, Art Sales from Early in the Eighteenth Century to Early in the Twentieth Century, 3 vols.
(London: Algernon Graves, 1918–1921); Algernon Graves, The British Institution, 1806–1867:

232
keenly aware of insurance’s place in the art world. In a February 1895 interview with The Sketch,
Graves related his valiant effort in 1867 to rescue a clutch of Gainsborough paintings from a
devastating fire that consumed Her Majesty’s Theater and numerous buildings around the
Haymarket in London.
119
Priced at least £40,000, these costly pictures—including a portrait of
Sir Henry Bate Dudley—had been lent to Graves’ father’s picture galleries for engraving, but
were heedlessly uninsured for the period that they were away from their owners’ residences. Had
they burned, the owners would have been unable to claim the existing premiums, as insurance
policies strictly stipulated that items covered must remain in the dwellings or buildings where
they were insured. Graves’ status as hired expert attested to the company’s interest in shoring up
as much knowledge as they could about the field, which played out in the company’s practices
and policies.

4. Practices and policies

The Fine Art Insurance Company expressed its gatekeeping function through its insuring
practices. These practices could have different outcomes for the insured, depending upon
whether the insured was an institution, an artist, a collector. In its articles of association, it
defined its purpose as follows:
To carry on the business of Insurance of works of art, houses, buildings and all kinds of
property, articles, and things against loss or damage by or through fire, accident, robbery
or tempest, or by or through accidents to, or loss of ships, lighters, or boats at sea, or on
the water, or against any other perils or risks whatsoever, and generally to carry on in all
its branches the business of insurance (except life insurance) [and guarantee] with full
power to effect re-insurances and counter insurances as may be expedient, and to carry on
any business of a character similar or analogous to the business of insurance [and

A Complete Dictionary of Contributors and Their Work from the Foundation of the Institution
(Bath: Kingsmead Reprints, 1970); Algernon Graves, A century of loan exhibitions, 2 vols.
(Bath: Kingsmead, 1970).
119
“MR. ALGERNON GRAVES A.C.R.C.,” The Sketch, February 6, 1895, 9, 106.

233
guarantee], or any other business, which can, in the opinion of the Board, be
advantageously carried on by the Company in connection with, or as auxiliary to the
general business of the Company.
120

From the beginning, the company’s stated business appears quite capacious, although art
insurance took priority in the list.
121
Already in 1891, the company directors asserted their
authority to pass judgement on artworks, particularly when it came to issuing “indisputable”
policies, which were policies whose terms could only be disputed on the grounds of fraud. This
discussion arose in a directors’ meeting of 1891:
A letter from the Manchester office (#3269) regarding the issue of indisputable policies
was read. It was resolved that no indisputable policy be issued unless the genuineness of
pictures attributed to certain artists be established to the satisfaction of the Board, and
especially when the values placed upon them indicate that if genuine the values insured
are obviously incorrect. Instructions on this subject were ordered to be issued to the
Manchester Branch Manager.
122

120
Minute Book of General Meetings 1891–1969, December 12, 1893, CLC/B/055/MS16826,
Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.
121
A memorandum from the secretary in 1894 indicated that the expenses of the Head Office
that year was £5,215, while expenses of home and foreign branches were £5,145. The secretary
then proceeded to recommend that the company reject the following classes of risks: “Boot and
shoe factories; Bedding factories and sack works; Cotton wearers and doublers; Glove and hat
factories; Lace factories; Leather and skin dressers; Jute and Flax mills; Printers and
bookbinders; paper mills; rope works; [illegible] refineries; Ship chandlers; Wood workers;
Theatres and Music Halls; woolen mills; Soap and candle works; Saw Mills; Confectioners; […]
Hosiery factories; [illegible]; Linoleum and [cloth] work; Oil mills; Oil and [illegible] works;
Paper Hangers; Rubber + Waterproof Factories; Worsted Mills.” Following that list, the
Secretary then recommended that the following class risks be “accepted with discrimination”:
Thread factories; Cement works, Dwellings and non-hay risks; Exhibitions; Granaries; Linen
factories; Wool and worsted [works]; Brick and Slate works; Breweries and Distilleries;
Chemical Works; Corn mills; Furniture Depositories and Carriers; Tobacco Factories. Board
Minute Book, CLC/B/055/MS14044/001, Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited,
London Metropolitan Archives, London.
122
Board Minute Book, October 5, 1891, CLC/B/055/MS14044/001, Commercial Union
Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.

234
By the end of the year, the company was issuing indisputable policies on prints, engravings,
drawings “in approved private dwellings or other buildings when the value insured indisputably
on any one picture, print […] does not Exceed £100.”
123

The company especially focused its attentions on pictures: whether in transit, on loan for
reproductive purposes, or even unfinished in artists’ studios. They frequently took out large
reinsurances on panel pictures because of the damages that panels often suffered in transit on
railways. One major precaution stipulated that if a picture was framed and glazed, its glass had to
be removed and packed separately.
124
While it might seem logical to remove a picture’s glass,
this was a contentious practice, for removing a picture’s glazing rendered it vulnerable to the
elements encountered in transit.
125
The board also inserted a special clause in connection with the
insurance of watercolors, again related to glazing, but this time the glazing in the sense of
applying protective coats of paint to a picture’s surface. In 1893, a watercolor by Edward Burne-
Jones, Love Among the Ruins (1870–73) was damaged when an egg-white varnish was applied to
its surface while it was on loan for reproductive purposes with one of the Fine Art’s clients, the
Berlin Photographic Company of London [Fig. 85]. This company would later claim that the

123
Board Minute Book, December 16, 1891, CLC/B/055/MS14044/001, Commercial Union
Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.
124
Board Minute Book, January 27, 1891, CLC/B/055/MS14044/001, Commercial Union
Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.
125
For example, when Isidore Spielmann had a painting by late Victorian painter, Henrietta Rae
(1859–1928) shipped without its glass to an exhibition, Rae wrote him an enraged letter, stating
“The line of the picture is so light, and the surface painting of the figures so granular, that if any
dirt ever lodges on the surface, the picture will be absolutely ruined. No sponging will ever
remove dirt from the interstices of the color. Do not for a moment think of omitting to send the
glass, and I sincerely hope it will be replaced before the inevitable dirt of an exhibition ruins the
picture.” Rae went on to state that as an artist sending her own picture to an exhibition, high
insurance costs forced her to underinsure, further contributing to the picture’s vulnerability,
whereas if a collector had sent the picture, “insurance would have been trebled.” Henrietta Rae to
Isidore Spielmann, Isidore Spielmann Letters From Artists, 1897–1915, MS/ENG/d/87/A-K/438,
Oxford Bodleian Libraries.

235
picture was in the hands of a Parisian photographic company when it was damaged, but it still
disconcerted the Fine Art.
126
A picture need not be completed for it to be insurable, it would just
“depend upon the merit of each case and that each acceptance of such risk should be submitted at
the following meeting of Directors for confirmation.”
127
The company’s minutes neglect to
specify how complete a work needed to be in order to qualify for coverage, nor do they indicate
whether the artwork’s or the artist’s social and artistic potential played a role in the company’s
decision to insure.
Given that the company’s primary work was considered “peculiar” relative to other
insurance companies (a recurring term throughout its meeting minutes), its finances were modest
when viewed alongside larger offices like the Guardian, the Phoenix, and the Sun, evinced by
data in trade journals like the Post Magazine and Insurance Monitor [Fig. 86]. But the Fine Art’s
small scale served in some cases as insulation against dramatic market fluctuations, and also
contributed to its sense of its own exclusivity.
128
An 1892 circular intended for art clients reveals
the kinds of cases the company undertook, and attests to its professional and social ambitions
[Fig. 87].
129
A design with two columns of text that lists current company clients, the text is

126
M. H. Speilmann, “An Artistic Causerie,” Graphic, October 7, 1893; Morning Post, iss.
37846, September 28, 1893, 3; Board Minute Book, March 31, 1891, CLC/B/055/MS14044/001,
Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.
127
Board Minute Book, September 30, 1890, CLC/B/055/MS14044/001, Commercial Union
Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.
128
The company was able to establish itself despite a rocky economic environment in London
due to the failures related to the international 1890 Barings Crisis. When another crisis in 1893
related to speculations in American railways shook British investors’ confidence and depressed
the insurance markets, the Fine Art could nonetheless assert in its annual report that “the
progress made by the Company’s business has been steady and satisfactory.” Fine Art Annual
Report for 1893, AVIVA Group Archives, Norwich.
129
Even if behind the scenes, the company men felt themselves to be on somewhat precarious
footing. The Company only admitted to success by 1896, when they felt they had achieved
respect of both the insurance world and the art world. Fine Art Annual Report for 1896, AVIVA
Group Archives, Norwich.

236
headed by royalty and members of the peerage—which included the Queen of Hanover, Princess
Marie of Saxe-Altenburg (1854–1898), as well as Thomas George Baring (1826–1904), First
Earl of Northbrook: Viceroy of India, one-time company trustee, and avid art collector who
exhibited his collection at his own Baring Gallery at No. 4 Hamilton Place in Mayfair.
130

Included also was the same Sir John Charles Robinson of the watercolor controversy with which
I opened this chapter.
131
Influential Academicians—including Hubert von Herkomer (1849–
1914), George Frederic Watts (1817–1904), and Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912)—are
followed further down by speculative ventures and limited liability companies, including the
Cunard Steamship Company Ltd (1879–1934), which would build the ill-fated passenger
steamer, the Lusitania in 1904. The second column includes municipal interests: major
industrialized cities that organized large-scale international exhibitions. Below them are the art
world intermediaries, gallerists including Agnew’s, Arthur Tooth & Sons, and P. D. Colnaghi
and Co.
132
Finally, we find a large block of what were referred to as “New Men”: American and
British cotton, steel, and coal magnates with ambitious art collections, and South African
Randlords who were diamond and gold magnates like Julius Wernher (1850–1912), as well as
the Sassoon family: Baghdadi Jewish opium merchants colloquially referred to as the
“Rothschilds of the East.”
133
The board’s ambitions were so great, that already in 1891 they

130
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, “Baring, Thomas George, first earl of
Northbrook (1826–1904), politician and viceroy of India,” by David Steele, accessed December
1, 2021.
131
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, “Robinson, Sir John Charles (1824–1913),”
by John James Napier, accessed December 1, 2021. Burton, Vision & Accident, 57-73.
132
In the later 1890s, Colnaghi would abandon the Fine Art for the Liverpool & London Globe, a
rival office. Board Minute Book, February 11, 1895, CLC/B/055/MS14044/002, Commercial
Union Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.
133
Further Randlords and Fine Art clients included Alfred Beit (1853–1906), as well as his
brother, Otto Beit (1865–1930), who insured their pictures through Agnew’s. Evidence of their
patronage is in the Agnew’s ledgers and day books. See Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional

237
sought to secure Queen Victoria’s picture insurances through their contacts, Baring, Archibald
Stuart-Wortley, and Sir Henry Ponsonby (1825–1895), the Queen’s private secretary. However,
only a month after the directors discussed the possibility of landing this extraordinary client, it
was revealed that a tariff office had won the Queen’s art insurances instead.
134

The circular’s austerely elegant design and commentary in the Company’s detailed Board
Meeting minutes indicate that the company established its network of contacts by word-of-mouth
in the upper reaches of a heterogeneous commercial and polite society: a circle dependent as well
upon the contacts of Thomas Agnew & Sons, Ltd., discussed more below. Company director
John Callcott Horsley RA (1817–1903)—a Royal Academician savaged by James Abbott
McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) for his conservatism, and whom Punch nicknamed “Clothes”
Horsley on account of Horsley’s objection to artists drawing from the nude—helped the Fine Art
win elite clients like the Royal Academy.
135
Working for the Fine Art in a period when
enthusiasm for his own artwork was in decline, Horsley used his influence to shore up support
for British art, shown in extant insurance documents related to the Chantrey Bequest of British

Society: England Since 1880 (London: Routledge, 1989, Second ed. 2002), 63-115; Michael
Stevenson, Art and Aspirations: The Randlords of South Africa and their Collections (Vlaeberg:
Fernwood Press, 2002). Other interesting insurance classes included philately insurance. The
company insured the stamp collections of John Neville Keynes (father of economist John
Maynard Keynes) and the Earl of Crawford. Board Minute Book, August 18, 1902 and June 6,
1904, CLC/B/055/MS14044/003, Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London
Metropolitan Archives, London.
134
Board Minute Book, November 16 and December 16, 1891, CLC/B/055/MS14044/001,
Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London. The
tariff office insured them for 3s 6d percent. This was more than what the Fine Art charged, but it
was likely the Fine Art did not get the commission because they were so new that their stability
as an office was still in doubt. Letter from J. C. Robinson to [Sir William] Agnew, November 15,
1891, NGA27/32/2/74, National Gallery Research Centre.
135
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, “Horsley, John Callcott (1817–1903),
painter,” by Helen Valentine, accessed December 3, 2020.

