ABSTRACT
Robert Witt, one of the founders of the National Art-Collections Fund, stated in 1911 that ‘great advantage could be secured in the National and Tate Galleries at least, and perhaps in others, by treating the collection as consisting essentially of two portions, one for exhibition, the other for storage’. Nine years later, in 1920, Witt’s ideas would be put into practice at the National Gallery with the creation of a ‘storage collection’ that was more diplomatically named the Reference Section. At the time, the Director Charles Holmes asserted that the division of the collection would allow ‘the very finest pictures’ to be displayed apart from the ‘secondary works’ that would only be available to students on the lower floor. However, it is interesting that such a distinction was no longer being made by 1993 when a later Gallery Director, Neil MacGregor, stated that ‘virtually the entire collection is on public view’. The ‘entire collection’ referred both to those works on the main Gallery floor and those in the lower-floor galleries, despite the fact that these latter galleries comprise a space that shifts somewhere between display and storage. This chapter will explore the rationale for the creation of the Reference Section, the storage and accessibility of these ‘secondary works’ and how their display and integration with the main-floor collection changed over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Furthermore, it will place the Reference Section into context by considering how the Gallery dealt with the issue of ‘secondary’ pictures in the nineteenth century prior to the creation of the lower-floor galleries. Before the existence of the Reference Section, these pictures were not placed into a ‘storage collection’ but instead were accommodated elsewhere in London, loaned out to regional galleries or faced the ultimate sanction: the auction house.
