There is a remarkable project of great enterprise and diligence in progress throughout the land — a plan to catalogue all the oil paintings (as well as those in acrylic or tempera) in national collections. This gigantic task is being undertaken by a charity called The Public Catalogue Foundation, which is publishing its findings in single volumes dedicated to different areas of the UK. The aim is to give a county-by-county account of pictures in museums and other public collections.
As I write, I have in front of me half a dozen of the Foundation’s catalogues: West Yorkshire: Leeds; Cambridgeshire: Fitzwilliam Museum; East Sussex; North Yorkshire; Suffolk and Imperial War Museum. Obviously some places are more dense with pictures than others, particularly a metropolitan centre like London. So far, the Foundation has only published The Slade and UCL and the Imperial War Museum catalogues to represent the capital’s rich and varied collections, though more volumes are forthcoming. Meanwhile, zealous researchers tally and tabulate among the dusty inventories of provincial institutions, recording their findings in this beautifully produced series of books.
Museums — particularly in these cash-strapped times, when the meagre elegant hang is favoured over the full-bodied floor-to-ceiling display — actually put on show at any one time a tiny percentage of their holdings. Members of the public can sometimes gain access to particular pictures in store, if they make an appointment sufficiently in advance, but until now it has not been possible to browse these hidden collections. The PCF’s affordable catalogues, with images printed in colour, nine to the page, offer something which is more than a thumbnail illustration, and they demonstrate the full range of a museum’s holdings. Occasionally, forgotten collections come to light. Thus the unknown Roebuck Collection (in the North Yorkshire volume), which contains a modest but interesting sampling of Modern British (among other things), emerges from the gloom. Representing the taste of ‘quite a playboy’ (in Mr Roebuck’s own words), the collection was left on his death in 1988 to the town of Skipton and is now in the process of being transferred to Craven Museum and Gallery.
Leafing through that North Yorkshire volume, the Harrogate Museum, famous for its Friths, strikes the eye with a strange early Bomberg, a lovely Robert Medley and a couple of dark Christopher Wood landscapes. In Scarborough are five John Armstrongs, donated by Tom Laughton, hotelier brother of the actor Charles Laughton. The National Railway Museum in York is distinguished by the hyper-realist train paintings of Cuthbert Ellis (1909–87), while at the University are three early John Hoyland landscapes, rare figurative works from this passionate abstractionist. York Museum, in case you’d forgotten, has a seemingly endless array of Ettys, yet there’s also a tough portrait of Sir Herbert Read, apostle of Modernism, by Bryan Kneale, better known these days as a sculptor. This mixture of old and new, expected and unexpected, is typical of these catalogues, and one of their principal charms.
These are essentially picture-books, with perhaps a short text about the history of a museum, particularly if a whole volume is devoted to one institution, as in the case of the Fitzwilliam, which has a brief introduction by Duncan Robinson. Here’s a volume to linger over. There are so many scribbled notes on my bookmark it’s difficult to know what to mention first. I’m always happy to encounter old friends in new contexts, so to find a striking portrait by Yolanda Sonnabend, one of our foremost stage designers, was as pleasant a surprise as the discovery of a Karl Weschke landscape, also in this eclectic accumulation.
I mustn’t however give the impression that our museums are stuffed to the gunnels with British art only, when Continental delights are also thick on the reserve racks. The Fitzwilliam is a case in point, with excellent things by Seurat and Vuillard, Degas and Cézanne, Matisse, Renoir and a couple of oddly effective stylised still-lifes by Picasso. Not forgetting Rubens and the simply magnificent pair of panels by one of my favourite artists of the Italian Renaissance, Domenico Veneziano.
For a wide range of British painting, look at the volume devoted to the Imperial War Museum, with its compelling mixture of imaginative interpretation and straight recording. Here are the high-art achievements of Paul Nash and John Nash, for instance, side by side with the accurate documentation of Leslie Cole, Philip Connard, Charles Cundall and Charles Pears. This is a book for all libraries, public and private, a reminder of man’s modern inhumanity to man, with a roll call of great names, some of them, like Albert Richards and Isaac Rosenberg, lost on active duty. (The only limitation of these catalogues immediately apparent is the fact that they only deal with oil paintings, and thus a great war artist like Eric Ravilious, who worked principally in watercolour, is excluded and could possibly be overlooked by anyone who considered this book to be exhaustive.) A particular pleasure is discovering new things: Dick Lee’s series of Catch-22 paintings, the sculptor Frank Dobson’s luscious oil ‘The Balloon Apron’, Julian Trevelyan’s fearsome ‘Premonitions of the Blitz’. This is a book to return to.
The first PCF catalogue I saw was the Leeds volume back in 2004. Since then they’ve been appearing thick and fast, and there are now more than a dozen available in hardback (£35) or paperback (£20). The latest volumes deal comprehensively with Cornwall and Hampshire. (You can order them direct with an additional £5 postage per volume on 0870 1283566.) The project is financed by private and public funding, and catalogue proceeds will be held in trust for future use in the restoration and conservation of paintings. The Foundation’s slogan is ‘Discover the Paintings You Own’. Through its industry and initiative, we are beginning to get an idea of just what treasures lie (often) hidden in our museums. The extent of this heritage is both exciting and heart-warming. The PCF aims to create a ‘Pevsner for Paintings’, revealing the previously unsuspected wealth of pictures in public ownership, and making them available — at least in reproduction, and eventually on the internet — to art-lovers everywhere.
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