Tate Britain has several demands on the display of its collection. Foremost is its role as the leading national museum exclusively devoted to showing works of what is called the British School of painting (and, to a lesser extent, of sculpture). It should be able to exhibit not only the work of major figures in considerable depth but also prime examples by many lesser artists who have contributed to the full current of British visual culture. The display must be amenable to visitors, especially those from abroad, for many of whom the British School is unfamiliar territory, with only a handful of recognisable names to guide them. For more informed and regular visitors, the display should not be too static; refreshment is necessary to avoid boredom. And recent developments in British art should provide a fine-tuned, vivid coda to what has gone before. It is with these ends in mind that we should assess the current formidable rehang and much internal reconstruction of Tate Britain which opened to the public this May.

The complete rehang, from the sixteenth century to the present, is firmly based in chronology.1 Apart from the century and a half covered in the first two rooms , spaces are thereafter devoted to periods of thirty or twenty years, which, after 1910, are narrowed to single decades. Most artists have their moment in one room only; other artists’ works can be found across two and even three rooms – Gainsborough, Sickert and Freud, for example. Keeping to these parcels of time has brought to light many unfamiliar, rarely displayed works, the curators having diligently trawled through the collection. Of a number of examples, we might mention Tilly Kettle’s full-length portrait of the actress Mrs Yates and a gem by John Brett, Lady with a dove. The display catches in its voracious net a range of creative endeavour, from international big fish to the most parochial minnows. But the premise of the display, that very different kinds of art are being made in any given year or decade, carries no intellectual weight or challenge. In practice it means that curators can more or less abrogate any sense of visual discrimination and throw away a good deal of received history. There is little evidence here of any underpinning research, flying in the face of one of Tate Britain’s statutory aims, which is to ‘increase the public’s understanding’ of British art through its collections. If such hanging by date is combined, as here, with the policy of eschewing ‘designated themes or movements’ and avoiding the grouping together of works by outstanding figures, then a free-for-all soon develops. In the first rooms this is much less noticeable when medium and genre are relatively restricted. But in the earlier nineteenth century, when genres expand and new kinds of subject-matter proliferate, the effect can lead to incoherence. There are passages in the hang that bear more resemblance to a minor auction preview or a wall at the RA Summer Exhibition. There are some killer juxtapositions – a few examples will make the point. A circular portrait possibly of the actor Ira Aldridge, by John Simpson, in a ferociously gilded frame, hangs next to Constable’s large study for Hadleigh Castle, one of the great European landscapes of that time; nothing unites them. Constable suffers again when the sublime modesty of his Flatford Mill is almost elbowed aside by the Paulus Potter-derived confection of a landscape by Thomas Sidney Cooper. Whistler’s masterpiece Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander is hung in a tight corner, almost indecently fronted by Lord Leighton’s bronze male nude The sluggard; neither work gains from this. A work each by Gwen John and Harold Gilman is hung side by side for no more per­tinent reason than that they each depict a female figure seated at a tea table. Both are fine pictures but the withdrawn mood of the John is no match for the confrontational colour and drawing of Gilman’s Mrs Mounter. Again, in a similar vein, no favours are done to William Coldstream by displaying his tentative portrait of a soldier in a turban next to Bacon’s Three studies for figures at the base of a Crucifixion, the most radical painting of its time in Britain. That they were painted within a year of each other is the least interesting thing about them. There are bound to be some rehangs (surely a major one will be needed when some of the Tate’s most celebrated Pre-Raphaelite works are returned from an exhibition now in Moscow) and works will go on loan elsewhere, especially from the twentieth century. We can only hope such adjustments will encourage more visual acuity.

The walls are a pale, warm grey providing effective unity throughout. The lighting is good until a certain yellowish tone appears in the later twentieth-century section. Labelling is very minimal (artist, title, date) but is not strictly adhered to – occasional excellent contextual labels crop up here and there and some works have a few sentences attached. This absence of information can be excluding. Would there be any harm, for example, in saying that Charles Dodgson, by whom there is a small photograph, is the real name of Lewis Carroll, or that Lord Auchinleck, portrayed by Ramsay, was Boswell’s father? As to the restructuring of the inside, there are several dramatic, long-view moments through the enfilade of rooms on the west side of the building, with Reynolds’s Archers at one end, Bomberg’s Mud bath at the other. And there is pace, even if only at the level of ‘what happens next?’. It is leisurely at first but quickens once a visitor crosses the central Duveen Galleries (which we hope to see used for sculpture in future, rather than the portentous film by Simon Starling whose soundtrack seeps into nearby rooms) and gains the full twentieth-century experience. It is here that we find two rooms permanently dedicated to Henry Moore. These, along with two spaces at the top extremity of the building given to Blake and the single room at the bitter end of the Clore Gallery’s Turners which shows works by Constable, are salutary reminders of the benefits of grouping together works by a single artist. The several BP Spotlight rooms dotted through the galleries would make ideal settings for artists or movements to be seen in a concentration that seems forbidden by the chronological hang.

The redisplay has been greeted with general enthusiasm in the press and there are indeed welcome improvements (and more to come, we hope, when the whole project is completed in the autumn). But need there have been quite such an imbalance between the blueprint and its visual execution, between information and pleasure?

1    As a preface outside the first room, an excellent illustrated time-line denotes important moments in the collecting of British art and the history of the Gallery itself.