The Western Manuscript Collection of Alfred Chester Beatty (ca. 1915–1930)

ABSTRACT

Alfred Chester Beatty and his wife Edith were amongst the last figures of a generation of London-based collectors who created major collections of medieval manuscripts between c. 1915 and c. 1930. In shaping his collection, Beatty benefitted from the advice and example offered by older collectors, in particular Sydney Cockerell and Henry Yates Thompson, and from the skills of those who worked in museums, notably Eric Millar. This period saw major developments in the study of medieval manuscripts. Much of this work was rooted in connoisseurship and concentrated on grouping books by region, artist and date. Trained by Cockerell and others, Beatty worked to develop connoisseurial skills in order to build a collection that could rival those in museums. The publication of catalogues of a selection of his books, and the sale of part of his collection in 1932-1933, helped to draw attention to the manuscripts that he considered to be of the finest quality. At the same time, the rejection of volumes from the collection, which were often never publicly linked to his name, helped to establish the collection’s reputation for excellence and to consolidate contemporary ideas about a canon of illuminated manuscripts that were to have an important influence on both twentieth-century collecting and scholarship.

In his diary entry for 11 December 1915, Sydney Cockerell, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, recorded his first meeting with “Mr Beatty, an American collector of manuscripts,” when Alfred Chester Beatty visited the Fitzwilliam.¹ Later that day, Cockerell, who was also a collector of medieval books, had tea with Beatty and his wife, Edith, before taking Beatty back to his rooms to look at manuscripts. It is unclear exactly when Beatty bought his first Western medieval manuscript, but the earliest records of his interest in such books suggest that he began collecting circa 1914, when he appears to have acquired two Books of Hours and placed an unsuccessful bid for a third.² In December 1915, shortly after his visit to Cambridge, Beatty purchased another Book of Hours and a second manuscript through a Sotheby’s sale.³ Beatty had made his fortune as a mining engineer in America.⁴ After the death of his first wife in 1911, Beatty and his two children moved to London, where he married Edith (née Dunn) in 1913.⁵ On 5 January 1916, Cockerell visited the Beattys at their London home, 24 Kensington Palace Gardens, to inspect Beatty’s nascent collection of manuscripts. Cockerell concluded that the manuscripts, of which there were about fifteen, were “not exciting,” though he noted that Beatty had “some beautiful Chinese books.”⁶ Evidently keen to encourage Beatty’s collecting, Cockerell immediately “took him to tea with the Yates Thompsons, where he saw some MSS that raised his standard.” The following morning, Cockerell “went carefully through Mr Beatty’s MSS and told him which of them (about half) I should not advise him to keep.” Later, when annotating his diary, Cockerell described his intervention in Beatty’s collection as “a memorable event, which gave him a new start.”⁷

Cockerell’s diaries provide valuable, if one-sided, insights into his relationship with Beatty and the relatively small community of people interested in medieval books. Beatty’s introduction into a group of collectors including Cockerell and Henry Yates Thompson was to prove extremely important in shaping his collection of medieval manuscripts over almost two decades. Beatty’s wife Edith also played a significant role in the development of the collection, purchasing some of the most lavishly illuminated manuscripts as gifts for her husband. The Beatty collection proved particularly influential because Beatty, following in the footsteps of Yates Thompson, organized the publication of a selection of his manuscripts. The catalogue was written by Eric Millar, and it appeared in two volumes in 1927 and 1930.⁸ A proposed third volume was never completed, as Beatty decided to sell his collection of Western manuscripts, and two major sales were held in 1932 and 1933⁹ The sales were financially disastrous, with many manuscripts failing to sell (“bought in”), and Beatty opted to keep the remainder of the collection, much of which was sold at two sales held after his death (which occurred on 19 January 1968).¹⁰ As a result of these sales, and other sales, gifts, and exchanges, Beatty’s manuscripts are now to be found in collections in Europe, America, Australasia, and Japan, as well as in the library in Dublin that bears his name. Although Beatty only actively acquired medieval manuscripts from circa 1914 to circa 1930, the choices that he made in acquiring and publishing material had a significant impact on the academic study of illuminated manuscripts. The influence of the circle of collectors of which he became a part, including Cockerell and Yates Thompson, played a major role in shaping both Beatty’s taste and the form of his publications. The Beattys can be seen as among the last of the collectors who were able to amass major private collections to rival those in museums. The collection, publication, and dispersal of the books at a time when art history was beginning to appear as an academic discipline in the English-speaking world also helped to ensure that Beatty’s favored manuscripts became part of a canon of illuminated books that were well known to both scholars and the market.

