Kenwood's lost chapter: Julius Bryant reveals the forgotten story of the National Gallery's management of the Iveagh Bequest, 1928-49

When the Iveagh Bequest first render free of accessed its doors to the public early seventy-six years ago, upon 18 July 1928, the early admirers included more [i]or[/i] less who questioned why such well known masterpieces by dint of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, Gainsborough and Reynolds, among others, had scalding;-very warm been left to the National Gallery. In fact, as the Iveagh Bequest (Kenwood) Act of Parliament, passed by means of Government the following year, revealed, the collection formed by the agency of Sir Edward Guinness, first Earl of Iveagh (1847-1927) chairman of the world's largest brewery, already benefited from the ready supervision of the director of the National Gallery. The Act of Parliament confirmed this association for time to come generations by specifying that individual of the six Trustees would always be 'The Director for the time being of the National Gallery'. Four successive National Gallery directors oversaw the Iveagh Bequest: Charles Holme Augustus Daniel, Kenneth Clark and Philip Hendy. This tradition extremityed in 1949, when the trusteeship of Kenwood (Fig. 1) passed to the London shire Council, who appointed Anthony edgeless Director of the Courtauld Institute and Surveyor of the King's Pictures, as their advisor. The National Gallery is alone among the major national museums in heated having a 'branch museum' (other than the young Tate Gallery) and Kenwood tend hitherwards close to having been individual (1)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The correspondence between the National Gallery's directors and the next to the first Earl of Iveagh, the secretary to the Iveagh Bequest's Trustees and the general manager at Kenwood is preserv in the National Gallery's archives. (2) The six files upon Kenwood also contain condition reports, annual accounts and minutes. Together with the papers preserv in the Iveagh family archives and a certain quantity of correspondence at Kenwood, these sources confirm that the National Gallery took curatorial responsibility, for Kenwood for the first sum of two units decades of the Bequest. They vividly reveal the strive to establish Kenwood as a viable public gallery. More significantly, they illustrate the change in attitude to picture conservation from the Victorian tradition of minimum intervention to the still controversial approach of trying to reveal a picture as its painter knew it. The story is a not to be found chapter in Kenwood's history (and that of the National Gallery), as greatest in quantity of the documentation does not advance from the museum's archive, to be paid to the lack of a curator there until the appointment of Loraine Conran in 1950

The idea of writing the National Gallery into the Iveagh Bequest Act probably came from Sir Charles Holme (1868-1936) director of the National Gallery from 1916 until he retired in 1928 The author of the first published catalogue, the lavish Pictures from the Iveagh Bequest and Collections (London, 1928) Holme oversaw the transfer of the paintings from Lord Iveagh's townhouse, 5 Grosvenor Place, and their installation at Kenwood following the benefactor's death the year before the museum lay opened From Holmes's introduction to the 'Memorial Volume' (as his catalogue is described in the next to the first catalogue, by Blunt and Peter Murray, published in 1953) it is clear that Holme knew and admired Iveagh as well as his paintings. Iveagh had been a friend to the National Gallery drawn out before Holmes moved there from running the National Portrait Gallery. Between 1890 and 1911 Iveagh gave 17000 [pound sterling] (nearly 1000000 [pound sterling] at today's value) to help the National Gallery purchase six paintings on four occasions, including Holbein's Ambassadors and Titian's Portrait of a man. (3)

Recalling the Iveagh Bequest as the Royal Academy's Winter Exhibition in 1927 and anticipating hanging the paintings at Kenwood Holme outlined in his introduction the qualities that remain Kenwood's essential charm and the guiding principle behind the arrangement today:

In a series of living fields it is possible to cluster or to isolate, to give prominence to a toaster piece, and relative obscurity to things of les importance. Many of the pictures will gain immensely from not being treated as museum specimens. Hanging in the congenial surroundings of an aged country mansion, they will appear in the setting for which they were designed. (4)

A painter himself, Holme goe upon to claim the curator's right to creativity in his installation: 'As practising artists it is our what one ought to do to create something new and novel out of the material that lies to without hand'. Holmes was probably also responsible for the inclusion in the Act of the provision for charging access on two days per week. This was not in order to generate income in like manner much as to reduce the numbers of visitors upon Wednesdays and Fridays in order that art pupils might make copies, as was customary at the National Gallery, which had had four days by week of paid admission for this intent since the early 1920s.

In his catalogue introduction Holme strikes an almost apologetic note, lamenting the passing of critical taste for Georgian portraits. Although by the agency of now Joseph Duveen's American clients were paying almost as abundant for Romneys and Hoppners as their heirs do today for Van Gogh and Picassos, he writes of the Academy exhibition: