News Intelligence Analysis
Observer
Raiders of the Lost Art
Less than a fifth of our public paintings
ever see the light of day - the others languish in dusty boxes
in backrooms and attics. But one man aims to change all that.
Andrew Ellis tells Tim Adams how he and his team are putting
art's missing masterpieces back in the frame
Tim Adams
Sunday December 4, 2005
For much of the past year I have had beside my bed a little
pile of volumes from an extraordinary series of books. The books
are full of photographs of oil paintings, each four times the
size of a postage stamp, reproduced in perfect colour in rows
and columns. Each of the books takes as its subject a county
of England, or in a few cases a notable gallery or institution,
and collects and annotates every single painting available there
to the public. As well as hanging in named galleries, the paintings
come from town halls and public libraries, railway stations and
hospitals; many were unearthed in basements or on unwalked corridors.
Some are badges of civic pride, others spectacular local investments.
The paintings in each volume number well over 2,000, but only
one in five are ever on display.
As well as being testament to the depth and quality of painting
up and down the country, a Monet in Southampton, a great trove
of Stanley Spencers in Leeds, there is something about the books
that makes them irresistible to late-night browsing. The juxtaposition
brings unusual life to the paintings: organised alphabetically,
there are odd portraits of mayors next to brilliant efforts of
the local avant garde; old masters and unexpected Impressionists
side by side with careful local views and extravagant seascapes.
In the West Yorkshire catalogue, portraits by Gainsborough share
a page with those by George Garrard, A Gardener at Bramham; two
Wyndham Lewises are sandwiched between the evocative village
greens of Maurice Levis and the gypsy family of Neville Lewis.
The portraits in particular ask to be placed into little local
class structures; familial snobberies emerge; longburied jealousies
and sexual intrigues smoulder.
In this sense, the catalogues are both wonderful social histories and crammed full of small-scale artistic discoveries. You find yourself building little stories up about both painters and subjects; armchair travelling around places you might normally only drive through. It is like flicking through Pevsner's counties without the small print; as English as the shipping forecast or Marmite.
The books are created by something called the Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF). It may sound a suitably august institution, but in fact it is the effort of three or four passionate enthusiasts. The project has set itself the daunting task of cataloguing over the coming six years every oil painting that the nation owns, and will plough any profit it may make from that enterprise back into the restoration and display of that work. Eventually the paintings will be available as a unique online archive.
The foundation lives on a subsistence budget. It receives no public finance, and has been rejected for funding by the Lottery on the bizarre grounds that its work does not constitute National Heritage. As a result there is a precariousness about the books. One volume tends to help pay for the next. West Yorkshire props up East Sussex; The Slade School of Art will bail out Cornwall; Norfolk waits at the printers until Kent has sold a few copies, and so on. Eighty books are planned; seven have made it into print.
Conversations with the people involved in the project tend to be prefaced by worries about where the money is coming from, and bright hopes that the Lord Lieutenant might cough up a few hundred pounds, or a local businessman might see the value in the books as gifts to friends or clients. This worry extends to the little teams (of two) who are trawling individual counties, scouring museum cellars and attics, shining torches into the darkest corners of our artistic legacy and trying to put names and dates and faces to what they find.
I discovered a couple of these art detectives in Fairfax House at York, a stately restored rococo home near Castlegate. It was a little like chancing upon a scene from Jane Austen. Lucy Denton was sitting on a gilt chair taking notes and making judgments about a roomful of portraits of the Fairfax family, who made their money out of Terry's chocolate, and who had once lived here. Norman Taylor was up a ladder trying to get the light right for a photograph of one of the family's daughters, taking as much care as he might if she were sitting in front of him, adjusting her decolletage.
Lucy used to work at Sotheby's, but she had been in Yorkshire for a while, recuperating from a serious illness, and this perfect job had come along to keep her going. Norman had spent most of his 40year career as an industrial photographer, but now that 'most of the machines were idle and the factories closed' he'd turned to the art world.
On a good day Lucy and Norman could photograph and catalogue 40 or 50 paintings in this way; their record was 62. Sometimes they travelled between places that had two or three paintings, near Catterick or Thirsk, and got a bit bogged down in questions of attribution and the swapping of stories with would-be curators. At Sotheby's, Lucy specialised in 17th- and 18th-century British painting, but for this, she said, she really needed to know a little bit about everything. At Fairfax House she found a wonderful 16th-century Flemish Madonna attributed to Jan Matsys as well as Dutch landscapes and local views, and various Fairfaxes staring coolly across the room at each other.
Here, most of the paintings came with a documented history, but elsewhere there had been one or two surprises. 'A Van Gogh under the floorboards won't happen,' Lucy says, not entirely devoid of hope, 'but something a bit more obscure is likely.' The West Yorkshire volume had already identified two paintings that may turn out to be Van Dycks.
The fascination for Lucy and Norman, in different ways, lies in both the quality and the provinciality of some of the finds. There were several paintings in each volume, Lucy suggested, that would sit happily in any national gallery in the world, while the parochial interpretation of major movements in art was endlessly intriguing. Seen in their local light, even cruder paintings become valuably 'naive'. Lucy and Norman have come to love the work of local sign painters who in their travels would dash off portraits for a free supper.