The English ritual of afternoon tea on 5 January 1916 laid the foundations for Beatty’s collection of medieval manuscripts and his entry into a select group of connoisseur-collectors of which Yates Thompson and Cockerell were both important members. By the time Beatty and Yates Thompson met, the latter’s collection of manuscripts was well known, not least because he had published catalogues in 1898, 1902, 1907, and 1912.¹¹ These publications were followed by seven further volumes of illustrations, published between 1907 and 1918.¹² Yates Thompson sent a copy of the final volume of illustrations to Beatty, inscribed to “Chester Beatty with great regard from H Y Thompson.”¹³ The catalogues made clear Yates Thompson’s ambition to be known for owning the highest quality material available, as he aimed to create a collection of one hundred “first[-]rate” manuscripts.¹⁴ He famously stated: “My plan has been never to buy any additional volume unless it was decidedly superior in value and interest to one at least of my original hundred, and upon its acquisition pitilessly to discard the least fascinating of the said hundred.”¹⁵ Because his collection developed as he was publishing his catalogues, they actually contain 134 of the manuscripts that passed through his hands, and the collection probably never numbered exactly one hundred. Nevertheless, Yates Thompson developed a reputation as a collector of only the finest books, and his collection was to prove extremely influential on Beatty’s collecting practices.

In May 1916, Beatty returned to Cambridge and spent at least three days in the Fitzwilliam Museum studying manuscripts.¹⁶ In September of that year, Cockerell ran into Beatty in Oxford, and the two men, together with Yates Thompson, examined manuscripts in the Bodleian Library.¹⁷ These hours spent in the close scrutiny of books were fundamental training for anyone wishing to be considered a connoisseur. At the same time, Beatty continued to add to his collection of Western manuscripts, and began to spend very large sums on some volumes, paying £2,000 for the De Levis Hours (an early fifteenth-century French manuscript, with sixteen miniatures and a gilded border on every text page, now Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library MS 400) in 1916, and £1,000 for another Book of Hours in the same year, as well as making much more modest purchases.¹⁸ Beatty continued to develop the collection slowly over the remaining years of the decade, but in 1920 he began to buy medieval manuscripts in significant numbers. In March of that year Beatty bought five manuscripts (the thirteenth-century Salvin Hours, a fourteenth-century copy of Augustine’s City of God in French, Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum Historiale, and the Gospel Book of Pius II, together with a second Book of Hours, which he returned) from the sale of Yates Thompson’s own collection, and he lodged unsuccessful bids on a further two volumes.¹⁹ In the report of the sale in The Times, Beatty was described as “a well-known collector of MSS,” and the growth of interest in manuscripts was reflected in the suggestion that the volumes sold for somewhere “between five and 10 times the original cost.”²⁰ In July, Beatty successfully bid on six items at the sale of Lord Mostyn’s collection (including the twelfth-century Mostyn Gospels, a late-fifteenth-century copy of Herodian’s Historia de Imperio, The Mostyn Hours, a fifteenth-century copy of Sallust’s De Bello Catilinae, and a Vitruvius), though he again returned a manuscript.²¹ Most significantly, however, at the end of that year Beatty made his first purchase from the collection of manuscripts that had been amassed in the nineteenth century by Thomas Phillipps.

