Word: chantrey
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1949-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...eight weeks, 99,029 Britons had trooped to see the evidence - 400-odd paintings and sculptures that the Royal Academy had bought & paid for from the proceeds of the Chantrey Bequest (TIME, Jan. 10). Were they as good as the Academicians insisted? Or did they belong back in the cellars of London's Tate Gallery, from which they had been momentarily resurrected...
...last week the critics stood withTate Director John Rothenstein-hanging was too good for most of the Chantreys. With Rothenstein they agreed that over the past 70 years of Chantrey buying, the Royal Academy selection committees had picked a high percentage of bad pictures and missed a lot of good ones. Wrote a Manchester Guardian Weekly critic: "Once the eye has been thoroughly glazed by the pompous onslaught of indomitable mediocrity, it is fascinating to wander limply through the galleries, no longer resisting ..." In the Spectator, Harold Nicolson suggested that a detailed, illustrated catalogue of the Chantrey purchases should...
...there are 400 things that London's progressive Tate Gallery can't abide, they are the pictures and sculptures that for the past 52 years have been drifting in from the bequest of wealthy Victorian Sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey. In that time, the unhappy custodians of the Tate have willy-nilly acquired tons and acres of lowing kine, rearing horses, languorous ladies, idyllic landscapes and storm-beset ships-of-the-line...
Probably nothing would have given greater shock to well-intentioned Donor Chantrey. He had left the bulk (?105,000) of his estate for "the purchase of works of fine art of the highest merit . . . executed within the shores of Great Britain." Chantrey's will specified that the president and council of the Royal Academy should be the judges of what to buy with the money. In 1897, the Academicians had picked the Tate as just the place for the collection...