What's Cricket?

At an auction at Sotheby's in London last week, U.S. Collector Charles B. Wrightsman bought for $392,000 the Duke and Duchess of Leeds's portrait by Goya of the first Duke of Wellington. The auctioneer's gavel had hardly banged for the last time when a group of Tory M.P.s started a campaign to prevent Wrightsman from getting an export license--and that could mean, as it has with other purchasers, that Wrightsman might have to wait months before the government decides whether he can take his painting home, or must resell it in Britain at some vague "fair price." The British are getting ever more touchy about art treasures leaving the country.

To John Walker, director of Washington's National Gallery, they are getting too touchy by half. It fell to him the night after the auction to give the trustees of Britain's National Art Collection Fund a quiet chiding:

"It is understandable that you want to keep these treasures that you yourselves once imported from ever being exported. But in view of your export restrictions, there may be some among you who will wonder whether buying old masters in Zurich and New York is quite cricket. Insofar as you have closed your own market, should your museums take advantage of the open markets that remain?"

A little more waspishly, Walker took up the chronic British complaint that British collectors and museums do not have the cash to compete with the U.S. "If money is so scarce," said Walker, "why do you buy in Switzerland a picture like the Lanskeronski St. George and the Dragon, whose only connection with English culture, so far as I can make out, is that St. George is the patron saint of England? We were anxious to purchase this picture ourselves, but it was too expensive for us. It is an indication of the immense riches you can draw upon when you desire." He might have added one more inconsistency: in 1961 Britain's imports of art have exceeded $39 million--nearly one-third again as much as its exports.

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