Beatty visited the Phillipps collection in Cheltenham on 6 October 1920

²² Following the visit, he wrote to the manuscripts’ owner, Thomas Fitzroy Fenwick, grandson of Thomas Phillipps, to arrange a further visit, adding that Edith was also keen to see the manuscripts.²³ Beatty returned to Cheltenham in December, when he arranged the purchase of twenty-four manuscripts and two fragments from Fenwick, for a total of £11,954.²⁴ Edith also arranged to buy a fragment of a lavishly illuminated tenth-century Gospel Book (Phillipps MS 14122, now Walters Art Museum W 751) for £500.²⁵ On 31 December, Fenwick wrote to Beatty: “Alas! The books have just gone, and one more chapter in their history is closed—a long chapter indeed—for many of them have been for close on a hundred years in the family possession. The New Year will find them in a new home, where I am convinced they will be appreciated to the fullest extent by two such devotees to medieval art as your charming wife and yourself.”²⁶ The illumination was clearly part of the appeal of the chosen volumes, but Beatty’s notes made on this visit to Cheltenham, now preserved at Sotheby’s in London, demonstrate an awareness of other features of manuscripts.²⁷ The notes are extremely brief, but often offer a judgment on the condition of a volume and the quality of the writing as well as that of the illumination. For example, of Phillipps MS 3010 (a copy of Livy’s De Secundo Bello Punico made in the second half of the fifteenth century for King Mathias Corvinus of Hungary), he wrote:

3010 Italian 15th CenturyCorvinus. Writing poor.Illumination fine.

The entries also often include prices, presumably those named by Fenwick.²⁸ Despite its “poor” writing, Beatty bought MS 3010 for £500.²⁹ It was sold in 1933 and is now in the New York Public Library (Spencer MS 27).³⁰ However, in other cases, Beatty concluded that a volume was “not fine or important enough” for his collection (Phillipps MS 1347) or that the price being asked was “far too high,” as in the case of Phillipps MS 3633, for which Fenwick wanted £3,000. When Cockerell saw the purchases, he was impressed, describing them as “very fine.”³¹ Beatty bought a further eight manuscripts from Fenwick in 1923 for a total of £3,320 and nine more in 1924 at a cost of £5,105.³²

On 15 May 1923, Beatty was elected a member of the Roxburghe club, an exclusive group of manuscript collectors and experts that included both Yates Thompson and Cockerell.³³ Cockerell was probably influential in supporting Beatty’s election, and his diary records that after the meeting he went to tea with the Beattys to break the news.³⁴ A history of the club published in 1928 claimed that Beatty “has been interested for many years in collecting Oriental and Western manuscripts, specializing particularly in manuscripts of artistic merit from the point of view of miniatures and calligraphy.”³⁵ Beatty seems to have written very little about his aims in creating the collection.³⁶ After Beatty’s death, his librarian, R. J. Hayes, claimed that “few private collections have ever been assembled where such rigorous tests of quality and condition have been applied,” adding “his collecting was never indiscriminate and it was by no means unusual for him to dispose of a manuscript when a finer example of calligraphy or painting turned up of a rather similar kind.”³⁷ This is supported by a note in the unpublished catalogue of the collection worked on in the 1920s, where in an entry with Beatty’s initials, dated 24 February 1924, the collection is described as containing “116 W. MSS. A few of the western MSS will be rejected as finer ones are obtained,” a phrase that echoes Yates Thompson’s collecting practice.³⁸ In all of this, however, Beatty’s definition of quality remains frustratingly vague, probably because his views were shared and reinforced by his circle of friends and collectors and thus were not felt to need explanation.

The rhetoric about quality in Beatty’s collecting resonates with some of Yates Thompson’s practices, though Beatty did not share all Yates Thompson’s interests. Although he often described material using terms such as “firstrate” or “exquisite,” Yates Thompson’s catalogues did not itemize the criteria that qualified these manuscripts for inclusion in his select hundred. Nevertheless, some recurring themes are evident in the descriptions of his collection. He was particularly interested in books that contained evidence of elite patronage or authorship. He wrote, “I cannot deny myself the pleasure of pointing out for the encouragement of collectors what a variety of interesting personages and institutions is encountered in connexion with the picture-books of the Middle Ages. It seems as though the greatest potentates had vied with one another for the possession of these treasures.”³⁹ Yates Thompson seems to have thought that books made for great men were both intrinsically interesting and likely to have been the best of their era, although he observed that “at the present day no one taste at once so refined and so artistic is so universal among the great ones of the earth.”⁴⁰ At the same time, Yates Thompson wanted manuscripts that were in perfect or near-perfect condition. In addition, he appreciated the decoration of books, and particularly those that he judged to be “refined” and “delicate,” such as the Coetivy Hours, a fifteenth-century Book of Hours measuring approximately 14 × 10 centimeters, with 148 miniatures and in which every page has richly decorated borders, often featuring subsidiary scenes or drolleries (figure 1).⁴¹

