Murray, Charles Fairfax (1849 - 1919)

Charles Fairfax Murray was born in Bow, then a country village on the eastern fringes of London, on 30 September 1849. His father was the linen-draper in this prospering community. Fairfax Murray was only four years of age when his mother died, and he spent much of his early childhood in the Suffolk town of Sudbury; little is known of this period, but it is certain that by the time he returned to London at the age of 12 or 13 his was already an accomplished if immature artist. The influence of Thomas Gainsborough remained strong in Sudbury, and it is possible that Fairfax Murray received early lessons from Richard Gainsborough Dupont. By 1864 or '65 Fairfax Murray was employed as a shopboy or apprentice in the drawing office of the great Victorian railway builder, Sir Samuel Morton Peto who commissioned a number of portraits of his family from the young artist. In 1866 Fairfax Murray sent a parcel of his drawings to John Ruskin who generously paid for his lodging and training that year, and on his 17th birthday arranged for his joining Edward Burne-Jones, another Ruskin protege, as his first studio assistant. Fairfax Murray quickly spread his wings within the Burne-Jones, Morris, Rossetti circle, assisting Burne-Jones, painting glass and illuminating manuscripts for William Morris and copying for Rossetti. In 1871 Fairfax Murray went to Italy for a short visit to paint and to study. In 1873 he returned there at Ruskin's expense to copy the Botticelli frescoes in the Sistine Chapel; he married an Italian girl, Angelica Colivicchi, by whom he would have six children, in 1875 and made first Siena and then Florence his base until 1885. In these years he made a precarious but satisfying living copying for John Ruskin and painting portraits and the money he made he spent on building up his Italian old master collection; he acted as agent for Sir Frederick Burton, the Director of the National Gallery and slowly built a private clientele which include the influential Wilhelm von Bode in Berlin and private collectors in England such as Charles Butler, George Salting and the banker R H Benson. When in 1886 Fairfax Murray resumed his place in the London art world it was almost as though he had never been away; by now the dealer and connoisseur had taken precedence over the artist, but he still regarded his painting as an important source of income and he was a sought-after portraitist. His wife was reluctant to live in London, and away from Florence for nine months of the year, he formed a relationship with Blanche Richmond that lasted until his death in 1919 and resulted in another family of six; he cared deeply for both. Back in London he resumed his close friendships with Burne-Jones and William Morris, and their circle in the Arts & Crafts movement such as Walter Crane and Arthur Mackmurdo; and the younger generation like Herbert Horne, Selwyn Image, Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon. In addition to bringing a number of important works in to national collections, Fairfax Murray played an important part in developing the great American collections. He was first advisor and later a partner with Agnew's; Lockett Agnew described him simply as 'the finest judge of art in the world.' It is the more unfortunate he left almost nothing in writing of the opinions which his contemporaries regarded with such respect. In 1894, the last year of Gladstone's administration, Charles Fairfax Murray entered the contest for the Directorship of the National Gallery, losing to an old adversary, Edward Poynter, Burne-Jones's brother-in-law. He was, however, at the peak of his influence in the art market, not simply as a dealer but as expert advisor to numerous private and public collections in Europe and the United States, a position he enjoyed until well in to the next decade. His friend of almost thirty years, William Morris died in 1896; Fairfax Murray drew three exquisitely poignant pencil drawings of Morris on his deathbed, his last tribute to the man who had meant so much to him personally and had guided him towards his passionate interest in early books. Burne-Jones died two years later, and Fairfax Murray moved in to the Grange, the house where he had served his apprenticeship from 1866. He gave up painting professionally in 1903 on account of a rheumatic hand, and around that time set himself to realising some of his collections in order to retire from the day-to-day market and enjoy some of the fruits of his labours; always the collector and connoisseur, Fairfax Murray invested almost as much as he raised in early books and illuminated manuscripts. In 1903 Fairfax Murray sold a collection of 260 Rossetti and 226 Burne-Jones drawings to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery below their market value, next year he gave 35 Burne-Jones stained glass cartoons, and in 1907 he again sold them more than 300 Madox Brown, Millais and Sandys drawings at a low valuation, adding substantially to what is regarded as the greatest Pre-Raphaelite collection. 1908 his friend Sydney Cockerell had been appointed, in no small measure due to Fairfax Murray's recommendation to his predecessor M R James, to the Directorship of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. From then on, the Fitzwilliam was the recipient of a steady flow of great art, illuminations, mediaeval ivories, and Morris and Rossetti papers, culminating in the Titian Tarquin & Lucretia he gave in 1914. He gave 46 paintings to the Dulwich Picture Gallery. His last major sale in 1909 was of his personal collection of 1400 Old Master drawings, to the American banker John Pierpont Morgan, for an astonishing sum equivalent to almost £3,000,000 today. In 1914, with Europe on the brink of war, Fairfax Murray moved back to Italy where he had built a library for his early books. He organised a final sale of many of his paintings in Paris and returned to Florence. In the late summer he suffered a stroke from which he largely recovered, but a second in 1916 left him paralysed for almost six months. Anxious to have his will drawn and proved in England, he succeeded by determination and heroic effort in dragging himself across borders and battlefields to Paris and on to London. He died there in January 1919, unable to return to enjoy the fine library he had worked so hard to achieve