Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Many art lovers who visit London never get to see one of its artistic gems, namely the Dulwich Picture Gallery which lies a few miles away from the centre which has several world-famous galleries including the National Gallery, Tate Britain and Tate Modern. If time is pressing, making the trip to Dulwich is probably not advisable, but if the time can be spared it is an expedition that is well worth the effort.

History of the Gallery

Dulwich Picture Gallery has the distinction of being the oldest public art gallery in England, having been opened in 1817 which was seven years before the National Gallery. The history of the gallery is remarkable, because it should never have been here in the first place.

In 1790 Prince Michal Poniatowski, brother of the King of Poland, commissioned a London-based art dealer, Noel Desenfans, to acquire pictures that would be suitable for a royal collection. He got to work and spent five years doing deals to gather pictures fit for a king. However, in 1795 Poland disappeared off the map when it was partitioned between Austria, Prussia and Russia and the King was forced to abdicate. This left Noel Desenfans with a collection of pictures and no-one to sell them to.

Desenfans got to know another art dealer, Francis Bourgeois, who added to the collection (at Desenfans’s expense). When Desenfans died in 1807, Bourgeois had the idea of establishing a public gallery for displaying the pictures, with the further idea that these would be owned by Dulwich College after his death. His asked his friend, the architect Sir John Soane, to design a suitable building close to the College.

Bourgeois died in 1811, but there was not enough money in his will to build the gallery. However, Noel Desanfans’s widow came up with the rest of the cash and the project went ahead.

The Gallery building

There can be very few public art galleries in the world (if any) that contain at their heart a mausoleum in which lie the founders’ coffined remains, but that is the case at Dulwich Picture Gallery. The visitor can see the three coffins (of Bourgeois and Mr and Mrs Desenfans) in a small stone space into which yellow light pours from the skylight above. It is a very strange experience!

Soane designed a gallery that is not huge but is very user-friendly, being all on one floor and comprising a row of five linked spaces with just a few side rooms. There is a parallel gallery that runs the whole length and which is used for temporary exhibits.

Despite knowing the size of the collection (370 paintings) Soane did not provide enough space for everything to be displayed at the same time. This is not a huge disadvantage because it means that the collection is frequently rotated and the returning visitor has a good chance of seeing something that is new to them.

The art collection

So what about the art? The collection made by the founders concentrated very much on 17th and 18th century art, especially that from Italy, France and the Low Countries. Later gifts and bequests were responsible for virtually all the British art now seen in the collection.

When walking round the gallery and reading the highly informative plaques on the walls, one gets the impression that some of the sellers must have seen Bourgeois and Desanfans coming! This is because a number of the paintings which the founders obviously thought were by Titian or Rembrandt (for example) have later been shown to be by artists trained by or working under the instruction of the masters. That is not to say that they are not very fine works in their own right, but they are not entirely “kosher”. In the founders’ defence, it must be stressed that it is only the use of modern techniques that has revealed the truth about some of the paintings they collected. It should also be said that the gallery contains many paintings that are genuine originals by major artists and are of international importance.

Another oddity of the collection is that Bourgeois fancied himself as an art restorer and he sometimes took it upon himself to “improve” an artist’s work by adding an extra strip of canvas at the top, bottom or side of a painting, which he then painted accordingly, so that a pair of paintings by the same artist would appear symmetrical on the wall, or a painting would fit the frame he happened to have available, no matter how this affected the balance of the work as originally envisaged by the artist. Some of these additions have been removed in later restorations but others have stayed put.

The trip out to Dulwich – the nearest rail stations are a 10-15 minute walk away – should not be rushed. This is a well-to-do inner London suburb that is a pleasure to walk through. The gallery is set in a small park of its own that contains several modern sculptures and places to eat one’s sandwiches and watch the squirrels!

© John Welford