Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
Since we last reported on the Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF) in an Editorial in 2005,1 the project of making available a photographic record of the entire national collection of paintings in public ownership has progressed with astonishing momentum.2 Museums make up the majority of participating collections, but it also includes paintings held by universities, hospitals, town halls, local libraries and other civic buildings, whose collections were often entirely uncatalogued and unphotographed.
Since its foundation, just over 150 years ago, the National Gallery of Scotland has amassed over 2,000 English drawings and watercolours, but, as we learn from Christopher Baker’s useful introduction to the catalogue here under review, these arrived at the Gallery more by accident than by design. The majority are the result of gifts or bequests and consequently the collection is uneven in quality and in coverage.
A tenth-century sardonyx bowl acquired by the 10th Duke of Hamilton in Russia.
An ivory of the Virgin and Child (c.1260) acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, is explored as part of the œvure of a thirteenth-century French sculptor.
New information concerning the commission of sculpture for the tomb of Enrico Scrovegni in the Arena Chapel, Padua.
An illuminated Psalter (c.1420) in the Bamberg State Library is attributed to the Venetian illuminator Cristoforo Cortese.
A frame designed by C.R. Ashbee for an early sixteenth-century Madonna by Gert van Lon, held in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge.
Acquisitions by the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, of furniture shown at the Swedish Pavilion during the Exposition Internationale in Paris in 1925.