238
pictures in the Royal Academy Archive [Fig. 88].
136
The Royal Academy formed this collection
using a trust to support contemporary British art that had been established in 1840 by sculptor Sir
Francis Chantrey (1781–1841). Critics of the Royal Academy saw the Chantrey Bequest as
exclusionary and chauvinistic, in thrall to conservative aesthetic dictates.
137
The insurance
documents for the Chantrey works are largely short-term, all-risk policies and receipts for
Chantrey acquisitions that were sent to Nottingham, Leeds, Derby, Oldham, Aberdeen, Sheffield,
and Liverpool. They prescribe how the artworks should be transported and what legs of the
journeys were underwritten.
138
That the Fine Art provided insurance for these works reveals how
the Fine Art was in the business of a particular kind of ideological prioritization supporting
reactionary art practices.
But the company also prioritized insuring loaned artworks at large-scale exhibitions.
Between 1890 and 1914, the company insured works at more than forty national and
international exhibitions. Another tireless company director, Sir James D. Linton, was
instrumental in this area. He helped the Fine Art secure contracts with the exhibition organizer,
Imre Kiralfy (1845–1919), who organized exhibitions at the Earl’s Court Exhibition Grounds in

136
Papers relating to the loan of Chantrey works to regional museums and galleries 1888–1896,
RAA/PC/15, Royal Academy Archive, London. I am grateful for Royal Academy archivist Mark
Pomeroy’s expert advice in working with these archives. See also Bayer and Page, The
Development of the Art Market, 199.
137
Gerald Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste: The Rise and Fall of Picture Prices, 1760–1960,
vol. 1 (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1961), 163-164.
138
While dealers often sold pictures for guineas, which were considered the “gentleman’s”
pound, worth twenty-one shillings instead of the usual pound’s twenty shillings, it appears that
some artworks were often insured for pounds. So, when an “indisputable” “all risks” short period
policy on two paintings sent to the town of Oldham, Bath of Psyche by Frederic Leighton and
Between two Fires by D. F. Millet stipulated that the painting’s values (at £1,050 and £330
respectively) were insured for “three pounds, three shillings” of a value of £1,400, it was unclear
whether the costs of insurance added up to the cost of the works insured.

239
London [Fig. 89].
139
These included the Empire of India Exhibition (1895), a massive spectacle
for which the Fine Art would list losses from damp, as well as the Empire of India and Ceylon
Exhibition the following year.
140
For the latter exhibition, Linton—as a Vice President of The
Society for the Encouragement and Preservation of Indian Art, one of his many committee
appointments—served as the exhibition’s Chairman of the Fine Arts and Loan Committee.
141

139
Paul Greenhalgh, “Art, Politics and Society at the Franco-British Exhibition of 1908,” Art
History 8, no. 4 (December 1985): 434-452; Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, 52-81.
140
Board Minute Book, December 3, 1894; Losses reported December 2, 1895,
CLC/B/055/MS14044/001 and 002 Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London
Metropolitan Archives, London. Further exhibitions insured there included the Victorian Era
Exhibition (1897) the Women’s Exhibition (1900).
141
Linton has a deeper history as a participant in collective schemes and speculations. A son of a
well-to-do family that had lost its fortune in the global financial panic of 1857, Linton had
studied painting against his father’s wishes, and became an Associate in the fledgling Royal
Institute of Painters in Water Colors in 1867: one of the professional artists’ associations that
challenged the Royal Academy’s cultural supremacy in the nineteenth century. Linton became a
full Member at the Royal Institute in 1870, and the Institute’s Vice-President in 1883, when,
thanks to his organizational acumen, the Institute was able to move to its own stately premises
opposite Burlington House in Piccadilly (the building remains there still). For his efforts, Linton
received a knighthood from Queen Victoria in 1885, and became the Institute’s president in
1889. Linton brought to the Fine Art’s board his expert knowledge about watercolors. He also
brought what anthropologist Mary Douglas (through a reading of Pierre Bourdieu) has called
“honorific capital.” That is, Linton brought professionalized “forms of civic recognition,” and
acquired knowledge, confirmed through his numerous honorific memberships, directorships, and
institutional presidencies. But while Linton was an asset to the Fine Art, his participation in City
business brought him deleterious dividends. For, like many artists, Linton was honorifically rich
but cash poor. A father of eight, with extended family to support, and a conservative painter of
period costume dramas in a world which rewarded diminishing returns for the same, Linton
cobbled together a precarious income. Along with the Fine Art and other associations, he also
chaired speculative financial ventures, including the “the London and Westminster Contract
Corporation, Ltd.,” established in London by two adventuring Americans in 1896, as well as a
clutch of West Australian Gold mining companies, like the “Menzies United Mines, Ltd.,” and
the optimistically named “Miner’s Dream Gold Mines.” In 1896, the “Miner’s Dream” mines
failed, and Linton sent his second eldest son to Australia to investigate. Then in 1898, the two
Americans of “the London and Westminster Contract Corporation, Ltd.”—a Mr. Brotherton and
a Mr. Van Ee—absconded back to their native land to escape arrest, having conned investors out
of around £60,000 to £70,000. Linton was hauled before the London Bankruptcy Court in March
with the remaining directors of these shell companies, making what a report in the Investor’s
Review described as a “very sad exhibition of himself.” But this was not the only court of
judgment that Linton faced. News of Linton’s misfortunes rocked the Royal Institute for Painters

240
This Committee organized a loan collection from the British East India Company, and Linton
wrote the catalogue’s brief introduction, where he outlined the physical challenges in pulling
such an exhibition together.
142
Prior to the exhibition, he published a newspaper appeal for loans
from collectors who might have items including arms, furniture, costumes, jewelry, art works of
all kinds, “in fact, everything of ethnological or general interest,” and promised that the directors
of the London Exhibitions Company would undertake “every reasonable responsibility for the
reception, custody, insurance, and damage, and the return after the closing of the Exhibitions of

in Water Colors. Already in 1896 after the failure of the “Miner’s Dream Mines,” Linton read a
prepared statement to his Royal Institute colleagues, where he protested that he never intended to
affiliate himself with “bogus companies,” that he was no different than his aristocratic colleagues
who also speculated in the City, and that he had only the Institute’s best interests at heart. In
response to his moving disquisition, other members nonetheless expressed concern that Linton
had roped his professional art world contacts into his City business—which was certainly true in
the case of the Fine Art. Ultimately the 1896 scandal was smoothed over, but when the bigger
“London and Westminster” scandal broke in 1898, Linton tendered his resignation by letter to
the Royal Institute board on April 2, 1898. All was ultimately not lost for Linton: he was re-
elected president at the Royal Institute for Painters in Water Colors in 1909, a position which he
held along with his Fine Art directorship until his death. Linton’s financial woes were a tragic
cul-de-sac, and a common enough story in the mining speculation boom of the 1890s. What they
reveal is a curious tension whereby artist-underwriter seemed to counterbalance cautious
professional behavior with personal risk. Sources for this narrative include: “The PROFITS of
COMPANY PROMOTION,” Morning Post, Tuesday, March 22, 1898; advertisements in The
Economist, October 3, 1896, 1308; The Statist, September 14, 1895, xxii; commentary in James
Herbert Curle, The gold mines of the world (London, Routledge; New York, The Engineering
and mining journal, 1905), 195; James Dromgole Linton miscellaneous papers, 860525
(bx.4,f.65), Letters and papers of British artists, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Julie
Codell, “From Culture to Cultural Capital: Victorian Artists, John Ruskin, and the Political
Economy of Art,” in The Political Economy of Art, ed. Julie Codell (New Jersey: Rosemont
Publishing, 2008), 27-39; Royal Institute for Painters in Water Colors General Meeting Minutes
Book 1 (February 6, 1888–April 23, 1903), and General Meeting Minutes Book 2 (June 9, 1904–
February 13, 1928), V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House London. I am grateful to Rosa
Sepple, President of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colors, and to V&A Head Archivist,
Christopher Marsden, who gave me access to the uncatalogued Royal Institute for Painters in
Water Colors archive, which was closed to researchers due to the archive’s poor conservation
state.
142
Imre Kiralfy, Official catalogue of the Empire of India exhibition (London: Earl’s Court S.W.,
1895), 169-170.

241
the objects lent.”
143
It was important that the Fine Art supported the London Exhibitions
Company, because it signified that the Fine Art was also interested in covering popular
spectacles outside of fine art exhibitions, although occasionally this was a problem as such
events had larger visitor numbers and involved more complex risks.
144
In 1908, the Fine Art
board was furious to discover that a dirigible which accidentally exploded at the Franco-British
Exhibition in London’s White City fairgrounds—killing three and injuring more—had been
insured with the Fine Art for a “ridiculous rate of premium,” considering that dirigibles were an
extremely hazardous risk.
145
The Directors insisted that “in future no hazardous risk be accepted
by any one person individually but that in such cases, the risk be submitted so two or more of the
persons authorized to accept risks and declined unless they are agreed that under the
circumstances the Company is justified in accepting same.”
146

When exhibitions were located close by in London, as with Earl’s Court, the Fine Art
could exercise direct oversight on items insured and their conditions. But when something went
wrong and the directors were unable to exert this kind of advance control, they resorted to

143
See also The British Architect, March 6, 1896, 163.
144
Brendan Edward Gregory, “The Spectacle Plays and Exhibitions of Imre Kiralfy, 1887–
1914,” PhD diss., University of Manchester, 1988. One of the Fine Art’s other major insured
exhibitions was the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. This exhibition was organized from
July 13, 1891 and was undertaken in consultation with Sir Henry Truman Wood, Secretary of the
Royal Society of Arts. About the exhibition, the Year’s Art noted disapprovingly that high
insurance costs prevented works by early British masters from being displayed, which was a pity
as this was the sort of work for which “the Americans have been lately displaying marked
appreciation.” The Year’s Art (1894): 220-221. The Fine Art covered works for exhibits at the
Chicago Exhibition, including transit insurances to the exhibition on behalf of the German
section, led by Antoine Proust and Adolph Wermuth. When a fire broke out at the exhibition on
July 10, the Company were liable to pay claims to Arthur Tooth & Sons, who had also loaned
works. Board Minute Book, January 15, 1894, CLC/B/055/MS14044/002, Commercial Union
Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.
145
“White City Balloon Disaster,” Nottingham Evening Post, August 18, 1908, 5.
146
Board Minute Book, August 17, 1908, CLC/B/055/MS14044/003, Commercial Union
Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.

242
threats, retrospective sanctions, or boycotts. In August 1892, the Fine Art had agreed to insure
loaned pictures traveling from Britain to the 1892 South African and International Exhibition in
the Cape Province of Kimberley, but in 1893 after the pictures apparently suffered damage
during this loan, the Fine Art complained to the Council of the Imperial Institute, the Council of
the Royal Academy and other art institutions, warning all against lending works to the
colonies.
147
Sometimes boycotts were more subtle, but still hinted at another kind of gatekeeping.
In June 1901, the company declined to advertise in the catalogues of the London Pastel Society
(founded in 1898) because they did not want to give the impression that they would accept
insurances on pastels, and especially on pastels travelling from abroad. The initial logic behind
this decision might appear sound. Pastels were perceived as uniquely unstable, constructed of
pure powdered pigments loosely attached to the tooth of a paper’s surface. Imagine such delicate
works jostled in the holds of a rolling ship. But it is also possible that the directors wished to
curb a concurrent vogue for pastels and pastel societies. In 1900, artist and writer Alfred Lys
Baldry (1858–1939) published a passionate defense of pastel in The Magazine of Art, in which
he argued that the claims about pastel being “too fragile and fugitive to have any commercial
value” were false and likely emerged from a not-so-subtle chauvinism about the medium that

147
The comments in the board minutes respecting the Kimberley Exhibition decision read as
follows: “The correspondence with Mr. Lewis Atkinson respecting the Kimberley Exhibition
was submitted and after some discussion it was: Resolved that the Secretary be instructed to
write a letter to the Council of the Imperial Institute, the Council of the Royal Academy and
other Art [Bodies] recounting the facts connected with the ill treatment of the pictures lent to the
Kimberley Exhibition pointing out that the result of the irreparable negligence must mitigate
against the excess of any application from the colonies for assistance in his country in the form
of the loan of works of art for Exhibition and requesting the various authorities to bring the
matter to the notice of the public bodies throughout the colonies. —Sir James D. Linton kindly
undertook to attend the meeting of the Council of the Imperial Institute when the subject came
before that body for discussion.” Board Minute Book, July 3, 1893, CLC/B/055/MS14044/002,
Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.

