Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel (Fig. 10) and Edward Burne-Jones’s Beguiling of Merlin (Figs. 3, 8); landscapes by Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, sensual marbles by French sculptor Maurice Ferrary and classicist John Flaxman’s relief designs for Wedgwood. These are just a few of the treasures in the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, a town across the River Mersey from Liverpool, England, founded as a model village for the workers of the nearby Lever Brothers soap factory. The gallery is home to an outstanding collection of paintings, sculpture, European furniture, tapestries, Chinese porcelain, and other fine and decorative works of art.
It was opened in 1922 by William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme (Fig. 15). Lever made a vast fortune in soap, an enterprise that resulted in the founding of Lever Brothers and its corporate descendant Unilever. The wealth he earned enabled him to become an art collector on a scale approaching that of industrialists Henry Tate in England and, in America, J. P. Morgan and Henry Clay Frick. Moreover, Lever’s Congregationalist upbringing, together with his innate kindness, contributed to his strong belief in altruism and self-improvement. Lever became a canny businessman as well as a pioneering labor reformer and an exceptionally generous philanthropist. This bore its finest fruit in his founding of the beautiful village of Port Sunlight to house his factory labor force.
Today the beaux arts–style Lady Lever Art Gallery forms the village’s noble centerpiece. At the head of a gracious tree-lined avenue of flowerbeds, it fairly overflows with the choicest works amassed by one of the great collectors at the turn of the twentieth century.
Lever was born in Bolton, Lancashire, the seventh child and first son of a Lancashire grocer. His mother had hoped he would study medicine while William himself had set his cap at an architect’s career. But when he was sixteen his father determined that he would join the family grocery business. Beginning as a packing clerk at a shilling a week, the industrious young man quickly progressed from the warehouse to the front office. At twenty-one his business acumen earned him a partnership. Confident that he could properly support a family on his handsome annual salary of £800, he married his childhood sweetheart, Elizabeth Hulme (Fig. 14), in 1874. Lever continued to expand the family firm, enlarging and improving the premises and opening a branch in nearby Wigan, always seeking new and more efficient ways to conduct business.
Having created a successful new brand (Sunlight Soap; Fig. 11), Lever decided to go independent in 1886. With his younger brother, James, William founded Lever Brothers that year.
Lever soon needed to expand his premises and his workforce. He began to consider establishing a manufacturing center where he could not only produce Sunlight Soap, but at a time when most factory workers lived in dreary slums, Lever also wanted to house his employees comfortably in (as he phrased it) “houses with gardens back and front, in which they will be able to know more about the science of life than they can in a back slum, and in which they will learn that there is more enjoyment in life than the mere going to and returning from work.” 1 In 1887 he purchased more than fifty acres in Wirral, Cheshire, conveniently on the River Mersey. In a March 1888 ceremony, Elizabeth Lever broke ground; construction commenced soon thereafter.
Always keenly interested in architecture and design, Lever envisioned Port Sunlight as a garden village in an urban setting. Beyond workers’ housing there would be schools, a library, sporting facilities, parks, a church, and even an art gallery. He engaged a number of architects to design buildings in a variety of picturesque styles inspired by traditional vernacular ones, especially Tudoresque half-timbering.
By this point in his career, Lever had begun collecting art, a pursuit he traced back to his acquisition of a pair of eighteenth-century Derby biscuit figures of a shepherd and shepherdess, which he displayed on the mantelpiece of his house in Wigan during the 1870s. Deciding during initial construction of Port Sunlight to reside closer to his new headquarters, Lever rented the much larger Thornton Manor, a mid-Victorian Gothic-revival house. After ultimately purchasing it, he began to enlarge it into a neo-Tudor manse whose spacious new rooms fairly begged to display art.
English and Chinese porcelain became abiding interests. Motivated during the 1890s by the collector and watercolorist James Orrock (1829–1913) to establish collections spotlighting British historical taste, Lever was particularly drawn to the famille-verte wares that had been a staple of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chinese export market. Similarly, he collected the blue-and-white ceramics that had been championed by such painters as Whistler and Rossetti during the rise of the aesthetic movement in the 1860s and 1870s, and often identified by the greater public with Oscar Wilde, who, as an Oxford University undergraduate, had famously quipped about his difficulty “living up to” the blue-and-white wares decorating his rooms at Magdalen College.2
Lever’s decorative arts collections gradually embraced important English and Continental furniture, tapestries, and, later in his life, ancient Greek and Roman works, as well as ethnographical objects collected during his many business trips throughout the world.
Determined to preserve a representation of the highest taste in eighteenth-century English decorative arts, Lever also built one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of eighteenth-century Wedgwood jasperware. He established the core of this collection in 1905 by purchasing the array of Wedgwood items in the care of Dudley Coutts Marjoribanks, 1st Lord Tweedmouth (1820–1894). The Scottish statesman and businessman, honored today as the founder of the golden retriever breed, was not only one of the earliest British Wedgwood collectors but had acquired numerous significant pieces from Josiah Wedgwood’s grandson Charles Darwin.
