Case Study 3: Lost Works

Coda

In addition to the two works of art by James Lambert and Joseph Wright, discussed here in some detail, the PMC photographic archive contains myriad images of works of art from public and private collections, some of which have not only disappeared from view or been altered through time, but which no longer exist at all. It contains for example the only visual record of a major version of Richard Wilson’s The Destruction of the Children of Niobe (Fig. 1); a photograph taken before the picture itself was destroyed during the Second World War, and which forms part of the Tate Photographic Archive that was donated to the Centre in 2008.¹

There is also, poignantly, a crisp black and white image taken by the Centre’s photographer in 1973 of Zoffany’s conversation piece, The Mathew Family at Felix Hall, Kelvedon, Essex (Fig. 2). A year earlier the painting had been placed by its owner on long-term loan to the National Trust at Clandon Park, Surrey. Tragically, in April 2015, it perished along with other important artworks and historic interiors in a major fire.² The PMC photo represents a visual record not only of a lost image, but of a moment in time, almost fifty years ago, when a photographer stood in silence in an English country house and clicked the shutter on his camera, bringing to light for the first time a work of art that had long existed only in the shadows.

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Footnotes

1. See “The Price of War”: Recording, Publishing and Preserving Art 1939–1945, Drawing Room Display, Paul Mellon Centre, 16 January to 28 April 2017, no. 3, pp. 4–6, https://issuu.com/paulmelloncentre/docs/final_pamplet_2017.01.04.↩︎
2. Martin Postle, “Art and the Country House: A Research Project by the Paul Mellon Centre”, Art and the Country House, DOI:10.17658/ACH/TE603.↩︎