243
stemmed from its association with eighteenth-century French and Italian Rococo artists like
Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) or Rosalba Carriera (1673–1757), and with cosmopolitan
artists like James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
148
It is likely that pastel’s low status as a particularly
feminized medium first associated with French Rococo, then with Whistler’s modernist efforts,
also played a role in the company’s decision to disdain the medium.
149

If there was a publicized accident, disaster, or act of vandalism involving works of art,
chances are the company was involved in some way. When suffragette iconoclasts, Lillian
Forrester (1879–after 1916), Annie Briggs, and Evelyn Manesta (1887 or 1888) smashed the
glass of thirteen paintings in the collection of the Manchester Art Gallery in 1913, one of a string
of similar attacks on art institutions across the country, the Company registered the events in its
meeting minutes, laconically noting that although that some of the damaged pictures had been
insured against all risks with the Fine Art’s Manchester branch, and others had been insured
against fire, “fortunately the pictures which had been damaged by Suffragists were insured with

148
Indeed, Baldry illustrates his article with a pastel portrait by Marion Gemmell, a pastel artist
in whose studio the London Pastel Society first formed in 1898. Alfred Lys Baldry, “Pastel - Its
Value and Present Position,” The Magazine of Art, January 1900, 278, 279. Oliver Wunsch
writes on the economic valences of pastel. Oliver Wunsch, “Pastel and the Portraiture of Risk.”
Working paper, November 2018, Microsoft Word file. See also Freya Spoor, “Prioritizing
Pastels: The stylistic and cultural impact of pastel exhibitions at the Grosvenor Gallery London,
1888–1890,” British Art Journal 21, no. 1 (2020): 32-39.
149
Ad hominem commentary in a number of archives leads me to believe that there was probably
no love lost between much of the Fine Art board and Whistler, although that is probably not
saying much given Whistler’s ability to make enemies. As we have already seen, Whistler spoke
disparagingly of some Fine Art directors like John Callcott Horsley. In Whistler’s
correspondence, he repeatedly ridicules another director, Thomas Humphry Ward, as the “plain
man” of the Times, while in another letter addressed to Whistler, the art dealer and critic, David
Croal Thompson described James Dromgole Linton as “inane.” The Correspondence of James
McNeill Whistler, Letters December 6–7, 1886; December 13/15, 1886?; February 25, 1892;
June 29, 1892; July 12, 1893, https://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/

244
the Company against Fire only”—hence absolving the Fine Art of paying any claims.
150
After
another suffragette, Mary Ann Aldham (alias Mary Wood, 1858–1840), hacked John Singer
Sargent’s Portrait of Henry James (1913) three times with a meat cleaver on May 4, 1914 as it
hung in the Royal Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition, the Company obligingly responded to
the Royal Academy’s request to retrospectively insure the painting against all risks at 2s 6p
percent, thereby providing a monetary buffer against any further potential attacks. However, the
damage had effectively been done [Fig. 90].
151

Owing to their work’s general exclusivity, the Fine Art rarely invested in publicity
beyond circulars distributed to those members of the bourgeoisie and upper classes who
possessed the capital to both purchase and insure valuable works of art. The company repeatedly
declined to advertise in less elite magazines and journals, or in contexts less advantageous to
their interests.
152
Normally, insurers could advertise in periodicals, and distribute fliers or display

150
The cost for repairing the glass was £85, and for repairing two of the canvasses was £25. The
pictures attacked were the following: The Last Watch of Hero and Captive Andromache by Lord
Frederic Leighton, The Syrinx by Arthur Hacker, Sybilla Delphica by Edward Burne-Jones,
Paola and Francesca by George Frederick Watts, The Last of the Garrison by Briton Riviere,
Birnam Woods by John Everett Millais, The Prayer and Portrait of The Hon. J. L. Motley by
George Frederick Watts, A Flood by John Everett Millais, When Apples were Golden by John
Melhuish Strudwick, The Shadow of Death by William Holman Hunt (the same picture that John
Maclauchlan reported insuring at one point), Astarte Syriaca by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. See
http://manchesterartgallery.org/news/manchester-art-gallery-outrage/
151
Fine Art memo addressed to the Royal Academy indicating the Company’s willingness to
insure John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Henry James (1913) against all risks, retrospectively,
May 11, 1914, AAD/1995/19/6/1, V&A Administrative Archive, Blythe House London. That
same month and in the same exhibition, suffragists also attacked Sir Hubert von Herkomer’s The
Duke of Wellington, and Sir George Clausen’s Primavera. See Royal Academy Council Minutes,
vol. 23, 14 Jan 1913 - 02 May 1918, Royal Academy Archive, RAA/PC/1/23.
152
Other sites where the Fine Art declined to advertise included the Admiralty and Horse
Guards’ Gazette and Edgbastons (July 1892), Academy Sketches (March 1893). They also
sometimes declined to place advertisements for their general burglary services in railway
stations. This was a recurring request (with one example in October 1894), and they rejected
such requests on occasion presumably to keep their services more exclusive.

245
posters at railway stations. The Fine Art advertised in exhibition catalogues, such as those
published for Linton’s association, the Royal Institute for Painters in Water-Colours (1891), and
the Catalogue of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, and in a number of Anglo-American
arts journals including The Connoisseur and the Burlington Magazine. They frequently paid for
prominent front cover inserts in The Year’s Art [Fig. 91], in whose pages also appeared
advertisements for Bradley & Co.: a firm of packing agents that the Fine Art patronized.
153
The
Fine Art directors also seem to have struck a deal with the American magazine, The
Connoisseur.
154
Magazine readers who wished to have their pictures or prints appraised for
valuation could send the item in question to the magazine editors by registered post, so long as
they insured the picture with the Fine Art for £120.
155
Further, the company also advertised in
The Car Illustrated, which was owned and edited by Fine Art director John Scott Montagu of
Beaulieu MP (1866–1929), an aristocrat and automobile enthusiast.
156
Aside from these

153
Fine Art advertisements can be seen in The Year’s Art for the years 1893, 1894, 1896.
Bradley & Co. evidently worked with many companies that Fine Art Directors were involved in.
Their clients included “the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colors, Institute of Painters in Oil
Colors, Royal Anglo-Australian Society of Artists, Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport, and the Fine
Art Insurance Co., Ltd. Fine Art Packers and Forwarding Agents Exhibitions and
Conversaziones collected for, arranged and hung. Pictures cleaned, lined and restored. Frame
makers, van proprietors, &C. 81, Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, W. Warehouse: 4 & 6
Tottenham Mews, Fitzrow Square, W.” The Year’s Art, 1896, p. 8. Further places where the Fine
Art inquired about advertising included in the Guardian, and in the Tablet and Christian World
in connection with communion plate insurances, May 23, 1892.
154
News magnate William Randolf Hearst (1863–1951) purchased this British magazine and
brought it to America.
155
For an example, see “Answers to Correspondents,” The Connoisseur, 1902, 293.
156
Montagu was friends with Charles Rolls, and he bought his first car in 1896. As David
Cannadine has described, Montagu was the first MP to use an automobile in an election
campaign, and in 1902 gave King Edward VII his first ride in an automobile. Between 1902 and
1916, he owned and edited Car Illustrated. He was a Fine Art director from November 30, 1891
until his death in April 1929. David Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in
Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 64. See also Edward Douglas-Scott-
Montagu of Beaulieu, The Motoring Montagus: The Story of the Montagu Motor Museum
(London: Cassell, 1959).

246
magazines, the Fine Art advertised their more general fire, all risks, and burglary services in full-
page advertisements in economic trade journals including the Post Magazine and Insurance
Monitor and The Insurance and Financial Gazette [Fig. 92], on several occasions appearing on
the former journal’s cover, to emphasize their growing market prominence.
157
In this context, the
company highlighted particular services based upon the magazine’s readership. In the Post
Magazine and Insurance Monitor, the company drew attention to its burglary services rather than
its fine art services: a class of risk more likely to be relevant to the magazine’s middling and
professional readers. In an unusual case in 1909, American magnate William Waldorf Astor
(1848–1919) took out large art insurances with the Fine Art, but in the process bullied the
company into placing advertisements in his Pall Mall Gazette for £50, threatening that he would
withdraw his business if they refused.
158

Frequently the Fine Art’s branches petitioned the Head Office to allow branches to
produce other kinds of advertisements. These included calendars, blotters, and notebooks:
advertising genres that were so prevalent and popular in the industry that magazines like The
Insurance Guardian and The Post Magazine and Insurance Monitor published review columns
where they briefly assessed such advertisements for their effectiveness and attractiveness. In one

157
In 1904 they renewed their advertisement campaign in the Insurance and Financial Gazette
for £21 per year.
158
“The Secretary mentioned that he had received a communication from the West End Branch
Manager to the effect that Mr. Coode Adams, the agent for Mr. W. W. Astor, had decided to take
away the insurances from this Company unless an advertisement was placed in the Pall Mall
Gazette at a cost of not less than about £50 a year [about £3,908.61 in 2017’s numbers]. The
Secretary referred to the difficulty with regard to an advertisement, and the matter was left in his
hands subject to the amount being only expended on the understanding that a large proportion of
the insurance was continued with the Company.” Board Minute Book, June 7, 1909, Commercial
Union Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London. For some of the
insurances on Astor’s pictures, see Thomas Agnew & Sons Ledgers 3 and 4, and Day Books 14
and 15, National Gallery Research Centre, London.

247
series the Post Magazine reviewer humorously debates whether the lettering on one pad is
“stately,” or the lithography on another American example, “Dainty. Beautiful. Roguish.
Winsome” [Fig. 93].
159
The above advertisements were generally purely typographic. But the
Fine Art mostly declined to produce such advertisements.
160
However, several exceptions to the
company’s advertising policy appeared with the Company’s Brussels branch, which, under the
directorship of Belgian art critic Maurice Siville, produced a rare series of posters by a group of
Liège-based designers working with the publisher Auguste Bénard (1854–1907). Siville and
Bénard published Caprice Revue, and they invited artist contributors Auguste Donnay (1862–
1921) and Armand Rassenfosse (1862–1934) to produce promotional lithographs for the Fine Art
[Fig. 94].
161
One of Auguste Donnay’s lithographs is printed in an alarmingly rich red, cream,
and taupe, and it depicts a pair of disembodied hands that appear to wrench open a jewel box
against a flaming backdrop, while the poster’s typography announces in increasingly large font
sizes the risks the company will protect against: TRANSPORT, DETERIORATION,
INCENDIE, VOL (transport, damage, fire, theft): the poster thereby collapsing at least three of
these risks into one image. Reviewing the Liège graphic artists in his journal, The Poster, Henri-
Roger Woestyn admired the Fine Art poster series for the artists’ line-work and particularly

159
“Calendars &c,” Post Magazine and Insurance Monitor, 1905. The Insurance Guardian also
printed calendar reviews.
160
The Head Office deflected requests to produce advertisements from the Birmingham and
Glasgow branches in 1896, although in 1896 and 1897 they authorized their Stockholm and
Hamburg agents to take out advertisements for £15 and £10 respectively. The latter’s agency,
overseen by a Mr J. Ungewitter, had been in operation since 1894. Board Minute Book,
September 9, 1895 and January 18, 1897, CLC/B/055/MS14044/002, Commercial Union
Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives, London.
161
For information about Belgian art posters in the 1890s, see Jane Block, “The Art Poster in
Belgium,” in Homage to Brussels: The Art of Belgian Posters 1895–1915, eds. Jane Block and
Trudy Victoria Hansen (New Brunswick: Rutgers University, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art
Museum, 1992), 1-15.

248
praised Auguste Donnay’s image with the grasping hands, stating that “it remains in one’s mind
like the remembrance of a horrible nightmare.”
162

The Fine Art’s images also recast common iconographic motifs prevalent in insurance,
introducing Latin mottos and allegorical figures. Several images by Armand Rassenfosse include
a motto for the company: Ars longa, vita brevis (Art endures, life is short), coupling the reminder
of impending death or memento mori with an observation about art’s longevity, under attentive
stewardship, of course.
163
A further circular produced with the Acme Tone Engraving Co. Ltd. in
Watford, England also presents a similar theme [Fig. 95].
164
In Rassenfosse’s advertisements,
allegorical women proffer classical sculptures of Athena or the Venus de Milo in outstretched
hands. Athena, virgin goddess of wisdom and martial protector of the Greek polis, was also
sometimes rendered as a helmeted Britannia on insurance emblems, as seen in early nineteenth-
century advertising for the Phoenix Assurance Company [Fig. 96]. Athena’s presence—symbol
of steadfastness—suggested that the companies “[pledged] the integrity of their conduct.”
165
In
his analysis of fin-de-siècle Vienna’s artistic development, Carl Schorske has shown how Athena
also appealed to civic patrons as a cultural symbol, for she represented “the liberal unity of

162
Henri-Roger Woestyn, “The Liège School,” The Poster, April 1899, 139–143. See John
Hewitt, “‘The Poster’ and the Poster in England in the 1890s,” Victorian Periodicals Review 35,
no. 1 (Spring 2002), 37-62.
163
The saying comes from the first two lines of the Aphorismi by Greek physician Hippocrates.
Greek: Ὁ βίος βραχύς, / ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρή, / ὁ δὲ καιρὸς ὀξύς, / ἡ δὲ πεῖρα σφαλερή, / ἡ δὲ κρίσις
χαλεπή. Latin: Vīta brevis / ars longa / occāsiō praeceps / experīmentum perīculōsum / iūdicium
difficile. English: Life is short / and art endures / opportunity fleeting / experimentations perilous
/ and judgment difficult.
164
Fine Art Circular (1897?), “Insurance” Box 3, John Johnson Ephemera Collection, Oxford
Bodleian Libraries.
165
Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form. First pub. 1985
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 87.

