A Guide to the National Gallery [antikvár]

Foreword by Michael Levey, Director of the National Gallery The superb and extensive treasures of several centuries of European painting in the National Gallery need some guidance if they are to be fully enjoyed. This book is planned to offer a friendly, helpful hand to the so-called ordinary visitor who we do not think 'ordinary' at all, and whose eye and appetite are likely to be at least as keen as those of the expert or scholar. For the latter there are, anyway, the Gallery's own detailed catalogues to study and ponder on. What Homan Potterton provides in his entertaining, instructive text is at once a concentrated history of European painting and a room-to-room commentary on the Gallery's own finest examples of it. He touches, too, on how the Collection has been built up, until today it can be claimed to be possibly the most sheerly balanced and representative of all national collections of European painting. Something of the secret of its strength lies, I believe, in the fact that it remains comparatively small. That means that a guide to it is feasible. A guide to it ought also to be enjoyable reading, reflecting the joy of walking through rooms of great pictures, where each of us may freely exercise his or her individual taste. No one should try and like every masterpiece by every painter. The percipient reader will detect places where Homan Potterton hints at his own taste—and thus encourages reaction. Reaction is what all the painters of the pictures in the Gallery would have wished their work to stimulate. Looking at pictures is a complicated and active process, prompting us to ask a myriad questions about why and how they appear as they do. We shall never obtain all the answers—which is one reason why we go on looking; but many of the questions a visitor may reasonably begin by asking will be found unobtrusively answered in the crisp company of this guide.