ART
The Victoria and Albert Museum. " The Age of Grace." At the Delbanco Gallery.
IF the reopening exhibition is anything to go by, the Victoria and Albert Museum may be transformed from a well-stocked mausoleum into a gallery worthy to display the splendours of the great and varied collections housed therein. As a child I was so fearful of the Cromwell Road that I would return home from a visit to the several museums and dream of stuffed okapis in flowered waistcoats, and glass-eyed tigers in a habitat of early steam engines, the whole housed in a vast railway terminus built of brass ond majolica, garnished with small arms and silent as a tomb. These pardonable " trauma " were the result of a curious ambivalence, for I could never keep away from the charnel houses of South Kensington for long. The neighbour- hood remains stygian, the facade of the Victoria and Albert remains morbid ; but, within, an admirable attempt has been made to arrange one court or hall for the display of treasures to their full advantage. Mr. Leigh Ashton, the director, plans a reorganisation of presenta- tion throughout the museum, and this first exhibition of British Art and Craftsmanship from the elevepth to the seventeenth century is ranged beside a similar collection of continental work displayed as in pre-war days. The contrast is designed to justify Mr. Ashton's new method, and indeed it does, for in spite of the splendid exhibits, which include certain of Leonardo's notebooks, in the foreign section, the cavernous hall in which they are arranged provokes instant claustrophobia and depression. The carvings and chasubles of the twelfth century, the embroideries and objets de vertu in the British section are, on the other hand, so lit and so placed as to give a feeling not only of life but of utility, and they are seen to perfect advantage. The miniatures of Holbein, Hillgarde and Oliver are highspots of the exhibition.
The Roland, Browse and Delbanco Gallery has an exhibition of eighteenth-century French and English pictures under tilt.. collective title of "The Age of Grace." A wonderfully graceful collection it is, so elegant indeed that the critic feels very badly dressed when visiting it. The Gainsborough drawings are fine, and the unfinished Reynolds portrait of Kitty Fisher is more sensitive than much of his work. The stately, timeless Richard Wilson of the " Ville Borghcse " is a marvel, but the absolute perfection of the small Watteau per- sonifies the age and the grace of the exhibition. Prose is no medium in which to describe it. Verlaine might have done so. I cannot. I advise the reader to visit this fete galante in Cork Street, W.r, at
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