The best of British
John McEwen
THE BRITISH SCHOOL by Judy Egerton The National Gallery, £40, pp. 456 There is 'little hope of Poetical Painting finding encouragement in England', rumi- nated the Swiss painter Fuseli in 1805. `Portrait with them is everything. Their taste and feeling all go to realities — the ideal does not operate on their minds.' The 61 pictures by British artists at the National Gallery confirm this view.
Portraits there are in abundance, of horses (the English were the first to do horse portraits) as well as men, and much is added by learning about the subjects portrayed: about Gainsborough's pretty daughters, depicted holding hands, who did indeed end their days together, the spinster Margaret 'odd', the maritally separated Mary 'quite deranged'; or his masterpiece `Mr and Mrs Hallett', 'an incomparable picture of love' in Ellis Waterhouse's scholarly opinion, a couple as beautiful as they were rich, destined to remain married for 48 years but to see him squander one of the greatest fortunes of the day on horses and property deals. As Horace Walpole said, 'half the nobility and half the money of England' went to New- market.
The many who have benefited from Judy Egerton's impeccably curated and cata- logued exhibitions of Stubbs, Wright of Derby, Turner (`The Fighting Temeraire') and Hogarth (`Marriage a la Mode') will be prepared for a tour de force, and they have got it. Its publication coincides with her winning the 1998 Hawthornden Prize for Art Criticism, awarded for her analysis of the 'Marriage', much the best contribution to last year's Hogarth tricentenary celebra- tions. This weightier but not less entertain- ing volume must surely win her further prizes. It is an exemplarly work of scholar- ship, adding passion and wit to erudition, and can be read for all kinds of informa- tion other than its always comprehensive analyses of pictures. As Judy Egerton says, with characteristic forthrightness, it is `chattier' than the 1959 catalogue, and all the better for it. It culminates the author's work at the National Gallery — her next project is a catalogue raisonne of the works of Stubbs — following 15 years as Assistant Keeper of the British School at the Tate. In
other words, no one is better qualified to write it. Every painting was examined with Martin Wyld, the National's chief restorer, and his admirable technical commentary includes the latest research of the Conser- vation and Scientific Departments.
The book divides into two sections. The first and largest is devoted to the pictures, an arbitrary assortment thanks to the sub- stantial transfers over the years to the Tate or 'National Gallery of British Art', found- ed in 1898 — just how arbitrary can be gauged from the following list: Constable (6), Gainsborough (11), Hogarth (8), Thomas Jones (1), Lawrence (1), Reynolds (5), Sargent (2), Stubbs (3), Turner (9), Richard Wilson (3), Wright of Derby (2) and Zoffany (1).
A century ago British pictures (which included Raeburns, a large number of Wilkies and such Victorian favourites as Frith's 'Derby Day' and Landseer's 'Dignity and Impudence') filled seven of the National's 23 rooms. By 1954, when the National and Tate collections were separat- ed by Act of Parliament, this had shrunk to its present number of two rooms. Mean- while the foreign collection has grown in proportion, so that today the British School represents a measly 30th of the picture total.
The National, as the senior gallery, used to boss the Tate around. As recently as 1983 it took back four pictures, having had second thoughts about Sargent and Wright of Derby. But despite the Tate's irritation and the National's admission that it lacked `an entirely consistent attitude to represen- tation of the School', such transfers in favour of the senior gallery remain possi- ble. Fashion dictates choice and it is the return to fashion of Victorian pictures which most embarrasses the National. Hav- ing dumped them on the Tate, it now finds itself left with a yawning 19th-century gap not a Pre-Raphaelite, Frith, Landseer, Whistler or Watts to be seen. The fact that a 19th-century story-painting by Delaroche is the most popular picture in the collection only makes the omission of English equiva- lents more embarrassing.
Part II is a history of the gallery, told No, no, you should have turned right at Mbolo, then east at the Karoba river . . . through the lives of those whose portraits in the building proclaim their importance as benefactors or public servants. It reveals that 'money is usually an index of useful- ness (if seldom of merit)'. Art collections are often dubiously compiled, benefactions are usually made for the worst and vainest reasons and social snobbery abounds. Plus ga change. Charles Long, 1st Baron Farn- borough told the painter Haydon that `there was nothing less known than Art' in the House of Commons; and Haydon (a source of good, therefore disgruntled, quotes) described Long himself, a lofty connoisseur, as 'a Pretender in Art'. Egerton is more impressed by the first `director', William Seguier (pronounced `Seeger'), a man who 'baffled many of his contemporaries because he lacked airs and graces'; and there is relish in her exposure of a creep like the Reverend William Hol- well Carr, one of the gallery's greatest patrons.
Inevitably Carr's story is the most amus- ing. Egerton notes that in his portrait `there is an unmistakably determined glint' in the eye. This no doubt accounted for the speed with which he took a degree in divin- ity as a Fellow to pick up a rich Church of England benefice in the gift of his old Oxford college. It gave him a living of over £1,000 p.a. from which he paid a curate £100 a year to fulfil the clerical duties in Cornwall he was prevented from doing himself — because of the 'very inimical' effect of the climate on his health! Mar- riage to an aging aristocratic heiress of large Carr estates in Northumberland dou- bled his surname and transformed his for- tune. Carr's collection, like most of the great English collections of continental art, owed far more to the French Revolution than the Grand Tour, to opportunism than taste. 'Scarcely was a country overrun by the French,' wrote one Dr Waagen, 'when Englishmen skilled in the arts were at hand with their guineas.'
The National's collection continues to grow, slowly. The two most recent addi- tions are the smallest picture in the gallery, Thomas Jones's 'A Wall in Naples', and Stubb's magnificent lifesize portrait of the Arabian stallion Whistlejacket'. Egerton, though she typically makes no mention of it, was instrumental in the purchase of the Jones picture, one of a series of oil on paper studies of walls made as a distraction when the artist was down on his luck in Naples. Jones normally painted classical landscapes in the style of his teacher Richard Wilson, but it is on these five unpretentious and, in the case of the National's example, radically geometrical, little pictures discovered in 1956 that his reputation rests. How different to 'Whistle- jacket', commissioned by Lord Rocking- ham, one of the richest and most charmingly reluctant of prime ministers and owner of the largest house in England, Wentworth Woodhouse. Parnassus is a great leveller.
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