Dulwich Picture Gallery: Jewel in the London Suburbs

Permanent-collection labels can be insipid, though.

T he Dulwich Picture Gallery is well known to connoisseurs, collectors, and serious art tourists. Located in a leafy London suburb, though, it’s visited mostly by locals and the discerning few. It’s lovely to have three Rembrandts and Poussins, Murillos, and Gainsboroughs in the hood. The building is a precious, small jewel designed by John Soane.

Opening in 1817, it’s the oldest public art museum in Britain and, I suppose, the oldest in the English-speaking world. Though I’ve done three exhibitions with Dulwich in my career, I hadn’t been for a while. A visit was long past due since the place has a new director as well as a Helen Frankenthaler woodcut exhibition called “Radical Beauty.” Frankenthaler is a superb artist renowned for her drip paintings absorbed by the canvas, her soak-and-stain method, but as a printmaker, she’s second to none among the Abstract Expressionists. I wouldn’t even call her an Abstract Expressionist since she died in 2011 and made her exquisite woodcuts starting in the 1970s. She’s her own thing.

I’ll write an institutional profile today and review the Frankenthaler exhibition on Tuesday.

The gallery is a ten-minute train trip to West Dulwich from Victoria Station and then a 15-minute walk by the grounds of a chichi private school. That’s far easier, shorter, and more scenic than most travel within Manhattan.

It took a few twists for this prestigious, elegant place to coalesce and to land in Dulwich. Francis Bourgeois (1753–1811) and Noël Desenfans (1744–1807) were two London art dealers hired by the king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the many incarnations of Poland, to assemble a royal art collection. Touring Europe on an expense account, the two did as charged, though well into their work the Commonwealth dissolved, with bigger powers gobbling pieces of it. So goeth Poland time and again.

The two dealers tried to unload the art, but Desenfans died and, soon after, his colleague and heir, Bourgeois. At the suggestion of his close friend, the actor John Philip Kemble, Bourgeois left the art to a boys’ school in Dulwich called the College of God’s Gifts. Kemble, one of the great interpreters of Shakespeare, was Sarah Siddons’s brother. The school merged with Dulwich College, never a college as Americans know it but a rich, selective primary and secondary school. Recall that the National Gallery didn’t exist at the time. Soane (1753–1837) was initially drawn into the story when Bourgeois hired him to design Desenfans’s tomb. The college eventually hired him to build the gallery.

Soane’s design is revolutionary in its use of overhead skylights allowing indirect illumination. The building’s façade of raw brick is unusual, too, and seems modern to us today. It doesn’t look like a temple. The entrance is inviting but unobtrusive. Soane thought about the tomb of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, the exterior walls projecting in and out in an attractive pattern. Faux bricked-in windows add interest. It’s got a tiny cupola. Bourgeois and Desenfans got their Soane tomb. It’s in the museum. There’s also a functioning chapel from the days when the gallery served the College of God’s Gifts. Communion is served there every Sunday at 8 a.m.

The museum is small. It’s got one long gallery with a high ceiling interspersed with arches, so it can seem like different spaces. Small additions include a foyer and a couple of small galleries. Rick Mather, the American architect based in London, designed a nice building about 20 years ago that’s not really an addition but an adjacency. It’s connected to the Soane building by an enclosed glass-walled cloister. That provides classroom space and a café. The grounds are spacious.

The Dulwich Picture Gallery is rare among British museums. It’s private. It’s also now freestanding. In 1994, the trustees of Dulwich College liberated it. I think they decided that a treasure-rich museum really wasn’t part of the school’s program. On the one hand, they gave up a collection that’s probably worth half a billion dollars today. Certainly, it would be the school’s biggest asset. On the other, Old Master art was worth a lot less then. Trustees thought more about programs and pedagogy and less about money. Museums have unique needs. There’s security, and the Dulwich Picture Gallery had been robbed at least three times and bombed during the war. There’s HVAC, art conservation, an old building, dealing with the public, and curators who may or may not have wanted to focus on children. It was an amicable divorce. In any event, going on its own means that the museum has an active fundraising program.

