Wernher Collection at Ranger’s House

The Wernher Collection at Ranger’s House is one of the finest private art collections in Europe, drawing together over 700 individual pieces collected by 19th-century diamond magnate Sir Julius Wernher. Featuring fine medieval jewelry, Italian sculptures, French furniture, and Renaissance masterpieces, the collection is housed in the 18th-century Ranger’s House, a historic Greenwich building.

Sir Julius Wernher was born in Darmstadt, Germany in 1850. He moved to London in his early 20s, gaining a job as a clerk in 1871. Soon after beginning his new position, he was asked by French diamond dealer Jules Porgès to join him on a trip to the newly discovered diamond mines in Kimberley, South Africa.

Over the next 10 years, Wernher transformed Kimberley’s nascent mining industry into a professional and extremely profitable business. Built upon the labor of locals, who were met with horrendous, life-endangering working conditions, the mines developed rapidly and made Wernher incredibly wealthy. As well as developing the mines, Wernher became a skilled and successful trader of diamonds. In 1884, he diversified his mining interests to take advantage of the discovery of gold in South Africa.

He was lauded for his level-headedness, business instincts, and financial acumen, which helped make him one of the wealthiest men in the United Kingdom at the time of his death. He is also remembered for his philanthropy, having bequeathed £250,000 to a project to build a university in Cape Town, and £100,000 to London’s Imperial College of Science and Technology.

His immense wealth allowed Wernher to invest heavily in art, perhaps his primary passion. He filled his London home, Bath House on Piccadilly, and his country estate with artworks from across Europe. His experiences grading diamonds in South Africa no doubt made him passionate and knowledgeable about superior quality craft and design so, upon returning to London in 1881, he set about building a vast collection that catered to his unique tastes.

His collection includes works by Old Dutch Masters, French porcelain and furniture, and Italian sculptures—large and bold, and grand pieces of historical and artistic note. Many of the highlights of the collection are, however, diminutive in form, and their beauty is more personal to the collector himself. Wernher was a fan of ‘splendidly ugly’ artworks, primarily smaller ivories, metalworks, wood carvings, and enamels from the Renaissance and medieval periods. These unique pieces often portray unusual subject matter, are richly embellished and decorative, and often aren’t attributed to any one artist.

English Heritage acquired Ranger’s House—the former abode of the 4th Earl of Chesterfield, and later the home of Greenwich Park rangers (groundskeepers)—in 1986. A decade later, they worked with the Wernher Foundation to bring Julius Werner’s collection to Ranger’s House, and thus save it from being sold off to individual collectors and institutions. The Wernher Collection at Ranger’s House is displayed according to how Wernher himself curated his pieces, using photographs taken at his London and countryside homes.