Birmingham's Barber Institute enjoyed a golden age of collecting under its recently retired director, writes Terry Grimley
Richard Verdi, who retired last month as director of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, has left behind a remarkable legacy.
Apart from adopting a far more aggressive attitude towards promoting the collection to the public - that is, if throwing open the doors of an art gallery to the public can be thought of as an act of aggression - he also stepped up the rate at which the collection grew over his 17 years in charge, adding no fewer than 80 works.
True, most of these were works on paper, with a total of just ten oil paintings (or rather nine-and-a-half, as a Van Dyck was bought in partnership with the National Gallery) and one sculpture.
But the Barber's is such a select, high-quality collection that this represents an expansion of something like 10 per cent, while the development of the graphic collection has been proportionately even more significant.
At the moment the Barber is showing an exhibition, Exceptional Beauty and Outstanding Merit - the title reflects the criteria which were set out when the collection was established in the late 1930s - which offers an overview of Prof Verdi's acquisitions.
It's a pretty impressive collection-within-a-collection.
Museum collecting, at least as much as politics, is the art of the possible. The acceleration of purchasing during Prof Verdi's directorship reflects a more pro-active approach to plundering sources of funding besides the Barber bequest, the purchasing power of which had obviously diminished considerably since the first director, Thomas Bodkin, was buying Poussin and Monet back in the late 1930s.
The National Art Collections Fund (now the Art Fund), the Resource/V&A purchase grant fund and, in particular, the National Lottery, all contributed to this purple patch in the Barber collection's growth.
Sometimes compared to New York's Frick Collection as a small-scale, high-quality public art museum, the Barber is also often described as the last great public art collection to be created in Britain. It certainly seems to have been launched at just about the last moment when it was still possible to create a reasonably representative overview of European art (though the collection is not restricted to Europe) from the early renaissance to 1900, ahead of postwar inflation in the art market.
The terms of Lady Barber's bequest were clear in setting the bar high. If works weren't good enough for the National Gallery or the Wallace Collection, they wouldn't be good enough for the Barber.
The one really unfortunate imposition laid down by Lady Barber, due to her antipathy to modern art, was that the gallery was forbidden to acquire anything from later than 1900.
Although this condition was changed to a 30-year time-lag in 1967, the damage had been done. It is now extremely unlikely that the Barber will ever have major works by Picasso, Matisse or a host of other major 20th century names.
In 17 years Prof Verdi was able to add only one 20th century painting. The Portrait of Bartolomeo Savona by André Derain is a rare example of the artist's Fauvist period and a previously unknown souvenir of his visit to London in 1906.
The portrait of Derain's fellow lodger was painted in return for his services as interpreter on a visit to the dentist, and remained in the sitter's family in Italy until it was bought by the Barber in 1997 - an illustration of the importance of international contacts in sniffing out potential acquisitions.
The other 20th century works bought by Prof Verdi are all either prints or drawings. They include works by Graham Sutherland and Wyndham Lewis and various Paris-based artists including Picasso (the powerful lithograph Bust of Jacqueline, from 1958), Matisse, Miro and Rouault. But the most concerted area of collecting focused on German graphic work, including examples by Klinger, Nolde, Beck-mann, Kollwitz and Dix, plus the Austrian, Schiele.
For various reasons German art has been relatively little collected by British museums, so this series of works marks out a distinctive territory for the Barber. Prof Verdi also added a number of works, by Adolph von Menzel and some other lesser-known figures, which trace the German tradition back through the 19th century.
One of the most joyful of the oil paintings bought by Prof Verdi is the tiny, jewel-like Mother and Child by the Sea, painted in 1840 by Johan Christian Dahl. Again, this example of Nordic Romanticism is a rarity for a British collection: Dahl was Norwegian, but he was a friend and follower of the great German artist Caspar David Friedrich, and lived in Germany for much of his career.
Within three years the Dahl acquired a companion piece in a small German Alpine landscape by Thomas Fearnley, also Norwegian despite the name which reflects his English ancestry.
The only other 19th century painting bought by Prof Verdi is a sturdy still life of artist's materials by Francois Bonvin, an artist I have to admit was completely unknown to me. Though the style of this 1879 painting is preImpressionist, it is interesting for illustrating one of the technical innovations which made open-air Impressionism possible - metal paint tubes.
It seems, though, that the 17th century remains the art market's bargain basement, accounting for five of the ten paintings bought by Prof Verdi. "Bargain", of course, is a relative term since several of these paintings cost millions.
The two biggest names are Rubens' Portrait of a Carmelite Prior and Van Dyck's ebullient portrait of his friend Francois Langlois as a bagpipe-toting musician, which now divides its time between the Barber and the National Gallery.
However, the single most spectacular painting is Matthias Stom's Isaac Blessing Jacob, a masterpiece by this relatively little-known Dutch follower of Caravaggio, and a notable example of a public collection bringing a painting back to Europe from America.
Another rarity is the Still Life with Musical Instruments (circa 1660) by the Italian priest-painter Evaristo Baschenis. He is said to be the greatest Italian still life painter of the 17th century, but this is the only painting by him in a British public collection.
Interestingly the Baschenis was bought without external assistance in 1997, the same year as the Van Dyck and Derain.
Prices haven't stood still since then, and with increased pressure on the National Lottery we may already be looking back here at a vanished golden age. It will be fascinating to see what kind of strategy Prof Verdi's successor, Dr Ann Sumner, comes up with to take the Barber Institute collection further into the 21st century.
* Exceptional Beauty and Outstanding Merit: Acquisitions Made During the Directorship of Richard Verdi is on display at the Barber Institute, Birmingham University, until January 20 (Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun noon-5pm; admission free).
