ART.
THE NEW TURNER GALLERY.
SrNeE Pennethorne's well-meant but inadequate Turner Gallery in Trafalgar Square was sacrificed for a public stair- case, the master's oil-paintings have been herded together in the small room which has made so many foreigners marvel,—. first at Turner, then at us. After many efforts, in which the Spectator has played its part, the national authorities carried out the moral obligations imposed by the great gift so far as not to sell a piece of ground at Millbank on which the Tate Gallery could be extended; but the Turner wing would probably have been no nearer existence to-day if Sir Joseph Duveen had not provided the means. This generous donor died before the work was finished, but his son, Mr. Joseph Duveen,
has interpreted his father's intentions in a bountiful way, and the public were able this week to behold the most original and potent artist England has produced in a building that, so far as care and study can make it, is worthy of its office. The skill shown in disposing of the little " accidentals " that distract the attention and tarnish the clear lighting of the rooms, and in other ways, gives the effect of a temple of art,— a place designed and prepared for but one end. There is one gallery of a hundred feet long and forty feet in height, another a little smaller, and two side galleries on the top-lit floor; downstairs are five side-lit rooms. The architect is Mr. W. H. Romaine Walker. Mr. D. S. MacColl, the Keeper of the Gallery, shows how necessary a part imagination plays in the arranging of a great art collection. There can only be praise for his orchestration of this irised body of beauty so marvel- lously comprehensive and wildly contradictory, with its great passages of sublime invention (as in Nature's tremendous gesture in the Snowstorm : Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps), its Wordsworthian purity (as in the lovely The Sunrise : a Frosty Morning and The Star of Eve), or• the visions spun from "such stuff as dreams are made on" (as in the Italian series), or the world quiet and attenuated with an undernote of mordant grey stealing through its sunset pinks, as in The Chain Pier, Brighton, and the harbour piece beside it that finger the bitter-sweet note of our most modern painting. Downstairs students may study the beginning and middles of his paintings, and some realistic oil-sketches in the twenty-three new works that are now seen for the first time. Altogether, one hundred and twenty-nine pictures in oil and four hundred and fifty odd other works are shown. In another fifty years the Americans may provide such a. Gallery for the Whistlers they will then have gathered together (mainly from fickle English owners), but at present there is nothing to compare to this "one-man show." At the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam there is, of course, the remarkable room built a few years ago for Rembrandt's Night Watch, and designed to render the same lighting as the hall for which he painted it, and the small group of Rembrandt rooms beside it; and there are several other Continental examples ; but one cannot recall a modern effort to do honour to a painter on this scale. Even the shade of Ruskin; who declared that the British nation " buried with threefold honour Turner's body in St. Paul's, his pictures at Charing Cross, and his purposes in Chancery," may now be able to rest in peace. J. B.
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