Pictures in a Deanery

Abstract

What could be a more delightful setting for an exhibition of old pictures than a house in a cathedral close — particularly when it is the close at Salisbury? The house was then the Deanery there, perhaps the finest of all the houses set down in that wide space, with views from its windows across green lawns and water-meadows, across rose-covered walls to the west front of the cathedral, the back with its cut hedges and grass walks leading down to the Wiltshire Avon? The idea of bringing together in one place a selection of pictures from surrounding country houses can never have been more justified. Nothing of the deadness, the intimidating professionalism of so many galleries: Dr. Tancred Borenius, in arranging these pictures, was able to imagine himself as an eighteenth-century dean with a taste for pictures and this fine house to put them in.