Exhibition of works by late members of the Royal Academy and of the Iveagh bequest of works by old masters (Kenwood collection)

This Royal Academy Winter Exhibition, the fifty-first in the annual series held at Burlington House since 1870, combined a commemorative display of works by recently deceased Academicians with the first public showing of the Iveagh Bequest, a collection of sixty-three Old Master and British paintings that Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh, had selected from his holdings and left to the nation upon his death in October 1927. The bequest also included Kenwood House and its grounds on Hampstead Heath, where the paintings were to be permanently displayed. Because repairs and installation at Kenwood were still underway, the Royal Academy provided a venue for the collection to be seen by the public before the house opened.

Vermeer’s The Guitar Player (c. 1672) appeared in the exhibition as catalogue number 216. Guinness had purchased the painting from the London dealers Thomas Agnew and Sons in 1889, and it had previously passed through the collections of Viscount Palmerston at Broadlands, Hampshire. The 1928 Royal Academy showing gave London audiences their first opportunity to see the painting in a public gallery setting. Kenwood House itself formally opened to visitors on 18 July 1928, with the paintings hung under the direction of Sir Charles Holmes, then director of the National Gallery, who was named one of the six trustees specified by the Iveagh Bequest (Kenwood) Act of Parliament.

The Iveagh Bequest was recognised immediately as one of the most important gifts of Old Master paintings made to the British public in the twentieth century. Alongside The Guitar Player, the collection included Rembrandt’s late Self-Portrait with Two Circles, portraits by Gainsborough and Reynolds, and works by Frans Hals. The Royal Academy exhibition brought wide attention to the bequest and established the reputation that Kenwood House has maintained as a small but exceptionally distinguished public collection.