January 2009

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As more than one of the contributors to this highly entertaining book observe, Christ Church Picture Gallery is appropriately housed in the college that gave us Alice in Wonderland. Like Alice disappearing into the rabbit hole, visitors first pass through a modest door in an 18th-century quad before descending into the submarine light of the largely underground gallery, whose 40th birthday is celebrated in this history.

It was an inspired idea to tell that story in the form of short memoirs by the nine curators who have been in charge of the gallery since it opened. As the current incumbent (who is also the book’s editor) observes, two generations of leading museum curators have started their careers in the idiosyncratic setting of a collection of paintings and drawings bequeathed in 1765 by General John Guise to his old college. As often as not Christ Church has seemed indifferent to this great treasure: several contributors to this book recall half-serious suggestions that the college should cover deficits by selling pictures.

For two centuries the works were shown in the college library – the paintings look rather wonderful there in a postcard of around 1920 reproduced in this book – but in the early 1960s the need to accommodate more undergraduate readers meant that a new home had to be found for the art. The architects Powell and Moya, then working on the college’s Blue Boar Quad, were commissioned to design a gallery sunk into part of the Dean’s garden, using funds given by Charles Forte.

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