The masterpieces take a holiday as gallery closes for GBP 9m facelift

BRITAIN'S oldest public art gallery closes down on Christmas Eve for 18 months and a GBP 9 million facelift. The Dulwich Picture Gallery is building an extension, with Lottery funds, designed to bring closer the original dream of architect Sir John Soane 190 years on.

Soane, the man who gave us the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, the Bank of England, had his first draft turned down. Deemed too elaborate and expensive in the cash-strapped days of the Napoleonic Wars, he was eventually forced to design a scaled-down version, which he duly brought in for under GBP 10,000. Now, his grandiose vision is to be restored.

The small, but perfectly formed gallery, bizarrely designed around a mausoleum housing its benefactors (the French art collector Noel Desenfans, his wife and their lifelong friend Sir Francis Bourgeois) has long been admired for its fine collection of Dutch and Flemish masters and works by Canaletto, Poussin and Gainsborough. In 1997, Dulwich was named one of 26 British museums judged to be "preeminent because of the richness and variety of its collection" and, after a vigorous marketing campaign, visitor numbers were this year increased from 30,000 to 100,000. High-profile exhibitions (the recent autumn exhibition by 17th century Dutch painter Pieter de Hooch accounted for more than half the visitors in 1998); lunchtime lectures, evening concerts and art classes for the unemployed and children's holiday workshops have all helped. The latter events, apart from encouraging visitors, are something the gallery's development officer, Kate Knowles, thinks are a duty the gallery owes the area. "Everyone thinks Dulwich is so leafy and posh, that our clientele is exclusively middle class. But remember, we're in Southwark, the second poorest borough in Britain, with Brixton and Peckham on our doorstep. The middle classes can educate themselves in art. We've a duty to teach those less well off." The paintings will "earn their living" during closure, she says. One hundred and fifty of them are being farmed out to dozens of galleries from Tokyo and Hiroshima to Houston, Washington, Madrid and Bilbao. The pictures have been taken out before, during the war, when the collection was evacuated to a safe house in Wales: a good call, as it happens, as a German bomb hit the grounds during 1944, badly damaging the building. This time around the operation will be rather more demanding, with the gallery's staff clocking up a lot of air miles. According to the rule book, someone has to accompany every batch of paintings to their end destination, and stay with them till they're safely hung on the wall. The remaining staff, sadly, will not have such a ritzy lifestyle, having to make do with a makeshift office in a local garage, complete with concrete floor and polystyrene-tiled ceiling. They'll venture out only to tour local schools and community centres -- even, it's hoped, a prison -- with copies of the Old Masters. A 19th century guide to the gallery, published a few years after it opened, commanded us to visit Dulwich preferably on a "fine sunshiny day -- in winter", admiring "the blush, the bloom, the burning glow of beauty" of the local surroundings, before venturing into the "rich summer of art which greets him on his first entrance into this exquisite gallery". You've got a day left. This side of the millennium, in any case.

Copyright 1998
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