249
politics and rational culture.”
166
Along these lines, Rassenfosse’s image with Athena does double
duty. The nude figure represents insurance personified, and she supports not only a physical art
object as a classical bust, but also a bust which is the representation of liberal, enlightened
patronage.
The figures’ classical poses and other visual attributes also recall the allegorical figures
representing different visual arts in eighteenth-century editions of Renaissance iconographer
Cesare Ripa’s emblem book, the Iconologia, which gave human forms to abstract concepts,
virtues, or subjects. Artists imported these classicizing forms into emblem books, or, as I show in
my fourth chapter, into artworks, interior designs, or architecture, and these iconographic
templates served as the foundations for the insurance industry’s visual culture [Fig. 97]. In the
Fine Art advertisements, these muses of “Art” or of “Painting” vest insurance—ultimately a
disembodied commodity—with familiar, embodied shapes. Yet, despite the fact that the Belgian
advertisements mostly emphasized sculptures, on the whole the company preferred to insure
pictures before all other art objects, and so it is in the records of the Fine Art’s initial partners—
Thomas Agnew & Sons, Ltd.—where more details about picture insurances may be found.
167

166
Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1979), 43.
167
“The question of statuary insurance and the liability to be undertaken by the company in
connection therewith was discussed. Resolved that the insurance of statuary against all risks as a
general rule not be accepted but only when forming part of an important and desirable order: the
Secretary to take all possible measures to restrict the liability of the Company on the risks, and to
insert as a proviso of the policy that the packing, unpacking, repacking and personal care during
transit be entrusted to competent parties to his satisfaction.” Later sculpture insurances abided by
this general rule on a case-by-case basis. Board Minute Book, November 30, 1891,
CLC/B/055/MS14044/001, Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London
Metropolitan Archives, London.

250
5. Agnew’s and the Fine Art: classing the art world’s risks
One of the Fine Art’s most important business partnerships was formed with the dealers
Thomas Agnew & Sons. From the 1870s, this dealership already contracted insurance with
conventional insurance offices. They frequently partnered with other dealerships. Once the Fine
Art’s footing was stronger, Agnew’s regularly brokered insurance with them, routing many of
their customers to use the Fine Art’s services. In this regard, Agnew’s records fill an important
gap for understanding how art insurance flourished in the nineteenth century, particularly as
Agnew’s were the only dealership to explicitly establish a separate insurance company apart
from their other services.
168
In the early 1900s, the Fine Art’s business radically expanded in
tandem—and perhaps in part thanks to—Agnew’s service as agents and underwriters. Even
though William Agnew retired from Agnew’s in 1895 and only remained a Fine Art trustee until
1896, the dealership and its attendant insuring activities were from then on managed by his sons,
George Agnew (1852–1941) and Charles Morland Agnew (1855–1931), and his nephew,
William Lockett Agnew (1858–1925). The Fine Art became something of an in-house company
for Agnew’s, and Agnew’s archive serves as an alternative source for information on the Fine
Art’s activities well into the twentieth century.
169
By cross-referencing the Fine Art archives with
Agnew’s trade accounts, valuation books, and stock books, I found that in some ways Agnew’s

168
As Agnès Penot describes, Goupil and Knoedler developed a partnership in the 1870s to ship
works oversees, and dealer Duveen also provided insurance services, but from a later date.
Agnès Penot, “The Perils and Perks of Trading Art Overseas: Goupil’s New York Branch,”
Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 16, no. 1 (Spring 2017),
https://doi.org/10.29411/ncaw.2017.16.1.4; Duveen Brothers records, 1876–1981 (bulk 1909–
1964), #960015, Getty Research Institute Special Collections.
169
Although Agnew’s continued to use the Fine Art into the twentieth century, a current statute
of limitations prevented me from consulting Agnew’s material after 1918.

251
ledgers and day books functioned effectively like insurance registers for the Fine Art.
170
This is
particularly helpful because aside from some scant provincial records, the Fine Art’s own ledgers
and registers that would reveal such detail about their business—and about the insurance of
particular pictures—survive in only fragmentary ways in the Fine Art’s archive.
171
Agnew’s, it
must be said, were not the first dealership to develop a side company to circumvent existing
financial restrictions. Already in the late 1840s, the French dealership, Goupil & Cie, established
the International Art Union in New York in order to promote their stock of prints and to bypass
custom duties on paintings into the United States.
172
But the Fine Art was so unique that

170
On insurance registers, see my first chapter. In the Thomas Agnew & Sons Ltd. records at the
National Gallery I surveyed four of Agnew’s London Ledgers, for the dates 1873–1882, 1882–
1891, 1890–1899, 1898–1913. These ledgers record Agnew’s London branch’s financial
transactions with individual clients over roughly ten-year periods according to a double-entry
book-keeping method that logs debits and credits to the accounts, and includes all assets,
liabilities, owners’ equity, revenues and expenses. These ledgers correspond to approximately
twenty-eight daybooks which provide the more chronologically granular daily debit and credit
transactions. These transactions include everything from picture sales, to the delivery of works,
framing, restoration, and particularly insurance transactions. From the 1870s until the first
decades of the twentieth century the number of insurance transactions recorded extend into the
thousands, many of which Agnew’s brokered for the Fine Art. These records make clear how
deeply enmeshed both companies were. Thomas Agnew & Sons London Ledgers:
NGA27/14/2/1; NGA27/14/2/2; NGA27/14/2/3; NGA27/14/2/4; Thomas Agnew & Sons
London Day Books, NGA27/13/3/1–28, National Gallery Research Centre, London.
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/archive/record/NGA27/14. A further note about geographic
range: I limited myself to Agnew’s London branch, as this is where the bulk of Agnew’s work
took place especially in the first decades of the twentieth century, although a brief survey of the
Liverpool and Manchester branches also reveal further insurance work carried out there. I
consulted Liverpool Ledger 2 (1858-1867), 4 (1871–1885), and 5 (1882–1902) along with at
least two corresponding Day Books, 11 and 12. The Manchester Ledger I surveyed was G1
(1898–1908) along with four corresponding day books. I also surveyed the sole surviving Berlin
ledger, although transactions in this ledger were minimal, and no insurance was listed.
171
Two extant insurance registers for the Fine Art do exist, and they are kept at the Gloucester
City Archives D2075.522 (1911–1921) and D2075.523 (1924–1943) for the Borough of
Tewkesbury. These registers cover a range of properties including hospitals and civic buildings,
as well as private insurances, and attest to the Fine Art’s expansion into other risk classes in the
provinces.
172
Penot, “The Perils and Perks of Trading Art Overseas.”

252
Americans writing in journals like The Connoisseur observed that no such formalized schemes
yet existed in the United States, but were sorely needed.
173

In assessing how Agnew’s insured their stock and developed their partnership with the
Fine Art, certain long-term patterns emerge from the above records which I will detail: (I) How
Agnew’s used the Fine Art to carry on internal insurances of their own property and that of their
contractors; (II) how Agnew’s and the Fine Art effected domestic insurances for clients in the
British Isles; (III) how the insurance of works in temporary transit to exhibitions or in the process
of restoration functioned; (IV) how works belonging to international clients were warehoused
when the works were barred from being exported for various reasons, including restrictive
foreign legislation and tariffs.

(I) Internal affairs: insuring Agnew’s family and Fine Art directors
Agnew’s began as a Manchester picture dealer, but steadily expanded. They opened their
Liverpool branch in 1858 and a London branch in 1860.
174
At the outset, Agnew’s negotiated
short-term and annual insurances with other insurance companies. These companies were myriad
and included the North British & Mercantile Company, the Economic, the Sun, London
Assurance Co., Liverpool & London and Globe, Royal, London & Lancashire, Alliance,

173
One such American complaint published in the Baltimore Underwriter went as follows:
“FINE ART insurance, Burglary insurance, Mortgage insurance, Registered Post insurance and
other applications of the insurance principle appear to be successfully conducted in England,
while little or no attention is paid to them in this country. That we have abundant field for such
organizations here is obvious, and the wonder is that with such outgrowth of American enterprise
as we witness in every direction, there has been so little manifestation of effort in these new
fields.” Baltimore Underwriter, September 6, 1893, 203. See also Ernest F. Shepherd, “The Ins
and Outs of Insurance as they Apply to the Connoisseur,” The Connoisseur 6, September–
December 1903, 101.
174
Agnew, Geoffrey, Agnew’s 1817–1927 (London: Bradbury Press, 1967); Pezzini, “Making a
Market for Art,” 30.

253
Manchester Fire, and underwriting syndicates with Lloyd’s of London.
175
Agnew’s brokered art
insurances with each office based upon the scope and value of the works to be insured, and upon
an office’s geographic proximity to the client. In some cases, Agnew’s were effectively acting as
agents for these companies, and for their services would receive commission fees from the
insurance companies. For example, Charles Morland Agnew insured numerous art works in his
own possession with offices such as the Alliance and The Law Fire Insurance Society, increasing
his insurances in 1899. For these, the Agnew’s business also kept the commission fee on their
own insurances, as the dealers also served as Law Fire agents.
176
George William Agnew MP,
Lockett Agnew, and William Agnew all purchased long and short-term insurances, with yearly
policies coming up for renewal on a regular basis, usually timed in accordance with quarterly
leases and law court sittings.
177
They insured their London building at 40 Old Bond Street for

175
Alexander Brogdan, insurance effected for £1 10s, “To cash paid renewal of North British
Policy on Property at Pantechnicon.” Thomas Agnew & Sons London Day Book 7, October 10,
1882, NGA27/13/3/7, 253, National Gallery Research Centre.
176
A letter from Thomas Agnew & Sons addressed to The Law Fire Insurance Society read:
“Gentlemen: Enclosed herewith please find policy 474746. Mr. Morland Agnew is desirous of
increasing this insurance with you to £8,000 and we can give you instructions definitely if you
are prepared to pass the line through our agency account and of course paying to us the
commission thereon. We presume there will be no difficulty in this and shall be glad to hear that
such is the case.” December 20, 1899. With the Fine Art, Charles Morland also insured
landscape paintings by artists including Giovanni Paolo Panini, Frederick Leighton and Joseph
Farquharson, along with numerous drawings. Thomas Agnew & Sons Valuation Book 9, 1889–
1891, NGA27/12/6, p. 132. Page 133 lists a selection covered by his Fine Art policy #40363.
National Gallery Research Centre.
177
Payments were often logged within fifteen days of leasehold and rents calendar dates: Lady-
Day (March 25), Midsummer (June 24), Michaelmas (September 29), and Christmas (December
25). Further payments also clustered close to dates corresponding with the legal calendar sittings:
Hilary Sittings (January 12–March 25), Easter Sittings (April 7–May 15), Trinity sittings (May
26–August 12), Michaelmas sittings (October 24–December 21). But because the insurances
effected also took place at idiosyncratic times (for example, for short term, one- or two-month
periods when an artwork was in transit) many payment schedules were irregular.

