Old Speech Room Gallery & Museum

The Gallery runs the Old Speech Room Gallery Arts Society, through which boys help to design and curate exhibitions.

The collections

Sir Winston Churchill's A Distant View of Venice 1929 is one of the highlights of the collection. It is an excellent example of his robust and energetic style. Churchill was above all a colourist. He captured the essence of Venetian colour in the city, the clouds, the boats and their reflections in the water. The bravura brushwork gives texture to the surface of the canvas, from the impasto in the sky to the long, fluid strokes in the water. His enthusiasm was inexhaustible. In his essay Painting as a Pastime, he wrote: 'When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the subject.'

Not all of these collections can be displayed simultaneously, but the following items are usually on show: antiquities, paintings by Romney, Sir Winston Churchill, David Jones, Victor Pasmore and Richard Shirley Smith, portrait busts of Old Harrovians such as Sheridan and Byron, and natural history. In addition, the School has a policy of showing its treasures in a series of themed exhibitions.

Recent exhibitions

Recent acquisition

Rupert Sagar-Musgrave: Fairground, Pushkar, 2005

Photographs by the landscape and travel photographer Rupert Sagar-Musgrave (Moretons 1984²) are regularly exhibited and published in books and the national press. He pursues his love of travel and desert environments through personal photographic explorations of places such as India, Italy, Spain and Morocco.

This timeless, panoramic image shows the largest camel fair in the world, held in the desert sands of Pushkar, in Rajasthan, north-west India. Livestock traders and Hindu pilgrims visit the holy town during the lunar month of Kartika. Also for sale are Marwari horses with pointed ears, which are especially bred for the desert environment. Rickety ferris wheels appear in the distance. The woman in the foreground has been collecting camel dung to store on her roof, dry and use as fuel. She inhabits a different space from the rest of the image, but is united with it by colour and tonal palette, as well as a common light source. We look towards the setting sun, which is slightly off to the right beyond the photograph. The subject is therefore back lit, creating 'rim lighting' around the edges of the woman, camels and carts. Light at this low angle picks up the dusty atmosphere and produces a glowing haze towards the horizon; it also catches a camel urinating in the sand. The fading of the image around the edges gives it a vintage quality. Indian, or oriental, subject-matter places the photograph in a long intellectual tradition: Sagar-Musgrave is an enthusiast for the watercolours of David Roberts and late nineteenth century landscape photographs of India.

Technically, the image is stitched together from a number of photographs shot at dusk over several days on Fuji 35 mm slide film (that is, not digitally). These were scanned, stitched and overlaid using photographic imaging software. Since Harrow has produced so many distinguished photographers, it is hoped that this may form the start of a photographic collection for the School.