Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, Britain experienced the foundation of an unprecedented number of societies, funds, trusts and publications concerned with the promulgation of art. Not a year passed without some group of high-minded people meeting in a room to pass a resolution or formulate a course of action to further the cause of the display, collecting or safekeeping of works of art. At the same time, a series of superb historical exhibitions highlighted the riches of British private collections. New galleries opened to the public at the Wallace Collection in 1900 and, in strong contrast, the Whitechapel in 1901 as well as several dealers promoting art, old and new. The National Portrait Gallery escaped from Bethnal Green to its present home in St Martin's Place. Public interest was fired in 1905 when the directorships of the British Museum, the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum all became vacant, a coincidence leading to much discussion on the roles of directors, trustees and their relation to government. Two years earlier The Burlington Magazine had been founded in a spirit of protest at the unaccountable lack in Britain of a serious journal devoted to the history of art. And in the same year, with an overlapping cast of characters, came the National Art-Collections Fund whose centenary has been celebrated throughout the country with exhibi tions all through the year culminating in the current spec tacular Saved at London's Hayward Gallery.1
François dieussart is celebrated for the large number of portrait heads he made of the princes of northern Europe between 1636 and 1661.1 However, the preceding period, in which he spent around fifteen years in Rome before moving to England, is much less well documented. As with many foreign artists in Italy, no securely attributed works from his Italian period have been discovered, and the Italian activities of this Walloon artist were known only through archival references.2
D.H. Lawrence had a great interest in painting and several of his novels feature artists, dealers and collectors, while many works of art are used emblematically in his fiction; throughout his life he wrote critical pieces on the practice of painting, and he was also something of a painter himself, his exhibition at the Warren Gallery, London, in 1929 creating a succes de scandale. He seems, however, to have had much less interest in sculpture. With the possible exception of Greek sculpture,1 he claimed that he found painting 'so much subtler'.2 Sculpture, he told Mark Gertler in 1917, was 'the lowest of the arts'3 and 'never quite satisfies me' because 'it is not sufficiently abstracted' and therefore 'frustrates the clarity of conception'.4 Consequently, sculptors and sculpture rarely appear in his writing. The major exception is their prominent appearance in what is perhaps his most significant modernist novel, Women in Love.5
In the 1520s in Rome, Cardinal Andrea Della Valle (1463-1534) built an extraordinary 'hanging garden' to house his collection of ancient sculpture (Figs. 19 and 20). The resulting display - the largest of its date in Rome - was an inventive and bold statement that made Delia Valle's passion for antique art an essential element of his public image. Poets wrote odes in its honour, artists visited to sketch the collection, and images of Delia Valle's antiquities and their setting were circulated in prints. The statue court influenced the display of sculpture in Rome for generations to come, most noticeably the garden facades of the Villa Medici and the Villa Borghese, where ancient sculptures were immured in similarly triumphal displays.1
Shorn of its crowning palm and laurel trees and removed from the Abbey itself in 1930 when it was shoehorned into the entrance to the west cloister, the monument to Captain James Cornewall (1699-1744) by Sir Robert Taylor (1714-88) today attracts little attention.
