POST-WAR PICTURE GALLERIES

Star (Christchurch), Issue 20073, 9 October 1920, Page 8

POST-WAR PICTURE GALLERIES

BRITISH SCHOOL OF PAINTING. (Special to the “ Star.”) ■ LONDON, August 27. The visiting New Zealander, whatever his hues and dislikes, will visit the National Gallery, partly because being m Trafalgar Square, in itself one of the sights to be see, one must, needs “ do ” the Gallery. But only a real lover of pictures, not “the” pictures mark you, will-find his way to “The Tate,” on the Embankment, some way west of the Houses of Parliament. And many from the Dominion have been hitter about the closing of the Tate, which took place in 1916, for the men in the £ij • • Wl ° wantec l to see something of British art, always wanted to see the collection in the Tate Gallery as being one of modern British art, and it has been my privilege in those dark airraided times, to take a privileged man or-two down into the deep basements where the art treasures were stored und to show one or two of them to a New Zealander in khaki. However, this late Gallery is itself again, or rather a now self, for the perilous times when pictures were stored in strong rooms have enabled the custodians to reorganise them. . before the war the Tate was exclusively devoted to British art from 1790 onwards. It housed the pictures pmchased yearly from the Royal Academy under the Chantrey bequest, and these of course show year by year-or should enow it the Academicians were not afnictea’ with the vice of the arriviste, a belief that nothing is progress which goes beyond his own art—the movement in England of this art. One room, wholly Watts, contained all those famous ones which in reproductions aro to be seen the world over - Love and Life,” “Love and Death, Love inumphant”—and a P %Kv°L th i> by himself, wlrt 'S’? 8 G ;' lilery 13 being opened with additional portraits and land-. Bcapes, lent by Mrs Watts and tho rustccs of ho Watts Gallery at Comp, ton, and Gallery XV., which is devoted to the middle phase of Millais and his contemporaries of the 1860-1890 period Iho reorgamstation is intended, as ho new \\ atts room shows, to convert the gallery from a place exclusively pven to modern British art to a raO lery of British art in which development of the national school from the time of Hogarth can be studied up to he present day. The finest examples ot the British masters, however, will be shown at Trafalgar Square, but, on, the other hand, t| lc Tate has received many pictures that were formerly at the National. Thus wo shall be able to study the eighteenth century in gallery 1 Blake and early Englian water colours in gallery 2, Constable, Crome, Cobman. Wilkie and Ward, and artists up to 1850, in gallery 3; the preRophaehtes in galleries 4 and 5. and the Turners m the Turner wing. The re-opened rooms have been re; decorated, following the general scheme adopted at the National Gallery, by which a hard wall surface is avoided in favour of an “ atmospheric” effect. Hie colour varies according to tho character of the paintings grouped in the particular room. Tims, Room 1, which contains the Hogorths, and the generally brownish works of the eighteenth century, has been done in a shade ( of huff which gifes full value to their colouring. The Hogarths, in particular, and Gainsborough’s “Musidora,” have never looked so well before.

• small Room 11, has been treated m light grey, nearly white. Hero have been grouped the splendid collection Of illustrations to Dante, by William Blake, which were secured by a combination of public galleries at tlu Lmnell. sale at Christie’s, in March, 1918.

ftooms TV. and V., devoted to the ore-Raphaelites, the second to Eosetti And Burne-Jonca In particular,' have been decorated in a violet purple, which well supports the vivid colouring of the school. Additional interest is given to Room TV. by tho inclusion in it of n few works which show what led up to pre-Raphselism, such as tho series if three "story” pictures by Augustus Egg) entitled ,r Past and Present,” ’Tlustrating a domestic drama with a moral. New works by Alfred Stevens and Madox Brown are also placed l in this room, some of which have not been exhibited for forty years. The works collected by the late Sir Henry Tate, the founder of tho gallery, are hung against a background ot strong green. The two principal rooms of the Turner wing have also been reopened, and in the second of them about a dozen of Turner’s later oil sketches are now shown for tho first time.