Should museums charge entry fees?

Plus: Picnicking with the Impressionists

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Tristram Hunt defends free admission to museums

One part of the culture wars battlefield that has remained curiously calm over the last few years is the question of free entry to UK national museums. The 1997 Labour Party manifesto committed Tony Blair's government to introduce open admission to those museums and galleries sponsored directly by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Since its implementation in 2001, this policy has become a hallowed feature of modern British cultural life. Even as a general election looms, the political consensus is absolute: free entry must remain. But after a decade of austerity in public funding, how viable is this policy for the functioning of British galleries and museums in the long run? My fellow UK museum directors and I certainly look on enviously at the sharp fee increases that now see entry to the Metropolitan Museum set at $30, the Louvre at €22 and the Uffizi at €25, and the impressive investment that flows from these.

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Bee Wilson compares the spreads on offer in scenes by Monet and Manet

Bee Wilson compares picnic scenes by Monet and Manet

Monet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, first painted in 1865, and another version in 1866, a response to Manet, was mocked by Zola in his novel L'Oeuvre as a 'storm in a cream jug'. Where Manet disrupted the concept of the French bourgeois picnic, Monet merely celebrated it. But what a celebration! Monet's picnic, of which he did several versions, is a true open-air feast (unlike Manet's, which was a studio composition). The whole scene is bathed in glorious green sunlight. On a cloth on the ground, there is a magnificent raised pie and a roast chicken, alongside a profusion of peaches, green grapes, bread and wine. A whippet looks hungrily on. Manet's is by far the more important painting. Yet Monet's is the picnic I would most want to eat.

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Edward Behrens on a torrid summer for London's auction houses

This June has not been a balmy month for the two main auction houses, Christie's and Sotheby's. The first omen came when Christie's announced that there would be no June evening sales in Impressionist, 20th-century or contemporary art. It was presented as a new normal, a necessary part of calendar reshaping to allow the company to 'better serve the needs of our clients, in particular by re-aligning our sales with the key art market convening moments of Frieze week in London and Paris+ Art Basel in Paris'. […] The June sale made £119m in 2021 and £181m in 2022, so it seemed like things were heading in the right direction. Or it did until last year, when the same sale raised a sales total of £63.8m.

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Acquisitions of the month: May 2024

Among the most important works to have entered museums last month is a remarkable family portrait by Lavinia Fontana, which has spent almost its entire life in private collections. The painting of the noblewoman Bianca degli Utili Maselli and six of her children (she bore 19 in total but ended up outliving all but three of them) features some cartoonishly rendered faces, a puppy, a bird and an inscription bearing the name of her daughter, Verginia. Most striking are the immaculately detailed clothing, jewellery and ornate ruffs worn by each of the seven figures. The Legion of Honor acquired it with the support of major donors as part of the museum's centenary celebrations. It is now on show in the museum's Renaissance galleries alongside works by Titan, El Greco and others, becoming the first pre-1700 painting by a woman to join the Legion of Honor's collection.

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Rowland Bagnall on the British colourist who studied with Matisse

Typically praised as the inheritor in Britain of Post-Impressionist techniques, particularly the swift brushwork and vibrant colour palette of the Fauves, Matthew Smith achieved critical and commercial success during his lifetime, twice representing Britain at the Venice Biennale (in 1938 and 1950). 'He seems to me to be one of the very few English painters since Constable and Turner to be concerned with painting,' wrote Francis Bacon; 'that is, with attempting to make idea and technique inseparable […] so that the image is the paint and vice versa.' Smith left his mark on Patrick Heron, whose paintings reveal not only the same striking use of colour, but also an appreciation of how colour interacts with – and even ultimately determines – space and form.

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In the current issue…

Donal Cooper on an important turning point in Renaissance painting

Two of the artists name-checked in the title of Christopher Wood's ambitious new book on early Renaissance Italian painting – Giotto and Fra Angelico – will be familiar to a wide readership. The third, however, will come as a surprise. Not much is known about Giottino, or 'little Giotto', the nickname given to the son of the painter Stefano Fiorentino, one of the most talented of Giotto's disciples according to early sources. The sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti rated Stefano as 'the best painter up to that time', while Vasari judged Giottino's art to have surpassed both his father's and Giotto's in its softness, diligence and unity. Almost none of the works that early modern writers ascribed to Giottino and his father survive, and their imprint on the archival record is similarly slight, leaving a problematic gap in our understanding of Giotto's legacy in the middle decades of the 14th century.

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