The agony and the ecstasy
A small group of paintings demonstrates how important a regional collection can be, says Mary Miers
IN style, display and location, the Wallace Collection in London and the Bowes Museum in Co Durham might appear to have little in common. Yet the two museums share much that makes them ideal partners—both for collaborating on small, focused exhibitions such as this one and for furthering research and scholarship.
Each owes its existence to a scion of the British aristocracy, who lived in Paris in the mid 19th century and built up a collection that included riches that had recently come out of Spain and were being sold in Paris and London.
The 4th Marquess of Hertford, whose collection would be bequeathed to the nation by the widow of his illegitimate son, Sir Richard Wallace, in 1897, reflected in his early collecting a taste for the Golden Age of Spanish painting, then highly fashionable. Armed with an immense fortune, the reclusive connoisseur began to buy up expensive works, notably, from 1843, paintings by the most desirable Spanish master, Murillo, followed by other artists such as Velázquez and Cano.
Less easily digestible were many of the Spanish works pur- chased by John and Joséphine Bowes, both devout Roman Catholics drawn to the intensity of religious scenes painted mostly for churches and monasteries. Unlike the Marquess’s, theirs was not a private indulgence, but one conceived for the benefit of the north-east of England, where Bowes, the illegitimate son of the 10th Earl of Strathmore, had been born in 1811. Having sold their French château in about 1860, they started building up an art collection and planning a vast Renaissance château at Barnard Castle as a public museum.
The core of their Spanish holdings, outstanding but little known, owes much to Spain’s dissolution of its monasteries in 1835–37. Many works that were not taken for the Prado and other museums found their way onto the market, in this case via the Conde de Quinto, who, as administrator of the Museo de la Trinidad in Madrid, had managed to siphon off some of the confiscated paintings for himself. After his death in 1860, his widow needed to sell and the
Bowes’s Parisian dealer, Benjamin Gogué, persuaded them to invest in this unfashionable end of the Spanish art market, negotiating for them very reasonable prices.
It is the cream of this collection—13 works carefully selected by Spanish art specialist Xavier Bray, director of the Wallace Collection—that can now be viewed in London, some for the first time. The exhibition is free and provides a rare opportunity for visitors to the Wallace Collection to compare the very different tastes in Spanish art of the contemporary 19th-century English collectors. Most of the paintings from the Bowes museum are by artists rarely seen in British museums, but the stars of the show, hanging opposite each other in the same room, are El Greco’s powerfully expressionist The Tears of St Peter (1580s) and a superb portrait by Goya of his friend, the ilustrados poet Juan Antonio Meléndez Valdés, painted more than 200 years later.
It’s difficult to believe that El Greco and Goya had little appeal for the Boweses; they bought the paintings simply because the prescient Gogué advised: ‘I think you might as well take one of each of them for your collection.’
The El Greco is the earliest of at least six versions, indicating the artist’s popularity in the 1580s and the significance of his penitential theme. By 1869, the Boweses were able to pick it up for the equivalent of just £8.
The daring juxtaposition of works is complemented by the hang, which allows them to be seen close-to and brilliantly lit against dark walls, without the distracting reflections of pro- tective glass, which has been temporarily removed. The inner gallery feels church-like, with Antolínez’s swirling pink-andblue Immaculate Conception dominating the end wall like an altarpiece, flanked by religious subjects by artists little known in Britain.
These include Pereda y Salgado’s vibrant and marvellously detailed Tobias Restoring his Father’s Sight, Coello’s penetrating portrait of Mariana, the Queen Regent, dressed as a nun and a dramatically lit The Martyrdom of Saint Andrew by Tristán, which shows the influence of El Greco on his pupil.
The catalogue charts changing attitudes to these works, some of which cannot be attributed with certainty. Could the tilted face of the Virgin in the final painting, Mr Bray wonders, be an early study by Goya, perhaps as a preparatory sketch for an altarpiece?
Sadly, neither John or Joséphine Bowes lived to see the completion of their northern palace of the arts. They would have been proud to celebrate its 125th anniversary this year by showing to London audiences how fine a provincial art collection can be.
‘El Greco to Goya—spanish Masterpieces from The Bowes Museum’ is at the Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, London W1, until January 7 (www. wallacecollection.org; 020– 7563 9500)
Next week: ‘The Business of Prints’ at the British Museum
‘The cream of this collection can be viewed free in London ’