ART
The National Gallery THE National Gallery has celebrated the centenary of moving into its present premises by opening one new gallery and ,redecorating another. The new room, which joins the Duveen gallery to the main suite of Italian rooms, is designed like most of the other recent rooms in the National Gallery, And is admirable as regards lighting and decoration. The paintings at present displayed in it form a somewhat miscel- laneous collection, mainly fetched up from the basement, but including also the two new Filippino Lippis, of great beauty, and also some other Florentine works of the Quattro- cento recently given. The big Venetian gallery, containing the sixteenth-century paintings, has been splendidly restored, so that its walls glow with the faded pink which we might expect in a Venetian palace, and in a colour, moreover, which changes to the most exciting variants when the sun falls on it. Unhappily the effect of the whole room is spoilt by the raw and slightly too yellow cornice, and the hard white of the roof, both of which strike very new and harsh against the delicacy of the faded pink walls. But in spite of this the room must present one of the grandest displays of Venetian painting to be seen anywhere, and the new background unquestionably makes the canvases tell with their full intensity.
It could be said with perfect truth, that as a series of repre- sentative masterpieces carefully chosen and beautifully dis- played, it would be hard to find the equal of the National Gallery as a whole in any other museum. Of course the English had the advantage of starting late, so that we are in the unique position of being actually short of that type of painting with which all the older galleries of Europe are overpowered, namely seventeenth-century Italian painting. In fact, this period is probably the only one which is really badly represented in the Gallery, though Lord Bearsted's recent gift of Valentin's Four Ages, which was seen at Burlington House, has helped to fill a corner of the gap. But with this exception one can see masterpieces of every type and period, arranged in such a way that they are made immediately attractive.
From 'the purely subjective points of view of taste and aesthetic enjoyment nothing could be better than the selection and arrangement of the works shown in the National Gallery. But there is yet another way of arranging a museum, namely, on a historical basis. It is possible to arrange a room, so that by simply going round it in the right way and studying the works exhibited in ths order indicated a visitor can actually see the history of the arts in a given period. It is true that at the National Gallery this could never be carried out fully, since to make such a scheme complete it must include not only paintings, drawings and engravings, but also furniture and pottery, and even photographs of architecture. Moreover, to make the development perfectly clear it is necessary to have short historical and explanatory notices in each section, so that the visitor may understand out of what circumstances the various works of art sprang, what sort of men produced them, for what purposes, and for what patron. Of course such an arrangement can only be achieved by sacrificing many ,.f the aesthetic attractions such as are evident at the National Gallery. There will be a mixture of all sorts of different objects which cannot present the same agreeable sequence Is a small selection of masterpieces, and, moreover, it may :le necessary to show many works which will not be of the 'first importance aesthetically. But if these sacrifices are made the result will present a true and to some extent complete picture of an historical period.
Of course it will be of no use just to put together all the works of art of one period in any order. The first duty of the arranger of such a museum would be to sort out in each period the different kinds of art which were being produced for different types of people, and to separate popular art from that of the court, and from the various stages of middle-class art of the same time. By this method even a complex period like the :ighteenth century in France can be made comprehensible, whereas in the present arrangement the visitor is apt to be laffied by finding painters like Fragonard and Boucher jumbled :n among Chardin and Greuze, without any explanation of .low one country came to produce such different kinds of paint- mg at the same time. Of course the introduction of such an arrangement would mean the transformation of a picture gallery from a pleasure garden into a classroom, and that would not
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