THE DISTURBING AND unfortunate events that in recent weeks have engulfed the Witt and Conway Libraries at the Courtauld Institute of Art are primarily attributable to the Institute’s current financial problems. When in July it seemed that the libraries would effectively close to the public, that their collections would be frozen and their staff made redundant, a catastrophe appeared about to unfold for the researchers, students, writers, publishers and members of the art trade, national and international, who made use of the libraries, particularly the Witt. There are surely few readers of this Magazine who have not availed themselves of these libraries’ riches and whose research has not taken unexpected directions from what they have discovered there. But for those unfamiliar with them, a little history is necessary. 

 The Witt Library began as Sir Robert and Lady Witt’s personal collection of photographs of Western European painting and graphic art from c.1200 onwards. Together with Samuel Courtauld and Lord Lee of Fareham, Witt is regarded as one of the founders of the Institute.1 In 1944 he drew up a Deed of Trust for the eventual bequest of the collection to the Univer­sity of London to form part of the Courtauld Institute but with full public access for ‘all those interested in art’, and it came to the Courtauld after Witt’s death in 1952. It was to have its own librarian and staff and to be open free of charge, five days per week. Funds were also bequeathed by Sir Robert for continuing additions to the collection. Since its donation, it has become the largest image library in the world, with approximately two million reproductions, housed in a warren of rooms at Somerset House. The Conway Library for architecture, sculpture and decorative arts came to the Courtauld from Lord Conway in 1932 and has since been enlarged to about a million images. Together with the Garrison collection (painting pre-1300) and the Photographic Survey, set up in the early 1950s by Anthony Blunt to record British and Irish private collections, the libraries are an unparalleled and astonishing resource. 

The photographs and reproductions are filed in sturdy boxes, their shelf-place determined by national school and then by subdivisions of subject and imagery within an artist’s œuvre. The images, be they photographs or cuttings from sale or exhibition catalogues and periodicals, are mounted on cards with generous margins allowing for captions and annotations, often of inestimable value. In some boxes articles on individual artists, some from obscure or defunct sources, may be found. Rational though this may be in theory, in practice it can lead to omissions and imbalances. Files for leading artists are generally well served in a veritable banquet of boxes, fully answering Witt’s intention that his library was for curators, scholars, dealers and collectors. Files for lesser artists can be equally fertile, though less so as one approaches the twentieth century. But its greatest strength is undoubtedly among the old masters. 

That all has not been well in recent years is underlined by the present crisis, triggered by a financial review of the libraries within the full context of the Institute, an important rec­ommendation of which was the ‘restructuring’ of the Witt and Conway. Quite simply, the libraries lose money. Funding ini­tiatives among dealers and other interested parties have nowhere met increasing costs. Meanwhile, there continues to be a backlog of cataloguing, and important projects, among them the indexing and storing of the Kersting photo archive at the Conway, will be left high and dry. In July it was suggested that the image libraries were ‘no longer central to the Institute’s core objectives’; a few weeks later, after considerable public and private outcry and the announcement of some remission for the libraries, we were reassured that they were ‘an important dimension of [the Courtauld’s] work as a teaching and research institute’ and were ‘a valuable asset for students, scholars and researchers’. These two quotations surely suggest, at the very least, some change of direction within an Institute devoted to the visual arts, whether the photographic libraries are cost effective or not. With the increasing emphasis in teaching moving from connoisseurial skills towards theoretical studies and the increasing availability elsewhere of images online, it is no wonder that in recent years there have seemed to be fewer undergraduate students making use of the libraries. If this were to change – and the study of art history continually sheds and renews its emphases – we may find that students once again wish to know what an object looks like before discovering why it looks as it does. Meanwhile it seems that no further images are to be added. Even if this ‘freeze’ were only temporary, it would still leave unbridgeable lacunae. 

Could the whole collection be digitalised? Some attempts have already been made in this direction but, as far as we know, no masterplan has been suggested. It would be a hugely expensive and time-consuming operation, needing full-time expert guidance. Although it might eventually free up space and make the libraries internationally accessible, it could never replace the value of those comparisons and deductions readily made from image-by-image spreads across a table top, vital to the understanding of individual artists, schools, imagery and technique. 

The remission alluded to above – the re-opening of the libraries on weekdays from 2nd November, with some unidentified skeletal supervision – is some consolation. But this has come more as a sop than a solution. The Photographic Survey could be maintained elsewhere, and could probably cover some of its costs, but the Witt is held in Trust by the Courtauld, provided it abides by Sir Robert’s Deed. The raising of a con­siderable endowment to underpin the libraries seems an obvious solution. This may seem an onerous task in present times, but the Courtauld might be surprised by the warm support that such an appeal would generate. Such support, however, would need responsible co-ordination and this is now a matter of the greatest urgency.