A Brief History of the Tate Gallery [antikvár]

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE TATE GALLERY BY SIR JOHN ROTHENSTEIN, C.B.E. The Director and Keeper THE idea of the Tate Gallery took shape in 1890. In that year Henry Tate's gift of sixty-seven paintings and three 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 intended as a collection of contemporary 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 transformed as well as enlarged. Instead of being a collection of nineteenth-century British painting it has become 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 nearly four thousand British paintings and drawings, over three hundred modern foreign paintings and over three hundred and sixty pieces of modern sculpture. Both the quality and the representative character of the collection have been continuously improved, and this in spite of the understanding whereby masterpieces are periodically transferred 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 greatest single source of acquisition by the National Gallery. The growth of the building has also been impressive: the eight original 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 regular Government Grant. During tne twelve ensuingyears the annual grant rose from L2,000 to L7,500; even so, up to the end of 1957 the Gallery had received for its purchases no more than L54,450, a sum which would be insufficient to purchase any one of the Gallery's several principal masterpieces. The full cost of the erection of every exhibition gallery has been borne by private benefactors. In the following pages an attempt will be made to sketch, very summarily, the stages of the Gallery's growth and to give some 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 pigc 4 Page 1