A Brief History of the Tate Gallery [antikvár]

A BRIEF HÍSTORY OF THE TATE GALLERY By Sir John Rothenstein, C.B.E. THE idea of the Tate Gallery took shape in 1890. In that year Henry Tate's gift of sixty-five paintings and two sculptures, almost all of them the work of Victorian contemporaries, was offered to the nation, but a gallery had still to be built to house them. When opened seven years later the Tate Gallery consisted of eight rooms and was in-tended as a collection of contempo-rary British painting only; it was, moreover, a mere annexe to the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square. In the intervening years the scope of the collection has been transform-ed as well as enlarged. Instead of being a collection of nineteenth-century British painting it has be-come the national collection of British painting of all periods, and in addition to this the national collection of modern foreign painting, and the national collection of modern sculpture both British and foreign. In scale the collection has grown beyond recognition. Instead of seventy works the collection contains over four thousand British paintings and drawings, over three hun-dred and fifty modern foreign paintings and over four hundred pieces of modern sculpture. Both the quality and the representative char-acter of the collection have been continuously improved, and this in spite of the understanding whereby masterpieces are periodically trans-ferred from the Tate to the National Gallery. Thus there is a sense in which the Tate, in addition to being in its own right one of the world's great collections, is the National Gallery of the future: for it serves as the National Gallery's greatest single source of acquisition. The growth of the building has alsó been impressive: the eight originál galleries built by Tate have now become thirty-four, including the more than three hundred foot long Sculpture Gallery, and the Tate is now the largest picture gallery in the British Commonwealth. This great institution has come into the possession of the British people at negligible cost. By far the greater part of the collection has been presented or bequeathed by generous friends of the Gallery, which before 1946 received no regu-lar Government Grant. During the twelve ensuing years the annual grant rose from L2,000 to L7,500 and in 1959 it became L40,000; even this sum however is inadequate to cover the cost of a single masterpiece of either the earlier British schools or modern foreign art. The full cost of the erection of every exhibition gallery has been borne by priváté benefactors. In the following pages an attempt will be made to sketch, very sum-marily, the stages of the Gallery's growth and to give somé idea of the scope and character of the collection that has come into being in so brief a period of time. The middle of the nineteenth century marked the high point of the Continued on page 4 above: Gallery XXV with sculptures by Moore and Hepworth. facing page : The Sculpture Hall with Matisse's UEscargot in the distance. Page 1