Person
William Fuller Maitland
William Fuller Maitland
- Alternative Names
- William Fuller Maitland (the elder)
- Life dates
- 1813 - 1876
- Active
-
Stansted Hall
- Occupation
- UK collector
William Fuller Maitland was the son of Ebenezer Fuller Maitland (1780-1858), who took on his wife’s name upon inheritance. He was the grandson of Ebenezer Maitland (1752-1834), who became a Director of the Bank of England in 1798. With a secure family fortune in banking, William Fuller Maitland started collecting art at the age of 24.
After studying at Cambridge, he benefited from the popular Grand Tour, making** several trips to Italy, learning about and acquiring works by the Renaissance Old Masters. Fuller Maitland purchased works by **early Italian Renaissance artists which formed the nucleus of his collection. By the middle 1800s the Fuller Maitland Collection was well-known and widely exhibited across the United Kingdom. In 1857, Fuller Maitland loaned ten Italian Old Master paintings to the exhibition _Art Treasures of the United Kingdom _in Manchester, including works by: Botticelli (two), Raphael, Taddeo Gaddi, Fra Filippo Lippi and Cosimo Roselli.
Fuller Maitland frequently loaned his paintings to the Royal Academy’s Winter Exhibitions, like in 1875 when he contributed six paintings comprising five Italian Old Masters and one work by Peter Paul Rubens. In 1870, he commissioned the building of a new home, Stanstead Hall, to house his growing art collection which was finished in 1876, the year he died. In 1878, Frederick William Burton (1816-1900), of the National Gallery in London, negotiated the sale of nine Old Master paintings with his son, William Fuller Maitland, the younger (1844-1932), who was also a collector.
William Fuller Maitland had owned two paintings that later entered the Schloss Collection: Paysage de Hollande by Jan Vermeer van Haarlem, the elder (Schloss German no. 225 / French no. 269) and Vierge et l’enfant by Adriaen Isenbrandt (Schloss French no. 122).
Sources:
Catalogue of the Art Treasures of the United Kingdom: collected at Manchester in 1857. Manchester 1857. Accessed 22 June 2021.
https://archive.org/details/catalogueofarttr00artt/page/n45/mode/2up?q=Maitland
Exhibition of works by the Old Masters and by deceased masters of the British School, including a special selection from the works of Sir A.W. Callcott, R.A., and D. Maclise, R.A., Winter Exhibition Sixth Year. Royal Academy of Arts, London. 1875. Accessed 22 June 2021.
Fuller Maitland Letters, 22 January 1878-November 1927. Archive reference NG45. The National Gallery._ _London. Accessed 22 June 2021.
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/research/research-centre/archive/record/NG45
Maitland, J.A.F. (Rev. Helen Davies) “Maitland, William Fuller.” The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 23 September 2004. Accessed 22 June 2021.
https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/17840
“William Fuller Maitland, the Elder.” Clan Maitland Society. Accessed 22 June 2021.