CHANTRET BEQUEST

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 69, 18 September 1937, Page 11

CHANTRET BEQUEST

WORK OF SIXTY YEARS

HELP FOR BRITISH ART

The close of the Royal Academy summer exhibition marks the completion of sixty years' activities under the Chantrey Bequest, which has been a generous contributor to the national collection of modern paintings and sculpture, ■ says a writer in -trie "Daily Telegraph."

In those sixty years the bequest made to the Boyal Academy by Sir Francis Chantrey, R.A., has enabled more than 340 works of art to be acquired at a cost exceeding £130,000. No other individual has done so much, to encourage modern British art.

The acquisitions may not always have been the best available. Indeed, some of them have provoked much controversy, and the administration of the fund was inquired into a generation ago by a Select Committee of tho House of Lords.

| There certainly was no doubt in the Imind of Sir Francis Chantrey as to I the object and scope of his bequest. In his will he stated that it was to purchase works "entirely executed within the shores of Great Britain, of the highest merit obtainable, at prices that shall be liberal," but the president and council were to have full discretion as to whether they expended in every or any one year the revenue available. EARLY PRICES. In the early days large sums were spent on individual works, Thomas Brock's bronze group, "A Moment of; Peril," cost £2200, and the same price was given for Herkomer's painting, "The Chapel of the Charterhouse."' Orchardson's "Napoleon on Board H.M.S. Bellerophon,*' Vicat Cole's "The Port of London," Millais's "Speak, Speak!" and Dicksee's "The Two Crowns" were bought for £2000 each, and this sum was also expended on Leighton's bronze group, "An Athlete Struggling with a Python." One painting by Alma-Tadema cost £1750, Farquharson's "Birnam Wood" and Cadogan Cowper's "Lucrezia Bot* gia Reigns in the Vatican". £1500 each, and pictures by Briton Riviere, Calderon, Poynter, J. C. Hook, G. F. Watts, and John Pettie cost from £ 1000 to £1200 each. Only on half a dozen occasions in. the last fifteen years has £1000 or more been expended, on a single: purchase. In 1922, when the counsels of the Tate Gallery had been .brought into the work of selection, the most notable acquisition was that of. thirteen cartoons and sixty drawings made by Alfred Stevens for the decoration of Dorchester House. They cost £2000. Since then J. J. Shannon's portrait of Phil May, Ambrose McEvoy's portrait o* his son Michael, and ■ Sir John. Lavery's "Chess Players" are, among those that have reached tlie one thousand guinea mark. There certainly has been a more enlightened choice by the Chantrey Bequest selectors in recent years and also an economy of expenditure in the absence of works of art clearly marked out for purchase. RECENT ACQUISITIONS. Such pictures as' Alfred Munnings* "Epsom Downs," Orpen's portrait of Sir William McCormick, and that of Somerset Maugham by Gerald Kelly, are recent acquisitions of permanent value and interest. Of sculpture thera has been Epstein's. bronze of Einstein. Sir Alfred Gilbert's "Paderewski" and his bronze figure of Eros, John. Tweed's "Lord Clive," and William McMillan's fine piece of statuary irt stone, "The Birth of Venus." ■ The Chantrey Bequest purchases this season, though eight in number, have cost only £ 1400. In the early, days of the administration of the fund1 it was the common practice to spend from £4000 to £5000 a year; bjut, on the other hand, there have been five years out of tht.- sixty in which no purchases at all have been made. The average annual- expenditure works out at £2353.