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PAINTINGS BY OLD MASTERS AT CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD by J. Byam Shaw Review by: JOHN GAGE Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 116, No. 5147 (OCTOBER 1968), pp. 951-952 Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41371973 . Accessed: 25/06/2014 07:31 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Royal Society of Arts. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 195.78.109.12 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 07:31:27 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

PAINTINGS BY OLD MASTERS AT CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORDby J. Byam Shaw

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Page 1: PAINTINGS BY OLD MASTERS AT CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORDby J. Byam Shaw

PAINTINGS BY OLD MASTERS AT CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD by J. Byam ShawReview by: JOHN GAGEJournal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 116, No. 5147 (OCTOBER 1968), pp. 951-952Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and CommerceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41371973 .

Accessed: 25/06/2014 07:31

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce is collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Royal Society of Arts.

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This content downloaded from 195.78.109.12 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 07:31:27 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: PAINTINGS BY OLD MASTERS AT CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORDby J. Byam Shaw

OCTOBER 1968 NOTES ON BOOKS

paintings by old masters at christ church, oxford. By J. Byam Shaw , London , Phaidon , 1968. 845 net

The publication of a catalogue of the Christ Church collection of paintings in a sumptuous format and at a very reasonable price is itself a remarkable event. Private collections, even those as accessible as Christ Church (the appearance of this catalogue coincides with the opening of a new gallery), do not often receive such generous treatment. The book is not a gallery-guide in the normal sense, but a solid work of reference which stands well with the catalogues of the Royal Collection, also published by Phaidon.

Mr. Byam Shaw divides the pictures into schools and then treats them by artists chronologically, each preceded by a succinct biography on the model of the National Gallery catalogues. He is concerned to document the history of each work, including its cleaning history, which in a number of cases has, together with recent develop- ments in art-historical scholarship, literally 'uncovered' a number of new attributions unsuspected by Tancred Borenius, who compiled the last catalogue, under consider- able difficulties, in 19 16. A triptych (20) dismissed earlier as a late imitation is now given to the workshop of Fra Angelico, and in part, perhaps to the master himself ; the well-known series of five Sybils (35) are shown after cleaning to be probably by Botticelli himself and the young Filippino Lippl.

The compiler also gives some attention to iconography: his entry for the Tuscan fifteenth-century Thebaid panels (21-9) - which shows, among other things, that the traditional title is not exact, for not all of the stories represented derive from the lives of the Egyptian desert-hermits - is a model of its kind; and No. 240, formerly catalogued as 'Italian School', The Virgin and Child with the Infant St. John , two other Saints and an Angel , appears now not only attributed to the Fleming Spranger but also as Faith , Hope and Charity. These are only a few hints of the thorough-going revisions in the catalogue, whose lucidity is unfortunately not always matched by the reproductions, which tend to be printed more smudgily than they might be, even at this low price.

On the collection as a whole - and it must be said that the Christ Church pictures are a precious rather than a great one - Mr. Byam Shaw contributes an introduction on the three chief contributions: the Guise Bequest of 1765, the Fox-Strangways Bequest of 1828 and 1834, and the Landor-Duke Bequest of 1897. General John Guise had a predilection for the great names of the Italian High Renaissance, and was often content with copies after them if he could not get originals. These are now mainly relegated to the storeroom, but two Tintorettos, a Veronese and some magnificent later pictures, like Annibale Carracci's Butcher's Shop (181), remain as some of the best work in the collection. The Hon. W. Т. H. Fox-Strangways and Walter Savage Landor were responsible for the most important single group of paintings: the early Italians that they collected in Florence in the 1820s and early 1 830s. They, too, liked a great name: Fox-Strangways' 'Cimabue' (6) and Landor's 'Giotto' (7) are still attractive morsels, but they are now given respectively to Jacopo di Cione and 'Florentine School, c. 1360'. To claim, as Mr. Byam Shaw does, that their taste was really exceptional at the time is to overlook the interests of a body of English collectors like William Young Ottley (who had been looking in this direction since at least the 1790s), William Beckford of Fonthill, Samuel Rogers, the London merchant Karl Aders, as well as the Liverpudlian William Roscoe, not to mention a whole generation of artists like, Blake, Flaxman, Ingres, the German Riepenhausen brothers and the Nazarenes, who had been turning to the 'Primitives' for a good decade by 1820. Like Roscoe's, Landor's and Fox-Strangways' taste may well have been formed by art-historical as much as aesthetic concerns; as well as by the low price of this type of Old Master ; but, whatever their motives, they certainly furnished the Christ Church collection with some of its most exquisite pictures.

