THE SPOILS OF EUROPE.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3334, 16 August 1926, Page 8

THE SPOILS OF EUROPE.

British people arc by this time accustomed to the spectacle of works of art of greater or lesser importance leaving England and finding a permanent home across the Atlantic. America thanks to her economic position since the war. is doing exactly what England did during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries —buying up, in addition to a fair proportion of rubbishy work, as many great masterpieces of painting and sculpture as happen to come upon the international art market (states Tiie Graphic). In a few years’ time it may even become necessary lor enthusiastic students of art history to travel to the United States if they wish to he fully informed upon the development of European art. There arc already, for example, more pictures by the rare Dutch master, \ ermcer of Dellt. in New York than (here are in any European capital, and, as time goes on, it is almost a certainty that more and more ua in tings of the highest importance will follow Gainsborough’.s “Blue Boy” to, adorn the private collections of wealthy Americans.

It is uut. however, by the amassing ol luindrcd-thousand-ponnd pictures 1 bar a man of I aste can show his love o' line things. There are other,. more modest, methods. A building in the middle ol New York, on Fort Washington avenue, contains between (jUO and <(ln separate items of sculpture, painting, and other works, mostly of French Romanesque and Gothic periods. The various columns and doorways, buttresses. and windows are arranged amid shrubs and trees so as to avoid the normally rather terrifying aspect of the average museum. This unique collection. got together by Mr George Grey Barnard, has. thanks to the generosity ol John D. .Rockefeller, jun.. been acquired by the Metropolitan’Museum ol Art. and was opened to the public recently.

Many of the items in the collection were salvaged by the late owner from the barns and pigstys in Central .('ranee, where, lor generations, the ruins qt the old churches have, in too many instances, been regarded merely as convenient sources of building material. The collection is extremely varied, and, apart from early paintings, ironwork, etc., there are fortyeight sculptured capitals and columns from the Romanesque cloisters of St. Gnilheim-dcvDosert, forty from the cloister of St. Michel do Cuxa, twenty Gothic capitals from the cloisters at Trie, and forty-eight from St. Gaudens. It is interesting to jioto that practically every European country has now taken steps to prevent the export of particularly important works of art across its frontiers. It has been extremely didicnlt to acquire any admitted masterpiece in Italy for many years, and the same is true with regard to Spain, though in the latter ease, if minor is true, the immemorial smuggler s’ tracks across the Pyrenees have borne many a precious canvas put of the country. The German .Minister of the Interior recently appointed a commission of art experts to make a list ol works the sale of which would mean an irreparable* loss to the nation. This list comprises nine hundred items paintings, sculptures, valuable specimens of arts and crafts, as well as objects of purely national and historical significance. As for ourselves, it is generally understood that Sir Charles Holmes, the Director of the National Gallery, has compiled a list of some twenty or so works of art which would on no account be allowed to leave these shores.