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Hospital art treasures |
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| Fiona Green describes how four beautiful paintings that used to be on display in the Middlesex Hospital entrance hall could have been sold on the open market if it wasn’t for a public campaign to keep them. | |||
Four large paintings on canvas which were displayed in the
Middlesex Hospital have been saved from being auctioned off. After a campaign to prevent the paintings from being sold the
UCLH NHS Trust has bowed to public pressure and announced that the paintings
will be kept.
The “Acts of Mercy” as they are know are by the painter Frederick Cayley Robinson and were painted during the
First World War and installed in the hospital’s entrance hail in 1922. The works, each six square metres in size, feature
soldiers waiting to be cared for and orphans waiting for food.
UCLH NHS Trust Chairman, Peter Dixon, has admitted that the hospital had no idea that the public cared so much
for them. He told the meeting that the Director of Tate Britain, Dr Stephen Deuchar, had not actually bought the
paintings, but had offered to conserve and store them for free until a home can be found for them in one of the Hospital’s
flagship new buildings in Huntley Street.
These rare masterpieces are quiet in tone, like seventeenth century Dutch interiors by Pieter de Hooch, and
they have provided comfort for staff, patients, and visitors alike, who have enjoyed them where they hung in the reception
hail of the now demolished Middlesex Hospital.
Cayley Robinson was much influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, and the Symbolists, most especially Puvis de
Chavanne, yet he remained an individualist. In his time, art critics labeled him a “visionary,” his pictures, “noble”. Yet
he was forgotten until 50 years after his death, when a retrospective exhibition in 1977, restored him to his rightful place in the history of art.
Following the purchase, last year, of the main Middlesex Hospital building by Candy & Candy, for a mixed-use
development, the beautiful hospital chapel was safe because it is a Grade II* listed status building. Many people felt that that the
pictures should be accorded a similar honour.
The decision to place them with Auctioneers, Christie’s, had been made, following a report by the
hospital’s art curator, Guy Noble, which said “Times have changed and the works are not suited to the new UCH.” However,
the public disagreed with such rigid views, and voted vociferously in response. In 2003, Peter Dixon, promised local Charlotte Street Association
chairman, Max Neufeld that “we
would certainly not consider permanent disposal”.
Mr Neufeld responded generously by saying “It is always difficult for a public body to reconsider an earlier
decision, and we welcome that they have done this”.
I have a personal interest in seeing them re-housed . Well apart from their enormous value, they were a great uplift
and support to me during my year-long cancer treatments and my later visits to see old friends, like the artist, Bruce
Bernard, who was treated for cancer there too in the last decade.
J.H.Baron, Senior Lecturer in the Dept of Surgery at Hammersmith Hospital Medical School, wrote in the British
Medical Journal in December last year, how his life “had been made happier by the
presence of these paintings”, and that “they were one stimulus to my devoting much of my
non-biomedical energies to beautifying hospitals”.
Local councillor, Penny Abrahams, says: "I am really pleased that the UCHF Trust Board listened to the public
outcry against the selling off of these pictures. They belong to the local community. At a time when so much of local
interest is being destroyed, I hope a safe home can be found for them in one of the many new buildings being
constructed”. |
Councillor Rebecca Hossack says "I cannot see why on
earth they should not be in the new UCH. I think mixing old historical things within new buildings, adds soul, and public
institutions certainly need that”.
However, the fate of the paintings is still uncertain. If they are not found a suitable home and hung within the five
years, the hospital has reserved the right to put them on the open market. It is up to us all now to see that a commitment
to house these national treasures is made, and soon.
When I talked to Max Neufeld, he said they weren’t murals, adding: “they are on canvas!” and he gave me some of
the history of his involvement in rescuing the paintings from an Arts & Heritage Committee who, in typical “Euston Arch”
mentality, supported them being left out of the new hospital construction.
He reminded me of the old rivalry between the Middlesex and University College Hospitals and said that the
pictures were meant to vanish, rather than stay and carry the rivalry over to a new site. The shiny new hospital needed no
reference to the past. What has changed significantly however, is the new value and importance attributed to the work of
painters like Cayley Robinson, which are now seeing a revival.
Max has always argued that they should remain in Fitzrovia “as part of our heritage” and not be sold off to buy
new art work. “That would be like selling a Renaissance picture to buy a Damien Hirst!” Max argues very persuasively
that they should be incorporated into a new, purpose-built site, like the prospective Ambulatory Cancer Centre. Meanwhile
they can be stored by the Art Collection and the Tate, pending their placement. He
says “pressure must continue to be kept up for the Hospital to identify where they will be displayed and we have a written
commitment that the architect is properly briefed to incorporate them into a specially designed site, as had been
done by Davis at the original site.
Finally, Max agreed, we must all pay tribute to Roisin Gadeirab of the Camden New Journal, without whose shrewd,
campaigning journalism, the pictures may have been quietly sold off. “The fate of the paintings is still uncertain. If they are not found a suitable home within five years, the hospital has reserved the right to put them on the open market. It is up to us all now to see that a commitment to house these national treasures is made, and soon.”
“Their hushed atmosphere, tense geometry and subdued colour scheme respond to the grim anxieties of the Home Front, as well as to their original classical setting. The figures wait - for the doctor, for food, for peace. A columnar tree cuts across ashlar. Greys tending to lilac, mauve and olive green set off the plain white bowls of the orphans and the clean bandages of the wounded. The glowing oil lamp in the foreground and the sash window illuminated in the sober terrace beyond are at once marvellous and mundane Cayley Robinson’s figures wait rather than act.”
- Nicholas Penny, curator of sculpture at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. London Review of Books (17 April 2003) |
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