Sudden Passion

Falling back upon that most cherished of British last resorts--the letter to the London Times--the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres solemnly intervened in a crisis that had united the United Kingdom in common indignation. The earl wrote in his capacity as chairman of the National Art-Collections Fund--a body founded 59 years ago expressly to protect Britain's treasures from falling into the hands of acquisitive American millionaires. Now the fund was out to protect Leonardo's exquisite drawing of the Virgin and child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, which its owner, the Royal Academy, intended to sell at auction to get itself out of the red. The fund had decided to launch a public appeal "to secure this incomparable treasure for the nation," would start things off by donating -L-50,000 from its own coffers. Everyone agreed that the noble lord had nobly performed, but last week some Britons had their doubts about their countrymen's sudden artistic passion.

There was no doubt about the drawing's importance: it is believed to be Leonardo's first conception of the great Virgin and Child with St. Anne that hangs in the Louvre. The price it was supposed to bring at Sotheby's next June was -L-1,000,000, or $500,000 more than the record-breaking $2,300,000 that the Metropolitan Museum of Art paid last November for Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. The staggering sum only increased the shock of the academy's announcement. Having sneered at the fusty place for nearly 200 years, the public now began to snarl.

The academy responded warmly to the Earl of Crawford's letter ("We've always wanted to keep this great work in Britain"), and reduced its price to a mere -L-800,000. If this sum is not raised, however, the drawing will go on the block after all. "A pretty stiff bargain," sniffed the Daily Herald, but then went on to decry the whole by-jingo fuss: "There is something slightly ridiculous about the present outburst of patriotic excitement to retain this Italian drawing, for the national habit is to get art on the cheap." The Herald might have added that the public's concern for the Leonardo was a rather blatant case of love at first sight. The drawing has long hung beyond public view in the academy's frayed Council Room, and in all of 1961, only a handful of visitors asked to see it.

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