Today Eleanor and her mother Janet invited me on an excursion to the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. The museum is a special love of Janet's, who was introduced to it through a friend who works there. Although I had heard very good things about the museum I had no idea what to expect, especially as the museums here can be a bit disappointing, more promise than delivery.
The first stop when we got there was the usual film (the Irish accent makes the word film into two syllables--fi-lim) about the founder. I usually dread these introductions, filing them away with headphone commentaries than has everyone moving like lemmings through the galleries and tours on the hop on and off buses, but this time I was glad I watched. Beatty was born in New York in 1875, one year after my Irish grandfather. Like my grandfather, he graduated with a degree in mining engineering, which they both received in 1898. And, like my grandfather, Beatty went off on a great adventure, Beatty to the Colorado mines, my grandfather to the much more adventurous territory of the Yukon. The similarity ends there. Although the film shied away from his background, Beatty clearly was raised in privilege in New York. How many kids were collecting Chinese snuff bottles as a hobby back in 1880? There is no record of what my grandfather might have collected as a child, and certainly his degree from Trinity was no less at least partially the product of privilege (and maleness) than was Beatty's from Columbia, but my grandfather had only a modest family income to help support him. He was also probably not as smart and was certainly not as connected or ambitious as Beatty, who managed to work his way very quickly from a mine hand to being called the King of Copper.
While my grandfather was dutifully returning to Ireland to take over the family farm in the early 1900s, Beatty was amassing a fortune. He began buying European and Persian manuscripts for reasons that are not fully articulated, then branched out into editions of the Qur'an around 1914. Supposedly he began buying these Qur'ans at Egyptian bazaars; there is a quote in the film that suggests he found that people would happily part with any number of these sacred books for the price of a Chevrolet.
Beatty amassed what has to be one of the most fabulously varied book collections in the world. Whether he did it by magnanimous purchasing to save fundamental artifacts from certain dereliction or by exploitive actions toward impoverished populations that robbed them of their heritage is a question that will probably remain open.
In the first exhibition room, The Arts of the Book, the European collection showed that Beatty went for the splashy over the substantive. The lovely paperback-sized Aldines were dwarfed by the bloated magnificence of huge, elaborately illustrated or flashily bound texts. Upstairs it was a different story. The room, again divided into three sections, this time by religion--Christianity, Islam, and Asian religions (chiefly Buddhism and Hinduism)--held a breathtaking array of artifacts. Beatty managed to collect nearly every important papyrus fragment of the Gospels and the Letters of Paul. Parts of the papyri codices were displayed here under carefully controlled light on purpose-built plexiglass stands. The mounting of the work in the museum overall was some of the best I have ever seen. There were gorgeous binding fragments that showed how the layers of papyrus were piled up to make thick bindings, there were examples of early books of the separate gospels, there were Bibles in Coptic. Despite the low light the artifacts were alive; from time to time there was nearly a trompe l'oeil effect, when the glass partition didn't even appear to be there and it felt like you could touch the work so temptingly close on the other side.
The other two main areas were equally vibrant. Beatty had, for instance, collected the dharani in its turned wooden container that was commissioned by the Empress Shotoku in the eighth century, a work often referred to as the first instance of printing (from wood and copper blocks) and the first example of mass production. Modest Qur’ans sat alongside thickly gilded folios. At the entrance to the gallery two video monitors showed looped footage of baptism and marriage rituals from the religions represented in the collection, helping to breathe life into the books and artifacts.
The portrait of Beatty used to advertise the library shows a jovial, well-fed man in the robes of some honorary doctorate. The rare television interview included in the introductory video gives us a smallish man, hatted in the outdoor location, perhaps to give him more height against his very tall female interviewer. His fabulous wealth in the often ruthless enterprises of mining says something as well about the facts of his life. Beatty, a naturalized British citizen, moved to Ireland later in his life because he was fed up with British tax laws. The Irish embraced him, and he was good to the country in return. He became their first honorary citizen, and in thanks he left them this marvelous collection of works, and the money to support it in the style to which he was quite obviously accustomed
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