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July 18, 2007
What's a National Heritage?
Two very good pieces at Times Online about cultural heritage.
The news that seven major artworks on loan to the National Gallery might be sold and may leave the country has a depressing air of inevitability. They are magnificent pieces. Titian’s Portrait of a Young Man ( pictured, far right) is a serene early portrait, less fleshy than others, sparse in colour yet rich in detail. Although it has only been on loan to the National Gallery for 15 years, it sat in Temple Newsam House near Leeds for more than 150 years. Likewise, the five paintings by Nicolas Poussin, the Sacraments, have been on loan only since 2002, but were in the Duke of Rutland’s Belvoir Castle for centuries. And few works could be more important to national heritage than Rubens’s exuberant Apotheosis of King James I, which belongs to Viscount Hampden and may also be up for sale.
His list:
1 Portrait of Catharina Hooghsaet by Rembrandt
2 The Bridgewater Madonna by Raphael
3 Portrait of Edward Grimston by Petrus Christus
4 Winter Scene and The Bird Trap by the two Breughels
5 Portrait of an Old Woman by Rembrandt
6 Judas and the Thirty Pieces of Silver by Rembrandt
7 The Cholmondeley Family by William Hogarth
8 War and Peace by Van Dyck
9 The Reverend Sir Henry Bate and Lady Bate-Dudley, both by Thomas Gainsborough
10 Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows by John Constable
11 Erasmus by Holbein
Saved for whom? These works never belonged to Britain anyway, says Rachel Campbell-Johnston
The National Gallery is undoubtedly facing a crisis. Loaned masterpieces by Titian and Poussin are about to be put on the market. And how can we stump up the many millions that will be necessary to buy them? The likelihood is that they will be sold abroad. The loss rips a hole in the fabric of our heritage.Or does it? Look at the list of other art works which Chris Bryant thinks we are most at risk of losing. Fewer than than a half are by British artists or artists working in Britain. The rest were, in the first place, acquired from abroad by a nation which had produced no Titians or Rembrandts of its own. Art was a trophy by which competing countries could manifest their power. Paintings were not icons of an art-historical legacy. They were symbols of status. And canvases were swapped between monarchs and connoisseurs and collectors like children swap Pokémon cards in the hope of getting the whole set.
I tend to agree with Campbell-Johnston - invest money and efforts saving the ones that are somehow really "British" - especially the Petrus Christus! Earliest surviving portrait of an English subject!
However, her argument does depend on the assent to the idea that imperialism=BAD. Imperialism is, of course, part of the British Heritage and as such evidence of the British Collector abroad and British Gran Tourismo is a defensible collection priority. Can't the "we were wicked imperialists - let it go abroad" become a kind of whitewashing of the British record? The huge collections of Dutch works alone are also interesting reflections on a very special relationship which is not a story of one-way imperialism.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at July 18, 2007 8:09 AM