Now in the front rank of British Wedgwood collectors, Lever with his vast financial resources was able to retain in Britain vast swathes of its artistic and cultural heritage at a moment when British ancestral collections were being harvested by deep-pocketed Americans. Lever regularly added to his Wedgwood collection, most notably purchasing in 1920 an exceptional marble mantelpiece set with Wedgwood relief tablets created around 1786. The central tablet is The Apotheosis of Virgil, designed and modeled by the famed English sculptor John Flaxman, who, early in his career, had worked for Wedgwood modeling classically inspired figures and groups to be rendered in jasperware (Fig. 6).
By 1790 Flaxman’s reputation as a sculptor in marble allowed him to devote himself to this calling. His graceful Cephalus and Aurora (Fig. 7), one of his first major sculptural groups, was inspired by the popular tale in Ovid’s Metamorphoses of the passion of Aurora, goddess of the dawn, for Cephalus, a beautiful but initially reluctant youth. Lever purchased it along with many Greco-Roman sculptures at the famous 1917 sale of the heirlooms in the snow provides a female counterpart to the drowned nude youth of Ford’s 1892 memorial to Percy Bysshe Shelley (now in its own gallery at University College, Oxford).
Lever also evinced a hearty taste for sensual female imagery in such contemporary French sculpture as Maurice Ferrary’s Salammbo (Fig. 4). Depicting the nude marble figure of Flaubert’s heroine entwining herself with an enormous bronze serpent, symbolic of her Carthaginian religion, it was purchased by Lever from Ferrary in 1900, following its display at the Paris Exposition Universelle.
Decorative arts and sculpture aside, painting was Lever’s central interest as a collector. Starting in the late 1880s he had begun to attend the important summer exhibitions at the Royal Academy with the idea of buying pictures he could use to advertise Sunlight Soap. But during the mid-1890s, influenced again by James Orrock, Lever became a truly serious art collector. Although he built a significant collection of eighteenth-century portraits and landscapes, including representative canvases by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Romney, Vigée Le Brun, and Turner, Lever was especially drawn to paintings by leading masters of the Victorian age, building an important collection by the Pre-Raphaelites Ford Madox Brown, Burne-Jones, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais (Fig. 2), and Rossetti. He also acquired major compositions by such classicists as Frederic, Lord Leighton, the revered president of the Royal Academy whose exquisite scenes inspired by Greek history and mythology earned him the sobriquet “Jupiter Olympus,” and the Dutch-born Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a popular painter of superbly detailed genre scenes of ancient Rome.
It’s worth noting that while Lever did acquire various paintings after they were initially shown at the Royal Academy summer exhibitions or the Paris Salons, and such a work as The Decameron (Fig. 12) directly from its creator, John William Waterhouse, he bought many artworks when the collections of their first and even second owners went up for sale on the secondary market.
A case in point is Leighton’s immense Daphnephoria (Fig. 16)—at 91 inches by more than 17 feet, the Lady Lever Gallery’s largest canvas. Inspired by the ancient Greek festal procession held every nine years by the Boeotians in Thebes to honor Apollo, it was commissioned around 1874 by Leighton’s friend James Stuart Hodgson, a partner in Barings Bank. When the bank’s failure in 1890 obliged Hodgson to sell the painting in 1893, it went to another British collector, George McCulloch, but was on the market again in 1913, at which time Lever bought it with the intention that it dominate the main hall of the new gallery he was planning—and which he decided to name after Lady Lever, following her sudden death in July.
Interestingly, Sargent’s On His Holidays, Norway (Fig. 17), which Lever bought in 1923, is essentially a landscape-cum-portrait of McCulloch’s son, Alexander, then a student at Winchester College, who would win silver in single sculls at the 1908 Summer Olympics at Henley-on-Thames.
Just as Lever assembled one of the great private art collections relatively late in his multifarious life, so he gathered his public honors similarly late. In 1911 he was created a baronet, whereupon his beloved wife became Elizabeth, Lady Lever. However, her death prevented her from assuming the title Lady Leverhulme when, upon being raised to the peerage as a baron in 1917, Lever memorialized her by adding her maiden name to his. Lord Leverhulme was elevated further by being created a viscount in 1922.
In March 1914, George V and Queen Mary honored Lord Leverhulme with a visit to Port Sunlight. After proudly conducting the royal pair through the factory, he arranged for the king to press an electric button on a scale model of the village and thereby lay the cornerstone of the new Lady Lever Art Gallery. In his address at the gallery’s opening in 1922, in the presence of Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Beatrice (Fig. 13), Lord Leverhulme noted: “Art has always been to me a stimulating influence. It has always taught me without upbraiding me; elevated me without humbling me . . . . Art can be to everyone an inspiration. It is within the reach of all of us.”3
Today, the gallery’s twelve thousand works of fine and decorative art not only represent the cream of Lord Leverhulme’s vast collections, they make it one of the richest and most rewarding representations of Great Britain’s artistic patrimony.
1 Quoted in W. P. Jolly, Lord Leverhulme: A Biography (London: Constable, 1976), p. 27. 2 Quoted in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 45. 3 Quoted in Oliver Rowe, “Art for All,” Financial Management, published online June 1, 2019, quoted in Lady Lever Art Gallery Guide (Liverpool: National Museums Liverpool, 2013; rev. 2013), p. 5.
