Old Masters from the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

AuthorSHAWE-TAYLOR, DESMOND
PositionA British collection comes to America - Brief Article

Ninety European masterpieces--many of which have never been shown in the U.S.--provide a rich overview of 17th- and 18th-century painting.

The Dulwich Picture Gallery, located a few miles outside central London, is England's oldest public art gallery, dating back to the early 19th century, and home to one of the finest collections of Old Master painting in Britain. Its formation is closely linked with the lives of Noel Desenfans and Francis Bourgeois, picture dealers who were commissioned by Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski, the last king of Poland, to assemble a collection of Old Master paintings for the creation of a national gallery.

Due to the King's forced abdication in 1795 as a result of Russia, Prussia, and Austria's partitioning of Poland, the paintings never reached Warsaw, leaving Desenfans and Bourgeois with more than 180 exceptional paintings in their possession. After opening the collection to public view from his home in London, Desenfans willed these pictures to Bourgeois, who bequeathed them to Dulwich College. Desenfans also left an endowment for the construction of a gallery, with the stipulation that the noted architect Sir John Soane design the building.

It was the founders' intention that their paintings should act as a "national gallery," offering a complete view of Old Master painting. As the canon has expanded, this view has come to seem partial--covering only European painting of the 17th and 18th centuries. Within this important period in European painting, however, the Dulwich collection has a scope, breadth of taste, and coherence associated with the great royal collections and national galleries of the world.

The Gallery's setting is as singular as the works it holds, residing within a garden next to the original Jacobean quadrangle of Old Dulwich College, in the heart of Dulwich Village, an oasis of parks, playing fields, and Georgian houses. The Gallery has been closed since January, 1999, undergoing an ambitious renovation, and will reopen in May 2000 with a refurbished building and new amenities.

While this necessary refurbishment has kept the Gallery's works from public view, American audiences will have the rare opportunity to savor the best of the collection in an exhibition organized by The American Federation of Arts and the Gallery. The largest and most important group of paintings includes 90 European masterpieces--many of which have never been shown in the U.S.--and provides a rich overview of...

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