Figure 1.

Dublin, Chester Beatt y Library W 082, fol. 209r. © Th e Trustees of the Chester Beatt y Library.

In addition, Yates Thompson aimed to obtain manuscripts from throughout the Middle Ages and across Europe. He declared, “It is very much to be regretted that my hundred [manuscripts] includes no specimen of early Irish art, and no worthy representative of the Winchester school of illumination of the 10th and 11th centuries.”⁴² However, in 1912 he noted that fifty-one of his manuscripts had been made in France, suggesting a tension between his plan and his personal taste, as well as the limitations of the material available for purchase.⁴³

Figure 2.

Dublin, Chester Beatt y Library, formerly W MS 103 fol. 160r, leaf repurchased by the Chester Beatt y Library. © Th e Trustees of the Chester Beatt y Library.

Beatty’s notes on the Phillipps collection provide some insights into his taste and his ambitions for the collection. Only very occasionally does Beatty make reference to former owners of the manuscripts. However, like Yates Thompson, Beatty wanted books that were in perfect condition, though he did occasionally purchase damaged manuscripts, including a richly decorated, but water-stained, early fifteenth-century Book of Hours (his W MS 103) from which he removed some leaves (figure 2).⁴⁴ His notes offer judgments on both the illustration and the writing of manuscripts. The latter appears to have been a largely aesthetic judgement on the script, as there is no obvious correlation between his comments and either the accuracy of the copying or the consistency of execution. There are some hints that Beatty, like Yates Thompson, was interested in obtaining a range of material: of Phillipps MS 4790 he wrote, “do not need it in view of my purchase from Ellis.” Similarly, although he judged the writing of Phillipps MS 3948 to be poor, he added, “may be worth getting as have no example of a bestiary.” (Edith purchased the latter in 1925, and it became W MS 80.) Intriguingly, the seven earliest items included in Beatty’s published catalogues were all purchased from the Phillipps collection in 1923 and 1924, suggesting that he may have been deliberately seeking to expand the scope of the collection. In contrast to his negative judgments of many volumes in the Phillipps collection, Beatty described Phillipps MS 1798 as “a first class book in every respect and in perfect condition” (figure 3). This was one of Fenwick’s treasures (a copy of Statius of Naples’s Thebaid), and Beatty set down a longer description than usual:

This is a beautiful book of the late XIV [century]. The writing is Italian. The miniatures however are French. The sky is blue and the figures are in a very brown grisaille type. A fine book, 12 miniatures. Miniatures are of a uniformly high grade. The book is not for sale except at a high price £3000–£5000.

In a second entry in the Phillipps notebook, he added that he “would be glad to add such a book to my collection.”

Figure 3.

Dublin, Chester Beatt y Library W 076, fol. 129v. © Th e Trustees of the Chester Beatt y Library.

