well as the establishment of nearly every institution of importance to
art or science in the country, was largely due to the instruction by
example represented in the South Kensington Museum. This institution,
it is important to remember, did not grow out of any desire to heap
curiosities together or to make any popular display; it grew out of a
desire for industrial art culture, and the germ of it was the School of
Design which opened in a room of Somerset House, June 1st, 1837. This
poor little school is now a thing to make fun of. It took over a month
for it to obtain the eight pupils with which it began. The first act
of its regulators seems to have been a rule that “drawing the human
figure shall _not_ be taught to the students.” Haydon insisted that
there could be no training without the human figure. The government did
not want artists, but men who could draw such patterns as should render
it no longer necessary for English manufacturers to go to Lyons and
Paris for such. Etty and Wilkie sat in the council beside silk-weavers
and portly warehousemen. Fine-art students were actually excluded--this
mainly because of the cry that the government would otherwise be
taking bread out of the mouths of private teachers--and the School
of Design in 1842 consisted of 178 pattern-drawers. Schools of a
similar character were gradually established in some of the provincial
manufacturing cities. And there had been about ten years of this sort
of thing when the great Exhibition of 1851-52 took place.
Queen Victoria has described the May day when the Palace of Glass was
opened in Hyde Park as the happiest of her life. She had witnessed one
of those noble victories which leave no tears behind but such as may
welcome glad tidings of good-will, and she had seen her hero wearing
the only crown he coveted--that of success in a great achievement for
European civilization. It is sad indeed that only as a widow does she
live to realize the latest results of that day on her country.
The great Exhibition may be termed, so far as English art is concerned,
the great revolution. Such a display of “florid and gorgeous tinsel,”
to use Redgrave’s description, was never seen, unless in the realms
of King Coffee. The articles from the Continent were glittering and
showy enough, but those of Great Britain outglittered all, exciting
the laughter of cultivated foreigners to such an extent that English
gentlemen were scandalized and abashed without knowing precisely what
was the matter. The Prince Consort, who was especially ashamed at the
general disgust manifested for this tawdry English work, had brought
with him from his careful training in Germany and at Brussels one
excellent habit--that of deferring to the judgment of accomplished men
in matters relating to their own specialties. When he found himself,
as Chief Commissioner of the great Exhibition, the hero of a great
aesthetic failure and of a great financial success--blushing for the
fame of the country which had bestowed its highest honor upon him, and
at the same time contemplating a net surplus of £170,000--the idea took
possession of him that the least the money could do would be to begin
the task of raising English work from the abyss of ugliness which had
been so admirably disclosed; and that idea led him to consult artists
of ability and men of taste, and to mediate between them and her
Majesty’s complacent ministers, whom he managed to rouse into a happy
state of bewilderment, which resulted in action.
The Prince Consort was, during his brief life, a fortunate man in
many respects, but in nothing was he so fortunate as when, inspired
by the best artistic minds in England, he induced the Queen to set
apart some rooms at Marlborough House (now the residence of the Prince
of Wales) for an industrial art collection and for art training, and
when he persuaded her ministers to devote £5000 to the same purpose.
He has thus made the great head-quarters of British art in some sense
his monument. In 1852 the small collection of the School of Design
in Somerset House was removed to Marlborough House, and the Board of
Trade confided to Owen Jones, R. Redgrave, and Lyon Playfair the work
of reorganizing the whole art training of the country. The collection
transferred from Somerset House was trifling enough, but now there were
added a number of articles that had been purchased from the Exhibition,
and a still more remarkable collection, which has a curious history.
After the French Revolution, when the infuriated people were prepared
to destroy not only the _noblesse_, but the works associated with them,
fine cabinets and beautiful china vanished out of Paris. At this time
George IV.’s French cook gathered up a superb collection of old Sèvres
china. This had long been distributed through the English palaces, and
was even used for ordinary table service; it was now, by the Queen’s
order, removed from the various palaces to Marlborough House, where it
was at once recognized as the finest existing collection of a class of
articles which was already exciting that competition among collectors
which at present amounts to a mania. But the Queen’s best loan was
her example. Ministers took up the matter with unwonted courage. Mr.
