Heard and Seen: The Ambassador's Choice

Extract

The John Hay Whitney Collection of paintings in the possession of the outgoing American ambassador to London has for the last six weeks drawn crowds to the Tate Gallery, attracted perhaps by the legendary worth of a private collection such as could scarcely exist nowadays in England. And it must be admitted that these seventy pictures, mostly acquired in the ten years that followed the end of the war in 1945, have the patina of eminent acceptability. Apart from a stray Blake, two Zoffanys and a group of American paintings, they reflect the definitive arrival of the impressionists and post-impressionists as the artists most appropriate for embassy walls.

But Mr Whitney’s choice is marvellously sound. As Sir John Rothensteiny remarks in his introduction to the catalogue (which is itself worthy of so magnificent an exhibition), the criterion has not been a mere ‘programme’, but rather the inherent quality of the actual painting. Thus Braque is, in the gallery sense, not at all well represented, but the two land- (or rather land-and-sea-) scapes of his fauve period in the collection are wonderful in their own right; one can at once see why they were bought, and how irrelevant it would be to insist that they should be ‘matched’ by his later work. Picasso, indeed, is represented by a splendid cubist Homme Assis as well as by a tender portrait of 1905, but once more it is the autonomous interest of the picture that matters. We feel that the whole collection, however ‘safe’ it may seem, is the vindication of the individual picture’s right to please.