Women Collectors and Cultural Philanthropy, c. 1850–1920

At the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, one of the finest university art m useums in the country, signs of its founding matriarch are few. As an anniversary publication makes clear, Lady Barber — née Martha Constance Hattie Onions (1869–1933) — was ‘no great intellectual force or major collector of fine art’.1 What she bequeathed to the University of Birmingham in 1932 was not a corpus of masterpieces but rather the funds to enable the construction of a building and a major purchasing spree. While subsequent male curators — like Thomas Bodkin — deserve the credit for the astonishing old masters assembled for the institute, Lady Barber’s own creative interests during her lifetime were centred on the home. At Culham Court, near Henley-on-Thames, where she lived with her property developer husband from 1893, Lady Barber introduced neo-Georgian decorations and dramatic alpine gardens. Furniture and especially textiles formed the most substantial part of her collecting, whether historic lace — sourced from the Midlands and Europe — or sixteenthand seventeenth-century Flemish tapestries and cushion covers. These rich fabrics formed the backdrops in several of the twenty-five portraits that Lady Barber commissioned from the Belgian artist Nestor Cambier between 1914 and 1923. These range from highly theatrical full-length portraits in fancy dress, through to evocative sketches of the drawing room at Culham Court, depicting Lady Barber among her cherished possessions (Fig. 1). It appears Lady Barber was determined for the ensemble of portraits to be kept together after her death, since she arranged them into a privately printed book and lobbied (unsuccessfully) for their exhibition in London. Their presence at the Barber Institute remains jarring, even embarrassing, for those who query the aesthetic merits of Cambier’s work or the ‘social climbing’ of his favourite sitter.2