At first, Lucy suggests, a few of the institutions, fire stations or even town halls were reluctant to open their doors to the foundation because of embarrassment at the condition of their paintings, and a lack of knowledge of what they had. In several instances canvases were found rolled up or hanging from stretchers, casualties of changing fashion and lack of wall space. Norman in particular felt sorry for some of the local mayors, sitting so proudly for posterity and so quickly confined to attics, though in some cases this neglect was justified. At least one mayor they discovered had been rubbed out of local history for financial improprieties.
I am sure that the clutch of lord mayors I met the following week in Lewes was entirely blameless in this regard. They had come along for the launch of the East Sussex volume of the catalogue at a local auction house, Gorringe's, and were all blinged up in their ceremonial chains. They joked a bit about the collective noun for such a gathering - a dazzle, maybe, or a pomp. One current mayor remarked out of the side of his mouth that past holders of the office were not really entitled to wear their robes, but no one seemed to mind too much. On the walls of the auction house, there was a little exhibition celebrating some of the treasures unearthed from the local galleries, which boast a Poussin and several Sickerts as well as never displayed work by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. The mayors wandered among them with a proprietorial interest.
The evening had been organised by Andrew Ellis, chief executive of the PCF, who works out of a little office at the National Gallery. His speech, inevitably a bit of a fundraiser, was well received by the audience, who smiled at his urbane huckstering and mostly kept their hands subconsciously in their pockets.
Ellis is the formidable force behind the catalogues. He is also the representative on earth of Dr Fred Hohler, who came up with the idea. Hohler had arrived at the Lewes launch from Florence, where he has been studying drawing for a month or two each year, 'learning the method of Velasquez and Titian, or a version of it anyway'. He was a career diplomat and a director at Hambro's bank before he decided to follow his real passion. It was probably in his genes: his father was a teacher at the Courtauld Institute, though until recently he himself 'could not sharpen a pencil'.
The idea for his grand project had its own Eureka moment. He was in Australia, for his eldest daughter's wedding. 'We were sent by the newlyweds on a tour of Victoria. We got to a place called Ballarat. My wife went shopping. I was sitting there under a gum tree trying to work out what one does with a free day in Ballarat when I saw a sign across the way that read "art gallery". I thought: pull the other one.' But he went in, and was more than surprised by what he found. 'There were some really good paintings there. The town had obviously acquired some things to enhance its importance, make itself respectable. And I thought: if it's like this in Ballarat, what must it be like back home?'
Thereafter, wherever he was in England, Hohler would spend an hour in local galleries. Invariably there were extraordinary collections of things, but whenever he asked for a proper catalogue he was told that no one had ever managed to make one. One day he was in Cambridge, sitting out under the equivalent of a gum tree on the Backs, when he spied a sign for the Fitzwilliam Art Gallery. In he went. 'It just knocked my socks off!' he recalls. 'Most countries would be more than proud to have that as their national gallery.' He asked for a comprehensive catalogue and was presented with a mimeographed list from the Ministry of Public Works, unillustrated, and dated 1961.
At this point Hohler turned to his fellow gallerygoers and called for their attention. 'If there were available for sale a catalogue of the paintings,' he asked loudly, 'would any of you want to buy it?' A good number of people put their hands up. That was about as close as he came to market research.
He went to the woman on the desk and said: take me to your curator. From the curator he heard a familiar story: there wasn't the time or the resources for a catalogue and all the paintings on display represented only an eighth of what the museum held. No one really knew what they had. And so the idea was born. Hohler canvassed opinion among various former students of his father, including Alan Borg, former director of the V&A. All of them said it was impossible. And so off he went.
Charles Saumarez Smith, director of the National Gallery, has been a great help offering time and resources and has been excited by the range of paintings so far. And each time a new volume comes out they feel they might be reaching a critical mass, that institutions and, God forbid, Heritage Lottery Fund managers might see the worth of it. Hohler also imagines using the catalogues as an educational resource. 'We are trying to do a test programme with primary schools, to see if learning to draw properly can affect children's mood and their behaviour. They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But if you are not able to behold these things that are held in collections all around you, how will you know?'
Hohler has had a lot of interest from other European nations wondering if they can get a similar project off the ground. He dreams of a continentwide catalogue of every painting: 'Imagine what a resource that would be!'
In the meantime, he is happy with more local pleasures, while never for a moment imagining his Herculean project will not come to fruition, somehow. 'The main thing is that it is bloody good fun,' he says. 'What other job in life can you go around just poking around looking at pictures? I was in Ramsgate, and instead of turning right out of this one room I turned left and suddenly I spotted a Rowlandson print: very naughty, two large ladies being tossed about in a bathing machine, arms and legs everywhere, and I thought: that's rather wizard! And I looked a bit more. And I realised what I was looking at was not a print but the original.' He laughs. 'We only need one of those a month and it will keep the blood flowing!'
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
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