254
£3,510 with the Fine Art, payable at Midsummer with an annual premium of £5 5s 3d.
178
By the
time the Fine Art Insurance Company was established in 1890, the Agnew’s and their business
were already primed to be the Fine Art’s first steady clients, agents, and shareholders.
179

Fine Art Directors were often Agnew’s clients or contractors, and they also stood to
benefit from the partnership between the two businesses. One such figure was Times art critic
and Fine Art Director, Thomas Humphry Ward (1845–1926). An acolyte of art and literature
critic Walter Pater (1839–1894) and a former Oxford don, Ward’s conservative tastes remained
largely static decades after his intellectual formation in the 1870s. A compulsive and somewhat
hapless spendthrift, he frequently usurped the considerable funds of his more famous wife—the
author Mary Augusta Ward (1851–1920)—for picture buying.
180
Ward’s accounts in the
Agnew’s archives list numerous purchases and credits to his account for costly de Hooghs,
Cuyps, Ruisdaels, Van De Veldes, Gainsboroughs, and a Rembrandt, although in his enthusiasm
he more than once purchased questionably authentic pictures.
181
Perhaps as befitting his less-
than-deliberate habits, Ward’s accounts in Agnew’s archive indicate that he rarely availed
himself of his own insurance services.
182
Other Fine Art directors and associates who had

178
Thomas Agnew & Son’s Insurance policies, NGA27/20/6/1 and 6, National Gallery Research
Centre.
179
The Agnew family bought up the Fine Art’s first 1,100 shares, at £10 per share, total £11,000.
In 2017, this would be about £902,542.30. Fine Art Shares Allotment Register 1891–1913,
CU4070, AVIVA Group Archives, Norwich.
180
John Sutherland, Mrs. Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-Eminent Edwardian (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1990), 188-190.
181
The remaining pictures sold from Humphry Ward’s collections in the auction on his house,
“Stocks” in 1922 evince the Ward family’s aspirational collecting tendencies. “Stocks,” Aldbury,
Tring. The remaining ... French and English furniture ... oil paintings ... water color drawings ...
engravings ... oriental china, bronzes ... 1922 Feb. 7–10. Sales Catalogues, 23.S.19220207,
GC/SAL, National Art Library, V&A Museum.
182
Humphry Ward and W. Roberts, Romney; a biographical and critical essay, with a catalogue
raisonné of his works (London: Agnew & Sons, 1904).

255
dealings with Agnew’s prior to the Fine Art’s establishment included James D. Linton, who in
1889 exhibited pictures from his jointly illustrated volume on the life of Mary Queen of Scots at
Agnew’s Bond Street Gallery along with his friend and collaborator, the watercolor painter and
Turner-emulator, James Orrock (1829–1913).
183
Orrock was a lecturer who gave a paper in
March 1890 at the Society of Arts arguing for more national gallery space dedicated to British
art: a call that The Times would amplify, and which Henry Tate would eventually answer by
opening his own gallery.
184
Orrock was also a casual collector, and he and Linton would
speculate on pictures through Agnew’s together, including on pictures by Henry Raeburn and
Frans Hals in the early 1890s.
185
Once the Fine Art was established, Linton would underwrite
Orrock’s Fine Art insurances, brokered through Agnew’s, and their collaborations reveal
something of the entrepreneurial, yet mutually-self-interested positioning that characterized the
Fine Art board members and their activities.
186

(II) Domestic insurances, town and country
Many Agnew’s clients who invested in insurance policies were domestic collectors who
insured their works at multiple estates and townhouses around the British Isles. They paid for

183
“History Made Easy,” Punch, or the London Charivari, November 23, 1889, 241; See also
chapter 2 for a discussion of the exhibition they organized concerning the degradation of
watercolors due to the effects of light.
184
Janet Minihan, The Nationalization of Culture: The Development of State Subsidies to the
Arts in Great Britain (New York: New York University Press, 1977), 155-156.
185
Thomas Agnew & Sons London Trade Ledger 4 (1885–1894) NGA27/14/7/4, p. 726,
National Gallery Research Centre, London. Also, Algernon Graves, Art sales from early in the
eighteenth century to early in the twentieth century (mostly old master and early English
pictures), vol. 2 (London, 1918–21), 6, 55.
186
Numerous examples exist in the Board Minute Book where Linton is listed as the underwriter
liaison for Orrock’s insurances. This meant Linton also earned a commission on these
insurances. Board Minute Book, September 14, 1903, CLC/B/055/MS14044/002, London
Metropolitan Archives.

256
long-term insurances as well as for temporary transit insurances from one residence to another.
Already in the 1870s, long-time clients were introduced, including engineer and later women’s
rights campaigner, Margaret Bruce, Lady Moir (née Pennycook, 1864–1942). Moir was an early
art insurance client, and she also commissioned Agnew’s services in framing and gilding
photographs, paintings, and prints. She paid an annual £25 premium to the Liverpool, London &
Globe office brokered through Agnew’s from 1875 every year in April until 1899, and then from
1903 to 1912, her payments shifted downward to £3 8s per annum. Another regular insurer was
soldier and Conservative MP, Bernard Fitzpatrick, second Baron Castletown (1848–1937) who
paid yearly premiums on two Fine Art policies for pictures on his estates, Hebden Cottenham
Park Road, and Granstown Manor in Ballacolla, Ireland while he was stationed in South Africa
during the Boer War, continuing for a number of years after that.
187
Bolton industrialist William
H. Lever (1851–1925) was another avid collector from the 1890s. In 1898 he paid monthly
insurance renewals on a portrait of his wife by Luke Fildes (1843–1927), and he paid transit
insurances for pictures by Reynolds, Hoppner, and Holl against all risks in transit to Hillside,
Bolton, and further transit insurances for pictures including Sir Edward Millais’s painting The
Black Brunswicker (1860) to Thornton Manor, along with china between 1900 to 1902.
188
Like
Lever, Scottish Royal Navy officer and American steel baron Alexander John Forbes-Leith
(1847–1925) frequently purchased insurances on individual pictures and had numerous Fine Art
insurance policies covering different estates. Forbes-Leith insured pictures in transit against all

187
Hebden was insured against all risks for £225, premium at £5 11s 3d; Granston Manor against
all risks for £1,850, premium at £4 12s 6d. Thomas Agnew & Sons London Trade Ledger 4,
(1898–1913), NGA27/14/2/4, p. 507, National Gallery Research Centre, London. Also, “The
War - embarkation of troops,” The Times, February 15, 1900, 4.
188
Insured for the sum of £2,900, Lever paid a premium of £2 3s. 6d. July 10, 1899, London
Daybook 18, p. 193, National Gallery Research Centre, London.

257
risks to his Fyvie Castle in Aberdeenshire, and effected twelve-month insurances at his London
townhouse at 1 Grosvenor Crescent, London S W, while at the same time insuring individual
pictures in the same location for higher prices.
189
He also insured pictures at the Agnew’s
premises at Old Bond Street, particularly “all risks” policies, which were frequently costlier than
the more limited “against fire” policies. A key point (corroborated by my findings in chapter
one) about the most assiduous insureds extends to their class positionality, namely that many
were members of the advancing industrial, mercantile, and financial elites, as opposed to landed
gentry. It seems that these insureds were somehow more inclined to recognize the merits of a
new service like art insurance.

(III) Warehoused risks: the Pantechnicon and Bond Street
For collectors who worried about leaving artworks at their own estates while they were
absent, many insured works at Agnew’s galleries at 39 (later 43) Old Bond Street. Works insured
on these premises were often insured against fire alone. Occasionally these were short-term
insurances of a month or more while a work was being restored. On rare occasions some works
remained in a kind of limbo stasis when their validity was in question, which made the decision
to insure a work questionable. Agnew’s nearly sold one such picture—a portrait of a man on
panel attributed to Raphael—for £20,000 to American collector Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–
1924), brokered through rival dealer, Bernard Berenson (1865–1959). However, Berenson
convinced Gardner not to purchase the picture, arguing it was an inferior work worth five

189
Insuring in 1900 a picture by Henry Raeburn, Mrs Gregory against all risks in transit from
London to Fyvie in the sum of £2000 with a £1 10s. premium. Insuring picture by Romney Mrs
Stratford Canning against all risks at No. 1 Grosvenor Crescent in the sum of £6,600 12 months
to December 19, 1901, premium at £16 10s. December 20, 1900, “to insurance: 19/63 : £16 10.,
p. 108.

258
hundred pounds, at most.
190
American politician and financier, William C. Whitney (1841–
1904), purchased the picture instead, but once the picture was restored, it remained at 43 Old
Bond Street for more than ten years, where it was insured for £17,000, and where it came up for
yearly policy renewals with the Fine Art.
191

For larger warehoused collections, Agnew’s brokered storage and insurance for works at
the Pantechnicon. The Pantechnicon was a four-story iron and brick warehouse with a classical
portico covering about two acres of land bordering Motcomb Street in one of West London’s
most affluent neighborhoods, Belgravia [Fig. 98]. Opened by West End property developer Seth
Smith in 1830, the building combined a picture gallery, a furniture shop, and a carriage shop
with a subdivided warehouse.
192
Touted as the largest and safest fireproof warehouse for luxury
goods, its clients were the owners of West End mansions who shut their town houses from July
to February, leaving their wine, jewelry, dishes, musical instruments, and fine art behind until
London’s social season re-opened. In February 1874, the building was all but destroyed by fire—
only its classical portico remained [Fig. 99].
193
Things destroyed in the blaze included the

190
“But even if I had come as your agent, so convinced am I that in every probability the picture
is a humbug that Agnew’s would even then have refused to show it to me, preferring to lose you
as a buyer to my publicly pronouncing myself against the picture.” In Jan Sammer, “Portrait of a
Man in the Hyde Collection: Raphael or Ridolfo Ghirlandaio?” (self-published, academia.edu),
1-10.
191
This picture is now in the Hyde Collection at Glen Falls, New York. Mrs. Charlotte Hyde
purchased it in 1938 from Agnew’s on the advice of William R. Valentiner, who vouched for its
attribution.
192
The term “Pantechnicon” came to refer to the moving vans that serviced this building, and the
term is still applied in the same way today. As of this writing in 2022, the Pantechnicon building
is now an upscale commercial compound touting a plethora of shopping and dining lifestyle
experiences that combine “Japanese” and “Scandinavian” aesthetic elements.
193
For a detailed description of the fire, the insurance companies involved, and the insureds who
lost artworks, furniture, and other goods, as well as information about related fires at other
furniture stores, see the Sun Insurance Company’s scrapbook, “Pantechnicon on Motcomb
Street” (1874–1882), CLC/B/192/DD/028/MS38840/002, London Metropolitan Archives.

259
library, armor, dishes, pictures, and curiosities belonging to Sir Richard Wallis MP, valued at
£150,000, of which only £28,000 was insured. Further collections destroyed included those
belonging to Wynne Ellis and Sir Seymour Fitzgerald, with paintings by J. M. W. Turner and
Joshua Reynolds. The proprietors had been insured with the Royal Exchange Office, but the
same could not be said for the lost collections. About this loss, the Illustrated London News
noted,
As regards the insurance of the articles, the understanding with customers was that the
firm were only responsible for safe custody, and that the insurance must be made apart
from them. They fear, however, that the customers had such faith in the building being
fireproof, that many of them would feel it unnecessary to insure their goods. There can be
no doubt, notwithstanding, that the insurance Co’s will be heavy losers by the disaster.
194

After this disaster, which reportedly cost £150,834 in damages, the building was rebuilt.
195

Agnew’s soon brokered the rentals of its rooms and the insurance of objects stored in them for
numerous collectors and institutions, with average costs for rentals anywhere from £1 to £15 or
more for six-month to one-year terms. In June 1889, Lord de Rothschild paid £10 for room
rentals to store property at the Pantechnicon for six months from December 31, 1888. Further
costs for Panechnicon storage depended upon the scale and amount of goods left there.
196
In
1902, the Corporation of Glasgow Art Gallery paid insurances for French eighteenth-century
pictures by Fragonard, Boucher, Vanloo, Vestier, Watteau, and Chardin belonging to collectors
Reginald Vaile and Harland Peck against all risks to the Gallery’s exhibition of loan pictures of

194
“Burning of the Belgrave Pantechnicon,” The Illustrated London News 64, iss. 1800,
Saturday, February 21, 1874, 182.
195
Sun Insurance Company Guard book, “Pantechnicon on Motcomb Street, 1874–1882,”
CLC/B/192/DD/028/MS38840/002, London Metropolitan Archives.
195
“Burning of the Belgrave Pantechnicon.”
196
London Ledger 2 1882–1891, March 31, 1885: to insurance [8/508]: 16s 9d, NGA27/14/2/2
2407, p. 177 / settled Jul 14, 1885 by cash £11,002 18s 9d [C13], National Gallery Research
Centre, London.

260
eighteenth-century French and British works.
197
Further insurances for works traveling to the
exhibition were also written on behalf of businessmen John Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) and
Charles Tennant (1823–1906). The institution paid for insurances covering six months, which
included time spent at the Pantechnicon, transit insurances to Glasgow, and then transit back to
the owners’ residences.
198
The Pantechnicon was an important staging ground and insurance site.

