Background

The almost 230 paintings, etchings and drawings and 20 busts at the University of London are largely what it has accrued in the way of business. From the University’s foundation in 1836 until the middle of the twentieth century, it commissioned large oil portraits of Vice-Chancellors. It continues to commission paintings of its Chancellors and of Directors of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. Artists include John Millais, Sir Augustus Edwin John, and John Singer Sargent, although most are less eminent. These portraits are part of the University’s history and heritage. They would have been part of the University Archive, had they been photographs that fitted into archival envelopes and boxes instead of great heavy objects.

Complementing these are a few paintings, portraits and others, given either by or in memory of University officials, where the importance for the University is the donor. Sometimes the picture is the only visible connection with an influential person at the University. For example, the series of official photographs of University Librarians begins only after Reginald Arthur Rye, the University’s longest-serving Librarian (1906-1944), who oversaw the Library through two world wars, a move from South Kensington to Bloomsbury, and massive Library expansion. Our only pictorial record of him is within a 1909 group photograph of all University staff. Yet as a keen amateur Egyptologist, Rye copied some ancient Egyptian scenes. His work, albeit insignificant from an art historical perspective, is important for representing him.

Some portraits accompanied book collections: oil portraits of library donors Sir Louis Sterling, Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, and Robert Hebert Quick; 19 oil portraits of literary luminaries from Chaucer to Nicholas Rowe given by Sir Louis Sterling together with his collection of first and fine editions of English literature.^{Footnote 3}

Finally, in 2010 Senate House acquired 53 paintings, prints and sculptures by artists of the 1960s and early 1970s who studied or taught in art schools, including Bridget Riley, Robyn Denny, and David Hockney, from the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA), on the basis that Senate House’s high ceilings and large areas were regarded as suitable for the works.

Expectations: what is art?

Until the early 2010s, the Vice-Chancellor’s Department of the University of London had undertaken administrative responsibility for art. This meant keeping tabs on locations, overseeing insurance valuations, and annually showing auditors a few pieces. The Vice-Chancellor’s Department possibly thought that the part of the University which looked after books and papers should logically also care for historic objects. The then Librarian may have felt that the handover would aggrandise the library and increase its internal profile. A benefit of library curation was the presence in the Library of conservators: admittedly book and paper conservators, but professionals who know about organisations like Icon^{Footnote 4} and are generically familiar with repairs and environmental conditions.

The transition of administrative responsibility brought with it no expectation of wider engagement with art works, but no discouragement either. Physical responsibility for the art remained with the Facilities Department.

From an institutional viewpoint, art constituted anything with a financial value which merited insurance, and did not fit into another category. The list of artworks I inherited was a valuation list. The inventory included alongside the pictures and busts, academic robes, furniture (from clocks to a Sevres porcelain vase and a Victorian chaise longue), models of Senate House, antiquities, silverware, china, and even a national cash register. Aesthetic and cultural considerations excluded some of these and cautiously considered other items on the walls, chiefly styled photographs of university dignitaries which had only nominal financial value but which were as significant for the university’s background as oil portraits. It excluded photographs, sketches and so forth held and catalogued within archival collections.

Metadata

From a library viewpoint, to have a collection and not to catalogue it was inconceivable. The University assets database, essential to maintain for everything the University wanted tracked, could not double as a catalogue, as it was an internal document with strictly controlled access.

A public access catalogue was therefore necessary. A management system for museum objects was an unwarrantable expense for a tiny percentage of holdings. The feasible alternatives were our current archival or book catalogues. The archival catalogue may have been more suitable because intended for unique items, but the library catalogue was the one to which I, as a librarian, had access. So cataloguing was done there by default, using MARC standards. This had the advantage of integrating library holdings with the artwork: a search on George Grote as subject, for example, would discover both books about him and his portrait, identified by the term ‘Pictorial works’ after his name, or a search on David Hockney as author would bring up both catalogues of his exhibitions and his art prints ‘Simplified faces’. An article about how art was catalogued at the National Library of Scotland provided invaluable guidance.^{Footnote 5} AACR2 supplemented this. DCRM(G) was less relevant for the nature of works being catalogued.^{Footnote 6} We intend to attach a photograph to each record.

Item records presented a challenge. The library management system required a library location. It provided no option for an area outside libraries in neutral University lobbies or corridors. A location ‘Senate House Library’ would have been both tactless and misleading, in view of the distinction between administering and owning art. We therefore omitted item records for many pieces.

More positively, although cataloguing was original, it was generally quick because it followed a basic template. Within groups one record could be copied from another with a few easy changes. All records were tagged with a common code, so that we could draw them out easily by management reports when required.

The opac excluded some items on the asset database, mainly functional ceremonial items which were not publicly available, and included others, of low financial value. It deliberately omitted private information, primarily financial values. The difference between the two databases necessitated a third database as the master, incorporating the holdings of both the other lists. This is an Excel spreadsheet of our devising. It includes fields for the gender and for the nationality of the artist, because such information is sought in connection with issues of ethnicity and diversity. Notes include information about the relevance of pictures to the University, which form the basis of captions, and references to archival records or publications about the material. Unfortunately, relevant changes in the master database cannot feed automatically into the other catalogues.

Thanks to the information on valuations undertaken by art dealers, art historical knowledge was required for none of the cataloguing.

