Out of the Basement

If there are 400 things that London's progressive Tate Gallery can't abide, they are the pictures and sculptures that for the past 52 years have been drifting in from the bequest of wealthy Victorian Sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey. In that time, the unhappy custodians of the Tate have willy-nilly acquired tons and acres of lowing kine, rearing horses, languorous ladies, idyllic landscapes and storm-beset ships-of-the-line.

Except for about 30 pieces (including an Epstein bust and a sprinkling of Pre-Raphaelites), the Tate has resolutely packed them off to the cellar. That, says the gallery's pastel-shirted Director John Rothenstein, is where they belong.

Probably nothing would have given greater shock to well-intentioned Donor Chantrey. He had left the bulk (-L-105,000) of his estate for "the purchase of works of fine art of the highest merit . . . executed within the shores of Great Britain." Chantrey's will specified that the president and council of the Royal Academy should be the judges of what to buy with the money. In 1897, the Academicians had picked the Tate as just the place for the collection.

This week in London, the Royal Academy, having worked over Tate's basement trove, put the whole collection on show in its Piccadilly museum. The Academy hopes to prove the error of Scoffer Rothenstein's ways, to end what it considers a "mischievous and unseemly controversy." Rothenstein hopes gallerygoers will laugh the collection back to the cellar. In a sense, he will be on show himself. From a group study entitled The Princess Badroulbadour, painted by his father Sir William Rothenstein, the young John of 1908 will gaze, fixed and helpless, at the passing jury.

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