April 10, 2008

We read the article (Mid-Ocean News, April 4) by Jonathan Land Evans on the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art souvenir catalogue with disappointment. We don't remember meeting him, although we do recall receiving a list of some artwork he was selling (which did not meet our acquisition criteria) and again to provide artwork from our collection for the Mid-Ocean News article on black Bermudian artists (a request with which we were more than happy to oblige).

He did not contact us to discuss any of the concerns he raised in the article, or check his "facts" with us first. Nor did he contact us to ask permission to use one of our images to illustrate his article, or acknowledge the artist, Otto Trott.

He laments the failure of the exhibition catalogue as a definitive book on the Masterworks Collection. It was, however, never intended to be more than a visual souvenir of the exhibition with some very brief narrative to accompany the images. This is a normal museum practice.

We are sorry that he finds the structure of the catalogue "contrived and vapid" because our visitors are simply delighted with it. Our reference, incidentally, was to the French song La Mer made famous by Charles Trenet then translated into English and sung by many artists including Bobby Darrin.

We accept that we have made some mistakes. We concede that there are a couple of typographical errors and an omission in the catalogue, and these have been corrected by the insertion of an Erratum slip into each copy.

These are a few points in the article worth commenting on.

l We deliberately excluded the Thomas Driver painting as the focus of this exhibition was the 1900s onwards. We will definitely be showing the Driver in the future, along with some other fine works which were not included in this first exhibition.

l Mr. Evans questions our dating of the Ross Turner. It was dated by us when the artwork was first purchased; since there is no date on the painting we used our records to establish a date, namely some helpful photographs we own of Turner and his brother-in-law Dwight Blaney.

l The suggestion that the date of the Hannah Rion is wrong is surely speculative. We talked to the donor of the work and all the documentation from the dealer who sold it noted 1899 as the date and, since we know Hannah Rion was painting in Bermuda then, we will stick to our records unless there is evidence to the contrary.

l A reputable dealer sold Frank Small's painting Welcoming Smile to us as a Bermuda-inspired work and while we would welcome any further evidence, the whitewashed roof, the variegated pigments on the limestone wall, the crushed limestone road and the oleanders all point to Bermuda. Since there is no proof positive that Small never came to Bermuda, this much-loved piece will remain in our collection as a Bermuda-inspired work until we have incontrovertible evidence that it is not.

l Finally, when the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit of her Bermuda work was mounted by us, some of the pieces on loan were called pencil drawings – some graphite. We do know that they are one in the same, but we have chosen to honour a highly acclaimed artist's own language.

Mr. Evans is gracious enough to say that the Collection is "world-class", the museum is "lovely" and the catalogue is a "nice souvenir" and "an enjoyable and worthwhile book". This is certainly borne out by the overwhelmingly positive feedback we have collected as we monitor visitor responses to their experience. Indeed, more than 3,000 visitors have passed through our doors and have expressed delight with the facility, the exhibition and the catalogue.

We wonder why, therefore, Mr. Evans chose to spend so much of his article on petty points or speculative questions framed as our errors. Perhaps it is because articles like this sell his books

Elise Outerbridge