(IV) International trading: exhibition risks and magnates
The above example reveals that an important and steady stream of business for Agnew’s
and the Fine Art was the insurance of loaned pictures to numerous exhibitions around the British
Isles. A further source of business was in the underwriting of private pictures that traveled
beyond Britain’s borders. Agnew’s and the Fine Art provided key support for works that might
never have traveled had not provisions been in place. From 1905 to 1906, they underwrote
artworks that traveled to four of the five sites of the George Frederic Watts Memorial Exhibition
[Fig. 100]. The painter had died in 1904, and his wife Mary Watts (1849–1938) initiated the
exhibition in order to show Watt’s works before they settled permanently at the purpose-built
Watts Gallery near Guildford. The Fine Art and Agnew’s underwrote private loans and pictures
managed by Watts’ executors on behalf of the Corporation Art Gallery in Manchester, the Laing
Art Gallery in Newcastle, the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, and the Royal Hibernian

197
Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum, Kelvingrove, Catalogue of loan collection of pictures by
French and British artists of the 18th century (Glasgow: Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum,
1902).
198
Insurances for Vaile were valued at £11,250, with a premium of £33 15s (or a valuation of
£879,437.25, and premium of £2,638.31, in 2017’s numbers). For Peck, insurances were valued
at the large sum of £56,350, for a premium of £169 1s (or in 2017, £4,405,062.10, with a
£13,215.01 premium). London Ledger 4 (1898–1913) July 20, 1902, Daybook 20, p. 337,
NGA27/14/2/4, National Gallery Research Centre, London.

261
Academy in Dublin.
199
The exhibition could be seen as a way to tie the disparate cosmopolitan
centers together, and it also gave Fine Art Insurance directors in these cities platforms to
advertise their patronage. For the exhibition’s Dublin leg, the seventh Earl of Mayo, Dermot
Bourke (1851–1927)—Fine Art Insurance shareholder from 1892 and Irish branch director from
1894—hosted a musical entertainment onsite at the exhibition in the Royal Hibernian Academy,
just one of a number of entertainments for Dublin’s upper classes that took place within the
exhibition’s walls.
200

While Agnew’s and the Fine Art frequently issued “transit policies” for works traveling
to exhibitions, they also issued polices to American and Continental magnates who wished to
send their purchases abroad. In so doing, collectors had to navigate a challenging tariff
environment. Following the Civil War, the United States developed the high tariff rates on
imported goods in an effort to raise capital for reconstruction. Costs were particularly

199
The exhibition began at the Royal Academy in London in late 1904. An example of the
insurance logged in the Agnew’s day book reads as follows: “Corporation Art Gallery
Manchester, March 31, 1905 “To cash paid insurance of pictures by G. F. Watts RA against all
risks from the Royal Academy to the Pantechnicon, whilst there until early part of May, thence
in transit to New [Manchester] Art Gallery, whilst on Exhibition and thence in transit back to
owner’s residences: 74 pictures, property of Xors [Executors] G. F. Watts RA £56,280; portrait
of AK Hichens £500; Charity £6,000; Time, Death and Judgement £3,000; Spring £2,000; Dean
Liddell £700; Mrs Watts £300; Henry W Phillips £400; Total amount insured £69,180 premium
paid, £172 19s. In 2017 this would be roughly a value of £5,435,438.01, while the premium paid
would be about £13,588.60. London Ledger 4, 1898–1913, NGA27/14/2/4, corresponding to
Day Book 22.
200
The Fine Art Directors logged their service to the exhibition in their directors meeting in
1905: “The Assist Sect read a letter from the Edinburgh Branch regarding the insurance of
pictures in connection with the Watts Exhibition, and the Board decided that provided every
precaution was exercised in slinging the van on the steamer the steps proposed to be taken would
be quite sufficient to meet the case.” Board Minute Book, August 14, 1905,
CLC/B/055/MS14044/003, Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London
Metropolitan Archives. ‘Watts Pictures,’ Irish Times 3, January 1906, 5. Quoted in Kathryn
Milligan, “Towards a Four Nations Art History? The G. F Watts Memorial Exhibition, 1905–06”
(Work in Progress Paper, 2020).

262
burdensome for art imports, with tariffs on art objects fluctuating between fifteen and twenty
percent: a cost that did not hold for American artists living overseas who sent works to the
United States, but which did apply to works over one hundred years old. From 1883 until 1909,
numerous Old Master works and other acquisitions remained housed abroad. In a 1902 New York
Times article, a reporter stated that thirty million dollars’ worth of art remained in Europe
because of the tariff.”
201
John Pierpont Morgan presented a spectacular example of warehoused
art-as-capital.
202
At Agnew’s he paid for yearly policies on the fourteen paintings by Jean
Honore Fragonard known collectively as “The Romance of Love and Youth.”
203
Painted for
Madame Du Barry from 1772 but never in her possession, Agnew’s had acquired the series in
1898 and Morgan purchased them the same year and immediately exhibited them, no doubt a
move that raised their value. He would go on to pay Agnew’s for twelve-month insurance
policies on the pictures while they were housed at the Pantechnicon and at his London estate in
Princes Gate for costs of £62,000, or premiums of £178 5s. In 1902, the pictures were exhibited
at the Guildhall Art Gallery, where they were insured for “not far short of £100,000.”
204
In 1909,
the Payne-Aldrich tariff was lifted for works older than twenty years, and by 1911, collectors
began abruptly shipping their works back into the United States.
205
In 1911, Morgan purchased a

201
“The Duty on Art,” New York Times, September 10, 1902, 8. Cited in Kimberly Orcutt, “Buy
American? The Debate over the Art Tariff,” American Art 16, no.3 (Autumn 2002): 82-91.
202
For the many pictures that Morgan bought through Agnew’s see, T. Humphry Ward and W.
Roberts, Pictures in the Collection of J. Pierpont Morgan, (London: Thomas Agnew & Sons,
1907), 57, 180-190.
203
These pictures are now at the Frick Collection in New York.
204
Thomas Agnew & Sons London Day Book 18, June 30, 1900, p. 374, National Gallery
Research Centre, London; Alfred George Temple, Catalogue of the exhibition of a selection of
works by French and English painters of the eighteenth century, with descriptive and
biographical notes by A.G. Temple (London: Guildhall Art Gallery: Blades, East & Blades,
1902); Alfred George Temple, Guildhall Memories (London: J. Murray, 1918), 240-241.
205
William J. Barber, “International Commerce in the Fine Arts and American Political
Economy, 1789–1913,” Economic Engagements with Art, eds. Neil De Marchi, Crawfurd D. W.

263
set of six Italianate landscapes by French court artist Hubert Robert.
206
In 1912, rather than keep
them abroad, Morgan instead paid for Fine Art insurance against all risks in transit from Paris to
New York in the sum of £45,000 (a premium of £76 17s 6d). As Morgan would often do, he had
the pictures shipped to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where they were exhibited
on loan.
207

6. Underwriters and art dealers
One of the Fine Art’s striking practices was that in some cases where prints and pictures
were irrevocably damaged, the company paid out claims for these objects, took possession of
them, and the objects became company property.
208
That is, as a part of their insurance policies,
the Fine Art made professional decisions about whether a work should be formally

Goodwin (Durham, N.C, Duke University Press, 1999), 209-235. Guildhall Gallery Director,
Alfred George Temple, lamented their loss when they were sent to the United States upon
Morgan’s death in 1913. Eleanor Sarah Dew, “Lenygon & Morant (c.1904–1943): ‘Period Style’
Interior Design and the Transatlantic Market for English Antiques,” PhD diss., Bard Graduate
Center: Decorative Arts, Design History and Material Culture, 2014.
206
These pictures had been commissioned for Louis XVI’s brother, the Count of Artois, later
Charles X of France, and in 1779 they formed part of the late-eighteenth-century decoration at
Bagatelle, a pavilion built for the count near Paris in 1777.
207
Thomas Agnew & Sons London Day Book 27, p. 218, National Gallery Research Centre,
London. See Flaminia Gennari-Santori, “‘I was to have all the finest’: Renaissance bronzes from
J. Pierpont Morgan to Henry C. Frick,” Journal of the History of Collections 22, no. 2 (2010):
307-324; Flaminia Gennari-Santori, “An art collector and his friends: John Pierpont Morgan and
the globalization of medieval art,” Journal of the History of Collections 27, no. 3 (2015): 401-
411.
208
An example took place in 1894, when they took possession of a damaged engraving at an
exhibition in Falmouth: “The board decided that the case of the loss in connection with the
Falmouth exhibition it was decided to offer the insured £5 12s and to keep the (picture) [struck
through] engraving.” Board Minute Book, December 3, 1894, CLC/B/055/MS14044/001
Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives. In June the
following year, the picture became company property: “The Secretary reported that the loss in
the name of Bullock had been settled for £5, and that the damaged prints had become the
Property of the Company.” Board Minute Book, June 6, 1895, CLC/B/055/MS14044/002,
Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives.

264
decommissioned. The Fine Art essentially adjudicated on an art object’s ontological status—a
practice that still continues today with contemporary art insurance companies like AXA Art
insurance, a firm of global art insurance underwriters and a specialist subsidiary of the AXA
Group, an international insurance company founded in the nineteenth century.
209
It is not always
clear how the Fine Art categorized these decommissioned objects. But I like to think of these
works that have somehow lost their status as a kind of invisible “para-collection,” existing
instead in an inverted relation to the works that circulated and remained visible around London
and beyond in this late-nineteenth-century art world.
In the Fine Art’s meeting minutes, there is one case in which the outcome for one of these
decommissioned works is clear. In or around 1908, a painting by Henry Raeburn (1756–1823)
depicting the artist’s son on a grey pony got a hole punched through it [Fig. 101].
210
At the time
the picture was in the collection of former Liberal Prime Minister Archibald Primrose, the fifth
Earl of Rosebery and an active member of the National Gallery. Rosebery had his secretary
appeal to the Fine Art to pay out his claim, and the company requested that James Paton (1843–
1921), Superintendent of Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum Director adjudicate on the damage
and offer an estimation. The company suggested that if Lord Rosebery disagreed with Paton’s
judgement, the picture would need to be sent to Christies’ and all parties would have to abide by

209
AXA maintains warehouses of decommissioned artworks, which are called “salvage,” a term
with links to the early days of the maritime and fire insurance industries. See Christiane Fischer
and Jill Arnold, “Insurance and the Art Market,” in Fine Art and High Finance: Expert Advice
on the Economics of Ownership, ed. Clare MacAndrew (New York: Bloomberg Press, 2010),
197-210. See also an artists’ project about AXA’s collection of “decommissioned” artworks, the
“Salvage Art Institute”: http://salvageartinstitute.org/.
210
The accompanying image included is not the original painting but a smaller copy on panel.
The original is a seven-by-four-foot canvas. I am grateful to Helen Smailes, Senior Curator of
British Art the Scottish National Gallery, for assisting me with this provenance history.

265
Christies’ valuation, although this seemed a decision of last resort that none of the parties wished
to face.
When no clear estimation came, the Company next appealed to three central authorities:
National Gallery Director, Charles Holroyd (1861–1917), curator Roger Fry (1866–1934), and
leading picture restorer, Ayerst Hooker Buttery (1868–1929) to ask their opinions of the
picture’s value, its possibility for repair, and whether the Company should pay the full price Lord
Rosebery was asking as compensation. The presence of Fry as consultant here is striking but not
unusual given that he was editor and contributor to the Burlington Magazine and, as Anna
Gruetzner Robins has described, cannily directed numerous exhibitions promoting the works of
artists and dealers alike.
211
After correspondence with Fry and Rosebery, the company offered to
pay £1,000 worth of depreciation.
212
But this too was apparently insufficient. In the end, the
company paid Rosebery £5,000 and took possession of the picture.
213

Now with an expensive and damaged picture on their hands, the Company seemed at a
loss as to their next steps but determined that they would have the picture repaired by the picture
restorers, William Morrill and Sons (1838–1910), and Sir James Linton volunteered to check on
its progress. Soon, others in the art world got wind that they had this picture, and in May 1909,
London art dealer Asher Wertheimer (1844–1918) inquired about its price. Then Lockett Agnew,
the new head of Agnew’s firm, telephoned the Fine Art secretary stating that “as he was a good
client of the Company, he considered that the Company should give him the first offer of the
picture and desired to know the Price,” further indicating that he was prepared to purchase the

211
Anna Gruetzenr Robins, “Marketing Post-Impressionism: Roger Fry’s Commercial
Exhibitions,” in The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850–1939, eds. Anne Helmreich
and Pamela Fletcher (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 85-97.
212
In 2017 this would have been worth approximately £78,172.
213
This would be about £390,861 in 2017.

