CUMBRIA.- A display that focuses on the collection of prominent artist, collector and Senior Royal Academician, Carel Weight. A prolific collector, Carel also acted as advisor to Tullie House’s own Art Purchase Scheme.

This display showcases works by a range of Royal Academicians: Ruskin Spear, L S Lowry, Sheila Fell, John Bratby and Peter Blake. It also offers a fascinating insight into the varied interests and tastes of Weight himself, and their lasting effect on Tullie House’s own art collection.

Carel Weight (1908-1997), important 20th century artist, teacher, advisor, collector and benefactor remained loyal to the Royal Academy throughout his career and became a Royal Academician in 1965 and a Senior Royal Academician in 1984.

In addition to Weight’s distinguished career as an artist and Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art, he also became third advisor to Tullie House Museum’s Art Purchase Scheme. From 1953 to 1962 he purchased 43 works of art for the museum collection. As a result several of his fellow teachers, friends and students are represented in the collection. As an avid art collector, Weight’s varied artistic interests are also reflected in the works he purchased for the museum.

This display reveals Weight’s interests and tastes as an artist, advisor and collector through the work of several Royal Academicians.

Carel Weight’s humorous portrait by Ruskin Spear, fellow artist and tutor at the Royal College of Art can also be seen. Alongside are works by two of Weight’s students at the Royal College of Art: Peter Blake’s first Pop Art painting ‘Children Reading Comics’ and John Bratby’s ‘Self-Portrait’ both produced in 1954.

Carel also collected the work of Sheila Fell and her sombre ‘Landscape with Farm’ from his collection can also be seen. Two further paintings by Sheila Fell are also on display ‘Village beneath Lake District Fells’ and a portrait of ‘Clifford Rowan’. As a Royal Academician it is appropriate to highlight Fell’s achievements as one of Cumbria’s finest 20th century artists.

When the Royal Academy was founded in 1768 a condition of membership was for each artist to donate a ‘diploma work’. At a time when Britain had no national gallery, the idea was that in this way the country’s most distinguished artists might contribute to a collection representing the best in British art.

Not all members have confined their generosity to a single work. In 1866 John Gibson left 57 sculptures to the Academy - Carel Weight surpassed him, leaving the Academy 141 works of art including several drawings and prints by Pissarro, Turner and Constable. Like most artists, Weight also exchanged works with his artist friends and his bequest includes paintings by fellow RAs Robert Buhler, Jean Cooke and Ruskin Spear, as well as by former students who became Academicians – John Bellany, Mick Rooney and Olwyn Bowey.

Carel Weight was a benevolent genius loci of the British art scene for half a century and, as Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art from 1957 to 1973, presided over a postwar revolution led by British Pop Art pioneers David Hockney and Roger Blake.