Lord Lee of Fareham, in a letter to Monday's Times,
draws attention to the curious fact that hitherto we have made no serious effort to ensure " the permanent preservation in our National Gallery of the originals and past glories of the British School of Painting." There is not, he points out, in the National Gallery any English picture of an earlier date than 1545. No doubt this is partly due to the fact that most, though not all, of the mediaeval paintings in England were wall paintings in churches, and such wall paintings had many enemies— first, our damp climate ; next, Puritan antagonism, which directly invited whitewash ; and lastly, the eighteenth- century feeling that Gothic art was an untidy thing, and that where it was impossible or too expensive to rebuild churches in the classic style, the best thing was to cover them up by a generous use of plaster. Now, however, as Lord Lee points out, the skill of men like Professor Lethaby and Mr. Tristram and others is enabling us to get the whitewash and plaster off without injuring what is beneath, and is revealing " how high a standard of technical skill and beauty had become ours even as early as the thirteenth century, if not earlier." In those days, indeed, our neighbours used to imitate us instead of our imitating them. In order to awaken public interest in the subject Lord Lee goes on to make the very useful suggestion that we should have a National Loan Exhi- bition of British Primitives, covering the period before the Reformation.
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