At any one time eighty per cent of the art owned by Britain’s many museums and public art galleries will find itself hidden away in storage. And once it is, it can stay there for years. Yet in these vaults are a wealth of treasures. It’s why I recently launched ‘Everyone’s Art’, which has a simple premise: to get these works out of the storeroom and into community centres, libraries, churches, village halls and schools, so their makers, and what they made, can finally be celebrated.
Consider Henry Bright, a friend of the critic, writer and painter John Ruskin. Ruskin paid for Bright to accompany Turner on many of his sketching expeditions, where he was encouraged to paint what he saw. Bright possessed a boundless talent for rendering, with complete fidelity, the true character of the sea and sky at Yarmouth or on the Norfolk Broads. Despite the bewitching quality of these pictures, exhibitions featuring his work are extremely rare – though a few might be thrown into a show about Turner every now and again.
A whole generation of confident, original, versatile painters – William Mulready, James Ward, John Sell Cotman, as well as Bright – thrived in the shadow of Turner and Constable. There are several reasons for the neglect of artists such as these: lack of space, staff redundancies, the need for shows to make a profit; when a painter slips into oblivion it rarely has much to do with the work they made.
Consider the London painter Paul Maitland. Ask someone to think of the art of the capital and it will be the great names of impressionism that might first come to mind: Monet or Pissarro.
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