6 JANUARY 1933, Page 7

National Gallery Loans Sir Philip Sassoon, the new chairman of

the National Gallery Trustees, is reported by the Daily Telegraph to favour a more generous loan policy. A certain number of the Gallery's less important pictures have for many years past been lent to provincial galleries. But it has long been felt by art-lovers out of London that more of the nation's pictures, to whose preservation they contribute as taxpayers, might well he shown from time to time in the well-equipped public galleries of Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and other great cities. The demand is all the more insistent now that far fewer pictures are shown at any one time on the walls of the National Gallery and far more are relegated to the cellars. It is surely desirable that good pictures which can be safely transported— excluding, as Sir Philip Sassoon says, the old panel pictures which must not be exposed to risk—should be lent to the great provincial galleries and possibly even to the Dominions.

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