A Peripatetic Virgin: A Seventeenth-Century Ivory Carving from Manila in the National Gallery of Victoria

In 1939, the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) became the beneficiary of a rich private collecting legacy—the bequest of Mr Howard Spensley (1870–1938) of Westoning Manor, Bedfordshire. Howard Spensley was born in Melbourne in 1870, the son of the Hon. Howard Spensley (1834–1902), solicitor general of Victoria in 1871–72, commissioner for Victoria to the London exhibition of 1873, and MP for Finsbury Central in 1885–86. The younger Spensley was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, and became a barrister, with chambers in the Inner Temple. Before moving to Westoning in 1905, when he bought Westoning Manor, he lived in London and travelled widely, particularly to Egypt and Australia, where he had business interests. He was an avid collector, with wide-ranging tastes, and he assembled an impressive collection of paintings, drawings, sculptures, antiquities, bronzes, ceramics, glass, and furniture, the details of which, including date and place of purchase and the amount paid, he meticulously recorded in a handwritten catalogue. Those records are held in the rare books collection of the Shaw Research Library at the NGV, in Melbourne. Spensley died on 3 March 1938, bequeathing his art collection to the NGV. This group of nearly 800 artworks was transformative in a number of areas of the Melbourne art museum’s collection, especially the small group of Italian Renaissance maiolica works and the large group of Renaissance bronzes, mortars, and plaquettes. Among the bequeathed works was a collection of some sixteen ivory objects of various dates and places of origin, including a 1714 portrait bust of Isaac Newton by David le Marchand (4118-D3), perhaps the most significant work in this group. But it is another of these ivory works that concerns us here (fig. 1). Spensley’s catalogue entry describes the work thus: