The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts pulled off an audacious feat of showmanship last Friday. As it announced its acquisition of the Manton collection of British art, it simultaneously unveiled that collection in a surprise exhibition, startling even the institute’s own employees (they had assumed that the closed galleries were being prepared for this summer’s Monet exhibition). One can pardon the Clark’s showmanship; the Manton bequest is truly remarkable. It comprises over two hundred paintings and drawings by the luminaries of early 19th-century English painting, with particular emphasis on the work of Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable, and the incomparable J.M.W. Turner. Moreover, it comes with an endowment of $50 million, a bequest of extraordinary generosity.
The collection was assembled by the reclusive Edwin A.G. Manton (1909-2005), the longtime president and chairman of the American International Group (AIG). Though the British-born Manton (born, in fact, only a few miles from Constable’s own Suffolk birthplace) took up residence in America in 1933, he remained deeply appreciative of the English landscape and began collecting paintings in the 1940’s. He was a great supporter of London’s Tate Museum, for which he was knighted in 1994, although his gifts were invariably anonymous. According to the Daily Telegraph, his reasons for anonymity were strictly pragmatic: “I made my gifts anonymously to protect myself from people importuning me. It was not a noble feeling. I was simply protecting my purse.”
It is known that the Tate hoped to receive Manton’s collection and that Yale University courted his heirs as well. But it makes sense that Diana Morton, Manton’s daughter and head of the Manton Foundation, would in the end choose the Clark, a much smaller institution where the gift would be that much more prominent. In acknowledgment, the Clark is renaming its library and study center after Manton and his wife.
The current exhibition shows roughly a quarter of the collection and eminently deserves a visit. Here are England’s three greatest landscape painters, represented by works spanning their careers, and hung without the sort of didactic program that forecloses on happy, accidental comparisons. The highlight is easily Turner’s Off Ramsgate (1840), a hazy coastal reverie from the crescendo of his career (although I kept returning to his brooding image of the Prussian fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, looming over the Rhine and Mosel rivers). Gainsborough’s landscapes are not as celebrated as his splendid portraits (several of which the Clark already has), but they are enchanting in their own right, their 18th-century picturesque sensibility contrasting palpably with the romantic turbulence in Constable’s work. Today’s art world offers few occasions for unqualified celebration; this is one of them. (And should a viewer prefer his encounters with art to be of the more troubled sort, he can still forge on to the tarp-covered vestiges of Christoph Büchel’s abortive exhibition at MASS MoCA.)
