Collectors at Work

Last week Edward G. Robinson, cinema tough guy, told a distinguished audience at the Philadelphia Museum of Art how he got started as a great collector of modern French paintings. It all went back to his childhood:

"I remember, as if it were only yesterday, the delight I felt as I spread out upon the floor of my bedroom the Edward G. Robinson collection of rare cigar bands...I progressed to cigarette pictures of big-league ballplayers...then those never-forgotten cards depicting the great and beautiful ladies of the stage."

Robinson's collecting tastes did not stand still. "Long before long pants, I haunted New York's museums and art galleries. How I longed in those days to take home some of the paintings that gave me so much pleasure." He finally got his wish, "when Hollywood conveyed me, through devious and sin-stained roles, to a succession of sizzling electric chairs" and six-figure paychecks.

Once acquired, said he, the picture-collecting habit "becomes like the drug habit ; you cannot live without it. Your walls may be bulging with paintings, business may be bad and prospects none too good, baby needs a pair of shoes, and you've sworn off buying. But honest, it's just this once and there's nothing you can do about it. There's no cure for it. Fact is, you don't want to be cured."

Hastings William Sackville Russell, 61, twelfth Duke of Bedford, has an art collection, too. Ever since Holbein painted John Russell, first Earl of Bedford, in 1539, the Russells have been collecting pictures. By the turn of the 20th Century, the walls of Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire home of the Russell family, were bulging with more than 500 canvases--one of the best private collections of old masters in England. The present duke has never bought a picture, but last week he had a cure for generations of collecting. With Woburn collapsing from dry rot and taxes, he had just auctioned off 200 of his less important old masters, including paintings by Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Velasquez, Murillo. Gross sales: -L-27,340.

Said the duke, an avid ornithologist: "I know nothing about pictures. If it had been deer or birds--but pictures!"

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