4. The picture space for the National Gallery will be doubled, without disturbing the Royal Academy.
5. The space available for exhibiting drawings, &c. will be increased about fourfold.
6. The appearance of the building both externally and internally will be improved.
7. The whole alteration can be completed within six months, and without moving a single picture out of the building, or closing the National Gallery to the public for a single day.
8. The cost of the entire work would not exceed 50,000l.
Any other plan than the above will delay the settlement of this vexed question interminably, and will lead to an expenditure of hundreds of thousands of pounds; whereas the adoption of the present proposal, coupled with the principle of local circulation rather than metropolitan centralization, will promote a taste for art throughout the United Kingdom, and enlist the sympathies and assistance of all in the conservation and extension of a National Collection of Pictures, thus rendered accessible to the population of the most remote districts.
FOOTNOTES
[25] Mr. T. Fairbairn is usefully striving to establish a public Gallery of Art at Manchester; but however rich it may become in local resources, specimens of Beato Angelicos, Raffaelles, and the like, successively introduced, for a season, from time to time, would have a very beneficial influence on the tastes of the visitors.
[26] So much doubt and ignorance exists on the subject of the tenure by which the Royal Academy holds its premises, that the official answer of Henry Howard, the Keeper, has been exhumed from parliamentary records to remove them. Mr. Howard says:—
“There are no expressed conditions on which the apartments at Somerset House were originally bestowed on the Royal Academy. The Royal Academy of Arts took possession of the apartments which they occupy in Somerset House, in April 1780, by virtue of a letter from the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury to the Surveyor General, directing him to deliver over to the Treasurer of the Royal Academy, all the apartments allotted to his Majesty’s said Academy in the new buildings at Somerset House, which are to be appropriated to the uses specified in the several plans of the same heretofore settled.”