Hayes claimed that “Beatty became known to every rare book dealer in London, Paris and New York as a generous buyer who insisted on fine quality and was prepared to pay high prices to obtain it.”⁴⁵ Yet the notes made on the Phillipps manuscripts suggest that Beatty was cautious with his money. He often valued the Phillipps volumes at less than Fenwick wanted, and thus did not buy. For example, of Phillipps MS 2164 Beatty noted, “will take £5000—too high.”⁴⁶ In his letters to Fenwick, Beatty also made reference to the demands of his business interests rendering him “not very flush” (1921) and blamed “high taxes” (1923) for limiting his ability to spend money on books, though this may have been, in part, an attempt to bargain with Fenwick.⁴⁷ In the unpublished catalogue of his manuscripts, Beatty sometimes used a code to record prices, a practice he may also have derived from Yates Thompson, who used a similar code.⁴⁸ Although it seems extremely unlikely that Beatty’s decision to sell his collection in 1932, in the wake of the Wall Street crash, was prompted purely by a need to convert manuscripts into cash, and was instead, as Charles Horton has argued, probably informed by a desire to focus on other parts of the collection, Cockerell later claimed that in this period Beatty “was in difficulties owing to the slump.”⁴⁹ This view was echoed by Morgan’s librarian Belle da Costa Greene, but she also suggested that Beatty had “rather lost interest in his European manuscripts.”⁵⁰

In contrast to Beatty’s cautious attitude toward the prices of manuscripts, his wife Edith was willing to pay much higher prices for items she knew Beatty wanted. In advance of Yates Thompson’s first major sale of manuscripts in 1919, Edith managed to persuade him to sell her the Coetivy Hours (now Chester Beatty Library W MS 82) for £4,000, making it significantly more expensive than any recorded price Beatty had paid for a Western manuscript up to that point (figure 1). The manuscript was a present for her husband.⁵¹ As is well known, Edith visited the Phillipps collection in November 1925 to buy further gifts for Beatty.⁵² On this occasion, she bought eight manuscripts for a total of £21,800, paying £7,000 each for two manuscripts (Phillipps MSS 1798 and 3502, now Chester Beatty Library W 076 and 122) that were intended to be Christmas and birthday presents.⁵³ These volumes (the Statius of Naples, Thebaid, that Beatty had previously admired [figure 3], and Dictys Cretensis, De Bello Troiano) were among Fenwick’s treasures, but in his notes on the Phillipps collection, Beatty had previously valued MS 3502 as “probably worth £3000–4000.” Edith’s extravagant enthusiasm at this moment is recorded in a letter to Fenwick. She wrote, “You won’t forget that I am going to buy the ‘Book of the Chase’ for £10,000—only I cannot afford it until next year—and also that if you decide to sell any other treasures … you will give me the refusal first—I shall always buy them, even if I have to sell some of my jewels,” a promise that was never followed through.⁵⁴ The books were shown to Cockerell on 2 December, who declared them “splendid.”⁵⁵

By the early 1920s, both Beatty and Edith seem to have been confident in their judgment of what constituted the finest medieval manuscripts available for purchase. However, the growing collection required management. From 1919 Beatty employed Francis Kelly as his librarian, and Kelly was later followed by Joan Kingsford Wood (whose sister Kate was married to Cockerell).⁵⁶ In addition, in 1923 Beatty employed Eric Millar, who was working in the manuscripts department at the British Museum, and a friend and protégé of Cockerell, on a salary of £100 a year to “assist me in a general way in my library at odd times and drop in at Sotheby’s when convenient to you and generally follow the question of manuscripts for me.”⁵⁷ Beatty’s arrangement with Millar lasted for almost a decade, and by 1924 Millar had formally begun work on a catalogue of the Western manuscripts. The publication was designed to form three volumes, and Beatty did not include all the manuscripts he owned in the catalogue, instead selecting what he believed to be the best of his manuscripts and organizing them chronologically. Two volumes of the catalogue, produced in large format and including some color images, complete with an additional two volumes of plates, appeared in 1927 and 1930, and these detailed eighty-one manuscripts. Work had begun on a third volume when, to both Millar’s and Cockerell’s horror, Beatty announced his decision to sell his manuscripts.⁵⁸ Beatty did not see why the project could not be completed, but Millar objected to cataloguing books he would no longer have access to, and the publication was eventually abandoned.⁵⁹

