The University Art Collection

 

"A hidden gem"
Visitor comment, Audiences Yorkshire survey 2009

 

The University has collected works of art throughout its history, commissioning portraits of its distinguished members and acquiring other works that both reflect and support its scholarly and educational roles.

The consistent quality of the art collection, unusual for a British university, owes much to the vision of a series of generous individuals and groups, united over the years by a conviction that life in the University and its region is enriched by understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts.

Early years

The movement to bring the practice and critical appreciation of art directly into the universities was begun by Felix Slade at the older universities in the 1860s. At Leeds, initially, the development of an art collection was largely governed by individual benefactors' preferences in traditional genre, and included animal paintings, seascapes, landscapes and other staples of art production. Jane Heald's Bequest in 1904, for example, included paintings by William Huggins and the younger James Herring. This pattern of preference is continued with later benefactions such as those of Dorothy McGrigor Philips. At the same time, the practice of commissioning portraits of significant University figures began and these works are placed in appropriate locations around the campus.

The Sadler era

Henry Lamb (1883-1960)
Portrait of Sir Michael Ernest Sadler, KCSI, CB, LLD, DLitt (Vice-Chancellor 1911- 1923)
Oil on canvas
Commissioned by the University from the artist in 1924
© Estate of Henry Lamb

Sir Michael Sadler, who had come under the influence of Oxford University's first Slade Professor, John Ruskin, was the first of a number of pioneering figures who helped to mobilise the advance of fine art in the curriculum and life of the University of Leeds. During his time as Vice-Chancellor (1911-1923), he devoted much energy to encouraging the arts in the city as a whole. An enthusiastic purchaser of pictures, he was a creative rather than speculative collector and one of the earliest enthusiasts for modernism, becoming a champion of its vanguard in English art. He exhibited pictures from his personal collection around the University for the benefit of staff and students. These were mainly works by notable figures in the early movement, and formed the core of the gift he made to the University when he left in 1923.

The Gregory Fellows

In the early 1940s, the Yorkshire businessman Eric Gregory encouraged the University to take a proactive role in the promotion and support of the arts by offering to finance a scheme for the institution of fellowships in the creative arts. The effects of this imaginative act of patronage were far-reaching and long lasting, since the scheme was not merely one to provide a setting in which artists might work free from commercial pressures, but rather to create a proactive atmosphere for the understanding and dissemination of modernist ideas.

The nominating committee was made up of Eric Gregory and his friends Herbert Read, Henry Moore, T.S.Eliot and Bonamy Dobrée (the latter was then Professor of English Literature in the University), who acted as promoters of a cohort of artists already co-opted into the circle of the creative elite. Unattached, these free-floating creative artists were introduced into the academic atmosphere in order to temper it, relaying the ideas of a creative avant-garde from artist to student and from student to community. The scheme got underway in 1949 and, over the course of more than twenty years, various painters, sculptors, poets and musicians were linked to the University and regarded as members of it, while continuing to work independently.

When Eric Gregory died in 1959, the University was named as one of his beneficiaries and invited to add to its own art collection by drawing art works from his personal legacy. Maurice de Sausmarez, the first Head of Fine Art at Leeds, was responsible for making the selection and his shrewd choice — which consisted of works by Matthew Smith, David Jones and Ceri Richards as well as Victor Pasmore, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore — added new dimensions to the modern collections.

The influence of Quentin Bell

Leeds was one of the first universities to employ working artists in its Fine Art department, integrating studio practice with the study of art history. This development was largely led by the first Professor of Fine Art, Quentin Bell, who came to Leeds in 1959. Bell encouraged the University to purchase further art for its collection, building on the foundations established by Sadler and Gregory.

As the son of Vanessa Bell and nephew of Virginia Woolf, his personal connections provided unique opportunities for collecting, and he was instrumental in helping the University acquire its large group of drawings and watercolours by members of the Bloomsbury and Camden Town groups and their contemporaries. The material that Bell assembled was regarded as a teaching collection, complementing what had already been given by other donors, and used to demonstrate through a variety of media such as charcoal, pencil, pen or crayon, not only the various functions that drawing serves, but some of the changes it underwent in the early years of the twentieth century, when the art of Matisse, Picasso, Cézanne and others were carried into England, intervening and at times undermining its established graphic conventions.

Bell was also instrumental in developing a collection of contemporary prints, as well as encouraging the University to collect paintings and sculpture by the Gregory Fellows. Some works were acquired through the generosity of the artists themselves or their heirs, others with the support of the V&A Purchase Grant Fund, but most of Bell's astute and energetic purchasing in the 1960s and thereafter was made possible by the regular support of Stanley and Audrey Burton. These many and substantial quiet acts of generosity towards the University continued in the leaner years that followed, when the University was unable to further maintain a consistent pattern of purchasing.

Collecting today

In more recent years, rising prices have placed further limitations on the University's active acquisition of art, but it has continued to receive many valued gifts and bequests, as well as timely assistance from national funding bodies such as the V&A Purchase Grant Fund and the Art Fund, as well as subscription to the Contemporary Art Society. The Friends of University Art and Music (Leeds) raise funds annually to assist in the purchase of further works for the art collection, which now includes over three thousand items, ranging from miniatures to architectural sculptures and murals.

Please explore images of artworks in the collection at the following websites:

Page last updated: April 29, 2009