Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge

British, founded 1744

BiographyLC Heading: Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge

Biography:

Continuing growth forced the firm to move again to 3 Waterloo Bridge Street (later renamed 13 Wellington Street). It was now selling not only libraries, but also increasing numbers of prints, coins, drawings, watercolours, even paintings, as well as other forms of the decorative arts. Soon after George Leigh's death, Samuel Sotheby took into the business his second son, Samuel Leigh Sotheby (1805–1861), who was born on 31 August 1805 in Hampstead; George Leigh had been his godfather. S. L. Sotheby married in 1842 or 1843 his first cousin, Julia Emma Pitcher (1818–1898), youngest of the six children of Henry Jones Pitcher (1779–1849) of Northfleet, Kent, a book dealer, and Anne Sotheby.

Samuel Leigh had a keen analytical mind and soon proved to be an adept partner in the business. It was a happy partnership, for father and son shared many interests, and indeed they became virtually fused into a single personality in the public mind. One of their strongest interests was the study of early printing and typography. They were in a wonderful position to appreciate it, for a constant stream of relevant raw material passed through their rooms and had to be scrutinized very carefully before being catalogued.

In the troubled economic circumstances after the Napoleonic wars the firm ran into difficulties. According to a notice that appeared in The Times on 25 November 1825, Samuel Sotheby of Wellington Street, Strand, auctioneer, was declared insolvent, and this was followed on 5 December with the dates of the proceedings in the bankruptcy court. It was presumably for this reason that Samuel Leigh began to take a more prominent role; Samuel Sotheby retired from the business, and in 1828 the firm sold its own entire run of bound and annotated copies of its sale catalogues down to that year. Over 700 of these sales—which included many of the most important libraries in the land—had taken place since Samuel Sotheby had begun to work in the auction house. Perhaps the most notable catalogue produced by him was that of the library of the first marquess of Lansdowne (d. 1805), who had been a passionate collector of state papers and owned 120 folio volumes of the Burleigh papers. The catalogue was in two volumes, the second running to 444 closely set pages. It aroused so much interest that the British Museum stepped in and bought the collection in its entirety for £4925, granted for this purpose by parliament, and thus no auction ever took place.

Despite his effective retirement, Samuel Sotheby was declared bankrupt a second time, and the 1836 insolvency may have been the cause of the anonymous sale of his huge library on 9 February 1837. Samuel Sotheby died at Cleves Lodge, Chelsea, on 6 January 1842. He was buried alongside Samuel Baker in St Paul's churchyard. The Gentleman's Magazine was clearly aware of these events when its obituarist wrote:
the character of the late Mr Sotheby was strictly exemplary in all the relations of private life; and though not so happy as he deserved in realising his fortune in a very arduous profession he retired from it with the good wishes and regret of very many who had long known and highly respected him. (GM, 17, 1842, 444)
In 1837 Samuel Leigh had changed the firm's title to S. L. Sotheby. Although he now faced the world alone, after nearly a hundred years in existence the firm had achieved an enviable reputation. During the following sixty years it consolidated its standing as the premier auctioneer of antiquarian books. For much of that time Sotheby had the able assistance of John Wilkinson (1803–1895), who had originally joined the firm in 1821 as an accountant but became a brilliant auctioneer, and later its sole manager. He retired in 1885.

Because he was so familiar with their contents, Samuel Leigh completed and published a number of books on which his father had already spent years of research, including The Typography of the Fifteenth Century (1845). The principal bibliographical work begun by Samuel and completed by Samuel Leigh (after sixteen years' further labour) was Principia typographica (3 vols., 1858). This concerned the early forms of book printing, such as block books, but both father and son had also been fascinated by the watermarks used on paper in the early days of printing and devoted much time to their collection and study. This topic was another important part of the book. There was also collaboration with William Young Ottley, a family friend, and Ottley's son over the eventual publication of each family's own book on this subject.

In 1835 Samuel Leigh's own curiosity was much excited when the firm received from Frankfurt the 5000 volumes of the library of Dr Georg F. B. Kloss (1787–1854), mostly printed before 1536. Many of these volumes contained marginal annotations which Sotheby thought to be in the hand of Philip Melanchthon, the friend of Martin Luther. His deductions (now not regarded as correct) were published in volume form in 1840 under the title Unpublished Documents, but they continued to occupy him for many years.

In a different vein, Sotheby produced Ramblings in the Elucidation of the Autograph of Milton (1861), and for more than thirty years he was at work on an unpublished ‘Bibliographical account of the English poets to the period of Restoration’. His widow, Julia Emma, endeavoured to complete the work, but never did so, and the manuscript was eventually sold to Chetham's Library in Manchester, where it remains.

Samuel Leigh was also something of a collector. In 1859 he staged an exhibition on the firm's premises of his ‘cabinet pictures’. They were mostly the work of a wide range of English artists, including Richard Parkes Bonington, George Cattermole, William Collins, John Sell Cotman, John Constable (A View of Windsor Castle), Richard Dadd, William Etty, and A. V. Copley Fielding, many of them given by relatives of the artists. On other occasions he bought them at auction, ‘paying more than others’. An informative catalogue survives. He also took a great interest in the management of the Crystal Palace, which had been re-erected near his home, Woodlands, in Norwood.

Samuel Leigh died suddenly and quite unexpectedly on 19 June 1861. He was subject to fainting fits, and during a ramble near Buckfastleigh Abbey he appears to have fallen into the River Dart and drowned. His library, including all his Melanchthon papers, was sold at Wellington Street on 8 February 1862. He was a man of enormous and diverse enthusiasms who had changed the character of the firm's establishment in Wellington Street into an altogether more interesting and wide-ranging business, where scholarship and, above all, accuracy were regarded as of primary importance. In John Wilkinson he was fortunate to have a partner whose solid but intelligent objectivity tempered his own idiosyncrasies and who was also able to consolidate, profitably, the many innovations that the last of the Sothebys had brought about.

The very different characters of the three generations of the Sotheby family set the seal on the business that survives to this day. They established the essential methodology of successful auctioneering, creating and consolidating sound administration, scholarship, and precision in cataloguing. This was particularly true of Samuel Leigh, whose questing mind gave the firm a new impetus on which his successors were able to build.

Frank Herrmann
(Frank Herrmann, ‘Sotheby family (per. 1778–1861)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2011 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/64165, accessed 17 May 2016])

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Last Updated8/7/24

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