Millar’s dismay and indignation at the sale of the collection seems to have been as much personal as professional.⁶⁰ He had invested a huge amount of time and effort in the work, and moreover had encouraged Beatty to buy books specifically for inclusion in the catalogue. In July 1925, Millar visited Sotheby’s to see the manuscripts coming up for sale. He wrote enthusiastically to Beatty about lot 201, describing it as “a splendid book, and I shall be very disappointed if you don’t get it.”⁶¹ He went on, “Cockerell (whom I met there) said there were several people about, American booksellers and the like, who might go for it even though they knew very little about it, so that it would be as well to put as high a bid on it as you feel justified in doing.” At the end of the letter he reiterated, “I needn’t say I wish you the best of luck over lot 201, which must come into Vol. 1 of the catalogue.” Beatty was evidently convinced, as he bought the manuscript (a twelfth-century copy of Zacharias Chrysopolitanus’s In Unum ex Quatuor with unusual grisaille decoration) for £700.⁶² A note in the Quaritch archives states that the manuscript was “sent to Eric Millar Esq.”⁶³ Beatty sold the volume in 1933, and it is now in the Wormsley Library.⁶⁴

The relationship between Millar, Cockerell, and Beatty also sheds some light on attitudes towards private collectors and museum acquisitions in this period. Although he was employed at the British Museum, Millar was happy to moonlight for Beatty (and certainly enjoyed the additional income, repeatedly asking for advances). He seems to have accepted that the museum was simply not in a position to compete with rich collectors at auctions. However, in 1923 Millar wrote to Beatty at the request of the keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum, Julius Gilson, about “an important Spanish MS 14th cent. coming up at Hodgson’s next Thursday. … Gilson asked me to tell you that he hopes to be allowed to go up to £210 on it, and he would be very grateful if you would let us have a try up to that amount.”⁶⁵ The Americans to whom Millar had referred in his letter about the 1925 sale included people like Belle da Costa Greene, who was buying for the Morgan collection, and Abraham Rosenbach, and these bidders were helping to drive up prices.⁶⁶ Greene was in England in June 1925, and Cockerell introduced her to Millar on a visit to the British Museum.⁶⁷ Although Cockerell looked in at Sotheby’s on the day of the sale on 27 July, his diary indicates that during this period he was preoccupied with trying to convince members of the Courtauld family to make donations to the Fitzwilliam Museum. Nevertheless, his willingness to try to manipulate the market is suggested by the diary entry for 28 July, which reads: “spent most of the morning at Quaritch’s and Maggs’ trying to arrange for J. R. Holliday or Charrington to buy the Caldecotts at Sotheby’s tomorrow without competing against each other.”⁶⁸ Cockerell sought to use the fact that private collectors were in a position to spend large sums on manuscripts as a means of enriching museum collections in the longer term.⁶⁹ In 1923 he approached Beatty about an English Book of Hours that he had found at Maggs Bros. “and which I gave him the opportunity of buying on condition of its coming to the Fitzwilliam after the death of himself and his wife. He is to show it to her and to let me know.”⁷⁰ Beatty did buy the manuscript for £450 and subsequently gave it to the Fitzwilliam, where it is now MS 375⁷¹

Cockerell described the news that the Beattys were to sell their Western manuscripts as “startling and depressing.”⁷² It seems very likely that he had hoped that the entire collection would come to the Fitzwilliam, and he later claimed that Edith had promised her collections of French paintings and furniture to the museum.⁷³ Cockerell immediately set about raising £3,500 to buy the William de Brailes leaves for the Fitzwilliam. Cockerell had persuaded Beatty to buy the leaves for $6,000 on a visit to New York in 1920 and had published on the thirteenth-century English illuminator in 1930.⁷⁴ He managed to raise the sum, which he described as a “great relief and satisfaction,” and the leaves are now in the Fitzwilliam Museum.⁷⁵

