Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Salting, George
SALTING, GEORGE (1835–1909), art collector and benefactor, was elder son of Severin Kanute Salting and Louise Fiellerup, both of Danish origin. The father was born at Copenhagen on 3 Oct. 1805, and died at Chertsey on 14 Sept. 1865. The son George was born on 15 Aug. 1835 at Sydney, New South Wales, where the father had become a partner in the firm of Flower, Salting, Challis & Co., merchants. They lived in Macquarie Street. George, with his younger brother, William Severin (b. 18 Jan. 1837, d. 23 June 1905), at first went to a school in Sydney until 1848, when George was sent home to Eton. His parents followed him to England two years later. He seems to have left no impression on his contemporaries at Eton save that of 'a pale, lean, tall, eccentric person,' although a contemporary portrait shows him as a handsome youth. Shooting was the only form of sport for which he cared. The whole family returned to Sydney in 1853, on account of George's health, contrary to the wishes of his Eton tutor, who saw in him the making of a good classical scholar. The brother William was at the same time withdrawn from Brighton College. A tutor was brought out for the two boys, and he complained of George's dreamy poetic temperament, which hindered continuous application. In the Lent term of 1854 Salting entered the newly founded University of Sydney with a scholarship for general proficiency. After a career in which he especially distinguished himself in classics, he graduated B.A. in 1857. When George and his brother left the university their father acknowledged their debt to its training by founding 'The Salting Exhibition,' tenable for three years by any pupil of the Sydney grammar school.
The Saltings returned to England in 1857, and settled in Rutland Gate. In October 1857 George matriculated from Balliol College, Oxford, but left after one term, owing apparently to his mother's death and its effect upon his father. The father gave up his London house and spent the autumn of 1858 in Rome. This sojourn moulded George's future career. While in Rome he devoted his whole time to the galleries, churches, and architectural monuments or to available books on the artistic and archæological treasures of the city. To other modes of study he added photography, then a serious undertaking, which involved his wheeling on a truck about the streets the apparatus together with a kind of tent, in which to develop his plates. Early in 1859 the party went to Naples and then to Florence. After a short visit to Australia they settled at a house named Silverlands, near Chertsey, where the father died (14 Sept. 1865). Thereupon George took for himself a suite of rooms over the Thatched House Club at the bottom of St. James's Street. There he remained unmarried and living with the utmost simplicity until death.
On his father's death Salting inherited a fortune generously estimated at 30,000l. a year. Thenceforth he devoted himself exclusively to collecting works of art, to which he brought a rare judgment and an unfaltering zeal. His severe training in Rome had prepared him for the vocation, which he was encouraged to pursue by the example of his friend Louis Huth, of Charles Drury Edward Fortnum [q. v. Suppl. I], and of (Sir) Augustus WoUaston Franks [q. v. Suppl. I], who had lately given a new seriousness to the study of medieval and renaissance art. But Salting was unique among the collectors of his time in consecrating the whole of his time and money to the pursuit, to the exclusion of every other interest.
For more than forty years Salting when in London spent each afternoon on a pilgrimage from one dealer to another, examining their wares with the greatest deliberation. When an object was selected as a desirable purchase, the price involved tedious negotiation, which Salting seems purposely to have prolonged so as to give him continuous occupation. Where he felt imcertain of his own judgment, he would walk to one or other of the museums or to a fellow collector, to obtain an opinion. At times he bought objects that on examination did not prove to be of good enough quality for his taste, and he would cause dealers embarrassment by offering these, which he called 'marbles' in allusion to schoolboy usage, in part payment for something of higher quality.
In the early days of his occupation of the Thatched House Club his purchases went there, but when the limited space proved inadequate even as storage, he lent his main collection of oriental porcelain to South Kensington (Victoria and Albert Museum), and subsequently many purchases went thither direct from the dealer.
Chinese porcelain was Salting's first serious interest, probably owing to the influence of Louis Huth. Here he formed what is without doubt one of the great collections of the world. It is especially valuable and important as presenting, perhaps more satisfactorily than any other, a complete series of the strictly artistic productions of the Chinese in this material. He cared but little for the historical interest of the wares or for tracing their history ; in his taste Chinese porcelain was confined to what he considered beautiful, without regard either to antiquity or to the evolution of the manufacture. To a limited extent he collected Japanese art products, but never with the same enthusiasm. His eclectic mind and sensitive eye evidently failed to find in them the same satisfaction. In the province of Western art he was fairly catholic: Italian and Spanish majolica, small sculptures in all materials, enamels, jewellery, bronze statuettes and medals, and all the varied productions of the artist craftsmen of the Middle Ages and Renaissance—these he collected with persistency and unfailing enthusiasm, and in many of the classes his collection is unrivalled. Pictures and drawings had less attraction for him, though he bought both, and he developed in his later years a passion for pictures by Corot, paying the inflated prices of the day. Another phase of collecting more in keeping with his normal tastes was that of English miniature portraits. Of these he had a superb series, many of them of high historical interest, and by the great artists from Tudor times to the eighteenth century. In addition he had also a few admirable antiques, bronzes, terra cottas, and the like. No matter what new style of collecting he took up, he sought only the finest specimens of their kind.
Although Salting was a familiar figure at Christie's sale rooms, and was well known to the great foreign collectors and dealers, his reputation hardly became a continental one until the Spitzer sale in 1893. To attend this sale he spent some time in Paris, where he endeavoured to lead the same simple life as at home, while bidding for himself in the sale room and spending there some 40,000l. on fine works of art.
Salting died in his rooms at the Thatched House Club on 12 Dec. 1909, and was buried at Brompton cemetery. Though he was not generally suspected of possessing any genius for finance, he left a fortune of 1,287,900l. net, a sum vastly greater than that inherited from his father. Despite his procrastinating and undecided character, which led intimate friends to foretell that he would die intestate, he made a will dated 11 Oct. 1889. There were small bequests of money to the London hospitals, and to relatives and friends, the residuary legatee of his pecuniary estate being his niece, Lady Binning, daughter of his late brother. But he divided his collections among the National Gallery, the British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum (at South Kensington), the main portion going to the last. The trustees of the first two had the power to select such of his pictures and prints and drawings as they thought fit. The bequest to the Victoria and Albert Museum was conditional on the objects being 'not distributed over the various sections, but kept all together according to the various specialities of my exhibits.' This reasonable condition serves the double purpose of providing the most appropriate monument of a munificent benefactor, and enables the public to measure the importance of the gift, which would have been impossible if the collection had been distributed over the whole museum. Further, such an arrangement provides in the future the means of judging of the standard of taste prevailing in the nineteenth century. The Salting collection was first opened to the public at South Kensington on 22 March 1911.
[Eton College Register; Sydney University Register; The Times, 14, 15, 17, 23, 25, 28, 31 Dec. 1909; 26 and 28 Jan. 1910, and 23 March 1911; private information from relatives and friends; personal knowledge; there is a good portrait from a photograph in The Salting Collection (V. & A. Museum), 1911.]