ART.
THE NATIONAL GALLERY.
Now that the reorganization of the National Gallery has been completed by the opening of the Dutch Rooms, gratitude for the labour of the Director and his staff demands that we should give space to a consideration of the result. Rarely, if ever, has an opportunity occurred for a like spring cleaning. Old wars did not send masterpieces scuttling into hiding of turn their homes into Government offices. What advantage, then, has been taken of it ?
The architecture of the Gallery, with the possible exception of the Dome, is little help to general harmony, and the Director's aim has been rather to suppress it and to emphasize the pictures. The sense of the excessive height of the rooms, their well-like coldness, has been diminished by clearly marked bands round the walls and by hanging the pictures low. Attention has been directed away from the hideous ceilings. The old lincrusta wallpapers, gloomily florid, in the worst Victorian taste, have been painted over with drab, unobtrusive colours and the pattern broken in some rooms by indis- criminate blotches and smears, which, by meaning nothing in themselves, detract nothing from the pictures. In the Italian Primitive Room, for example, an attempt has been made to suggest the damp-stained plaster walls to which the majority of the pictures were toned, with the result that many works, which on the old violent walls appeared thin and pale, show a new-seeming richness and quality. Financial limitations prevented a complete redecoration of every room, such as that which has succeeded so splendidly in the Venetian Rooms. An important alteration has been made in the lighting of Room X. The system of vertical lights, employed with such mastery by Sir John Soane in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where the finest Hogarths in London benefit from it, throws the light diagonally across the room on to the pictures. Although Room X. is not as a room so well lighted as Room XII., next to it, yet there is considerably less reflection in the pictures ; a great asset, for nothing is more distracting, when we are examining a picture, than to see in it, not only the old image of ourselves, but the more interesting image of every passer-by.
The rearrangement of the pictures has not been drastic. The big altar-pieces, which before dwarfed their neighbours, have been assembled in " the Dome " and the adjacent room, where an effort has been made to suggest the settings for which they were painted. Here alone has it been possible to improve the effect of the pictures by employing the architecture of the Gallery. The Italians have been more logically grouped than they were previously, and a number of inferior pictures of all schools have been hung in the reference galleries to avoid overcrowding the best work.
An important part of the reorganization has been the reframing of many pictures, the removal to the outside of labels that offended inside the frames, and the improvement of their lettering. Considerably more remains to be done in this -way, and although, for example, the new frame well becomes the Giorgione (Number 269, Room VI.), the gold mount on the John ..4rnolfini (Number 186, Room XV.) requires toning down. Time, great care, great patience and much experiment will be necessary before nothing will remain to criticize, but towards that ideal the present Directorate is moving.
I have frequently heard complaints against the constant shifting of pictures in all our Galleries. 'they come mostly, I suspect, from people whose visits are less frequent than their complaints. But it is true that this is cause for
annoyance. A little consideration, however, will show that it is unavoidable. The effective hanging of a room—a far more complicated undertaking than is easily imagined—requires symmetry of arrangement. An addition cannot usually be hung without upsetting this symmetry, and a complete re- arrangement of, at least, one wall is therefore necessary. The public may be certain that it is more troublesome to those who have to do it than to those who find it done.
Even the stay-at-home must realize the excellent condition and sympathetic display of our national collection and, as a good citizen, flatter himself upon it ; but it is only when we return from the Continent that we fully taste our superiority in these matters. I have seen pictures in Bruges green with mildew ; in Strasbourg I have seen a German Primitive so warped that the panel projected out of the frame and was cracking down the middle. Little more care is shown in Italy, that is verbally so proud of her treasures, and the Louvre is overcrowded to boredom. I have not visited the German Galleries, but I am told that they alone rival ours in wise and systematic care.
When we remember that beyond the work and thought necessary for the re-hanging and re-decoration of the National Gallery every picture has been thoroughly cleaned and renovated, we must gladly admit the debt which we owe to Sir Charles Holmes. Can he not increase it by finding less conspicuous accommodation for the Holman Hunt, the Walker
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