Henley, of the Board of Trade, secured the Bandiuell pottery, Mr.
Gladstone the Gherardini models, and the precedent was set which has
since added the Bernal, Soulages, Soltikoff, Pourtalès, and other
collections--one of the most curious being that of the Rev. Dr. Bock,
a collection of mediaeval religious vestments. There is a myth still
current that in one or two cases the secret agent of the British Museum
had been bidding for some treasure against the secret agent of South
Kensington; but it has no foundation. Once upon a time the British
Museum and the Tower of London found themselves bidding against each
other for a piece of old armor; but no similar accident could have
occurred under the keen eye of Sir Henry Cole, who from first to last
has been felt in the progress of this museum. Sir Henry developed a
power of getting money for the museum, from the stingiest chancellors,
unknown in the history of the English exchequer. He, with Mr. Richard
Redgrave, explored Italy, and brought back many valuable treasures of
early art.
[Illustration: SIR HENRY COLE, K.C.B.]
In 1854 the first report of the newly-established Department of Science
and Art was laid before Parliament. It was a Blue-book of 642 pages--so
much being required for those interests of the country to which the
Board of Trade had, in 1836, devoted the half of one page. This report
and those which followed bore witness that a new enthusiasm had arisen
in England for recovering its lost arts; but they increasingly proved
also that the collections evoked from their hiding-places were already
overflowing Marlborough House. In one sense this overflowing was of
signal advantage, for it enabled the department to send a collection of
four hundred beautiful specimens as a circulating museum through the
provincial cities and towns--a plan which has been maintained by the
museum, and also by the National Gallery of Fine Arts, with excellent
results. The commissioners had not at that time, so far as their
reports show, any notion of localizing the various schools of science
and art at South Kensington. Indeed, no such expression as “South
Kensington” had existed until 1856, when Earl Granville so christened
the “Brompton Boilers,” which the government had empowered Mr. Cole to
prepare for the transfer of the Marlborough House collection (voting
£10,000 for the purpose), and which, with their three boiler-shaped
tops, still stand as the seed-shell of the museum. It was little
supposed then that the “Mr. Huxley” whom the report of 1856 speaks of
as employed to collect specimens on the coast would ever be seated
as he is now in a palatial science school at Kensington. There must,
however, have been some very far-seeing eyes looking at things in those
days, for the commissioners of the great Exhibition of 1851 persuaded
the government to add to the Exhibition surplus of £170,000 enough
to make £300,000, and to invest the sum in the vast Kensington Gore
estate. This estate comprised between twenty-five and thirty acres of
land, twelve of which belong to the museum, and has become the site of
a great metropolis of science and art. The museum was opened on June
22d, 1857, by the Queen, accompanied by the Prince Consort and the Heir
Apparent.
The removal of the collections of Marlborough House to South
Kensington, and the establishment of the new movement in a centre of
its own, with room to grow, was speedily followed by a grand event,
namely, the donation by Mr. Sheepshanks of his superb collection of
pictures to the nation. Mr. Sheepshanks supplies to gentlemen who wish
to benefit the public about as good an example as they can find in
modern annals. For many years he had welcomed artists to study and copy
in the gallery opening from his dining-room, which so many of them
now remember as an oasis in the wilderness which surrounded them in
the last generation. But the owner of this gallery had observed that
the Philistines of Parliament were still very strong: they had once
refused to accept even a valuable collection of pictures (as already
stated) from unwillingness to house them; and although they had got
beyond that, and thankfully accepted the Vernon Gallery, he saw that
the arrangements for giving shelter to this gallery were made very
slowly. The National Gallery had a large portion of its Turner and its
Vernon bequests housed at South Kensington, and a much larger portion
of them hid away in its crypt, for twenty-five years, awaiting the
hour when England should find out the magnificent works of which it
is the heir, by seeing them on the new walls completed in 1876. Mr.
