The wrong impression

Mowers by Charles-Emile Jacque. Not a signpost on the way to Impressionism.

5 April 2012

Roll up! Roll up! New exhibition at the Wallace Collection! At the Wallace Collection? At the place that all who know it well want to keep to themselves as a haven shut off from the itinerant hoi polloi of London's grungy tourist trade? What is the director thinking of with this circus-barker business promising a "spectacular exhibition" of the birth of Impressionism, the "major outcome of an exciting new partnership between the Wallace Collection and the Bowes Museum", 300 miles away in the wilds of Teesdale?

Are these two sleepy old ladies of our museum world really kicking up their heels in a careless cancan to attract more visitors?

Of visitor numbers at the Bowes Museum I know nothing. I know only that I have done my duty by it in the past, and at the risk of offending the denizens of Durham, in which county it just is, and Yorkshire, Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumberland, in which counties any southerner might reasonably guess it to be, I am inclined to say that it is in entirely the wrong place and deserves to be removed lock, stock and barrel, to Buckinghamshire or Berkshire.

I observe, in passing, that the Bowes Museum is in Durham only by chance - John Bowes and Josephine, his French wife, a comedy actress and, though only the daughter of a watchmaker, the Comtesse de Montalbo, originally intended it to be in Calais.

A day's journey away from the metropolis, a day's journey back, and a day of hard, aesthetic work if the fine things in this "Wallace Collection of the North" are to be absorbed, means spending two nights on lumpy mattresses and eating Yorkshire pudding.

Utterly incongruous and inappropriate in its moorland setting, this Louvre-like chateau contains wonderful ceramics, particularly from Meissen and Sevres, fine glass, fine tapestries, indifferent furniture and more than a thousand paintings, by Tiepolo, Goya, El Greco, Boucher, Giordano, Sassetta, Oudry and all sorts of rarities and obscurities.

It is from among these last, the obscurities, that the Wallace Collection has borrowed 21 of the 26 small paintings that form its latest "spectacular exhibition ... illustrating the story of how this popular artistic movement (Impressionism) was born in 19th century France".

Here, I admit, is a respectable landscape at Ornans by Courbet (one of many), a trifle too late in the day, the light dying amid dense and almost opaque dark greens, with not a hint of Impressionism in it.

Here is a beach scene at low tide by Boudin (one of many), again so late in the day that one wonders why the silly women still shelter under parasols when not a hint of sunlight can be seen - indeed, the sky is grey enough to suggest imminent rain, and the dreary little thing looks more like Herne Bay or Whitstable when the tide is out, or even the Medway muds.

We all know that Monet, early sat at Boudin's knee, but this wretched example hardly makes that point.

And here, too, is a still-life (one of many) by Fantin-Latour who, though more a Symbolist, was at least on the fringe of Impressionism, but it is a disjointed composition, with one viewpoint for a vase of flowers and another for fruit that has tumbled from an upturned basket.

In the narcissi, the handling of paint is swift and assured, but it is with a hesitant weaving of brushstrokes into unlikely textures that Fantin-Latour struggled to communicate the forms of pears and apples. Was there ever an uglier example of this usually accomplished artist's work? It is more on the road to Cubism than Impressionism.

And we have too a little Corot (one of many), an absolutely typical thing of wispy trees against the light, two cows and a peasant woman wearing Corot's essential touch of red to set the subtle greens alive.

With these four paintings put aside as irrelevant, what have we left? We have more little landscapes the size of postcards and ladies' pocket handkerchiefs. Charmed by his appalling syntax, I shall quote the distinguished art historian Ellis Waterhouse, writing of the Bowes Museum 40 years ago: "There are at least half a dozen painters represented in this exhibition which anyone might be forgiven for knowing nothing about." Try Anastasi, Cals, Dauzats, Deshayes, Flers, Jacque, Legrip, Michallon, Monticelli, Noel, Valenciennes and Ziem.

Of these, some of us know Michallon and Valenciennes as very late painters in the classical tradition of Nicholas Poussin, though two centuries behind the time, with tentative hints of realism, at least in observation; but nothing about them suggests incipient Impressionism.

Of Monticelli, some may recall that Van Gogh expressed enthusiasm for his rich colour thickly and energetically curdling on the canvas (in the end, habitual and confusing and repellent), but that reaches into Post-Impressionism.

Of the rest, these are precisely the kind of painters whom one discovers, disconsolate on a wet winter afternoon, in the deserted upper rooms of the V&A; these are not there, nor, apart from Ziem, are they in the Wallace Collection, but they are of a type that were last seen on the art market half a century ago at Christie's for 50 guineas each, then sold on for twice as much by small dealers in the warrens of St James's.

Are they worth a second glance? Well, yes - in their own right, for charm, nostalgia and other irrelevant influences on the connoisseur, even for the quality of competence, but not, certainly not, as signposts on The Road to Impressionism.

These are spare-bedroom pictures of absolutely no importance, the visual equivalents of novels left in the lavatories of country houses for constipated guests, and to promote them as having some relevance in the emergence and development of Impressionism is, to put it bluntly, absurd.

Nor does it help the argument to exhibit them with two of the National Gallery's feeblest Impressionist pictures by Renoir and Monet, a shoddy Sisley from Bedford, the paint opaque and dead, and a leaden Pissarro from the Ashmolean in Oxford - auction-room sweepings, the lot of them. Perhaps I may be allowed to reverse the adage "straining at a gnat and letting pass an elephant", for, in this case, the director of the Wallace Collection has strained at an elephant and given birth to a gnat.

If the Collection is to mount ambitious exhibitions, then it must find a space large enough to accommodate them: a vestibule and two rooms small enough to be in a workman's cottage in a Battersea back street, are simply not enough to house anything worthy of the adjective "spectacular".

All the expensive rejigging (some might call it wrecking) of the building to provide a restaurant unpleasantly noisy enough to be a Wagamama but not a proper exhibition space, seems - as with the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and the British Museum - to be the incomprehensible commonplace of museum development today.

I quite see that this exhibition - or rather the propaganda associated with it - is a device to increase the number of visitors to the Wallace Collection, and the director has long striven to raise the figure to a thousand a day, without recognising that doubling the present number will greatly increase the risk of damage and theft (unless she is prepared to double the number of guards) and, at the same time, spoil the very characteristics of calm, unhurried contemplation and genuine Victorian clutter that make the Collection a far pleasanter and more peaceful place to be than the British Museum or the V&A.

The ambition to destroy the sense of period in Manchester Square is a peculiarly contemporary form of madness, much in line with ministerial thinking on the participation of ethnic minorities and success judged by the numbers through the door.

The director of the Collection tells us that The Road to Impressionism is a "wonderful exhibition ... there couldn't be a more appropriate London venue for the show".