A retired priest in North Wales told me that after the war he had been asked by Billy Butlin to buy 19th-century paintings for the holiday-camp chapels, because they were going cheap. One he bought, for 49 guineas in 1947, was William Dyce’s 1835 ‘Lamentation of the Dead Christ’. In 1983, after the Butlin’s chapels had closed, it made a handy £125,000 at auction, when it was bought by Aberdeen Art Gallery. As late as 1962, Lord Leighton’s great ‘Flaming June’ (1895) was sold for £50. Today? Millions.
Talk about ‘the bubble reputation’. The pattern of artistic fame followed by subsequent obscurity has been repeated through the centuries. But now we live in an age of more art exhibitions than anyone in the past could have imagined, and many of them are vehicles – not always successful – for resurrecting forgotten artists or a specific aspect of their work. A good example of the latter is the display of Constable portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in 2009. Only 20 years earlier, a house sale in East Anglia included a large group portrait by Constable on the wall. The seller saw no point in removing it, since no one cared twopence for a Constable portrait, only his landscapes. As it happened, the NPG show failed to alter anyone’s opinion because, of course, Constable’s portraits hadn’t got any better: they were still as clunky as ever.
