And Another Thing | 19 November 2008

Now that I am in my 81st year I have been wondering what to do about my art library, which has more or less taken over my country house in Over Stowey and occupies all the available space there. I originally began collecting it seriously 30 years ago, to help me write a general history of art. That has long been completed and published. But the books, most of them huge, remain, and make the white-painted, floor-to-ceiling shelves, all made by a local carpenter, groan in patient submission. Books are such heavy things, especially art books printed on glazed paper. My house is full now, so I have scaled down my purchases, buying chiefly the big catalogues of important exhibitions held in London, Paris or New York. But there are exceptions. I have just got, via the internet, a long-sought copy of Grego’s two-volume Rowlandson the Caricaturist, published as long ago as 1880, but still the most complete survey of his engraved work. And I am missing some key sets, such as Otto Benesch’s six volumes of The Drawings of Rembrandt (London 1954-57), which I want in E. Benesch’s revised edition of 1973. Not easy to get, and expensive. Nor have I got a complementary volume by J. Giltaij, published by the Boymans Museum of Rotterdam in 1988, The Drawings by Rembrandt and his School. I see from my Rembrandt shelf that I have 17 books about him, some multi-volume, which include most of the important studies published in the last quarter century. But I have just been looking at the fine bibliography of works on Rembrandt published in Volume 26 in the Grove Dictionary of Art, and I see there are half a dozen indispensable studies of the master, which ought to be in my library if it is to carry any serious weight.