The National Gallery, Lewis Bequest (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The National Gallery, Lewis Bequest The Gainsborough Landscape (no. And the Portrait ofa Young Man (no. 1 by Antonello da Messina, are alone, at present prices, almost worth the capital sum of the Bequest, and when we add to it the Frans Hals, the Van Goyen, and the great John Crome, I really think it would have been im possible to expend such a sum to better pur pose. Indeed, our benefactor could not but be pleased if he could only see the repeated additions of interesting and admirable pictures bearing his name added year by year to the National Gallery he loved to such good effect. It has often struck me that there is no better way of commemorating a man than by present ing in his name to the National Gallery a sum of money, the interest to be spent on pictures. Every now and then some new memorial of the generous donor appears with his name clearly written on a gold ground, and his gene rosity is remembered afresh by all Visitors to the Gallery, and more especially by the Trustees and the Director, who are thus enabled to add some work of value to the National Collection which might otherwise have been lost to us. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.