Treasures and their houses.

TREASURES AND THEIR HOUSES

KEEPING UP with the Joneses seems to be the overriding preoccupation of the United States' major museums these days. At the moment, I have to say the National Gallery is ahead, thanks to its "Treasure Houses of Britain" exhibit--alas, just closed--which was a splendid museum exhibit as such, but an even more splendid evocation of a way of life that is still struggling to survive the twentieth century.

"Treasure Houses of Britain" brought together some seven hundred objects from more than two hundred country houses of the United Kingdom. But instead of grouping them in modern museum fashion--eighteenth-century paintings in this room, sixteenth-century furniture over there, and cabinets full of objects, all the vases together, then the silver, then the jewelry--the organizers of the exhibit took the East Building of the National Gallery and transformd some 35,000 square feet of space into 17 galleries, halls, rotundas, and so forth, with the objects and works of art arranged just as they would be in a room in a real country house. That is to say, the museum's rooms do not attempt to duplicate specific rooms in specific houses, but they do create a more natural context for the art, using wallpaper, for example, instead of starkly painted museum walls, and hanging the paintings above pieces of furniture, which are themselves splendid to look at.

The displays include paintings ranging from Rubens and Canaletto to those English favorites, Stubbs and Landseer; silver (I especially fancied the toilet service made for the Countess of Kildare in the early 1700s); porcelain (some lovely Sevres and Chelsea); and the best bric-a-brac of the arts, complete with some splendid tiaras, like the one from Woburn Abbey, a design of glittering diamond English wildflowers set on quivering stems--a wonderfully lovely wearable mobile. Every picture was cleaned and restored to its pristine beauty; every object looks as it was meant to. The Ford Motor Company contributed well over a million dollars, but I feel sure that preparing the exhibit must have cost much more, with private parties filling the gap. (Not to mention the cost of preparing the catalogue, which even at $30 paperback, $60 hardbound, could not possibly pay for itself.)

But beautiful and instructive as it was--and despite the effort to use natural rather than museum settings--this show did not give a real-life impression of the British country house; it ought really to have been called: British Country Houses as They Should Be. Even among the houses that are regularly opened to the public (and most of the great houses could not have survived otherwise, since that is the only condition on which the government will forgive the ruinous inheritance taxes), a place that is actually lived in will be at once less perfect and more authentic than even the most "natural" museum exhibit. Think for a moment of the horrible fact of how much stuff most of us manage to accumulate in just a year, and then multiply that over several generations. There is seldom either the money or the inclination to clear up the confusion so long as the place is reasonably respectable-looking, comfortable, and functional. When there is money, it's more likely to be needed to repair the roof--indeed, the odd painting or piece of sculpture may need to be sold to get the money to pay for the roof. Not to mention the fact that when you're sharing quarters with the artistic accumulation of centuries, you're apt to forget what you have, as a number of Great House owners found out when the show was being put together.

Critics of this show have rushed to point out that part of the purpose was to give the owners of these houses an economic boost--and why not, indeed? To retain their unique historical value, these houses must be kept intact. An empty house, however splendid its architecture, has no life--as is demonstrated by the endless glorious but empty palaces and mansions in France and Italy. Granted, some of the houses in Great Britain that are open to the public look like interior decorators' showcases; but there are still enough of them unsullied by the professional decorator touch, where the family really live among the their dusty and rundown treasures. After all, people who are it, as the owners think, do not need a decorator to tell them what to do with their homes.