Sheepshanks resolved to see his gallery--which was worth even then
a hundred thousand pounds--attended to while he was yet alive. He
offered his pictures to the country on the following conditions: that a
suitable building should be erected at Kensington (which would remove
them from the dust and smoke of the city); that they should never be
sold; must be open to art students, and at times to the public; and
that the public, especially the working-classes, should be permitted to
view the same on Sunday afternoons. The government assented to all of
these conditions except the last, and Mr. Sheepshanks was reluctantly
compelled to add to that provision the words, “it being, however,
understood that the exhibition of the collection on Sundays is not to
be considered one of the conditions of my gift.”
Having thus summed up the history of the museum, it remains for me to
consider its three aspects: (1) as to architecture and decoration; (2)
its collections of objects; (3) its educational or art training method
and character.
The accompanying map will show the series of buildings at South
Kensington. There exists to the west of Exhibition Road a park of
about ten acres, holding at the north the Royal Albert Hall, at the
south the Museum of Natural History, and between these, on either side,
the long line of arcade buildings containing the National Portrait
Gallery, the Indian section, Naval Museum, Patent Office, the Museum
of Scientific Apparatus, and, in addition, spacious halls for the
display of machinery during exhibitions, for horticultural shows, and
Mr. Frank Buckland’s methods of pisciculture. Such a collection of
museums, answering the varied needs of science and art, cannot be found
elsewhere--even within the limits of a nation. The gardens adjoining
this series of buildings are beautifully adorned with statues and
fountains, and will remain in the future, as they have been in the
past, a favorite promenade, entered from Albert Hall and its extended
galleries, in summer always bright with flowers, with music, and gay
companies.
[Illustration: SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM--GROUND PLAN.]
[Illustration: DIAGRAM SHOWING GLITTER POINTS IN A PICTURE-GALLERY.]
The building containing the courts was designed by the late Captain
Fowke, of the Royal Engineers, and, I believe, there is no other
building in this country more adapted to its purpose. The task assigned
Captain Fowke was to build a picture-gallery eighty-seven feet long by
fifty wide, with two floors, the upper to be lighted from above, and
the lower open to the light from side to side, and to make the whole as
near fire-proof as possible. The building is thirty-four feet above the
ground-line to the eaves, and fifty to the ridge, and consists of seven
equal bays, twelve feet in length and of the width of the building. The
upper floor contains four separate rooms, two of forty-six by twenty
feet, the others of thirty-five by twenty feet, lighted entirely from
the roof, and giving a wall space of 4340 square feet available for
hanging pictures. The lower floor is thrown into two unequal rooms of
forty-six by forty-four feet and thirty-five by forty-four feet, each
having a row of piers along the centre, the play of light from side to
side being thus nearly unimpeded. Thus the upper floor has no windows,
but as much wall space as possible, while the lower has no walls, but
piers, as is demanded for the exhibition of objects in cases. The roof
is double glazed, and the rule of lighting is that the height and width
of the gallery should be the same, and the skylight half of the same.
This renders it always easy for the spectator to avoid the glitter
point on a picture, as may be seen by the accompanying diagram. The
glitter point, altering with the position of the beholder, is at B,
nine feet from the floor, when the beholder is at E_{2}, or five feet
from the wall; and the glitter descends to C, seven feet from the
floor, when the beholder advances to E_{3}. But if the spectator can
recede to fifteen feet, the wall has no glitter up to thirteen feet.
The skylight at South Kensington is brought as near as is consistent
with avoiding glitter, and is twenty feet nine and a half inches from
the floor. Just below the skylight run horizontal gas-pipes, with
fish-tail burners projecting on two-inch brass elbows, and the light at
night is as nearly as possible the same as in the day. When the gas was
first put in this building there occurred an interesting controversy
concerning the effect of gas on pictures, which elicited a valuable
statement, jointly signed by Faraday, Hofmann, Tyndall, Redgrave, and
Fowke, who had been appointed as a commission of inquiry, to the effect
that coal-gas is innocuous as an illuminator of any pictures, if kept
at a sufficient distance above them to avoid bringing into contact with
the pictures the sulphuric acid caused by its combustion (22½ grains
per 100 cubic feet of London gas).
In the large courts electric lamps are now used with much success.
It is wonderful to note the beauty of porcelain and all objects of
delicate decoration under the new light; it brings out the minute
traceries better than daylight.