The permanent collection has Dutch, Flemish, French, Italian, English, and Spanish Old Masters of very high quality. There are three Murillo beggar paintings, among them his Flower Girl, from the late 1660s, and the fluffy Virgin of the Rosary, from the late 1670s, done in his vaporous style. Desenfans and Bourgeois bought Murillo in depth. The English loved him, in part because he’s so soothing, but Murillo appeals to many tastes. He loved and worked in Seville, which in Spain’s Golden Age was the country’s international business hub. Murillo sold work to buyers from all over Europe. He developed a style that’s a little Spanish, a smidge Dutch, a tittle Italian, a jot English, and a speck German.

There are ten paintings by Rubens, including to-die-for sketches, and two tiny Raphaels. Guido Reni’s St. Sebastian is a nude beefcake pinup. In 1835, William Linley, last of a great English musical and theatrical family, left his collection, heavy on Gainsboroughs, to the gallery. The big Gainsborough double portrait of Elizabeth and Mary Linley, actresses and singers whose act was called “the nest of the nightingales,” is splendid. Our current version of Vanity Fair would have devoted a spread to them.

I’ve been to Dulwich many times. The place is great, but it’s changed for the worse. I think the permanent collection has been seized by museum educators catering to the lowest common denominator. Baby talk rules the day, at least in the permanent collection spaces.

The Dutch gallery, main wall, with two Rembrandts, a couple of landscapes, and one or two other things also looked strange. I don’t like that loud, purple panel pushing Rembrandt’s Girl at the Window toward us, and what gives with the empty space above it? This is a curatorial choice, and there are a few other weird arrangements of things that make for a jarring rather than soothing look. I don’t mind saturated colors, but the red walls need to be grayed down. They’re too grating.

Interpretation is odd, too, as if someone decided that simple is best, or simple-minded, I should say. It starts in the Dutch space. “One of the few painters who successfully worked across multiple themes,” we’re told, “was Rembrandt van Rijn, who created powerful works that still resonate today.” This sentence, aside from being insipid, references three paintings of single figures, two of which are portraits, so no “multiple themes” are at play, at least by Rembrandt. And if I had three splendid Rembrandts in my museum, I’d think of something more sparkling, more erudite to say, or say nothing. A Young Man, perhaps the Artist’s Son Titus has a short label telling us that Rembrandt painted it at the end of his career, he had many hardships, and this picture might have been his son, “who died a year after he did.” This pushes us toward poignancy, not a bad place in itself, but it muddles the viewer’s mind. Rembrandt didn’t know his son would die a year after his own death, and neither did his son, who might not be the subject.

In another gallery, there are three of Poussin’s Seven Sacraments once owned by the Duke of Rutland and now at Dulwich to settle a tax bill. Painted between 1637 and 1640, these are heavy hitters, yet the room’s introductory panel is as bland as porridge, observing that art before 1800 was often narrative but after 1800 was likely to concern nature.

Snoozy indeed. If only a bolt of inspiration and eloquence were to strike the museum’s label writers. I don’t know whether the goal is to be as noncommittal as possible or accessible in the extreme, but the place needs to pitch for higher-octane thinking. No one will die.

In a gallery of portraits called “Facing the Past,” we’re told that pictures exploring “the effects of time” get a special blue label interpreting the artist’s take on this theme. A Carracci painting, the museum notes, “captures the effects of time, in the man’s wrinkled brow and wiry hair, whilst still giving a sense of life and character.” This is awkward. The subject’s wrinkled brow and gray, not wiry, hair are among the features giving him “a sense of life and character.”

And Venetia, Lady Digby, on Her Deathbed, by Van Dyck, is about to conk off. Talk about “the effects of time” in action. For her, time’s about to expire. No blue label, though, the least Lady Digby could get for her trouble. The biggest wall in this gallery is packed with portraits. It looks like the “Ten Most Wanted” montage that used to titillate me at the post office when I was a child, though only in monotony and not in prospects for peril. It’s an overdose of faces, and pasty aristocratic ones at that.

It could be lots worse. There’s no anti-racist piffle, and by “anti-racist” I mean the lie that race explains everything. Had the chapel been open, I would have ventured to praise the Lord for this in a proper Church of England setting. Good Methodist that I am, I wouldn’t even have minded the smoke and mirrors.

All of my observations about insipid interpretation might sound petty, but I remember Dulwich as perfect, with the art, by and large, speaking for itself. I know English museology aims now at the helping hand and family-friendliness, but I prefer a visit to a place like Dulwich, a distinguished museum, to push people to look closely and to think big thoughts. Overall, of course, I loved my visit and was delighted to be back. Next week, Frankenthaler!