page_title: James Staats Forbes
section_title: Art collection
hierarchical_section_title: James Staats Forbes / Art collection
caption_attribution_description: English: Garden Corner, 13 Chelsea Embankment, LondonThis is a photo of listed building number 1080708.
context_page_description: James Staats Forbes was a Scottish railway engineer, railway administrator and art collector. He was the uncle of the painter Stanhope Alexander Forbes, and father of the zoologist William Alexander Forbes.
context_section_description: Forbes was a keen connoisseur of art, and built up a huge collection, particularly of works of the Barbizon School, works of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and of nineteenth-century Dutch painters.  He also had several paintings by James McNeill Whistler, including Blue and Silver: Boat Entering Pourville; Blue and Silver: Trouville; The Girl in Red; Grey and Brown: The Sad Sea Shore; Grey and Gold: High Tide at Pourville; Violet and Blue: The Red Feather and The Widow. His collection consisted of over four thousand pictures and drawings, valued at over 220,000 pounds at the moment of his death.
  Following his death, his executors chose not to hold a sale of the whole collection, which would have taken a week and might have depressed prices, but instead to sell it in parts. Four hundred selected works were exhibited at the Grafton Galleries in 1905. The purchase of a large proportion of these by Abraham Preyer, including works by Théophile de Bock, Johannes Bosboom, Jozef Israëls, Hein Kever, Jacob and Willem Maris, Anton Mauve, Johannes Albert Neuhuys, Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch and others, was one of the largest art transactions then known. The exhibition also included works by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Charles-François Daubigny, Narcisse Virgilio Díaz and Jean-François Millet. A further exhibition was held in Brighton in 1908.
  Forbes died at his home, Garden Corner, 13 Chelsea Embankment, Chelsea on 5 April 1904.  He was buried at West Wickham in Kent five days later.
  James Forbes House, Southwark is named after him.
caption: Garden Corner, Forbes' London home, where he died in 1904
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "", "Image Make": "SONY", "Image Model": "DSC-T5", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image DateTime": "2013:09:05 20:10:24", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "256", "Image PrintIM": "[80, 114, 105, 110, 116, 73, 77, 0, 48, 51, 48, 48, 0, 0, 2, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail Make": "SONY", "Thumbnail Model": "DSC-T5", "Thumbnail Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail DateTime": "2013:09:05 20:10:24", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "2484", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "16439", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/8", "EXIF FNumber": "7/2", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "125", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2013:09:05 20:10:24", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2013:09:05 20:10:24", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "8", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "29/8", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "633/100", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1944", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2592", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "2278", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal"}