It could be said that a war-wound that turned fatally septic was responsible for what is known today as the Holburne Museum in Bath. Captain Francis Holburne was expected to succeed as the 5th Baronet of Menstrie but died after being wounded at the Battle of Bayonne in 1814. His younger brother William prepared to inherit the title and estate which, six years later, came to him on the death of his father. He abandoned his naval career and embarked on a rather late Grand Tour during which, it seems, his avid collecting began. Thereafter he lived in Bath until his death in 1874, unmarried and with three unmarried sisters in a house that over the years almost silted up with its accumulation of furniture, objects and pictures. The idea that they would form a museum open to the public eventually became a reality in a cramped house in Charlotte Street. After protracted wrangling between Holburne’s trustees and the Corporation of Bath, the collection finally found its present home in the former Sydney Hotel. This had been erected in 1795–97, chiefly for refreshments and entertainments attached to the pleasure gardens behind it, and grandly situated facing the distinguished length of Great Pulteney Street. Once it had been acquired for the projected museum it was internally redesigned with a first-floor gallery devoted to the decorative arts and one on the second floor for pictures. It opened in 1916 and since then Sir William Holburne’s collection has been amplified by many other bequests, loans and acquisitions. 

A review of the new Museum appeared in this Magazine in June 1917.1 With feline aplomb, the writer, More Adey, skirts any detailed assessment of the collection and concentrates instead on its display and the general furnishing of the galleries to which he awards full marks. He picks out a few fine objects on show – some ceramics and domestic silver – but notes that the omnivorous William Holburne was ‘a careless judge of pictures’. This impression remains true. Fortunately, the Museum attracted some notable works over the subsequent decades and, more recently, some highly appropriate long loans. The large picture gallery chiefly holds eighteenth- and very early nineteenth-century portraits shown against darkish green walls. Here paintings by Gainsborough and Ramsay dominate. By the former there is the full length of William Wollaston, his land stretching firmly behind him, his sideways look turned to the future, the whole figure given with handsome nonchalance. Also on loan is the same artist’s The Byam family, originally painted as a newly married husband and wife but later altered to include a small daughter and to update Lady Byam’s fashions.2 In 1962 the bequest of Sir Orme Sargent added, among other family pictures, two superb portraits by Ramsay. Most recently, the Holburne has benefited from a long-awaited solution to a thorny problem; what to do with the writer Somerset Maugham’s collection of theatrical portraits. As a dramatist in thrall to the theatre Maugham was an early collector of this genre and over the years amassed about forty such works which he gave to the National Theatre. Disgracefully, they never found a permanent home, in spite of several unsuitable schemes. At last they have found an appropriate resting place in Bath, shared between the Holburne and the Theatre Royal; six are currently on show in the Museum, including Zoffany’s portrayal of David Garrick in swirling travestie for his role in The Provok’d Wife (Fig.I).

Earlier this year, the Museum received extensive publicity when it re-opened after renovation and an extension carried out by Eric Parry Architects. This has included the daring and entirely successful moving of the central staircase of the house, to a few feet to the left, unblocking the vista through the ground-floor entrance to the gardens at the back; a beautiful full-height glass extension to the rear of the building that creates temporary exhibition rooms and a greater feeling of light and air; and the almost complete redisplay of the collections. While it has to be admitted that the Museum is distinctly eclectic and charmingly provincial (and in places still fussily crowded), in its renovated state its former shabby gentility has been vanquished. It now presents itself like Gainsborough’s Lord and Lady Byam, stepping out with the next generation, all in their finery, to greet the future.

1 M. Adey: ‘The Arrangement of the Holburne Museum’, The Burlington Magazine 30 (1917), pp.240–41. This review is cited in the new publication accompanying the re-opening of the Museum: The Holburne Museum. Texts by Alexander Sturgis, Matthew Winterbottom and Amina Wright. 88 pp. incl. numerous col. ills. (Scala, London, 2011), £12.95. ISBN 978–1–85759–665–6.

2 Gainsborough’s Landscapes: Themes and Variations is currently on view at the Museum (to 8th January 2012; to be reviewed).