BRITISH ART TREASURES BOUND FOR U.S. SHOWING

Curators were busy this week cataloguing and crating for shipping about 700 works of art from more than 200 of Britain’s stately country homes. All will be shipped to the National Gallery of Art in Washington for the largest single exhibition of British art ever seen outside the United Kingdom.

“This is the greatest collection of loot ever to leave this country,” joked one art expert.

Entitled “The Treasure Houses of Britain,” the exhibition will include some of the finest paintings, sculptures, tapestries, arms and armor, furniture, jewels, porcelain and silver collected in Britain’s country houses during the last 500 years.

The exhibition, the largest single show ever mounted by the National Gallery, will be opened in November by Prince Charles and Princess Diana.

Many of the artworks have never left their owners’ houses or been seen in public before.

The works include paintings by Rembrandt, Holbein, Rubens, Van Dyck, Velazquez, Canaletto, Hogarth, Gainsborough, Turner, Landseer and Sargent; sculpture by Praxiteles, Bernini, Canova, Flaxman and Henry Moore; Boulle, Kent and Chippendale furniture; Sevres, Chelsea, Derby and Chinese porcelain and splendid examples of tapestry, jewelry, silver and other decorative arts.

The value of the exhibition has been estimated at $500 million and has been underwritten by a grant from the Ford Motor Co.

It was the British Council and officials of the National Gallery who hit on the idea of an exhibition from British country houses to bring together the achievements of five centuries of collecting and patronage of art.

The British regard their country houses as one of their nation’s most important contributions to Western Civilization, according to Lord Gibson, chairman of the National Trust, which now owns many of the famous old stately homes.

The story of British countryhouse collecting dates back to the days when the landowners of the late 17th and early 18th centuries openly flaunted their wealth by building grand houses and mansions throughout Britain.

Even before that, moneyed British families purchased famous works of art from the Continent.

The art was brought back to fill the vast halls, massive staterooms and acres of bare walls of the vast houses.

The British loans will be installed in nearly 35,000 square feet of special space in the National Gallery’s East Building.

The exhibition will be laid out according to chronological periods--from Tudor England to the present.