Sir Michael Sadler's Collection, Leicester Galleries ART
THIS is a really exciting exhibition. The catalogue says it is of " selected paintings, drawings and sculpture from the collection of the late Sir Michael Sadler," and a selection it is. One can do very little except give grateful thanks for such a show, so two minor critical comments should come first. Rather too high a proportion or good " gallery " pictures are shown to represent Sadler's taste perfectly, and there are not quite enough old masters to allow com- parisons on the spot between old and new, of the kind he was himself so fond of making. Apart from that there is nothing but praise, and enjoyment. The exhibition does go far towards representing his own taste, and this is important, because he was not only what is called a discerning buyer but a constructive one. He acted always on his own instincts, and bought the right pictures at the right time, not waiting for the critics' verdict, and not caring at all about com- mercial values. As an encourager of young artists his influence for the good was immense, and it has not ceased with his death. He never lost his capacity for making new discoveries and for finding unexpected pleasures in paintings past and present.
Certain works, some of them small and unaggressive, stand out. The Gainsborough, an oil sketch of Loading Cattle on a Boat ; the Delacroix oil sketch of a landscape, which has a • wonderful fire ; an early Rouault landscape (1902) and the Picasso still-life of 1911. All of these are small, and exceptional. Cezanne, Modigliani, Daumier, Constable, Jongkind, Fantin-Latour , Corot and Etty are all represented, not fragmentarily only. There are too many good works by living painters to enumerate, but this is the place to renew an acquaintance with earlier periods of certain living artists like Henry Moore, Frances Hodgkins and David Jones.
And among the good pictures, and the interesting pictures—the pictures. that might have belonged to anyone with a lot of taste and sensibility—there are many works which, taken together, could only have belonged to a man more interested in painting than he was in collecting paintings. (See works here by Millet, Leibermann, de la Fresnaye, Ribot, Vuillard, Gilman and Spencer Gore.) He was
indeed a collector to be thankful for. JOHN PIPER.
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