Online engagement

Cataloguing gave us a handle on the artworks. It did little to disseminate public awareness of them. So we extracted a list from the library catalogue for our web pages. Analogously with reporting books and archives to appropriate union databases, we reported the artwork to Art UK as the union database for art in public collections.^{Footnote 7} Filling in ArtUK’s detailed spreadsheet was tedious and time-consuming, although some rearranging, copying and pasting from our own Excel sheet was possible. But the exercise resulted both in the desired prominence (subsequently proven by the queries made via ArtUK) and in high quality photographs by an ArtUK photographer. Once again, art historical knowledge was not essential. The presence on ArtUK enabled us to benefit from the art historical knowledge of others.

As a quick win, we looked up the individuals in our portraits in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and informed the editor when the section on ‘likenesses’ in their biographies omitted our portraits. Enhancing Wikipedia holdings, as we had done for relevant archival and printed special collection holdings, remains an aspiration.

By agreement with the former Trustees of the CNAA collection, the CNAA art was given its own microsite on our web pages.^{Footnote 8} The group of literary authors noted above – the so-called Chesterfield portraits, because they had formerly been owned by Lord Chesterfield of Letters to His Son fame and hung in his Mayfair home, were an easy subject for a web page. As English literature is a major library strength, I wrote paragraphs about Lord Chesterfield’s opinion of the writers portrayed and the role of those writers in the library of the portraits’ final personal owner, Sir Louis Sterling. Thus the portraits became a peg for book holdings which are seldom on view, as in:

… [Abraham] Cowley jostled shoulders in Chesterfield’s collection with the portraits of poets who knew his work: John Dryden admired him, as in a qualified way did Alexander Pope. Lord Chesterfield showed his acquaintance with Cowley’s writings by quoting him in his Character of the Duke of Newcastle: ‘We may apply to him with propriety what Mr. Cowley says of Pindar: “Pindar is imitable by none; /The Phoenix Pindar is a vast species alone”’. Sir Louis Sterling showed his respect for Cowley through ownership of the first collected edition of Cowley’s works (1668); Cowley’s Poems (1656) and Ode upon the blessed restoration and returne of His sacred Majestie, Charls [sic] the Second (1660) were subsequently acquired for Sterling’s library. Other early copies of Cowley’s works are held throughout the special collections, including the three clerical special collections at Senate House Library …^{Footnote 9}

Corporate identity

When Senate House Library inherited responsibility for the central University of London’s artwork, pictures on the walls were captioned with a title, the artist, and the date of creation. Potential existed to make the art add consciously to the University’s history and identity. The University wanted to raise the profile of Senate House within Bloomsbury. Librarians are practised at writing display captions, and it is immaterial whether a caption for a book or manuscript or for an oil painting. So I wrote more descriptive captions, focussing on the subjects of the artworks and their connection with the University: for example, on the fact that the eminent crystallographer Sir Henry Alexander Miers (1858-1942) was the second Principal of the University of London, 1908-1915 and succeeded brilliantly in the role but was unhappy because it left him little time for academic work; and stressing in the caption for a portrait of Queen Victoria the trailblazing University of London charters that she had signed and openings of University buildings that she had attended.

We also used pictures to point visibly to library holdings hidden in stacks: to note, for example, that Sir David Hughes Parry, alongside administrative and academic achievements, had given the University the complete publications of the Welsh Gregynog Press, issued in special bindings; that the physicist Sir Arthur William Rücker, first University Principal, was the recipient of an autographed copy of Marie Curie’s thesis, now in Senate House Library, and so forth. We have furthermore swept pictures in with books and manuscripts for engagement purposes. Blogging and tweeting about ‘modern radicals’ and ‘elections’ for themed months, we tweeted pictures of two radical founders of the University and blogged about early University members of Parliament represented pictorially. In a display about Senate House for an Open House weekend, we showed archival material and books relating to the building, while weaving into the descriptive text an invitation to view surrounding pictures: of Lord Athlone, Chancellor when the University moved into Senate House; of Lord Macmillan, who fundraised tirelessly for the Bloomsbury site; and of Sir Edwin Deller, the University Principal who was killed on the construction site.

Equality, diversity and inclusion

The University, founded in 1836, is new enough not to be plagued by historic slavery issues. Furthermore, it has through its Institute of Commonwealth Studies a reasonable representation of African artists. But the challenges of equality and diversity which rage both in universities and in libraries^{Footnote 10} also plague art collections, at the central University of London as elsewhere. Most people who have played a significant role in shaping the University and therefore look down from the walls have inevitably been white men, painted by other white men. Increasing the length of descriptive captions helps to show diversity, as these men include several Jewish people (debarred from attending Oxford or Cambridge), as well as men who campaigned for female education.

The effectiveness of such narrative, however, requires willingness to read print, and we want something more obvious. We began by commissioning an oil portrait of Dame Lillian Penson, the University of London’s, and the UK’s, first female Vice-Chancellor. Funding prohibited commissioning many more paintings to redress the perceived imbalance.

SOAS had discovered that people object not to white men as such, but to serried white men.^{Footnote 11} The pictures of white men have their value: the only truly academic query we have received about our portraits concerned a portrait of a white man by a white man. A challenge when portraits are all of meaningful historical figures is to add diversity without giving the appearance of lowering standards of significant achievement in order to fit other criteria. Our solution is to think less about art and more about history. The University of London’s two pioneering features are being the first university in the United Kingdom to allow external degrees (1858) and to award full degrees to women (1878). Thus a picture of George Leveson Gower, 2nd Earl Granville, Chancellor in 1878, will have next to it a blown-up sketch from a periodical of early women graduates to complement the narrative of the caption, and the portrait of Sir John George Shaw Lefevre, Vice-Chancellor in 1858, will be coupled with photographs of noteworthy people of colour who obtained external degrees. Portraits of library donors will be enhanced by photographs of material donated.