Gift Horses

As limousine after limousine slid up to the canopied portico of Derby House in London's Stratford Place, a red-coated footman intoned the names of the visitors --two dukes, seven earls, eight lords, three ambassadors, the Prime Minister. Within, the host, a book publisher who calls himself "the world's largest," stood graciously receiving his guests.

"What a great occasion!" murmured one eminent personage.

"I do hope you'll like it," the host replied. "Queen Mary came the other day, and seemed to approve." In fact, she had come twice, and, said the host, had firmly expressed a conviction: "This should have been done 50 years ago."

Overcoming All. What Queen Mary and so many other visitors admired last week was the new National Gallery of British Sports and Pastimes, the biggest collection of sporting art in the world. The collection, half a million pounds' worth of paintings and prints, and the -L-400,000 mansion (renamed Hutchinson House) which housed them had been presented to the British nation. The bestowal had been made, as the gallery's catalogue said, by "Mr. Walter Hutchinson, the famous master-publisher, master-printer and sportsman, who has overcome all difficulties, and now stands before the public as a princely benefactor of quite remarkable distinction."

There was no doubt about the "master-publisher" part: Hutchinson's publishing and printing firms put out about 10 million books a year--from Calcium Superphosphate and Compound Fertilizers, by P. Parrish, to The Gamester, by Rafael Sabatini--and have brought him a fortune exceeding -L-4,000,000. And there was no doubt that he had overcome plenty of difficulties--in person. For five years he had haunted the auctions, picked every painting and print himself, without a moment's doubt of his judgment. He knew what he wanted: "But of course! I own horses; I know what they look like."

Perhaps, a few critics gently suggested, one should know a little more than that. Commented the London Daily Mail (under the headline HUNTIN', SHOOTIN' AND PAINTIN') : "Many of the prints and canvases are aesthetically worthless; more of them are to be regarded as entertaining examples of folk art equivalent to Toby jugs and samplers."

The Times, remarking that "nobody would wish to look several hundred gift horses in the mouth," complained that the pictures were not well hung. In fact, they were slapped up (at Hutchinson's direction) pretty much like the pictures in an ex-prizefighter's restaurant: you couldn't see the walls for them.

Beadles & Magnificence. Despite everything, it was a rather wonderful show. Visitors could forgive a dozen stilted scenes of the chase for a curio such as Tregonwell Frampton Arrested by a Bea dle, or The Ancient Ceremony of Cheese-rolling; and could pass pleasant minutes in contemplation of George Stubbs's beautifully painted study of Gimcrack (see cut), a magnificent grey horse of the 1760s, or of Marshall's John ("Gentle man") Jackson, a straight, first-rate study of the prime pugilist of the Regency.

The centerpiece of the show, John Constable's Stratford Mill, was worth all the rest. Some British critics have called it, with arguable justice, "the world's best landscape." In Hutchinson's mind, a few boys fishing in the foreground qualified it as a sporting picture.

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