266
picture at “no loss to the company.”
214
Sir James D. Linton then noted that the picture restoration
was “most skilfully [sic] repaired.”
215
The board decided to offer the picture back to Lord
Rosebery at £5,250 to cover the amount “paid for the picture and the expenditure that the
company had incurred (£250).”
216
The Company, seeing a potential profit, then decided that if
Lord Rosebery demurred, they would sell it to Lockett Agnew for £6,500, although it is unclear
whether they were selling it to Lockett for his private use, or if he was acquiring the picture for
the gallery.
217
In June 1909, Lord Rosebery indicated that he was uninterested in repurchasing
the picture, but Lockett Agnew balked at the Company’s inflated price, although they insisted
that the mark-up was to cover the costs the company had expended on the picture.
In October 1910, the picture’s trajectory almost changed course when the commercial
dealers Wallis & Son (who had acquired Ernest Gambart’s French Gallery) requested to exhibit
the picture. The Fine Art Board decided to assent, on the conditions that the Fine Art would incur
no expenses, and that Wallis & Son would take out picture insurances against all risks (with the
Fine Art, of course) for £6,000 for the entire duration that it was away from the Company, where
it had been in the meantime hanging in the board room.
218
They further insisted that should

214
Board Minute Book, June 7, 1909, CLC/B/055/MS14044/003, Commercial Union Assurance
Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives.
215
This was a long-lived firm of picture restorers. George Morrill (c.1812–1865) took over a
picture lining business started by a Francis Leedham in 1857, and eventually Morrill’s sons
would take over the business from him. https://www.npg.org.uk/research/programmes/directory-
of-british-picture-restorers/british-picture-restorers-1600-1950-m. The iteration of the company
that restored the Raeburn operated from 1899 to 1961. Board Minute Book, June 7, 1909,
CLC/B/055/MS14044/003, London Metropolitan Archives, London.
216
£410,404 in 2017’s numbers.
217
£508,119 in 2017’s numbers.
218
They stipulated that it “would be insured from the time it left [the] office against All Risks
until safely re-hung on the walls of the Board Room, for the sum of £6,000 [£469,033 in 2017],
such insurance being effected with this Company.” Board Minute Book, October 17, 1910,
CLC/B/055/MS14044/003, Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London
Metropolitan Archives.

267
Wallis & Son sell the picture, it would have to be at a price of £6,000 and they would offer the
dealers a five percent commission.
219
But then in November the company again backtracked,
stating that the picture could go on display but it would not be for sale at all. Presumably the
company was unwilling to relinquish a commission fee. Wallis & Son agreed to these terms and
exhibited the picture. Finally, in 1911, the company sold the picture for £6,000 to Agnew and
Sons. Agnew’s promptly sold the picture out of their Paris branch to the French politician and
collector, the Marquis de Ganay for 200,000 Francs.
220
This last exchange is listed in the Thomas
Agnew & Son’s Picture Stock Books, stock number 3763, for the date, July 17, 1911 [Fig.
102].
221

This case, the most documented narrative about a single picture in the Fine Art’s archive,
shows how insurance could physically transform a work of art. And this story is exemplary for it
reveals how the company mobilized numerous art world agents like James D. Linton to deploy
their expertise in assessing and restoring a damaged work. It is also exemplary because it is a
narrative about precisely the kind of artwork the company preferred to cover: paintings by
British artists who were acknowledged masters. Since the work was so damaged that it lost its
status in the Earl of Rosebery’s eyes, he relinquished it to the insurance company’s custody. The
company’s attention to the physical object through conservation shifted the liminal stasis of the
artwork’s valuation, that returned it to the art market. Once repaired, the object retained a kind of
provenance value from Rosebery’s collection even if it was no longer his property. In this respect

219
Board Minute Book, October 17, 1910, CLC/B/055/MS14044/003, Commercial Union
Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives.
220
Jean de Ganay (1861–1948).
221
Thomas Agnew & Son’s Picture Stock Books (1909–1919), p. 128-129,
NGA27/1/1/11, National Gallery Research Centre, London.

268
the insurance company created works for sale, while at the same time perpetuating their own
business. The art insurers intervened as intermediaries in a market they knew well.

Conclusion

The period I have covered in this chapter extends only to the First World War. The war
disrupted insurance markets, as young men left their jobs to join the army, and as the British war
economy redirected companies’ investing power toward government bonds and drained
resources.
222
The Fine Art continued to operate independently until 1917, when it became a
subsidiary of the North British & Mercantile Insurance Company, a larger company that had for
some time sought to acquire the Fine Art.
223
Yet, the Fine Art continued to work with art world
representatives and with Agnew’s well into the twentieth century. When Sir James D. Linton
died in 1916, Sir Robert Clermont Witt (1872–1952) took his place as Fine Art director.
224
A
solicitor, art historian, Trustee of the National Gallery, and co-founder of the Courtauld Institute
of Art in London with industrialist Samuel Courtauld (1876–1947) and art patron Lord Lee of
Fareham (1868–1947), Witt provided the Fine Art with the exclusive ties to the art world that
they so desired. There are further narratives similar to the Henry Raeburn case between the First
and Second World Wars, when insurance for art continued to expand despite war-related

222
During the First World War, discussions about fine art business became sparse in the meeting
minutes, as they turned to debates about investing in British government war bonds. They also
mentioned each time a staff member was killed at the front. Board Minute Book 1908–1918,
CLC/B/055/MS14044/004, Commercial Union Assurance Company Limited, London
Metropolitan Archives.
223
For a debate about their ultimate transferal to the North British & Mercantile, see Board
Minute Book 1908–1918, June 11, 1917, CLC/B/055/MS14044/004, Commercial Union
Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives.
224
Witt is introduced in a Board meeting on April 17, 1917 and is listed as a director from June
5, 1917. Board Minute Book 1908–1918, CLC/B/055/MS14044/004, Commercial Union
Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives.

269
downturns in business.
225
In 1959, the North British & Mercantile Insurance Company itself
became a subsidiary of the Commercial Union Assurance Company. In 1968, ownership of all
the issued shares of the Fine Art passed to the Commercial Union, and the Fine Art became a
subsidiary which continued to do fire and accident insurance business. The company then
dwindled, eventually becoming a non-functioning “paper company,” before dissolving in 2005.
The Fine Art was a unique amalgam between forward-thinking insurers and art workers.
Its specialist art workers were in many cases drawn from the British art world’s more
conservative ranks. These were somewhat rear-guard-facing agents like Thomas Humphry Ward
or John Callcott Horsley, who were critical of modernist practices, and who labored to prop up
criticized institutions like the Chantrey Bequest, even while plunging into the modern economic
world through their own speculations, and via their City work as financial service providers. In
this regard, the Company’s connection to merchant capitalism forms a further invisible backbone
to an already semi-visible service. These partnerships between artists and insurance company,
and insurance company and other intermediaries, starkly underscores the art object’s ontological
status as a temporally unstable entity touched and transformed by many more intermediaries than
is often immediately apparent. This malleable ontology reveals the ways in which insurance

225
In 1918, the company recorded flipping more salvage pictures that came to them after a
claim: “The managing director submitted particulars of two pictures, one originally attributed to
Romney, but since thought not to be by that master, and another attributed to Janssens. He
mentioned that these pictures, which were insured for £1,000, had been damaged in 1914 in
transit from Dublin to London, and on settlement of the loss for £500, had been taken over by the
Co. In view of the stagnancy in the Art world at that time the question of disposal had been
deferred, but he thought the present might be a suitable time to have the damage repaired, the
cost of which would be trivial, and to send the pictures to Christie’s for sale. It was decided to
adopt this course.” Thomas Humphry Ward oversaw arrangements for this sale. Board Minute
Book 1908–1918, July 25, 1918, CLC/B/055/MS14044/004 and Board Minute Book 1918–1933,
September 26, 1918, and December 19, 1918, CLC/B/055/MS14044/005, Commercial Union
Assurance Company Limited, London Metropolitan Archives.

270
operates as a rationalizing political technology, a form of capital, and an instrument of power, all
at once.

271
Chapter 4. Art into life – artists, emblems, insurance

1. Introduction

My previous chapters have explored how insurance industries came to understand and
insure artworks over the nineteenth century. Artists appeared as commentators, as owners who
insured their own property, and sometimes as insurance agents themselves. The previous
chapters therefore ask and attempt to answer the following question: Given its position as a
service industry, how did insurance serve the art world: private collectors, exhibitions, and art
institutions? This chapter reverses and focuses that essential question to ask: “How did artists
serve the nineteenth-century insurance industry, particularly the life insurance industry?” In the
previous chapter we met late-nineteenth-century artist-insurers like John Callcott Horsley and
James Dromgole Linton with the Fine Art & General Insurance Company Ltd. This chapter
shows how artists participated in the life insurance industry—working for insurance companies,
and sometimes even forming their own—over a longer durée, from the 1790s to the early
twentieth century. Life insurance profoundly affected some artists’ working lives and their
capacities to self-organize and practice collectively.
The chapter is subdivided into three parts, which might better be described as episodes.
The first part looks to the period of exponential growth in premium life insurance industries in
Britain after the 1780s, when companies expanded their reach with new campaigns targeting the
expanding middle classes, the government, and industrial interests. Artists and engravers in this
period imagined and then visualized abstract and essentially invisible concepts like time,
Providence, and insurance risk. The images they produced appeared on the early insurance
companies’ printed policy documents and in other graphic forms: tangible agreements that bound
their bearers into contractual relationships with corporate bodies motivated by a shared
272
dedication to make provisions for life. As contracts, these documents are related to monetary
instruments like coins and fiat money. But they are also juridical and fiscal forms that make
visible an essentially intangible economic product. By introducing this category of document and
print, I argue that we might consider how contractual forms that are usually read for fiscal and
socio-historical data can also offer socio-cultural and iconographic clues to the ways in which
risks were imaged, visually.
The chapter’s second section builds upon the discussion of legal emblems and contracts
regulating mutual relationships by looking at benefit insurance schemes started expressly by and
for British artists from the end of the Napoleonic Wars through the first half of the nineteenth
century. It explores the Artists’ Annuity Fund and the Artists’ Benevolent Fund: linked
associations designed to provide life annuities and aid for indigent artists and their families.
While previous scholars have viewed these schemes as collective efforts made by engravers to
overcome the economic hardships endemic to their occupations, I discuss these associations in
the context of a wider world of mutual aid associations and philanthropy expanding from the
1790s to the 1840s. Moreover, I show that these small-scale mutual aid schemes emerged from a
critical realm of economic thought and practice reliant upon what Ian Hacking called a new
“avalanche of printed numbers” to quantify life that developed in the era.
1
Analyzing the works
of artists and actuaries involved in the schemes, I show how these associations were closely
linked to private insurance and government schemes. With these two associations, artists in a
sense attempted to form classed, occupational solidarities validated by the newest scientific data,
and I argue that in select cases they imported analogous methods into their writings and

1
Ian Hacking, “Biopower and the avalanche of printed numbers,” Humanities in Society 5
(1982): 279-295.
273
artworks, creating a kind of “actuarial cognitive style” that integrated emblematic and empirical
visual forms.
In the chapter’s final section, I look at the insurance advertising that the radical artist
Walter Crane produced for British life insurance companies in the late 1880s and 1890s: an area
of his commercial oeuvre that has been neglected by art historians. In these advertisements and
visual campaigns, Crane deployed the same iconographical and emblematic lexicon that he was
developing in his children’s books, in commissions he produced for private collectors, and
especially in his radical cartoons and works for socialist organizations. Yet, there are subtle
differences between Crane’s insurance advertising and his socialist work, and I argue that in
these differences Crane figures tensions between different forms of mutuality—friendly
societies, political societies, insurance companies—that were operative in the nineteenth
century’s last three decades before the rise of the first British national health insurance scheme.
This chapter makes no claim to survey the visual culture of the entire insuring advertising
landscape, which would mean including fire, marine, and accident insurance. Rather, its point is
to reveal how artists participated in different arms of the life insurance industries. Artists
produced the visual culture of life insurance out of pre-existing iconographical and narrative
stock in emblematic themes. Accordingly, as an experiment, each of my three episodes are
framed by a corresponding emblematic creature, and I discuss each creature’s attributes in the
context of the history of life insurance and the visual arts.