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Page 3: PAINTINGS BY OLD MASTERS AT CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORDby J. Byam Shaw

JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS OCTOBER 1 968 Of some interest to the student of art and technology is Mr. Byam Shaw's excursus

on the German colour-printer J. C. Le Bion, who was patronized by Guise and is represented by several paintings and copies in the collection. Much new information about Le Blon's activities in England has been assembled here (as M. Georges Wildenstein has recently done for the French period: Gazette des Beaux Arts , i960); and his career, unsuccessful though it was for largely technical reasons, forms an important episode in the history of colour reproduction and eighteenth-century taste (Raphael, Leonardo, Titian, Guido Reni and the Carracci are among the masters he copied). But Mr. Byam Shaw is surely wrong in claiming that Le Blon's three-colour theory of the primaries was Newton's, although the printer was careful to bolster his theories with Newton's name.

In this catalogue, Mr. Byam Shaw has done a great service to Christ Church and to art history : we now await eagerly the catalogue, already begun, of the even richer Christ Church collection of drawings.

JOHN GAGE

landmarks of the world's art: prehistoric and primitive art, by Andreas Lommel; the ancient world, by Giovanni Garbini; the classical world, by Donald E. Strong; the world of islam, by Ernst J. Grube; man and the renaissance, by Andrew Martindale; the age of baroque, by Michael Kitson.

London , Paul Hamlyn , 1967. Each volume , 30s net

The first six volumes in this series each measure 8 X k 1 1 i inches and contain upwards of 200 illustrations, of which more than 100 are in colour. They are excellent value for the money.

The general plan of the series is well described by its title ; it has the double aim of both interesting and instructing the general reader in the subject of any particular volume, and also, when taken together, of giving him an overall picture of artistic achievement from the earliest times - presenting such evidence as we possess of the beginnings of man's efforts at visual expression and then tracing its later developments in specially important periods. The text, of necessity limited by the number of illustrations, is supplemented by biographical and other notes, and a list of books for further reading, as well as a sort of glossary of events and their chronology which illustrates the inter-relation of some of the chief manifestations of the various arts, and their connection with ancillary events of a political or other nature. For example, in The Classical World it can be seen that within a span of about 30 or 40 years Alexander the Great defeated the Persians, Praxiteles and Apelles were producing masterpieces, the theatre at Epidauros was built and Theocritus was writing his lyrics. Each volume, moreover, furthers the objective of a general survey by a most imaginative use of maps. These show the differing political divisions of the part of the world under survey and the shifting of cultural centres ; also, in the volumes dealing with the more ancient cradles of civilization, they show the main changes in the geological structure of the world.

Excellent and highly enjoyable as these volumes are to read singly, they gain greatly, especially from the aesthetic-historical point of view, when considered together and do much to emphasize the risk of regarding art as a continuous advance and of trying to make its development fit into too neat a pattern or to regard 'progress' as pursuing a straight rather than, as it more frequently is, a zig-zag line in time.

We find this well illustrated in The Ancient World. Statues such as that of A Noble from Saggura (painted limestone), or the wooden statue of Kaapery priest and high state official у both of the Fifth Dynasty (c. 2800-2350 b.c.), combine great nobility and grandeur with a startling degree of characterization of a particular individual,

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