ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the Club’s approach to the exhibiting of European painting and prints, what were (and still are) defined as ‘old masters’. Members of the Club collected widely, as we have seen, and within the category of paintings and prints, those produced by British artists were also exhibited at the Club. Some of these were made by artist members and associates, such as Burne-Jones and Rossetti, but only displayed after their deaths for reasons noted in the Introduction.1 The Club also exhibited British prints and paintings collected by members such as the works of Cozens, Blake, and Turner. It was with their displays of European prints and paintings, however, that the Club both carried on established traditions of presentation and interpretation and innovated new ones, in some cases, making a lasting impact on approaches to the subject in the field. In order to illustrate this, the chapter will begin with the Club’s exhibitions of Rembrandt Etchings (1877) and Early Netherlandish Painting (1892), which can be seen as reflective of the traditional art collecting approaches of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but with a new display strategy. This will be followed by a discussion of exhibitions of Italian regional schools of painting, from 1893-1919, where innovative approaches to display and categorization were used.