Page:The Cornhill magazine (Volume 1).djvu/370



Just half a century ago, the pictures now in the Dulwich Gallery were offered to the Government as the commencement of a National Gallery, by Sir Francis Bourgeois, who had been a soldier, but became a painter, and was subsequently elected Royal Academician. He inherited these pictures, which Stanislaus, king of Poland, had purposed to form the nucleus of a national collection in that country. But the Government refused the proffered gift. The thoughts of England were then turned not to pictures, but in very different directions. The little four-paged broad-sheets of The Times brought their morning news of the victories of Wellington in Spain and Napoleon's invasion of Russia; of war declared against England by America; of the Prime Minister's assassination in the House of Commons; of bread riots, when corn was not to be bought until landlords had secured their eighty shillings a quarter; of the insanity of George the Third and the regency of his unpopular son. There was no inclination in such times to think of National Galleries of Art.

After ten years of peace, with Napoleon at St. Helena, Peterloo riots suppressed, and Thistlewood hanged, George the Fourth was making his investments in Dutch paintings, Goutier cabinets and Sèvres porcelain, and the government (Sir Charles Long says), prompted by the king, induced the House of Commons, in 1824, to vote fifty-seven thousand pounds for the purchase of thirty-eight pictures collected by Mr. Angerstein, the banker. Thus began our National Collection of Pictures. These were shown to the public in a small, dingy, ill-lighted house on the south side of Pall Mall, until 1833, when it was proposed to erect a special building for them. The site chosen was in Trafalgar Square, on which had stood the "King's Mews," where, from the days of the Plantagenets, the royal falcons had been kept and "mewed" or moulted their feathers. In our own time, Mr. Cross's lions and wild beasts from Exeter 'Change have been lodged there; there, also, the first exhibitions of machinery were held, and the public records were eaten by rats in these "Mews," which were pulled down to make way for the present National Gallery.

From its first conception to the present time, no building has ever been a more lively subject for public criticism than this unlucky National Gallery. Poor Mr. Wilkins, the architect, was sorely perplexed with conditions. The building was not to intercept the view of St. Martin's portico; it must not infringe on the barrack space in the rear; the public must have one right of way through it, and the Guards another; the old