Press Release
Miscellaneous History
1979-03-06


[transcription]

VANCOUVER
ART GALLERY
PRESS RELEASE

1145 WEST GEORGIA, VANCOUVER, BC., CANADA V6E 3H2 (604) 682-5621
March 6 1979-10


FOUNDERS' COLLECTION
SLATED FOR MARCH/APRIL
AT THE VANCOUVER ART GALLERY

Thirty-nine paintings from the Founders' Collection will go on view, Saturday, March 3 at The Vancouver Art Gallery. Works by such well-known British artists by George Morland, Sir Hubert Herkomer, R.A., and W.P. Frith, R.A. will hang in the South Gallery—the same space in which they were first displayed and presented as gifts by the Gallery's Founders to the citizens of Vancouver on Opening Day, October 5, 1931.

"The Founders' Collection—To Capitalize an Impression" is the first of a new programme of exhibitions designed to examine the evolution of the Vancouver Art Gallery's Permanent Collection.

"We hope this series will give an overview of some of the contrasts and changes that have taken place in the history of art as reflected in our Permanent Collection since the Gallery was founded in 1931," Peter Malkin, exhibition curator explains.

"At the same time we feel they will reveal something about this community's sense of social and cultural function and obligation," Mr. Malkin points out.

- more -

/2

Mr. H.A. Stone, one of eleven founders and first president of the Vancouver Art Gallery Association, led the campaign to establish a public art gallery and acquire private funds to provide a nucleus of works for a Permanent Collection. For Mr. Stone, this project was "a great cultural adventure" which would prove itself "an incentive and stimulus for the cultural commonweal of the whole community."

In April 1931, Mr. Stone and Charles H. Scott, commissioned by the Founders to assemble a collection "good in quality and comprehensive in appeal" set off for Europe to purchase, among others, single examples of British art which would be unique on the American continent while at the same time aiming at a collection that would provide a history of British and Canadian painting that would give the Gallery "an individuality and completeness which would be lacking were another policy pursued." It was also their intent that their purchases would, over the years, "gain in reputation and value."

Financially assisted by the Government of B.C. through the B.C. Cultural Fund and the B.C. Lottery Fund, the exhibition continues through April 22.

Reference:
Dorothy Metcalfe
Information Officer
Local 20


- 30 -