In recent years there has been a surge of interest in the treasures hidden in our public art collections, many of them rarely if ever on view. The Tate Gallery is perhaps the principal offender here, showing only a tiny percentage of its glorious and wide-ranging holdings of British art, but attention is now being directed towards our provincial galleries and museums. Since 2003 the Public Catalogue Foundation has been recording and publishing the oil paintings held in galleries and civic buildings, county by county, and issuing invaluable volumes of colour illustrations to show us what usually remains invisible. By its calculations, a shameful 80 per cent of these paintings are not on view. This unknown resource is finally emerging into the light, and in London will have a venue for its public exposure: the grand building just off the Embankment known rather anonymously as Two Temple Place.
Built in the 1890s as an estate office and London pied-à-terre, it was commissioned by William Waldorf Astor (later 1st Viscount Astor) to be a house which would ‘personify literature’. It thus contains such details as sculptures of characters from The Three Musketeers carved by Thomas Nicholls to decorate the newel posts on the great staircase, a frieze of figures from Shakespeare, and silver gilt panels by George Frampton on the door of the Great Hall upstairs depicting Arthurian heroines. After its sale by the Astor family, the building was for many years the head office of the Society of Incorporated Accountants and Auditors, before being acquired in 1999 by The Bulldog Trust, a charitable foundation that specialises in educational grants. The trust has spent the past decade or so deciding what to do with this magnificent pile and has finally decided to turn it into an art gallery.
The interior space, despite its grand, battlemented Portland stone façade and gilded weather vane of beaten copper depicting Columbus’s ship the Santa Maria, is actually not extensive, though it is extraordinarily ornate. The architect was John Loughborough Pearson (1817–97), a medievalist considered to be the founder of the Gothic Revival, and noted for his attention to harmonious detail, proportion and contour. John Betjeman described him as one of ‘the three most remarkable pioneers who thought and constructed in Gothic rather than imitated’ (the other two being Butterfield and Street). Pearson was primarily a church architect (best known for Truro Cathedral), and passionately interested in vaulting, though his excursions into domestic building show considerable versatility. In Betjeman’s view, Two Temple Place was ‘one of the most attractive late-Victorian private houses in London’. Today it is worth visiting in its own right as an architectural gem. But there is another good reason to seek it out: the first in a series of exhibitions that will bring the treasures of regional galleries to the heart of our capital.
The current exhibition is William Morris: Story, Memory, Myth (until 29 January), and may be visited every day except Tuesdays when the building is closed and certain days when it is booked for private functions (check the website). Admission to the house and the exhibition is free, there’s a café and a bookshop, and the whole experience is a very civilised one.
The house gives the impression of great solidity from the moment you enter: it is well grounded, substantial, a thing of carved stone, ornamental ironwork and much oak panelling. The hall floor is laid with a geometrical pattern of marble, jasper, porphyry and onyx, forming a richly coloured focus to the building, offsetting the mahogany sculptures and the pillars of ebony around the gallery above. The labels for the exhibits have been well designed and are easy to read, and a handsome, small but appropriately solid catalogue accompanies the exhibition, priced at £7.50.
On the ground floor is the Lower Gallery, where the Morris exhibition begins with a series of five marvellous embroideries on the theme of ‘The Romance of the Rose’, a medieval French allegorical poem reinterpreted by Morris and his great friend Burne-Jones. These are done in silks, wools and gold thread on linen, and are immensely subtle in effect, their colours being mostly duns and greys, with a little deeper brown and blue. ‘Love Leading the Pilgrim through the Briars’ is an especially fine embroidery, with figures floating amidst an intricate filigree of thorns and tendrils. These beautiful panels have been recently conserved by the Royal School of Needlework, and this is their first outing. They are on loan from the undervisited William Morris Museum in Walthamstow, which is currently closed for renovation but is scheduled to reopen in July 2012.
Upstairs, the exhibition continues around the gallery and then into the Library, with Morris designs for such beloved items as his Brer Rabbit furnishing fabric, in blue or brown, and some lovely tiles telling the stories of Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast (decorated with an exquisite swan border). Move through into the Great Hall and the architecture takes over: hammer-beam roof, panelling galore, great carved fireplace, stained glass. ‘The Woodpecker’ tapestry and an embroidery on the theme of Pomona just about hold their own, but most of the exhibits up here are inevitably somewhat overshadowed. In life, William Morris and John Loughborough Pearson were rivals over the restoration of Westminster Hall, a contest Morris lost. In their present confrontation Morris gets to invade Pearson’s building, but the match is pretty much a draw. I wonder how other exhibitions will fare in this highly ornate space. I can’t see modern paintings working here at all (though I’d like to see someone try an installation of abstracts), but a collection of Cathedral treasures or Tiffany glass (from the Haworth Art Gallery in Accrington, for instance) might complement rather than conflict with the setting.
The aims of the Bulldog Trust are threefold: to raise awareness of the unknown riches in the country’s regional art galleries; to promote the architectural wonders of Two Temple Place; and to encourage and provide opportunities for up-and-coming curatorial talent to organise exhibitions. I can see that the last objective fits neatly with the trust’s educational work, but I fear that it may bring a certain timidity to the exhibition programme. Why not also employ, from time to time, independent scholars of more experience than the up-and-coming, men and women who in these times of swingeing cutbacks may no longer be employed by other museums? Two Temple Place is such a remarkable cultural asset that it deserves the very best, and youth is no substitute for hard-earned knowledge and the wisdom of experience.
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