Louis Huth

Louis Huth was born at Finsbury in London, the son of Frederick Huth (1774–1864), a merchant and merchant banker born in Germany, who 'came of very humble origins, the son of a soldier [without rank], with only his intelligence and appetite for hard work to single him out from other poor boys at the bottom of the social heap in the small village of Harsefeld in the Electorate of Hanover.

[6] Between 1865 and 1869 Huth commissioned the architect Matthew Digby Wyatt to design Possingworth Park, Cross-in-Hand, Waldron, East Sussex, a red-brick neo-gothic mansion, built by the Uckfield firm of Alexander Cheadle.

Apparently, it contained 'forty-two bedrooms with a wealth of oak panelling and huge, intricately carved stone fireplaces in lofty reception rooms with beautifully moulded and painted ceilings.

Squire Huth and his wife brought to Possingworth the graciousness of the Victorian age, holding elegant dinner parties and lavish dances and balls.

[8] It seems that while as a young man he worked in the firm founded by his father, at least in his early days Huth exhibited little of the work-ethic that characterised his father and which had helped created the financial success of his business; rather Huth, described as ‘frivolous and philandering’ was ‘quite the cock of the roost, a sort of Count D'Orsay; whatever he did immediately became the fashion for all the bucks in town, and when he noticed a young lady (of whom there were a number of pretty ones) her fortune was made.

Huth was apparently endowed with a strong sense of humour and was very particular in aspects of his appearance, so ‘that there cannot be many old men who keep a collection of wigs of different colour, that those around can be warned in time of the changing moods of the wearer!

'[15] Both Louis and Helen Huth were depicted in recently re-discovered marble portrait busts by a leading sculptor of the Victorian age, Alexander Munro, who had close connections to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood artists, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82).

[18] They also owned other paintings by Watts, including Daphne, (untraced), Galatea, Sir Galahad (sold Christie’s, London, 19 February 2003, lot 34), and Una and the Red Cross Knight (exhibited at the Royal Academy 1869, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight).

After numerous accounts and interviews with relevant parties, including Huth, Whistler was expelled at the special meeting of the Club on 13 December.

Edward would have been required also to agree to Helen’s private sale to Sir Hugh Lane of one of her portraits by George Watts, who gave it to the Dublin City Gallery in 1908.

[29] And while the painter W. P. Frith RA regarded Charles a generous and intelligent patron, Evan R. Firestone considered Huth to be a dealer.

[30] While it is true that Huth did dispose of items from his collection during his lifetime, including several works he owned by Whistler,[31] that factor in itself does not justify his classification as a dealer rather than a collector or connoisseur.

Apart from discussion of his role in the purchase and sale of a number of works, less than ten, attributed to John Crome, insufficient examination and analysis of his buying and selling of art has been done to enable firm conclusions to be reached.

Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that a man born into and inheriting considerable wealth, who continued to derive significant financial returns from his share in the bank of Huth and Co in which he was a partner until his death (albeit not actively involved in its management),[32] would have had any need to find alternative sources of remuneration.

Huth's tastes turned towards the Aesthetic preoccupations of his friend [Dante Gabriel] Rossetti with whom he vied for the pick of blue-and-white porcelain in the 1860s.

They extend from Turner watercolours to Byzantine ivories, and encompass among other things, oriental porcelain, Italian Renaissance ceramics, Japanese netsuke, Limoges enamels, jewellery, ironwork, textiles, bronzes, furniture, illuminated manuscripts, etchings, engravings, drawings and paintings by old and modern masters.

Mr Huth had for the most part formed his splendid collection – dispersed within recent years – before the pupil had seriously entered the pursuit of objects of art.

'[39] Another commentator has noted that following his father’s death and the receipt of his inheritance, Salting embarked on his ‘career’ as an art collector ‘with single-minded determination’ and ‘encouraged in his pursuits by the advice offered by his friend Louis Huth’.

[44] Huth’s death in 1905 would have caused the legacy to lapse, but Salting obviously took no steps then or in the remaining four years of his own life to re-write the will or to add a codicil to it.

It is unclear how many of these paintings, particularly of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had already been acquired by Huth before his marriage in 1855,[45] but it is clear that the development of the collection from the mid-1850s extended to the commissioning also of one of the leading sculptors of the day, Alexander Munro.