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There was a time when museums might have been regarded as rather
forbidding and austere centres of learning, but today they are more
likely to position themselves firmly within the tourism and leisure
industry with all manner of food, fun and family entertainment on
offer. A high-profile museum brand often relies on a fast-changing
menu of temporary exhibitions with an attractive programme of
activities, cleverly marketed to ever-growing numbers of visitors.
Many of these changes have been positive and beneficial but they
have not been without risk to the central purpose of museums as
repositories for collections that are looked after, researched and
displayed with knowledge and sensitivity. The permanent collection
should be the heart and soul of any museum. Nurtured and developed
with intelligence, a collection can be an endless source of
surprise and delight as well as a focus of local and national
pride. The museum in this view is a setting for sustained
encounters with objects and works of art, somewhere to be visited
and revisited over the course of a lifetime, a place that helps to
bind communities, with collections that are cared for and shared as
a reminder of the past and a source of inspiration for the present.
The process of acquiring works for public collections is rarely
easy in any setting. In the face of escalating prices on the art
market and diminishing public funds it is all too easy for
complacency and apathy to settle upon the museum community. But the
task of building collections of national or local importance is
never finished. It should not be about casual 'shopping' or
satisfying the whims of museum directors or sponsors. It is about
building a heritage that is richer, more complete and more relevant
for future generations; with every successful acquisition, a
museum's collection gains in strength and character. The volume is
dedicated to Peter Hecht, the great champion of public art
collections, who throughout his career has worked to show us why
museums matter and how their collections, large or small, national
or local, can make a profound difference to the lives of those who
use them. We hope that it will bring people the world over to
realise the importance of collecting for the public, locally,
nationally and internationally, and to acknowledge and encourage
the role of private individuals, associations and institutions, as
well as public bodies, in this vital endeavour.
This lavish catalogue presents sketches made en plein air between
the end of the eighteenth century and late nineteenth century. It
accompanies a major exhibition at the National Gallery of Art,
Washington (USA), the Fondation Custodia (France) and the
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (UK). In the eighteenth century the
tradition of open-air painting was based in Italy, Rome in
particular. Artists came from all over Europe to study classical
sculpture and architecture, as well as masterpieces of Renaissance
and Baroque art. During their studies, groups of young painters
visited the Italian countryside, training their eyes and their
hands to transcribe the effects of light on a range of natural
features. The practice became an essential aspect of art education,
and spread throughout Europe in the nineteenth century. This
exhibition focuses on the artists' wish to convey the immediacy of
nature observed at first hand. Around a hundred works, most of them
unfamiliar to the general public, will be displayed. The artists
represented include Thomas Jones, John Constable, J.M.W. Turner,
Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, Achille-Etna Michallon, Camille
Corot, Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Johan Thomas Lundbye,
Vilhelm Kyhn, Carl Blechen, Johann Martin von Rohden, Johann
Wilhelm Schirmer, Johann Jakob Frey, among others. The sketches
demonstrate the skill and ingenuity with which each artist quickly
translated these first-hand observations of atmospheric and
topographical effects while the impression was still fresh. The
exhibition and the catalogue will be organized thematically,
reviewing, as contemporary artists did, motifs such as trees,
rocks, water, volcanoes, and sky effects, and favourite
topgraphical locations, such as Rome and Capri. The catalogue will
present numerous unpublished plein air sketches, and contains
original scholarship on this relatively young field of art history.
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