Security from fire here has been made as nearly absolute as possible,
and Sir Philip Cunliffe Owen believes it impossible by any device to
fire the museum; yet the water arrangements and vigilance at South
Kensington are as complete as if the building were built of the
ordinary materials. As a matter of fact, the choice of materials was
made after long and patient scientific experiments. The main material
is the best gray stock brick, with ornamental work of certain blue,
red, and cream-colored bricks peculiar to some English counties. Some
iron it was, of course, necessary to use for joists and girders, but in
every case this iron has been isolated by being surrounded with a thick
fire-proof concrete. The floor is of Minton tiles imbedded in Roman
cement. The double roof is Mansard, and covered with a French tile
(_tuile courtois_), selected at the Paris Exhibition of 1855.
[Illustration: SIR PHILIP CUNLIFFE OWEN, DIRECTOR OF SOUTH KENSINGTON
MUSEUM.]
The picture-gallery described above, made to hold the Sheepshanks
collection, has had additions made behind it, in accordance with the
original plan, of three large rooms, which contain various collections
of pictures, and near the back entrance to these is the gallery of
Raphael’s cartoons. All this series of picture-galleries constitutes
an upper floor of a wing to two vast double show-rooms. One of these
is a large square apartment, in which large numbers of marble and
other antique monuments are displayed. The other, connected with
it, is architecturally divided by slender pillars--between which,
as an avenue, are show-cases, above and below--into two noble rooms
with splendid arched ceilings. The first-named of these rooms (that
which is without division, and single-roofed) has not yet received
its wall decorations, which are to be a distemper half-way up, and
above, a frieze of frescoes large as Raphael’s cartoons. The other
show-room--with the double-arched ceiling--furnishes, as may be
imagined, fine opportunities for wall decoration, as also for the
ornamentation of floor and ceilings. The decoration here has not been
completed, but it has gone far enough for the scheme to be judged by
its effect.
And it is just here that a careful criticism is necessary. While the
purely architectural work merits all the praise that can be claimed
for it, securing an admirable play of light, making each division
add its light to the other, and reducing the space occupied by
pillars and other accessories to a minimum, the decorations are but
measurably successful. The faults are due, I think, to the intention
that the ornaments themselves should present some of the features of
a collection of styles. The result proves that it would be better if
the varied styles were exhibited in a court set apart for the purpose.
The floor, for example, is rich in its varieties of tiles, there being
some five or six of different designs and shades. It is true that the
great central floors are made of tiles of uniform design and color, and
that these--a deep brick red, with small green spots at the corners of
each tile--are grave and good; but all around, where we pass through
arch or door, there is a deep fringe of brilliant tiles, which are
reflected into the glass cases nearest them, to the injury of the
objects shown; and in the series of “cloisters,” as the spaces beneath
the picture-gallery may be called, there are further experiments in
floor tiles which militate against the effect of the articles exhibited
in them. The ceilings in these cloisters, or side spaces, have been
covered with Oriental decorations by the late Owen Jones; they are
Indian, Persian, moresque, and of the greatest beauty, each coffer in
the ceiling and each archway presenting a new design, and yet all in
harmony: these being too far above the show-cases to affect any objects
in them, are rightly placed; but the floor, as the necessary background
to many objects in the rooms--many of which depend on delicate shades
of color for their effect--will eventually, I suspect, have to be
reconstructed, and made entirely of the grave hue which has happily
been already adopted for the greater part of it. Ascending a little
above the floor, it must be said also that there is too much brilliancy
about the lower arches and their spandrels--too much white and gold. It
is not only that this does not give a sufficiently subdued background
for the bright glass or chased metals in the upper parts of the cases
(on the ground-floor), but they are by no means the best supports
for the grand series of life-sized figures in mosaic, on deep gold
surfaces, which make the magnificent frieze of the upper wall.
[Illustration: NORTH COURT, NORTH-WEST CORNER, SHOWING CASTS OF THE
BIGA (OR TWO-HORSE CHARIOT), FROM THE ORIGINAL IN MARBLE AT THE
VATICAN, AND OF THE PULPIT BY GIOVANI PISANO, FORMERLY IN THE CATHEDRAL
AT PISA.]
