Wornum’s diary: We’re not amused?
Written throughout his tenure as keeper of the Nationwide Gallery between 1855 and his dying in 1877, Ralph Nicholson Wornum’s diary—not an official doc however “for my very own use and prepared data”—supplies a fascinating document of every day life on the gallery and is filled with details about photos acquired for the gathering, and their framing, restoration and show. There may be a lot of human curiosity too throughout the diary’s pages, together with references to gallery employees (deaths of colleagues are recorded respectfully inside a black border) and visits by distinguished individuals.
One such go to occurred on 17 February 1860, though not on the constructing designed by William Wilkins. Owing to lack of show area at Trafalgar Sq., the gallery established an outpost on the South Kensington Museum (because the Victoria and Albert Museum was recognized till 1899) for its British photos, which opened in December 1859. When Wornum confirmed Queen Victoria across the accomplished galleries, she remarked on “the excellence of the association”, and he in flip “amused her by telling her some anecdotes about Turner”. These anecdotes, nevertheless, weren’t maybe as amusing as Wornum thought, as Queen Victoria made no reference to them (or him) in her personal journal entry for this go to.
Poynter’s grand design on the Wallace Bequest
Following the dying of Woman Wallace in 1897, the artist Edward Poynter, director of the Nationwide Gallery, lobbied for the switch of the Wallace Bequest, with its matchless assortment of French artwork and furnishings, to Trafalgar Sq.. Writing to a Treasury civil servant on 25 February 1897, he argued {that a} new museum constructing (one of many choices into consideration) could be a “ineffective extravagance” and recoiled on the prospect of “some hideous new block of buildings equivalent to the trendy architect thinks acceptable for a museum”. As a substitute, Poynter envisaged the Wallace Bequest housed in a “distinct constructing” on land then occupied by St George’s Barracks however bodily linked to the Nationwide Gallery. An bold rehang would deliver the gallery’s Dutch and French photos into “historic sequence” with the Wallace Bequest. Poynter included in his letter a “very tough” sketch illustrating his imaginative and prescient of the structure.
Within the occasion, the Lansdowne Committee, which had been established to find out the ultimate preparations for the housing of the Wallace Bequest, was unpersuaded by Poynter’s impassioned plea that by not transferring it to Trafalgar Sq., the committee (of which he was a member) would “miss a possibility of constructing, maybe, the best gallery in Europe”.
The Wallace Bequest remained as an alternative as a nationwide assortment, in a remodelled and enlarged model of Hertford Home, the late Sir Richard and Woman Wallace’s stately home in Manchester Sq..
The novelist E.M. Forster labored as a clerk on the gallery within the 1910s Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Inventory Photograph
E.M. Forster, novelist, fire-watchman and movie cataloguer
Biographers of the novelist and critic Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) make solely fleeting reference to his employment on the Nationwide Gallery as a part-time clerical assistant to the director, Charles Holroyd, making the month-to-month recurrence of his title within the petty money guide for 1912-18 particularly putting.
From September 1914 to October 1915, Forster mixed the roles of fire-watchman and “novice catalogue-compiler”, though he appears to have been temperamentally unsuited to the latter. Forster was a frequent customer to the gallery (he used it as the situation for an opportunity encounter between Cecil Vyse and the Emerson household in his 1908 novel A Room with a View) and, through the Second World Warfare, was an ardent supporter of the Image of the Month initiative and the pianist Myra Hess’s extremely fashionable lunchtime live performance sequence. When it was introduced that the latter was to finish, he signed a petition (different signatories included the poet Louis MacNeice and the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams) urging its continuation past April 1946.