Millar’s published catalogues and his work for the unpublished third volume provided the basis for the sales catalogues created in 1932 and 1933.⁷⁶ Beatty’s initial plan had been to sell the bulk of his Western collection at a series of annual sales, each of which would “contain a selection so far as possible representative of the whole.”⁷⁷ However, after the not inconsiderable losses made on the manuscripts offered at the first two sales, and an improvement in Beatty’s financial situation, the idea for further sales was dropped.⁷⁸ Beatty’s sale catalogues bore little resemblance to those available when he first started collecting. In addition to detailed descriptions, the lots were illustrated with large plates, including some color images. In the preface to the 1932 catalogue, Beatty was described as one of the “great collectors of modern times.”⁷⁹ His collection was compared to that of Yates Thompson, although it was said to be “more carefully representative of various dates, classes and schools.” The documentation provided in Millar’s catalogues and the sales catalogues subsequently made those manuscripts relatively easy to trace, and the publicity around the sales helped to draw attention to them. Indeed, some manuscripts continue to be associated with Beatty’s name when they appear at auction, including his W MS 104, some-times called the Chester Beatty Hours, and W MS 173 (Phillipps MS 2506), sometimes described as the Chester Beatty Bible, both of which have been dismembered with leaves now divided among collections around the globe. In the preface to the 1968 sale catalogue, Hayes claimed, “It is no exaggeration to say that throughout the world the words ‘Chester Beatty’ placed before the number of a manuscript convey immediately to the scholar and the connoisseur the idea of something of special importance and distinction.”⁸⁰ The book dealer Alan Thomas quoted these words in his catalogue as he attempted to resell the manuscripts he had bought at the Beatty sale, suggesting that he recognized and was keen to trade on the value of the Beatty name.⁸¹

The reputation of Beatty’s collection was partly built on foundations laid by earlier collectors, including Lord Mostyn and Yates Thompson. The 1932 catalogue observed that the period of Beatty’s collecting coincided with the Mostyn and Yates Thompson sales, “which contained numerous manuscripts of an importance rarely seen in the market.”⁸² Earlier still, the exhibition and publication of the catalogue of the exhibition of illuminated manuscripts organized by the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1908 had raised interest in illuminated books and helped to lay the foundations for a “canon” of Western, and more particularly English, manuscripts; a selection of volumes that were widely accepted as pinnacles of a series of styles, and which were to prove attractive to both scholars and collectors. The exhibition attracted 5,053 visitors, not including the Club’s members, through whom admission to the exhibition was obtained.⁸³ Cockerell and Yates Thompson were both members of the exhibition’s organizing committee, and were among the private owners who lent a combined total of 197 manuscripts to the exhibition. Cockerell also wrote the introduction to the catalogue. This introduction sought to group manuscripts into regional and chronological schools, with “France, Italy, and the Netherlands [being] well and typically represented,” providing a typical connoisseurial framework for the period that resonates with the collections put together by both Yates Thompson and Beatty.⁸⁴ Moreover, the exhibition, it was claimed, presented “the finest examples” of illuminated manuscripts from England, together with volumes made across Europe, between the ninth and sixteenth centuries.⁸⁵ Although Beatty did not move to London until 1911, it is noteworthy that at least eleven manuscripts shown in the 1908 exhibition, including the Salvin Hours (then in Yates Thompson’s collection, now in the British Library) and the Ruskin Hours (then owned by Cockerell, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum) subsequently came into his collection (figure 4).⁸⁶

Figure 4.

Case M at the Burlington Fine Arts Club exhibition of 1908. Beatt y subsequently owned two of the manuscripts in this case (the Holford Hours is in the second row, second from the left, and Statutes of the Order of St. Michael is in the third row, far right).

The Burlington Fine Arts Club had been founded in 1856, and aimed to “bring together Amateurs, Collectors, and others interested in Art; to afford ready means for consultation between persons of special knowledge and experience in matters relating to the Fine Arts; and to provide accommodation for sharing and comparing rare works in the possession of the Members and their friends.”⁸⁷ The 1925 edition of the Club’s rules observed that “connoisseurship and taste have become qualifications for membership as well as the collection or possession of works of art,” and it remained a society of gentlemen (and later ladies), who paid an annual subscription, with dealers and those seeking to make profit from trade in art explicitly excluded from membership.⁸⁸ Nevertheless, the Club developed a library with the aim of making it “a means of obtaining knowledge of all sales or other opportunities for the acquisition of Works of Art; and to make it a general medium of information on points relating to the history and condition of the Fine Arts both at home and abroad.”⁸⁹ Similarly, the Roxburghe Club encouraged its members to sponsor publications (Beatty presented a Chronicle of Akbar the Great in 1937), underlining the connections between scholars and private collectors.

