The art of collecting : a lecture / by Sir Robert Witt.

  • Witt, Robert Clermont, Sir, 1872-1952.
Date:
[1950?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The art of collecting : a lecture / by Sir Robert Witt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    So let even the busiest of us remember how much of our lives we spend in what the poet described as: ‘Dipping buckets into empty wells, And growing old with drawing nothing up.’ And let us set about making some kind of a collection, however late in life. First let me remind you that it is happier to be a collector, than to be the owner of a collection. It is the chase, not the quarry, that counts, the pursuit of the unattainable, the discovery of the unexpected, with all its vicissitudes of success and failure. This pursuit must be based, partly on taste, partly on knowledge. Neither will suffice alone. Taste, in the true sense of ‘fine artistic judgment’, is something natural, and bestowed upon us at birth, by the Gods above. I mean, of course, good taste, for you will all have met the pathetic figure who has ‘a great deal of taste’ —and all of it bad. It is doubly blessed to be given eyes to see and fingers to touch. But the collector must also have knowledge, which comes from study, training and experience. How can we acquire these? From ownership itself, from observation and from criticism. As regards ownership, we all possess something in our homes, either inherited or acquired. What we have in¬ herited cannot, unfortunately, represent our own taste. Until we become collectors, what we have acquired con¬ sists too often mainly of the gifts of our friends—those terrible wedding presents, for instance, that disfigure our