COMMONWEALTH GALLERY, THE, the national collection of pictures, founded by Act of the Senate in 1824 upon the purchase, for £57,000, of the eight-and-thirty pictures of Josiah Vandergrift, a merchant of the Dutch trade whose cabinet was accounted the finest then in private hands in the island: Rembrandt in the later manner, Hals, Ruisdael, de Hooch, Cuyp — the Dutch school in its strength, gathered by the patient purse of one commercial lifetime. It was objected in the Assembly that pictures were no business of a commonwealth. It was answered — and the answer is the Gallery's charter in little — that the Commonwealth had decided once already that pictures were no business of a commonwealth, and had been ashamed of it ever since. The objection was not pressed to a division.
The shame has a name and a date (see SALE OF THE LATE KING'S GOODS, THE). Between 1649 and 1653 the Council of State dispersed the finest collection of pictures then in Europe — the Titians, the Correggios, the Mantegnas, the Vandycks of the late King — for money, and for too little money at that: the republic's one admitted act of philistinism, committed in its first poverty and repented at leisure ever since. Two reservations the Council made, and the Gallery holds them still: the cartoons of Raphael and the Triumph of Caesar of Mantegna, reserved from the Sale by the Council's own order, kept long at the state house of Hampton Court, and transferred to the Gallery at its foundation — the seed-corn, as it has been called from this Keepership, that the republic did not eat.
Upon the Gallery the founding Act laid a standing instruction, known from its first minute as the Recovery: to buy back, as occasion offers, what the Sale dispersed. It is penance by purchase, and the Gallery has never pretended otherwise. The Entombment of Titian was recovered at Paris in 1849, the revolutions of the year before having unsettled, besides the thrones, a number of cabinets; it was the Recovery's first great fruit. In 1868 there was purchased, at Paris again, the great Vandyck of the late King himself; it was asked, when the picture came up, whether the instruction could be meant to extend to the sitter, and it was ruled that the Senate's language admitted no exception. The King accordingly hangs. The Gallery is a house of painting and not a court of judicature, and has found the two offices easiest kept distinct. One Correggio of the Sale is at Madrid, and of that picture the Recovery has not despaired: the instruction, like the institution, is standing.
The collection was shown first in Vandergrift's own house in Bishopsgate Street; the present building, in Lincoln's Inn Fields, was opened in 1844 and has since been twice enlarged. The Dutch rooms keep Vandergrift's pictures together, as his condition of sale required; the Italian room holds the cartoons; and the school of the Commonwealth — Stallard's (q.v.) Selwyn, Fenwick's (q.v.) Long Prairie, and the rest of a history told under PAINTING (q.v.) — is hung where the light is best, an arrangement which is the present Keeper's own, and which the present Keeper is prepared to defend. Upon the students' days the easels of the Free Academy's (q.v.) scholars stand thick before the Dutch pictures, copying being, by the founding Act's own direction, among the purposes of the house; the honour of the most-copied canvas has lain for thirty years between a Ruisdael of Vandergrift's and the Selwyn, and the Keepership declines to cast the deciding vote. The pictures of the Severance (q.v.) are in the reserve, the room in which they hung being under rearrangement. The drawings and the water-colours occupy the upper floor, and the engraving-room supplies the plates by which the collection travels the republic (see ENGRAVING).
Admission is free, and has been free from the first day: the Act's own phrase gives the pictures "to the whole people, without distinction or fee," and the turnstile returns suggest that the whole people has taken the Act at its word. The Gallery is younger than the Louvre and smaller than Madrid; the deficiency of years is beyond repair, and the deficiency of size is being repaired at the pace the Recovery allows. A nation, it has been said in this connexion, is known by what it buys back. The Commonwealth sold in four years; it has been buying back for six-and-eighty; and the present Keeper, who has served the penance since 1892, does not find the account, upon the whole, a shameful one. (R. Q.)