Two recent events at the National Gallery – the opening of Strange Beauty: Masters of the German Renaissance, and the display of its new acquisition, George Bellows’s Men of the docks (1912; see Fig.85, p.271) – raise specific questions about the Gallery’s collecting policy, past and present, and a more general consideration of national schools and British taste.

‘I don’t care so much for my drawings’, Edward Hopper once remarked. When a publisher proposed a book of them, he responded that it ‘would only very inadequately express what I attempt to do in my paintings’. Now, however, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, recipient of approximately 2,500 Hopper drawings in a bequest from the artist’s widow almost fifty years ago, has organised the first major exhibition focused on this aspect of the artist’s achievement. Having been shown at the Whitney and at the Dallas Museum of Art (where this reviewer saw it), Hopper Drawing is currently at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (to 22nd June).