The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones
Jonathan Jones, in his blog for the British Guardian newspaper, has a beef with the Queen.
In his post today, Someone should rescue this royal loot (pegged to the upcoming Buckingham Palace exhibition, Bruegel to Rubens: Masters of Flemish Painting), he declares:
The fact is, the exhibitions at the Queen’s Gallery are just public relations. The whole place exists to justify a collection that makes no rational sense….How does it really add one iota to the prestige of the British monarchy
to maintain an art collection that’s big and rich enough to fill a
national art museum?Sure, keep the Landseers, ma’am, but do you really
need the Rembrandts, the Vermeer, the Holbeins, the Tintoretto?…It’s a bit of a joke that we make so much fuss about “saving” the odd
Titian for the nation and allow these thieves to hold on to their
stupendous sack of artistic loot.
The rhetoric’s a bit strong, but the point—that this extraordinary collection, held in trust for the public, should be more publicly accessible—is well taken. At least some progress has been made since 2006, though, when Charlotte Higgins complained in the Guardian that “there is no publicly accessible inventory of the Royal Collection.” Its website now features a voluminous, searchable A-to-Z e-gallery—everything from Fra Angelico to Federico Zuccaro.