Hidden treasures of the Leverhulme legacy

Feb 5 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

Lord Leverhulme shared his great works of art with the public, but was always deeply protective of his collection of porcelain. Laura Davis reports

THERE are many beautiful women here in this white palace built by a prince of industry to house his treasures.

Voluptuous flame-haired damsels line the walls of the grand walkways, gazed upon by anyone with an eye for a painting and a ticket to Port Sunlight.

In a series of interlinked side rooms, girls dressed in blue fall in love with humble poets and a merciful goddess watches over the gallery.

“I always feel like I’m protected by these ladies in the Lady Lever,” says Dr Yupin Chung, researcher and curator of the Chinese art collections at the Port Sunlight gallery.

Her work, a secondment from the University of Glasgow, cannot help but be tied in with the link between the Pre-Raphaelite models of the oil paintings and the Oriental women that decorate the blue and white ceramics.

Though many people are aware the late Lord Leverhulme built the gallery to share his vast collection of British art works with the public, they may not know he also accumulated more than 1,000 Chinese art objects.

His fascination in these items, which range from tiny snuff boxes shaped like miniature bottles to large vases he displayed at his private homes, stemmed from his interest in the Pre-Raphaelites.

They were much admired by artists associated with the aesthetic movement, who believed art’s main purpose was in expressing beauty, and Leverhulme even possessed some ceramic pieces that were originally owned by the people whose paintings he also had displayed on his walls.

“These kinds of collections have not really been researched before,” says Dr Chung, who moved to the UK in 1995 to study art history and museum management in London.

“He started to collect Chinese ceramics in the 1890s, and he didn’t really show them to other collectors, so you could say they are really ‘hidden treasures’.

“He didn’t particularly like dishes but preferred sculptural objects like large vases that he displayed in the entrance of two of his homes, Thornton Manor, Cheshire, and The Hill in Hampstead. Chinese porcelain was really perfect for decorating an English home.”

The creation of 18th and 19th- century porcelain in China – both in terms of increased production and design – was influenced by the huge demand for it among European merchants.

From the late 17th century, it became fashionable for the wealthy to display such porcelain in their stately homes, and the English landed gentry was particularly fond of pieces that told stories, including the Romance of the Western Chamber that features in some of Leverhulme’s collection.

While the Chinese themselves favoured simpler designs, they produced vast quantities of figurative porcelain for export.

“A lot of things made in the 18th and 19th centuries were for the West, but before that China also did a lot of work to export to Japan, and so the Japanese have had quite a lot of influence on Chinese porcelain as well,” says Dr Chung, who will be producing a fully-illustrated catalogue of the Lady Lever’s Chinese collections.

They also contain some much older pieces, such as the 140cm-tall sculpture of Kuan-Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, created during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644).

Artefacts in the third room date back to before the 15th century. A lavender-blue flower pot from the Song Dynasty (960-1279) stands out for its simplicity and bright cobalt blue flambé glaze.

“It is not common for a collector in the UK to have a monochrome piece like this,” explains Dr Chung. “It shows the artistic innovation – it is not about the illustration of a story.

“China learned how to use cobalt blue from the Middle East in the 13th-14th century and started to invent its own blue colours later.” Leverhulme, founder of soap manufacturing company Lever Brothers, tended to favour a single dealer at a time. His first recorded purchase of porcelain was in 1894 from Thomas Agnew & Sons of Bond Street, London, and he continued to use him as his major supplier until 1911.