Scholarship in trust

This month's issue is APOLLO'S latest collaboration with the National Trust. In the following pages, we present important new research about its holdings, together with news of its recent acquisitions. Nobody could doubt that the National Trust is one of the greatest ornaments of British life, yet this issue demonstrates something else: its extraordinary internationalism. Here are articles on Indian textiles; Italian paintings; a Haggadah illuminated by a German artist in what is now the Czech Republic; and a spectacular bed made in Paris. The account of new acquisitions ranges from an Italian renaissance devotional painting to a rococo French portrait, and the Trust is about to launch a campaign to secure a huqqa made in Lucknow for Clive of India (see page 77).

Notably, none of these subjects can seriously attract opprobrium from historians of colonialism. Even the huqqa is an object that pays tribute to native crafts, and may have been commissioned by Clive to raise his standing in the eyes of Indian princes. Instead, this international aspect of the Trust's holdings reveals the curiosity and discrimination--and, of course, acquisitiveness--with which English men and women have studied and explored the world. These objects represent the values not of imperialism but of scholarship and connoisseurship, qualities that the National Trust exemplifies.

It has upheld those values simply by executing so well its basic function to acquire and preserve landscape and architecture of beauty and historic importance. In so far as its country houses are concerned--the setting for virtually all its significant art--only three or so years ago they appeared largely to be frozen, with the Trust's acquisitive energies directed simply to retrieving objects that had left them in the past. It seemed unlikely that further major houses would be acquired--none had come to the Trust since Chastleton, Oxfordshire, in 1991. That perception has now changed, thanks to the acquisitions in 2002 (both by purchase, not gift) of Tyntesfield, Somerset, and William Morris's Red House, Bexleyheath. This had a remarkably vitalising impact on public perceptions of the Trust, as its curators were widely seen to be campaigning and forcefully articulate about their mission.

That change has been particularly welcome, as the National Trust is so often criticised for presiding over a snobbish, 'elitist' heritage culture. In part that has arisen out of misunderstanding about its changing role as a custodian of art and architecture. When it first began to acquire country houses in a systematic way, in the late 1930s, it did indeed see its role as preserving their owners in them, to maintain a way of life that was under threat. Over seventy years later that view of its aims is no longer tenable. The rise of standards of conservation and curatorship has led to the National Trust having to treat its houses as museums, however much earlier generations of its staff hated the word. Indeed, 149 of its properties are now registered museums.

Throughout the world, the National Trust is recognised as setting a gold standard in the display and conservation of historic houses and their collections. If a criticism is to be made, it is that scholarship has not figured much in the Trust's statements of its aims, although it is (or ought to be) fundamental to its purposes. At Waddesdon Manor, alone of the Trust's houses, there is a lively programme of publications, lectures and seminars, but there Lord Rothschild, not the National Trust, is in charge. Nobody doubts that the Trust can when required publish its collections to the highest standards--look, for example, at the catalogue of its centenary exhibition of paintings at the National Gallery, London, in 1995. But there is no systematic programme of adult academic education or of scholarly publishing.

In part that may be because the form of such publishing needs further debate. The National Trust has some coherent collections--such as the silver at Dunham Massey, the textiles at Hardwick, or the architectural drawings at Wimpole--that deserve traditional museum-type catalogues (and these three are now being given them). But arguably there ought to be catalogues of houses--publications that go beyond the existing guidebooks to draw together research on architecture and gardens as well as works of art, to serve the ever-growing recognition that these houses are above all historic ensembles.

In pioneering a new sort of scholarly publication the National Trust could lead the world. But it will not do so until it budgets adequately for research and publication, as at present it does not. At the moment its resources are stretched, like all organisations which rely on investment income. Yet if it were to establish as a separate charitable fund a Foundation for Scholarship then it seems highly likely that it would win enthusiastic support--financial as well as academic--from that wide, international community whose interests and values are so well represented in this issue of APOLLO.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Apollo Magazine Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group