COLLECTION NEWS - FEBRUARY 2008

Dulwich Picture Gallery is currently updating its comprenhensive collection's database. If you have any collection queries, call 020 82998720 / 8722.

GALLERY INTRODUCTION

Dulwich Picture Gallery houses one of the world's most important collections of European old master paintings of the 1600s and 1700s.

The collection is also one of the oldest in Great Britain, substantially put together in the years 1790 to 1795.

The paintings are housed in the first purpose-built art gallery in England, designed by Sir John Soane in 1811.

CONSERVATION NEWS

This is a particularly exciting time for conservation at Dulwich. The Getty Foundation has generously funded the conservation of twenty-six paintings, the most recent of which to be rehung in the gallery in its newly conserved state, is Nason’s Portrait of a Man, 1663. Nason was a Dutch artist who trained in Amsterdam and then entered the painter’s guild in The Hague in 1639. The costume on the man suggests he is also Dutch. The painting is similar to a female portrait in the Walter’s Art Gallery, Baltimore, with the possibility they exist as a pair.

Other paintings recently conserved in the collections are:

Gainsborough’s An Unknown Couple in a Landscape (DPG 588), c.1755.
During conservation an x-ray revealed a half-length portrait of a female figure underneath the present painting, presumably discarded by Gainsborough or at the request of his sitter. Gainsborough turned the canvas upside down before repainting what you see in the present composition.

Ommeganck’s A Bull (DPG 145). A Flemish painting, which during recent conservation had the removal of discoloured varnish and also careful retouching so that cracks on the painting are no longer a distraction. Tiny details that bring the picture to life – the hairs on the bull’s chin, the birds above and the distant landscape – can now be more easily admired.