Waddesdon Bequest

In 1898, Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild bequeathed to the British Museum as the Waddesdon Bequest the contents from his New Smoking Room at Waddesdon Manor. This consisted of a wide-ranging collection of almost 300 objets d'art et de vertu, which included exquisite examples of jewellery, plate, enamel, carvings, glass and maiolica. One of the earlier objects is the outstanding Holy Thorn Reliquary, probably created in the 1390s in Paris for John, Duke of Berry. The collection is in the tradition of a schatzkammer, or treasure house, (and is referred to as such by some writers) such as those formed by the Renaissance princes of Europe; indeed, the majority of the objects are from late Renaissance Europe, although there are several important medieval pieces, and outliers from classical antiquity and medieval Syria.

Following the sequence of the museum's catalogue numbers, and giving the first number for each category, the bequest consists of: "bronzes", handles and a knocker (WB.1); arms, armour and ironwork (WB.5); enamels (WB.19); glass (WB.53); Italian maiolica (WB.60); "cups etc in gold and hard stone" (WB.66); silver plate (WB.87); jewellery (WB.147); cutlery (WB.201); "caskets, etc" (WB.217); carvings in wood and stone (WB.231–265). There is no group for paintings, and WB.174, a portrait miniature on vellum in a wooden frame, is included with the jewellery, though this is because the subject is wearing a pendant in the collection.

The collection was assembled for a particular place, and to reflect a particular aesthetic; other parts of Ferdinand Rothschild's collection contain objects in very different styles, and the Bequest should not be taken to reflect the totality of his taste. Here what most appealed to Ferdinand Rothschild were intricate, superbly executed, highly decorated and rather ostentatious works of the Late Gothic, Renaissance and Mannerist periods. Few of the objects could be said to rely on either simplicity or Baroque sculptural movement for their effect, though several come from periods and places where much Baroque work was being made. A new display for the collection, which under the terms of the bequest must be kept and displayed together, opened on 11 June 2015.

The collection was started by Baron Ferdinand's father, Baron Anselm von Rothschild (1803–1874), and may include some objects from earlier Rothschild collections. For Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744–1812) of Frankfurt, who began the prominence of the family, his business dealing in coins, "antiques, medals, and objects of display" preceded and financed his banking operations, and most Rothschilds continued to collect art.

At least one of the objects now in the British Museum can be seen in a cabinet in the background of a family portrait from 1838 (left), the year before Ferdinand was born. In his Reminiscences Ferdinand recalled his excitement as a child when he was allowed to help wrap and unwrap his father's collection, which spent the summers in a strongroom when the family left Vienna for a country villa.

The period after the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars offered tremendous opportunities for collectors of the decorative arts of the medieval and Renaissance periods. These categories were valued very little by the art market in general, and metalwork was routinely sold for its bullion value alone. Some of the older objects in precious metal in the collection may have first been received by the family as part of banking transactions; ownership of such pieces had always been partly a way to get some use from capital. Ferdinand records several complaints that his father did not make more use of his opportunities, but in his last years Anselm began to expand his collecting range, and it was he who bought both the Holy Thorn Reliquary and the Ghisi Shield. This golden age for collectors had passed by the time Ferdinand inherited his part of his father's collection in 1874, which was also the year he bought the Waddesdon estate and began to build there. Ferdinand continued to expand the collection until his death in 1898, mostly using dealers, and expanding the range of objects collected. In particular, Ferdinand expanded to around fifty the ten or so pieces of jewellery in his father's collection.

The New Smoking Room built to hold the collection was only planned in 1891, and the collection was moved in there in early 1896, less than three years before Ferdinand's death. Good photographs allow an appreciation of how the objects were displayed, in glassed cases and on open shelves around the walls, over doors, and over the small fireplace, which had an elaborate shelved chimneypiece in wood above. Several objects, including the Casket of Saint Valerie, were on tables away from the walls. Comfortable seating was plentiful, some upholstered with pieces from medieval vestments, and there were framed photographs and houseplants. The room is now refilled with objects from the same period though of somewhat different types, and visitors to Waddesdon Manor can see it from the doorway.

The room, with the adjoining Billiards Room, is the only reception room at Waddesdon Manor to follow the French Renaissance style of the exterior; the other rooms are in broadly 18th-century styles, and contain a magnificent collection of paintings and furniture centred on that century. The segregation of the collection was part of the concept of what has been called the "neo-Kunstkammer", adopted by some other very wealthy collectors of the period. The Renaissance Room at what is now the Wallace Collection and the collection of Sir Julius Wernher were other examples formed in England over the same period. The neo-Kunstkammer aimed to emulate the collections formed during the Renaissance itself, mostly by princely houses; of these the outstanding survivals were the Habsburg collections in Vienna, Prague and Ambras, as well as the treasuries of the Green Vault in Dresden, the Munich Residenz and Kassel. Unlike those collections, contemporary and recent objects were not included.