ART
Constable. (Victoria and Albert Museum.) WHAT an iceberg is the great mass of art accumulated in this country ; how small that part with which we are familiar ! Let some occasion for national rejoicing revolve the mass ever so slightly, and how many glittering facets come freshly to light ! A man might spend all his daylight hours upon them and fail to exhaust the Coronation exhibi- tions that now multiply apace up and down the country. At the British Museum, every Michelangelo drawing' in the land ; at the Victoria and Albert, happily coinciding with next week's Gains- borough exhibition at the Tate, some 400-odd paintings, water- colours and drawings by Constable—everything from his hand in the museum's possession. A first impression of riches is chastened by the simultaneous showing at the national museums, at the Ashmo- lean and the Fitzwilliam, of some of the 1,669 acquisitions'secured by the National Art-Collections Fund during the fifty years cats existence. Since its first important purchase, the Rokeby Venus, the Fund's benefactions have averaged £40,000 a year. Now more necessary than ever, its present membership of only 7,500 must somehow be increased if the iceberg is not to melt away more than it has already been permitted to do.
The Constables are grouped chronologically into nine sections, and, since the artist used to sink himself in a set of subjects (the details of horses and carts, trees, skies, a particular place) for considerable periods, until he had extracted from them all the information he,might require, these groups show remarkable homogeneity and mark clearly Constable's development. He was of course a late starter. From the earliest drawings here, made before the turn of the century, it is easy to see why his friends attempted to dissuade him from an artistic career. By 1802 he had reached in oils a certain technical competence and an understanding of poetic nuturalisrn ; six or seven years later, in his mid-thirties, he had developed a highly romantic, rich, sometimes almost Palmer-like vision of landscape, expressed in the most free, muscular brushwork. But not perhaps until twenty years later was he to reach a comparable freedom in drawing. And, though there has been a move to re-establish the set- pieces so laboriously assembled through the winter months when he could not sketch out of doors, it is the pochades in all their wonderful immediacy that continue to excite. One example : the small view of Hampstead Heath, lit through the slanting rain-clouds, that commences Bay 5. It is-solidly felt and full of recession, tremulously atmospheric, subtle in colour. What a lot it says.
In addition to the several other shows of drawings in London, there is now one at Messrs. Wildenstein's called " The Art of Draw- ing 1500-1950." The bravura of the title is almost justified. The 'exhibition is headed by two Raphaels—one, a study of sweetness but great precision, for the Phrygian Sibyl of the Chigi Chapel in Rome ; it closes with a group of nine drawings by Picasso. As this is Wilden- stein's it is perhaps unnecessary to remark the predominance of
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