[Illustration: SOUTH COURT, SHOWING THE PRINCE CONSORT’S GALLERY.]
It is these superb figures, representing the great artists of the past,
which constitute the most salient feature of decoration in the museum.
In this case (as in so many others in the museum) the scheme--due
to the late Mr. Godfrey Sykes--of combining the purposes of general
decoration with subjects of special interest in a museum, has been
most fortunate: the general effect is noble, the figures interesting
as portraits and as representations of costume, the varieties of
mosaic in which they are produced being of value for comparison.
There are thirty-six flat alcoves--eighteen on each side--and the
figures in them are those of the chief artists in ornamentation, with
the names of their designers beneath: Phidias (by Poynter); Apelles
(Poynter); Nicola Pisano (Leighton); Cimabue (Leighton); Torel, the
English goldsmith, d. 1300 (Burchett); William of Wykeham, bishop and
architect of Winchester Cathedral, d. 1404 (Burchett); Fra Angelico
(Cope); Ghiberti (Wehnert); Donatello (Redgrave); Gozzoli, one of whose
Florentine frescoes, containing his own portrait, is in the museum, d.
1478 (E. Armitage); Luca della Robbia, specimens of whose terra-cotta
work in the museum show him to have been a man of genius, d. 1481
(Moody); Mantegna (Pickersgill); Giorgione (Prinsep); Giacomo da Ulma,
friar at Bologna and painter on glass, d. 1517 (Westlake); Leonardo da
Vinci (J. Tenniel); Raphael (G. Sykes); Torrigiano (Yeames); A. Dürer
(Thomas); P. Vischer (W. B. Scott); Holbein (Yeames); Giorgio, painter
in majolica, d. 1552 (Hart); Michael Angelo (Sykes); Primaticcio, the
Italian who made the decorations at Fontainebleau, d. 1570 (O’Neil);
Jean Goujon, to whom is attributed the old carving in the Louvre,
d. 1572 (Bowler); Titian (Watts); Palissy (Townroe); François du
Quesnoy, Flemish ivory carver, d. 1546 (Ward); Inigo Jones (Morgan);
Grinling Gibbons (Watson); Wren (Crowe); Hogarth (Crowe); Sir J.
Reynolds (Phillips); Mulready (Barwell). The only very modern artist
in this list is Mulready, and he is certainly unfortunate, looking
as if Mr. Punch’s most cynical artist had been employed to depict
him. The late Mr. Owen Jones has been well represented in a mosaic
set in the wall near a staircase leading from the Oriental Court
decorated by him. Mulready is the only bit of really ugly work in the
series, although, of course, the merits of the others are unequal.
The artists have evidently given careful archæological study to the
costumes of each period, and in some cases--as Prinsep’s Giorgione,
Scott’s Vischer, and Pickersgill’s Mantegna--the work is such as the
grand old workers around need not be ashamed of. Of great interest,
too, are the varieties of material of which the mosaics are composed,
concerning which I can only say here that the Italian glass appears to
me incomparably superior to the experiments in English ceramic wares.
The shape of this double room, it will be borne in mind, implies four
large lunettes, one, that is, at each end of the two large roof-spans.
One of these has been already filled by Sir Frederick Leighton, P.R.A.,
with an admirable allegorical painting representing the “Arts of War.”
Here we see workmen forging every variety of armor, shields, weapons,
and women buckling them on to knights, as is written in fabliaux of the
Round Table. Sir Frederick has put his most graceful drawing and purest
colors into this fine work. There is also in the gallery a design for
a companion picture of the “Arts of Peace,” wherein the ladies are
engaged in the pleasanter work of adorning themselves, and utilizing
mirrors, while the men are toiling to provide the sinews for the
gentler siege in which their own hearts are liable to capture. These
works are scholarly, almost hypercritically exact in archæological
details, and when the second is completed the court will be greatly
improved.
[Illustration: CHINESE POTTERS AT WORK.--WINDOW IN THE CERAMIC GALLERY.]