London’s Guildhall reveals hidden gems among collection of 4,000 paintings
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Version 0 of 1. The portraits of stern-faced City worthies in robes, wigs and chains of office in London’s Guildhall collection have now mostly been banished to the stores. Instead, the walls are full of women and children, paintings including Grecian nymphs, serene Victorian ladies arranging flowers on a sunny window seat, a little girl painted by John Everett Millais yawning through a long sermon, and two Victorian children, a match girl and a crossing sweeper, shivering in the snow as they look yearningly at a pantomime poster. A ticket would have been an unimaginable luxury for these children. The sentimental middle-class Victorian audience, the target audience for artist Augustus Edwin Mulready, for whom a family outing to the pantomime was an essential part of Christmas, might have winced, or even wept. Mulready was famous for street scenes with charming urchins, but the street children were very real. Not far from Guildhall, in the forensic museum at Bart’s hospital, there are the real feet of just such a girl as the one in the painting, preserved in a specimen jar: she fell asleep in a doorway, and woke up so badly frostbitten that both her feet had to be amputated. “Poverty has not gone away,” curator Julia Dudkiewicz said. “Is the heart of the City a proper place to make people think a little of social and spiritual issues, that money and materialism are not everything in life? We are going to try.” The City’s art collection dates back 400 years, but is little known even within the Square Mile. In the 19th century, when Dudkiewicz’s predecessors began buying hundreds of contemporary works and accepting more as gifts and bequests, it was intended as a national collection. When the gallery opened in 1885, there were huge queues to see pictures including works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edwin Landseer and John Constable. The gallery was destroyed in the Blitz, and although most of the paintings were safely in storage, they remained there for the decades it took to build a replacement. The work was delayed when the construction work uncovered extensive remains of a Roman amphitheatre, now on display in the basement, and the new gallery did not open until 1999. It has now closed for a refurbishment and rehang and will open again in mid-January. Dudkiewicz – whose love of Victorian art was born when she had to learn Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shalott as a student in Poland – believes the collection, which she calls “fabulous”, fell out of public and critical consciousness in the half-century of closure. The 70,000 a year who do find their way there must pass through a daunting airport-style security check, because the building also serves as the foyer for grand banquets and other official functions in the medieval Guildhall itself. She and her colleague Katherine Pearce can do nothing about the entrance, or the fiercely patterned carpet, but in every other way they have tried to soften and make the building more friendly. They have painted the walls a dark green beloved of the Victorians: “We needed a colour that could wrestle the carpet into submission,” Pearce said. They went through all 4,000 paintings in the stores and were astonished at what they found. They have brought out scores that have never been hung, and others not displayed in a lifetime. The problem, they believe, was not their quality or condition – which is generally superb – but fashion. The Victorians were seen as old hat when many were acquired in the early 20th century, and even more so when the gallery opened. A series of major exhibitions, including the Pre-Raphaelites at Tate Britain, and soaring auction prices are now transforming their reputation. Richard Ormond, a former director of the National Maritime Museum, great-nephew of the painter John Singer Sargent and an acknowledged expert on Victorian art, recently paid a visit to Guildhall. He was stunned to see among the paintings a work he had not only never seen but the first he had ever encountered by the artist, Frederick Edwin Bodkin, an eerie view of Hampstead Heath. “That was some career achievement, showing a new artist to Richard Ormond,” Dudkiewicz said happily. “We hope many, many more people will come now and enjoy the treasures they never knew were here.” The Guildhall gallery reopens to the public on January 15. |