ALL who have not already done so should give their eyes a treat by visiting the lovely new Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art, at the Botanical Gardens. The collection is a fine and varied one, elegantly presented, and housed in a new state-of-the-art facility that has much to commend it. Surely few (if any) other communities of Bermuda's tiny size can boast such an impressive assemblage of locally-themed artworks as this: put together with evident love (and much donated money) by Tom Butterfield and his team. It is a very fine thing to see so many appealing Bermuda artworks gathered under one roof, and more impre0 works in total).

Many of the paintings featured in this exciting new exhibition will be pleasantly unfamiliar, having been acquired in the years since the late Patricia Calnan's Masterworks Bermudiana Collection coffee-table book was published. Quite a few of them have also been away on overseas tours in recent times, awaiting completion of the new museum building. Certainly there are paintings to appeal to all tastes. Works by many well-known painters are on display, as well as paintings by less exalted (but often very good) artists. Mostly the artworks are from the 'golden age' of Bermuda painting (essentially, from the late 1800s to the 1950s, when the island attracted many visiting artists of skill and significance).

The official souvenir catalogue is in the form of an attractive 120-page book, featuring many delightful colour images. With its distinctive art-deco cover based on a 1949 Pan Am travel poster by Boris Artzybasheff (Russian/American, 1899-1965), the book retails for a modest $15 at the museum, and makes a nice souvenir of your visit or a gift for an art-loving friend or an overseas Bermudaphile. It is, however, on closer inspection, a disappointing and rather slipshod effort. Although it has some interesting things to say, the accompanying text is in no way on a par with the artworks displayed. The writing lacks polish, and there are numerous errors which ought to have been caught before the book went to press. Artists' names are frequently mis-spelled (as, for example, those of Graecen, MacKnight and Stieglitz), which is especially unfortunate for a well-resourced museum that ought to be able to show itself in a better light amongst its international peers. Several substantive errors (as well as a number of other, more agreeable, features) are noted below. Overall, the book's good points certainly outweigh its bad points, but that is chiefly down to the quality of the artworks themselves. The numerous errors detract quite strongly from the value of the book, both as a reliable reference and as an instrument of cultural tourism promotion and heritage outreach to the wider world.

To commence at the very beginning, the book's sub-title is needlessly clumsy. Surely 'Highlights from the Collections of the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art' would have been better and certainly more dignified. Then there is the structure of the text. Much of the book is thematically arranged around sequential snippets of lyrics from the classic song Beyond the Sea, but this is a tedious and unhelpful feature. Contrived and rather vapid, the resulting associations do little in themselves to advance one's appreciation of the paintings or of their historical context. Over-insistent and largely insight-free, this structure merely risks putting people off listening to Bobby Darin for life, which was surely not anyone's intention.

A nicer feature (although profligate of space that might have been used to better advantage in some more substantive way) is the occasional colour-cued pages of quotations from Bermuda's artists of yesteryear. These inject interest and variety, both visual and historical, and provide insights into Bermuda as a locale for painters. Those readers who have never visited the island will probably find them particularly interesting.

The book's many colour photographs are well done, and mostly of a satisfying size; but even the thumbnail pictures are crisp and appealing, and make for a useful souvenir-reference of this important exhibition. The works themselves are mostly well-selected, and present a good and wide-ranging summation of at least the second half of Bermuda's art history (works from the early and mid 1800s being omitted, for reasons unexplained). It was disappointing to me that the museum did not feature its handsome Thomas Driver oil painting of St. George's, from 1821, as such an example of the early Bermuda 'topographic school' of artworks would surely have been very desirable, if only to lend historical perspective. Also disappointing (from the viewpoint of presenting a truly representative selection of artworks) is the absence from the catalogue of any works by either the Tucker sisters or Adolph Treidler, whose works may be said to have epitomised the island's painted image in the early and mid 1900s, respectively. However, there is a very nice collection of Tucker watercolors in the upstairs gallery of the museum itself.

At page 17, the date of 1885 given for Ross Turner's delightful view of a cottage at Fairylands is at variance with its previously-published date of 1890. At pages 19-23, the discussion of the sculptor Henry Moore is puzzling. It is far from clear why several pages are devoted to 1980s charcoal sketches by him, when their relationship to Bermuda is really so slight. Whilst it is interesting to know that Moore found inspiration in some sea-shells that were brought to him from Bermuda by a friend in 1982, this is surely not the place in which to lavish so much attention upon them. The discussion of them and their timing is also confusingly at variance with the further discussion of Moore at page 113, where it is said that these shells (though collected in Bermuda by a friend in 1982) inspired some of Moore's works in the 1960s and 1970s. (Shells? More like magic beans.)

At page 35, the reference to the protruding 'volcanic' (sic) rocks in Hanna Rion's lovely painting is rather fanciful. Surely erroneous, too, is the date of 1899 given for it, when it looks to be very much a 1920s picture. At page 43 the reference to the British 'Home Office' as a repository for Bermuda topographic artworks is also inapt. Both the Admiralty and the Foreign & Colonial Office were the recipients of some Bermuda artwork in or around the 1800s, but I doubt if their less glamorous Home Office colleagues ever had that pleasure.

At page 47, the supposed view of Red Hole is actually a view of the old Inverurie Hotel, viewed from Salt Kettle. As for page 83, now is perhaps as good a time as any to point out that Frank Small's delightful 'Welcoming Smile' painting is much more likely to be a Bahamas picture than a scene of Bermuda. Anything more than a cursory examination of the white roof (with its dormer windows and its lack of corbelling and protruding rafter-feet below the eaves) ought to indicate that it is simply a white-painted roof, and not a proper Bermuda roof. Small is known to have painted in the Bahamas (where white-painted or other pale-toned roofs were not uncommon, judging from old photographs of the Nassau area), but I am not aware of any evidence of him ever having painted in Bermuda.

At page 113, the commentary on Georgia O'Keeffe's two visits refers to her working in both 'graphite and pencil' (sic), as if the two were different. At page 114 there is a reference to (New York's) famous Salmagundi Club having been in Bermuda presumably the result of some vague and confused folk-memory of a Hamilton tobacconist shop. Sadly, such mistakes as these are likely to do little for Bermuda's reputation in the art world. Last (and perhaps least), at page 115, in the little biography of Clark Voorhees, the date of the British Empire Exhibition should be 1924, not 1919 as stated.

On the whole, this is an enjoyable and worthwhile book, but it is unfortunate that a higher degree of quality-control was not exercised.

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Jonathan Land Evans BA (Hons), MA, LL.B (Hons) is a Bermudian lawyer and historian. His history of Bermuda in old maps is forthcoming from the Bermuda Maritime Museum Press. He is presently writing a three-volume history of "Bermuda In Painted Representation" which examines how (and by whom) the island has been depicted in art. He is happy to be contacted at jonathanevans36hotmail.com, particularly if readers have or know of artworks or information that might be relevant to this major study.