On The Joy of Collecting | The Sunday Journal No.10

This week I stumbled across a lovely film on YouTube from The Sunday Times Style featuring the historian and author Lucy Abel Smith, who has spent over forty years making her husband's family home in the Cotswolds entirely their own.

What struck me most wasn't the faux medieval frescoes, the sculpture park or even the extraordinary library built almost on a whim after a picnic conversation with an architect.

It was something she said right at the beginning.

"Like all things in this house, nothing was really pre-planned."

We live in an age where we're encouraged to think that homes, and perhaps collections too, should arrive fully formed. Colour schemes decided. Styles agreed. Objects carefully coordinated by an interior designer. Everything matches everything else.

Yet here was a home assembled over decades. A chair here. A piece of glass there. A commission from a friend. A painting inherited. A screen inspired by church doors over the road. Jewellery bought because it made her smile. A library because her husband decided he wanted to “leave something to the house”.

Nothing was really pre-planned.

And that's what I found so appealing. It felt like permission.

Permission not to have a style.

Permission to change your mind.

Permission to like strange things.

Permission to mix periods, colours and objects that shouldn't work together.

And, most importantly, permission simply to take pleasure in things.

Sometimes, if Antonio and I are honest, The Torrance Gallery feels a little too eclectic. There are lots of different styles, different artists and different ways of seeing, all vying to catch the eye. Every now and then we feel the temptation to simplify things. To be more restrained. To have fewer voices and fewer colours and of course there is a place for that. But, generally that isn't really what we're about or what the gallery has been since it began in 1970.

We are about colour and character. Different personalities. Different interpretations. Big skies and tiny still lifes. Whippets and Venice. Quiet landscapes and exuberant abstracts. A gallery where there are lots of options and where people can discover things they perhaps didn't know they liked.

Because the best collections are rarely assembled. They accumulate.

Nobody really sets out to become a collector, a picture is taken home on a whim. Then another. Things arrive through holidays, friendships, marriages and chance encounters. Some pieces become favourites, others quietly disappear, but gradually the objects around us begin to tell the story of who we are.

One of the things I enjoy most about running a gallery is occasionally seeing where paintings end up. Rarely are they hanging in minimalist perfection. More often they are above bookshelves, beside family photographs, over kitchen tables, quietly becoming part of everyday life.

That, I think, is the point. Not to create a perfect collection, but to live amongst things that bring pleasure. As Lucy Abel Smith says at the end of the film:

"There are really no holds barred."