2. Pelican: emblematic contracts or imaging insurance

How did artists and other practitioners represent insurance prior to the 1780s? Economic
crises provided one impetus for an insurance iconography. In the second decade of the eighteenth
274
century, following the Spanish War of Succession (1701–1714), France and Britain restructured
their considerable debts by providing equity for publicly traded corporate shares in companies
chartered to exploit overseas trade in the Atlantic, South America, and in East Asia. Heated
trading, inflated prices, and proliferating paper currency introduced by the Scottish-born French
finance minister, John Law, created bubbles which burst first in France, then Britain, and then in
the Netherlands. Hard on the heels of these spectacular failures appeared a compendium of
prospectuses, engraved plates, commentaries and plays, Het groote Tafereel der dwaasheid
(“The Great Mirror of Folly”) which assessed and lambasted these very visible and international
financial failures. As Rik Frehen, William N. Goetzmann, K. Geert Rouwenhorst and recently
Nina Dubin have shown, insurance here played a central part in many of the images, for—
contrary to what is often assumed about the 1720 financial crashes—marine insurance companies
like the Royal Exchange Assurance and the London Assurance actually “bubbled” more
dramatically, with more heated consumer interest and inflated share prices, than the South Sea
Companies.
2
And yet, in the engraved satires of the bubbles by artists like Bernard Picart (1773–
1733), insurance proved a devilishly difficult concept to depict. As Dubin argues, the artists
presented insurance through personifications that lacked distinguishing, emblematic
characteristics beyond the purely typographic, as in an image by Picart that was much reprinted,

2
Rik Frehen, William N. Goetzmann, and K. Geert Rouwenhorst, “Finance in the Great Mirror
of Folly,” in The Great Mirror of Folly: Finance, Culture, and the Crash of 1720, eds. William
Goetzmann et. al. (New Haven: Yale University. Press, 2013), 63-85; Nina Dubin, “Dupes,
Rogues, Impostors: Reproducing an Insurance Bubble” (working paper, 2022), Microsoft Word
file. On the British “Bubbler’s Medleys” of the period, which depicted assembled documents as
trompe l’oeil compositions, see Frans De Bruyn. “Reading Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid:
An Emblem Book of the Folly of Speculation in the Bubble Year 1720,” Eighteenth-Century Life
24, iss. 2 (2000): 1-42; Maggie M. Cao, “Trompe L’oeil and Financial Risk in the Age of Paper,”
Grey Room 78 (Winter 2020): 6-33; Dror Wahrman, Mr. Collier's Letter Racks: A Tale of Art
and Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012).
275
especially in Britain, A Monument Dedicated to Posterity in Commemoration of Ye Incredible
Folly Transacted in the Year 1720 (1720) [Fig. 103], where the personification of “Assurance”
sits at the center of the composition and is indicated only by a typographic band around her head,
with no additional allegorical accoutrements. As Dubin shows, the artist inscribed insurance as a
lynchpin of the era’s financial pandemonium, yet what could account for insurance’s lack of
defining characteristics?
3
It is precisely insurance’s prospective featurelessness, its aversion to
visuality, that partly motivates this chapter.
Starting in the eighteenth century, the insurance industries developed visual and material
cultures in order to render their invisible services visible, both to themselves and to their
potential clients and investors. Cultural economists and historians of insurance have largely
provided historical assessments of this material, rather than art historians. For example, as Liz
McFall and Francis Dodsworth have shown, some insurance industries like life companies were
plagued by charges of gambling. So to offset public perceptions of insurance as risky and
unstable, companies constructed solid and imposing architectural edifices as head offices,
located near financial centers, a point that Daniel M. Abramson underscores in his broader
discussion of financial buildings, particularly the Bank of England’s architectural history.
4
As

3
William Hogarth would produce his own bubble satire, Emblematical Print on the South Sea
Scheme, and would later return to insurance in his The Times (1762–3). Ronald Paulson,
Hogarth: Volume I: The “Modern Moral Subject” 1697–1732 (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 1992),
67. See also, Ronald Paulson, Hogarth Volume III: Art and Politics 1750–1764 (Cambridge:
Lutterworth, 1992), 336-412.
4
Liz McFall and Francis Dodsworth, “Fabricating the Market: The Promotion of Life Assurance
in the Long Nineteenth-Century,” Journal of Historical Sociology 22, no. 1 (March 2009): 30-
54. Abramson talks about how from the early eighteenth century, forms of commercial
humanism permeated architecture, emphasizing “cultured grace, classical learning, and elegant
manners” which “validated business.” Daniel M. Abramson, Building the Bank of England:
Money, Architecture, Society, 1694–1942 (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2005),
56. See also Liz McFall, Devising Consumption: Cultural Economics of Insurance, Credit and
Spending (London and New York: Routledge, 2015). For a discussion about how insurance
276
Hannah Farber has shown, marine insurers also worked to give their products and services “good
characters” by commissioning painted portraits of their founders and commemorative silver plate
(like church plate) and other material objects: visualizing their services’ values using preexisting
material culture traditions borrowed from institutions like the church.
5

But insurance is a “writing business” that creates equivalences between texts, material
property and persons, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it relied especially upon
print media, which is this section’s focus.
6
Scholars in the social history of business publishing,
design history, and the history of consumption converge in their analyses of subjects like jobbing
printing and ephemera, and have shown how this industry served insurance.
7
James Raven looks
at the British jobbing printing industry: a client-oriented field responsible for producing
economic blank forms, booklets, and documents, connected to scriveners, book, pamphlet, and
newspaper trades rather than to art printing.
8
Raven reveals jobbing printing’s role in recording
and communicating economic precepts, and sees it as crucial for financial and commercial
developments in the eighteenth century. William Hogarth famously highlighted a kind of craft or
jobbing production with his 1762 “Grand Exhibition of the Society of Sign Painters,” in which
Hogarth satirized high art exhibiting culture by depicting an imaginary show that that highlighted

architectures of “security” developed in twentieth-century America, see Elihu Rubin, Insuring
the City: the Prudential Center and the Postwar Urban Landscape (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2012).
5
Hannah Farber, “Underwritten States: Marine Insurance and the Making of Bodies Politics in
America 1622–1815,” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2014, 127-171.
6
Eric Wertheimer, Underwriting: The Poetics of Insurance in America, 1722–1822 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2006), xiii.
7
Julie Anne Lambert, A Nation of Shopkeepers: Trade Ephemera from 1654 to the 1860s in the
John Johnson Collection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
8
James Raven, Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Boydell &
Brewer, 2014). See also Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in
Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
277
forms of “jobbing” production like shop signs and trade cards as anti-art. Maxine Berg and Helen
Clifford show how trade cards were another kind of jobbing printing and a peripatetic version of
the shop sign [Fig. 104].
9
These printed items presented the name and address of a business
representative, and might indicate the goods or services furnished by the proprietor, and even
present an image of the shop itself with its goods on display, miniaturizing the experience of
window shopping.
10
However, the difference between a trade card and an insurance policy is
evident in the fact that the former was an advertisement tied to a particular individual service-
provider, was distributed for free, and was not perhaps meant to be kept for long, while the latter
bound its bearer into a broader group of people and strove for longevity beyond the trade card’s
ephemeral life.
11
Indeed, a policy must be kept, and kept safely: without the enduring physical
object, an insurance claim would be impossible.
Art and design historians have also engaged with a world of print media or, in
contemporary parlance, ephemera. Many such interventions have emerged in response to the
global economic crisis of 2008, which rendered visible seemingly invisible workings of global
finance capital that was increasingly detached from familiar forms like paper currency. These
scholars have sought to re-engage how money functions as a measure of value as well as visual
and material phenomenon. Notable studies have dealt with monetary materiality in the French
context: metallic coin as specie and metallic coin as bearer and mediator of socio-political

9
Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, “Selling Consumption in the Eighteenth Century: Advertising
and the Trade Card in Britain and France,” The Journal of the Social History Society 4, iss. 2
(2007): 145-17; David Garrioch, “House Names, Shop Signs and Social Organization in Western
European Cities, 1500–1900,” Urban History 21, no. 1 (1994): 20-48.
10
Sir Ambrose Heal, “The Trade Cards of Engravers,” The Print Collector’s Quarterly (1927):
218-250, 353-354.
11
John Johnson, “The Development of Printing, Other Than Book-Printing.” The Library s4-
XVII, no. 1 (1936): 22-35.
278
ideology.
12
A concern emerging from intersecting roots in anthropology, design history, and
sociologies of consumption, material histories of money address the base material commodities
that are profoundly implicated in capitalism like gold, silver, aluminum, cotton, and sugar, and
see these materials as historical reservoirs in themselves.
13
An important predecessor here is
Adrian Forty, whose Objects of Desire (1992) argued for attending to the base economic and
ideological forms behind design, rather than reifying particular named authors.
14
Forty made way
for a new attention to industrial design as a key study area: an outlook extended, for our
purposes, to the ways in which national mints operate. Working in the vein of design historians
like John Styles, who attended to “everyday” design, Miranda Clow analyzes the semantic and
typographic elements of printed documents and ephemera from two fire insurance offices, the
Sun and The Insurance Office, to show how the offices “developed trust” through their design
strategies, rather than through their wider visual culture.
15
Other design scholars court a

12
See works by Rebecca Spang (albeit not an art historian), Richard Taws, and Amanda
Lahikainen on French and British paper currency. Rebecca Spang, Stuff and Money in the Time
of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2015); Richard Taws,
The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (University Park,
Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 13-42; Amanda Lahikainen,
“‘British Asignats’: Debt, Caricature and Romantic Subjectivity in 1797,” Studies in
Romanticism 53, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 509-540; Amanda Lahikainen, “Currency from Opinion:
Imitation Banknotes and the Materiality of Paper Currency in Britain, 1782–1847,” Art History
40 (2017): 104-131.
13
See Amy Ogata’s work on the ways in which materials like iron and aluminum were crucial to
the ideological, industrial, and imperial self-fashioning in Second Empire France. Amy Ogata,
“Aluminum, Orfevrerie, Industry, and Allegory in Second Empire France,” Art History 42, no. 3
(June 2019): 482-509; Michelle Foa, “In Transit: Edgar Degas and the Matter of Cotton, between
New World and Old,” The Art Bulletin 102, no. 3 (2020): 54-76.
14
Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750 (New York, N.Y: Thames &
Hudson, 1992 [1986]). On minted money see Laura A. Kalba, “Beautiful Money: Looking at La
Semeuse in Fin-de-Siècle France,” The Art Bulletin 102, no. 1 (2020): 55-78.
15
John Styles, “Manufacture, Consumption and Design in Eighteenth-Century England,” in John
Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993),
527-54; Miranda Clow, “The Design of Trust, Past and Present: A dialogue between ‘design for
279
philosophical tendencies which emanate from legal scholarship, environmental studies, and
anthropology that seek to dissolve distinctions between the natural world and the human world,
reifying materials into mystified “actants” operating on equal footing with human subjects.
16
But
what follows insists on human actors—artists—who produced the material and visual campaigns
for insurance offices, but also in the process took the lessons of insurance into their own
practices, developing schemes and projects informed by insurantial and actuarial principles.
In 1797, William Hamilton, RA (1751–1801) produced an emblem to adorn the headings
of Pelican Life Insurance Office policies [Fig. 105].
17
In a direct sense, the image represents both
painting and relief sculpture, combined in a two-part composition: a tondo or oval vignette in the
top panel depicts a pelican on its nest with chicks. The bird is in the process of vulning: meaning
it pecks opens its breast to feed or anoint its chicks with blood. A human figure representing the
god Hymenaios or Hymen, whose name derives from the refrain of a marriage song, carried a
lighted torch to the right of the pelican. This personification appeared in other ephemera,
including a 1740 ticket produced by William Hogarth representing a seated Hymenaios with

trust’ in contemporary design practice and the fire insurance industry in England 1680–1914,”
PhD diss., Victoria & Albert Museum / Royal College of Art, 2020.
16
Twentieth-century German scholar Aby Warburg described objects or images as having an
“afterlife” or Nachleben: an observation that researchers in the humanities have adapted to legal,
scientific, and anthropological frameworks termed the “New Materialism,” “Object-Oriented-
Ontology” (OOO), and Actor-Network-Theory (ANT). Humanities scholars working in these
veins ascribe agency to non-human objects or systems. As this dissertation deals with objects in
circulation, I have often fielded questions about how I think about my objects’ “lives.” While
such methods provide grounds for evocative thought experiments, I choose to show how human
beings make things which are then mediated by other human beings within capital. Georges
Didi-Huberman and Harvey Mendelsohn, The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of
Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2018), 15-16; Igor Kopytoff, “The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process,” in
The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2017/1986), 64-91.
17
Pelican policies are archived at the John Johnson Ephemera Collection at the Oxford Bodleian
Libraries, as well as at the London Metropolitan Archives.
280
Cupid carrying a similar lighted torch [Fig. 105].
18
In Hamilton’s image, Hymenaios offers a
heart-shaped wreath to a female figure emerging from a cornucopia in a crowd of women and
putti. The bottom panel presents a neoclassical frieze portraying a marriage scene, and it registers
the impact of contemporaries like Thomas Stothard and particularly John Flaxman, whose work
Hamilton admired.
19
Painter, engraver and philosopher Henry James Richter RA (1772–1857)
engraved the print, and it was likely that he provided Hamilton’s connection to the insurance
company. Henry’s brother, Thomas Richter, was a prominent insurance director with the Pelican
Insurance Company, as well as with the Pelican’s parent fire company, the Phoenix Insurance
Company.
20

It is possible to assume that these policy-headings resulted from a straightforward brief
between a company and an eminent artist. A Royal Academician was courted for his prestige and
skill to produce an evocative interpretation of the insurance company’s name. But I want to
suggest that an analysis of the image’s allegorical sources, the role played by the artist, and the
image itself, should be seen in co