National Gallery displays paintings acquired in last decade

THE FRUITS of a decade of acquisitions by and gifts to the National Gallery will go on display today.

The Taking Stock: Acquisitions 2000-2010exhibition features paintings acquired by the gallery in a decade where it was able to add substantially to its own collection.

The gallery benefited from the Celtic Tiger both in terms of the money it had to acquire paintings, but also through Section 1003 of the Taxes Consolidation Act (1997) which allowed wealthy people to write the cost of donation off against tax.

It also received as gifts paintings it could not possibly have purchased. The 52 paintings in the collection and the 53 drawings, selected from 500 acquired during the 1990s, will be on display in the millennium wing. Minister of State for the Arts Martin Mansergh, who visited the exhibition yesterday, said he had “no idea that so much had been acquired and so much of an excellent quality”.

One of the major works gifted was Guercino's Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph, one of eight Baroque canvasses given to the gallery by the Anglo-Irish art collector Sir Denis Mahon, who turns 100 this year.

A striking Irish addition to the collection, Louis le Brocquy's A Family(1951) was given to the gallery by former chairman Lochlann Quinn. A painting with a topical theme is Nicol Erskine's The 16th, 17th (St Patrick's Day) and 18th Marchpainted in 1856, which shows that drink and debauchery which surround the national holiday is not just confined to modern times. National Gallery director Raymond Keaveney said the gallery would never have been able to afford a painting such as Guercino's even in the boom years as it would have subsumed their entire grant-in-aid allocation, which averaged out at about €1.5 million a year over the last decade.

Mr Keaveney said they were able to use a more generous allocation from the State of about €15 million in the decade to fill up gaps in the collection, especially works completed since 1870.

A centrepiece of the collection is William Orpen’s striking portrait of Count John McCormack, which the gallery bought for just over €400,000 last year.

However, Mr Keaveney stressed that the entire budget of the collection, even when it was at its height, was insignificant when viewed against the €71 million ($104.3 million) paid at Sothebys in London last month for an Alberto Giacometti sculpture.

“Our greatest strength is the fact that people feel it is appropriate to gift things through us. We can improve the collection through acquisitions, but what transforms it is gifts,” he said.