Buried treasure | 26 November 2011

In recent years there has been a surge of interest in the treasures hidden in our public art collections, many of them rarely if ever on view. The Tate Gallery is perhaps the principal offender here, showing only a tiny percentage of its glorious and wide-ranging holdings of British art, but attention is now being directed towards our provincial galleries and museums. Since 2003 the Public Catalogue Foundation has been recording and publishing the oil paintings held in galleries and civic buildings, county by county, and issuing invaluable volumes of colour illustrations to show us what usually remains invisible. By its calculations, a shameful 80 per cent of these paintings are not on view. This unknown resource is finally emerging into the light, and in London will have a venue for its public exposure: the grand building just off the Embankment known rather anonymously as Two Temple Place.

Built in the 1890s as an estate office and London pied-à-terre, it was commissioned by William Waldorf Astor (later 1st Viscount Astor) to be a house which would ‘personify literature’.