BID TO KEEP PAINTING AT HOME
Boost for appeal to buy Moore masterpiece
SHOWING A young woman lost in thought, sitting on an elaborately inlaid ivory chair, it is an example of one of his generation’s leading artists at the peak of powers.
A Reverie was created by Yorkborn painter Albert Moore in 1892, a year before his death, and praised for its beauty as well as the “extraordinary care” taken over its details.
The masterpiece is perhaps the most important of his paintings still in private hands and has a price tag to match, with £3.6m needed to buy the piece for the public from its current international owner.
Earlier this year, York Art Gallery launched a campaign to acquire the work “so it stays in the city for generations of visitors to enjoy”. And yesterday the bid moved a significant step forward with the announcement that the Friends of York Art Gallery had made a donation of £180,000 towards the project.
The donation, which includes bequests of £160,000 and £20,000, will be put towards the total needed to buy the painting, and the group has also agreed to continue to raise money to help the gallery reach its target.
A Reverie is currently on show in the York gallery as part
of Albert Moore: Of Beauty and
Aesthetics, the first monographic exhibition of Moore’s work since a memorial exhibition in 1894, a year after his death.
Peter Gibbard, chairman of the friends group, said: “A
Reverie is quintessential Moore, a stunning masterpiece of design and execution. Because of Moore’s painstaking working methods, he produced a comparatively small number of paintings. Very few now remain outside museums and this may be the last opportunity for York Art Gallery to secure one of this quality and size, which the leading Moore scholar Robyn Asleson calls ‘perhaps his most important picture still in private hands’.
“We are proud to support this campaign to try and ensure it has a permanent home in York where it would honour the memory of a great Yorkshireman.”
Rebecca Williams, fundraising manager for York Museums Trust, said: “We are thrilled that the Friends of York Art Gallery have made such a significant pledge towards the purchase of this hugely important work.
“It is incredibly important to have the support of organisations in the city like the Friends, so we can show there is a real appetite for this wonderful painting to have a permanent home here in York, Moore’s home city.”
A Reverie shows a young woman, relaxed in pose, deep in thought. She is draped in apricot and fawn and wears a double row of beads and a cap. A critic from
The Times described the work as “beautiful” and added: “A Reverie is as might be expected from Mr Moore, the figure of a girl in a Greek dress, and thus far it does not differ essentially from scores of other pictures by him.
“But the extraordinary care which he has employed upon the details of the picture, upon the pearl-inlaid chair in which the girl is seated, upon the hangings and the floor, mark out the work as something exceptional.
“Few painters move within so narrow a range as Mr Albert Moore, but few also attain so much perfection within it.”
The painting is being sold by Agnews Gallery in London. York Art Gallery staff are now applying to funding bodies including the Heritage Lottery Fund but would welcome public donations. For more information email Rebecca. williams@ymt.org.uk.