In connection with this Vote, I want to make one suggestion. There is a very inadequate grant made to this gallery for annual acquisitions which, no doubt, the director and the board spend to the best advantage but it has occurred to me that the fixed nature of this grant orients the mind of the director and the board controlling the gallery away from certain masters whose work it is clearly impossible to acquire within the limited grant provided. Would the Minister consider, in consultation with the Board of the National Gallery, preparing a schedule of certain masters with this end in view—that, if the director should become aware of one of these desirable works coming upon the market, he would be free to make representations to the Minister for Education and, through him to the Department of Finance so that special authority would be forthcoming for a Supplementary Estimate for an additional sum to acquire that particular picture outside the annual appropriation for Vote 51?
Let me give a case in point. At the present time, I think, we are giving the gallery £1,000 a year for acquiring pictures. We have no examples in the gallery, so far as I am aware, of Van Gogh or Manet, Monet or Gaugin and I do not think we have a Renoir. There is a great school of painting which, so far as I am aware, is entirely unrepresented in our gallery. It is quite unthinkable that a picture of any of these masters would be available within the limit of the resources provided annually by us. There is no other fund that I know of from which the gallery can buy a picture. It would be natural that the director would hear if a good sample of the work of any of these masters was about to come upon the market. There is no use in his opening negotiations for its acquisition if he knows that he is limited to whatever remains of £1,000 because he knows that within that limit he could not possibly make an offer which would tempt the intending vendor. If, however, he felt free, in the event of such an offer being made known to him, to come to the Minister for Education in the foreknowledge that his application would be favourably considered, he might very easily acquire advantageously pictures which would involve the State in no loss at all, because it is highly likely that, over a period of years, as the number of these masters' canvases decreases by loss of one kind or another in the world at large, the value of the surviving ones will increase.
Opportunities, as we all know, in the art world present themselves from time to time. I know of a case in which somebody was travelling abroad and while he happened to be in the City of Sydney, an old gentleman died and, to the astonishment of everyone, one of Van Gogh's lost canvases was discovered in his bedroom. That was an opportunity to acquire something very advantageously if a prompt offer was available because, although such a picture could be negotiated by consigning it to Christie's in London or some other art centre in the world, disposing of it in Sydney was no easy task and the insuring of it to London with a view to putting it on sale there would have been a very formidable charge upon the executors who could not foresee what the picture would realise on being delivered at a suitable art centre for sale. Many other such occasions arise when a director of a gallery can purchase a very valuable acquisition for the State if the means to pay for it are available to him. At present our director, I think, is hopelessly hampered in that regard. Would the Minister consider at least a proposal along the lines laid down by me?
I propose the Schedule because I quite agree that it would be very desirable to have Titians, Rembrandts, Van Dykes and Michael Angelos, if we had the money to pay for them, and I think their names might be included in the Schedule, although I think it is highly unlikely that we would be able to pick up many bargains by these masters, but I do feel that we want to provide some wider discretion than the £1,000 at present named and I think the Schedule might reasonably, for the time being in any case, be confined to those masters no sample of whose art we at present have in our National Gallery and who we feel quite clearly should be there represented.