Picture galleries outside London: Brighton Art Gallery and Museum

Contemporary Review, Dec, 1998 by Donald Bruce

Eclectic as the selection is, the tiny sample in the Ceramics Room is completed by Hogarth's portrait of a bold-faced servant-girl, Shamela rather than Pamela, in mob-cap and smock. She reappears in his sketch at the Tate Gallery of the six servants he packed into his small house at Chiswick. Aert van der Neer's Dutch Winter Scene in the teashop gallery is probably nearer the truth than Avercamp's joyous representations of the same subject. Villagers glumly patrol a sheet of grey ice flossed with snow, whilst a hunting hound pads through the lugubrious fog; the canine equivalent of a visitor lost in the dim and shapeless display at Brighton.

Sadly, Brighton is not alone in hiding away its masterpieces from its permanent collection in order to find room for modish temporary exhibitions. In recent months the Tate Gallery itself has set a deplorable example. The absurdly named and dismally situated Beecroft Gallery at Southend shows its remarkable collection of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings only to visiting scholars. At Southampton Art Gallery pictures have been consigned to the store-room although bought (as stipulated by its open-handed founder Robert Chipperfield) on the advice of Kenneth Clark and his successors as Directors of the London National Gallery. The public has been deprived of its legitimate heritage. A clue to the ascendancy of the Walker Gallery in Liverpool is to be found in the dedication of its guidebook to 'The memory of all our donors, in gratitude for their generosity and for the resultant pleasure given to the thousands of ordinary people who come to the Walker each year'.

Most custodians know the difference between a Museum and Art Gallery and an inchoate Museum-cum-Art Gallery; not, admittedly, the trustees of the Holburne Museum and teashop at Bath, which is now and almost deservedly penniless as a result of moving out paintings in order to heap up, in an undifferentiated space, china and landscapes, silverware and portraits, mythographies and gateaux, Old Masters and a pottery workshop. The Holburne Museum is not a civic institution. The Brighton Gallery, on the contrary, can draw upon the conscripted bounty of the local ratepayers, channelled through their corporation. In addition, the Dome management is on the point of receiving about [pounds]22,000,000 from the Arts Council for a concert hall which may further curtail the space for the internationally important collection of pictures donated by past benefactors. One hopes that the grant from the Arts Council will also provide, indirectly, the means for restoring the picture gallery as it was in the period from 1903 to 1974. Otherwise a trust, enjoined by the philanthropic past, will be broken to the shame of the historic County Borough of Brighton.

The Brighton Museum and Art Gallery is closed on Wednesdays. Otherwise it is open from 10.00 to 17.00 on weekdays and from 14.00 to 17.00 on Sundays. The telephone number is 01273. 290900.

The next article in this series will be on the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.