Beatty’s collection was formed at a time in which there was a growing interest in manuscripts as a subject for scholarship. In 1923 Cockerell introduced Beatty to his neighbor (at 18 Kensington Palace Gardens) Lord Lee of Fareham.⁹⁰ Later that year, Cockerell recorded a dinner at the Beattys’ where the company included “the Witts,” probably Sir Robert Witt (a member of the Burlington Fine Arts Club) and his wife Mary.⁹¹ At this time, the Witts lived in Portman Square, where their neighbors included the Yates Thompsons. In the 1920s, Lee and Witt collaborated with Samuel Courtauld to found the Courtauld Institute of Art, which was intended to provide an academic training that would equip students to serve the needs of collectors like themselves. The Courtauld opened in Portman Square in 1932, just at the moment of the Beatty sales, and in this context, it is striking that the preface to the 1932 sale catalogue observes that Western manuscripts offer “satisfaction … to the instincts of the artist, the scholar, and the man of letters alike.”⁹² Some of Beatty’s books on manuscripts are now to be found in the library of the Courtauld Institute, although it is unclear how and when they were acquired.⁹³

The impact of Beatty’s decisions in selecting material to be publicly acknowledged as part of his collection, and the subsequent inclusion of these volumes in major museums, private collections, and publications is thrown into relief by the challenge of hunting for the material in his collection that was not included in his catalogues or in the sales that bore his name. In the 1920s Beatty disposed of manuscripts anonymously, as well as exchanging manuscripts, notably with Abraham Yahuda, and giving some as gifts, to recipients including Millar.⁹⁴ These volumes have received almost no attention in subsequent scholarship. One of the early purchases, a Psalter, found its way to Senshu University in Japan, where it is now MS 7 As a consequence of the digitization of the manuscript, including the detailed inscriptions on the flyleaves, it can be identified as a manuscript purchased by Beatty from Quaritch in 1916, which was subsequently resold by Quaritch in 1931.⁹⁵ Similarly, thanks to digitization, a group of manuscripts that were exchanged with Yahuda between 1927 and 1931 can be identified in the National Library of Israel.⁹⁶ As each manuscript is a unique survival, these volumes are not necessarily less valuable or important than those Beatty favored, but his taste, together with that of his circle, played a very significant part in shaping twentieth-century attitudes to and the study of medieval manuscripts. Ironically, the Western manuscripts that remain in the Chester Beatty collection, which were transferred to Dublin in 1950, have also received very little attention in scholarship, probably because Dublin has been perceived as relatively inaccessible by those working on manuscripts in the major English centers for manuscript scholarship of Cambridge, London, and Oxford.

Chester Beatty and his wife Edith can be seen as part of the culmination of a generation of major, London-based collectors who were active between circa 1915 and circa 1930. As such, Beatty benefited from the advice and example offered by older collectors, in particular Cockerell and Yates Thompson. Beatty happened to be collecting during a period in which some major collections were put up for sale, but he also sought out material from dealers around the world and managed to extract treasures from the Phillipps collection. This period saw major developments in the study of medieval manuscripts. Much of this work was rooted in connoisseurship, and concentrated on grouping books by region, artist, and date. Beatty worked hard to develop connoisseurial skills in order to build a collection that could rival those in museums. The publication of his catalogues helped to make the manuscripts that he judged to be the finest and most important of his collection available to a wide audience of collectors, curators, and scholars. The sales of his collection in 1932–33 (and later in 1968–69) made some of the manuscripts available to collectors, and helped to further publicize the collection. At the same time, Beatty’s rejection and quiet disposal of books that did not meet his idea of the finest quality helped to consolidate contemporary notions of a canon of important and desirable illuminated manuscripts. In this, Beatty and his circle came to have a significant influence on both the trade and study of medieval books in the twentieth century.