This handsomely produced study of collectors from Lord Arundel to Elgin and the sixth dukes of Bedford and Devonshire sets out to consider ‘owning the past’ (over a slightly longer period than the title indicates), beginning with a quotation from J H Plumb: ‘The personal ownership of the past has always been a vital strand in the ideology of all ruling classes’. Nietzsche’s broader view that ‘the man of the future is the man who has the longest memory’ might have been preferable. Rome was attractive for both its artistic and political lessons, and Arundel and Pembroke set the scene, ‘annexing history’ to re-create both virtue (including virtù) and auctoritas. So far so good, perhaps. This of course helped drive not simply excavation but also restoration (especially Cavaceppi). However, to hope for a large set piece, like a Judgement of Paris, was (already) unrealistic: Rockingham’s commission to Nollekens must qualify the book’s central theme. The enthusiasm of Winckelmann, and of a small group of obsessive collectors who arranged for the publication of their collections or did so themselves (Charles Townley, Richard Payne Knight, Sir Richard Worsley), led to Greece, artistically, trumping Rome, something it could not do politically. The Elgin Marbles (although reprobated as Roman by Knight), are a neat demonstration of Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, consecrating the principle of non-restoration just as the rarity of undamaged antiques gave further impetus to ‘re-creation’ by neo-classical sculptors (Flaxman, Westmacott, Canova, Thorvaldsen, Chantrey) and their patrons.

Beyond a diversion into the fringes of eroticism with Townley and Cosway, Knight (‘anthropologist in his way’, as the Herefordshire volume of The Buildings of England (Brooks and Pevsner Reference Brooks and Pevsner2012, 117) puts it) and outright libertinism (Dashwood), the book concentrates on self-projection as motivation for collection and display. This approach does not fully comprehend the dynastic imperative for Sir Hugh Smithson’s statement of a Percy restoration, so soon after the Percy name and titles had nearly been lost (pp 105–8), or Coke of Norfolk’s commemoration of his own political beliefs in Chantrey’s relief of the passing of the Great Reform Bill at Holkham (pp 136–8). (Here Rome offered no precedent: the subject was paired with Magna Carta, and thus makes a step towards the Gothic Revival.)

This general approach leads to a significant misinterpretation, we are told, in support of the thesis that William Weddell of Newby (1736–92), Rockingham’s brother-in-law, was ‘buying taste’, that he was ‘un-aristocratic’, ‘nouveau-riche’, ‘made the leap into the gentry class after a bachelor great uncle left money to his father’, ‘bought himself a nobleman’s country house’ (contradicting the later, correct statement that his father had bought Newby Hall), went on a Grand Tour after his father’s death in 1762 ‘to remake himself as a landowner and a public man’, ‘lacked the education, the discernment or even the social confidence to select his purchases’ except from dealers and had a sculpture gallery that was ‘a wealthy parvenu’s stab at demonstrating taste’; this approach also apparently leads to the misinterpretation that the Rockingham Club was a ‘front for political cronyism’, that he ‘never shed the insecurity of an outsider’ and that his failure to win the parliamentary seat at York in 1784 ‘brought an end to his hopes of a peerage’ (pp 4–5, 10, 13, 151–8).

This type-casting distorts the context, social, artistic and indeed political. The Weddells, having originated, like their Robinson cousins, as York freemen, moved into the countryside where they were seated at Earswick Hall from 1607 and were later entered in the heralds’ visitations. The last of the line, Thomas, left a substantially enhanced fortune, although it is only speculation that his involvement in the South Sea Bubble was a source. That his nephew, Richard Elcock, who bought Newby from John Blackett in 1750, was required to take the name and arms of Weddell (done by private act of Parliament in 1748) was not unusual at a time when Browne (less formally) became Duncombe, Pyndar became Lygon (1735), Smithson became Percy (1750), Roberts became Coke (1755) or Moore Foljambe (1776), and the subsequent heirs were not considered ‘parvenus’. ‘Aristocrat’, just coming into use in a social sense, is best understood in contemporary terms: ‘By the word aristocracy I do not mean to be understood as intending the Peerage only, but to include such of the Commons as are possessed of property equal, if not superior, to many who have seats in the House of Lords’, wrote the third Duke of Portland in 1780 (Albemarle Reference Albemarle1852, 412). Weddell’s formal education was at Gray’s Inn and St John’s, Cambridge, and his Grand Tour came late because of the Seven Years’ War. The Rockingham Club was the avowed vehicle for the Rockingham, later Fitzwilliam, political interest in Yorkshire, and if Weddell had been an outsider, he would not have been one of the candidates for the county (not city) in 1784, as it happened against his friend and trustee Henry Duncombe (1728–1818). As Weddell and his younger colleague, Francis Ferrand Foljambe (1750–1818), made clear on declining the poll, they ‘never courted Pension, Place or Title’ (York Chronicle, 9 April 1784), which was typical of the Rockingham Whigs. Weddell may have overpaid for the Venus, but we are not told that (as Francis Haskell noted in a personal communication to the reviewer) Adam’s plans for a replica of a Roman gallery at Newby were a first in European terms, antedating those for the Museo Pio-Clementino in Rome. Nor do we learn that Weddell’s wife, Elizabeth Ramsden, shared his tastes, and painted four ovals and a central medallion with classical figures in the ceiling of her room: plausibly she took informal lessons from Zucchi or Angelica Kaufmann who worked at Newby.

Goulding declares her admiration for these collections only at the end. She is absolutely right, however, that their twin enemies have been ‘archaeological taste’, leading to the devaluing of restorations (and even their disassembling by the Getty Museum) and the constant trickle of sales: the Nollekens Judgement of Paris in 1986 (Minerva’s broken hand now restored by the Getty), Canova’s ‘sublime’ Graces from Woburn or the ‘exquisite’ Newby Venus, which went to Qatar in 2002 apparently without thought of a stop on the export licence. Here the Elgin Marbles, if or when they return to the Parthenon, may indeed have proved something of a Trojan horse.