The DNA of Dulwich Picture Gallery is aspirational, in the sincerest sense. Opening in 1817 when private collections were still the norm, it’s the world’s first purpose-built public art gallery. (It’s also a credible contender for inspiring the design of the red telephone box.) After a significant reworking, and the addition of a new children’s space and sculpture garden, the Gallery is again hoping to redefine what it means to make art accessible.
The Grade II*-listed building was Sir John Soane’s utterly original embodiment of the dying wish of the founders: for their collection of old masters to ‘go down to Posterity for the benefit of the Public’. There’s an unapologetic Enlightenment idealism at the heart of this demand for everyone to be able to partake in Europe’s cultural canon. This is baked into the architecture too, which originally included almshouses (since converted into gallery space).
So it’s admirable that the Gallery is determined to continue expanding its audience, even to those aged eight and under. While it’s hardly the first cultural venue to offer a playground, it has made the wise decision to house this in its own ArtPlay Pavilion, away from the main building (this common sense has escaped the National Trust, which has allowed kids to take over the whole of
Sudbury Hall).
Any new structure here has big shoes to fill. The founders had handpicked Soane, who excelled at idiosyncratic reinterpretations of tradition. Despite them insisting that ‘for establishments such as ours, the Gothic was clearly the Style’, Soane persisted in reconnecting the collection with its lineage to classical antiquity. His austere hints at pilasters and blind arcades of round arches are rendered in London stock brick with a dressing of Portland stone, inscribed with Greek meander motifs.
Whether it was primitivism or budgetary expedience, Soane’s raw distillation of classicism evokes the brick bones of a Roman ruin. There’s a radicalism to the building that is almost modernist (and that, at the time, was scandalous). The galleries’ roof lanterns, meanwhile, set into coved ceilings that allow for natural top-lighting, have become the standard for exhibition spaces ever since.
The Pavilion’s architects, Carmody Groarke, have dutifully picked up Soane’s baton, at least in spirit if not in style. There are several echoes of the main building: the neat square plan, the top-lighting, the arches (fashioned into niches for games of hide-and-seek), the corbelled cladding that mirrors Soane’s brickwork. But with awnings like a kiosk, it can feel as though you’re about to buy an ice cream in the park. All the play areas, however – designed by HoLD Collective – take inspiration from the Gallery’s masterpieces.
It’s a cacophony of sensations and symbolism. Canaletto’s rendition of Walton’s mathematical bridge becomes a climbable miniature. The ladder of light in De Gelder’s ‘Jacob’s Dream’ becomes a slide. Even the Gallery’s mausoleum becomes a seating pit, with its Doric columns as cushions. There’s a richness here – drawn from the Gallery’s genius loci – that is sure to pique the curiosity of any child. A refusal to dumb-down, too. It feels like a heroic last line of defence before these children inevitably acquire smartphones and the TikTok brainrot takes hold.
Outside, what was a hedged-off lawn has been opened up, adding three new acres. If Soane had his way, the gardens would’ve been a grand quadrangle, completed by another library wing. Instead, we are to be content with a scattering of sculptures, bemusing provocations, on loan as part of a regular rotation, including Harold Offeh’s psychedelic slide sandwiched between flaming eyeballs. Kim Wilkie’s plaited ‘land artforms’, on the other hand, a series of undulating mounds that will mature into a wildflower meadow, could end up resisting the faddishness. The gardens are not quite an art destination on their own, but they are nevertheless a welcome gift to the public realm.
Legacy and patronage loom large, as it did within Soane’s original architecture, which climaxes with the mausoleum, a reliquary that still houses the remains and busts of the founders. To secure its future, more than 100 saplings have been planted in the new gardens, each one sponsored by a donor from the community. (The Gallery boasts an admirable independence from big-state arts funding.) Come the time the next generation looks again at how to further expand the Gallery and its audience, it will have become a forest.
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