The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs: Obituary

Sir William van Horne was one of the most striking and picturesque figures among the great collectors of America. A big, burly figure overflowing with vitality, he took his chances in society as he had taken them in the backwoods of Canada, with a genial and unpretentious simplicity of manner. He did not care to hide behind the entrenchments of etiquette and formality with which most of the newly rich protect their sensitiveness to criticism. On his frequent visits to New York he would put up at one of the big hotels.  There he was entirely accessible to anyone who would spend long nights in the saloon over  innumerable tankards of German beer discussing  Japanese pottery, the ideal planning of cities,  Chinese scripts, Dutch painting, cattle breeding and  bacon curing, or who would listen to his racy  descriptions of his adventures in planning the  Canadian Pacific Railway.

At his home in Montreal his guests would spend the day looking at his vast and varied collections of old masters and of Japanese pottery. In the evening discussions on some of his so diverse hobbies would go on till well into the early hours, and it was currently believed that when all his comparatively youthful guests had at last dropped off to bed. Sir William retired to an immense attic fitted up as a studio, and there by the aid of an intense arc light would begin to paint one of the ten-foot canvases of Western Canadian scenery which filled up any gaps in his walls as yet uncovered by old masters.

His curiosity and his power of acquiring knowledge were as insatiable as his energy was restless and untiring. In his attitude to art these characteristics were apparent. His temperament and his past life had been too active to allow of any profound or contemplative enjoyment of beauty. Whatever his unusual faculties enabled him to grasp in a rapid glance he enjoyed exuberantly, but beyond that he never cared to penetrate, too many other curious and odd interests being at hand to solicit his attention. I believe his knowledge of Japanese pottery was remarkable, but I think what attracted him most was the possibilities of connoisseurship which this study afforded him.

He used at one time to offer to tell the maker of a piece without seeing it, by feeling it with his hands held behind his back, on condition that if he was right the piece should be his, and if wrong he should pay a forfeit; but, according to his own account, he was so frequently right that the Japanese collectors with whom he played the game, finally fought shy of the ordeal. His collection of old masters, as may be imagined, was as varied and odd as his tastes. It was full of out of the way and curious things which other collectors would have overlooked, but as far as I recollect it was not a choice collection, and contained few indisputable masterpieces. But I may be under- estimating it, for certainly after all these years, and having only once visited his collection, I find my memory of Sir William van Home's personality, of his abounding vitality, and his rough-and-ready comradeship more interesting and arresting than any of the objects which he had acquired. ROGER FRY

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