SOUTHAMPTON, England -- The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is generally acknowledged to be the world's first modern museum worthy of the title. Unlike its predecessors, it was not just a cabinet of curiosities -- archaeological relics and anthropological wonders amassed by some explorer and shown in his own home. Nor was it a rich man's art collection that stayed firmly attached to his walls but still called itself a picture gallery. The Ashmolean was specifically designed for the public display of its collection -- and therein lies the difference.

Since Oxford's museum opened its doors in 1683, thousands of museums and art galleries have been built all over the world. As the years pass, all of them, whatever their vintage, type or geographic location, come to share a common headache. Permanent collections, like little Topsy, just grow and grow, but museum buildings do not. Nowhere is this chronic lack of space more acute than in Britain's museums, where inheritance and tax laws have long encouraged the bequest of works of art or artifacts to public collections. Indeed, many were founded on the basis of the generosity of a single individual and then added to over the years by the museum's own acquisitions.

Besides the storage problem, administrators must consider the issue of conservation, which is particularly thorny in the case of paintings. The sad fact is that, no matter how inspirational and otherworldly a painting may be, it is first and foremost a physical object, containing organic matter that is vulnerable to decay. When the work in question is one of the jewels in the crown of a museum's collection, it is likely to be on permanent public display in a climate-controlled gallery, where its condition can be monitored daily. But works like this are always in the minority. Down in the basement of any museum, one finds the rump of its collection -- works that have been acquired over the years through bequest or curatorial choice and yet have subsequently been judged to be of inferior artistic quality. The museum may hesitate to display them publicly, but the obligation remains to preserve these works in optimum condition for posterity. Languishing in the storeroom, however, they deteriorate physically, chemically and organically, and the museum may lack the resources to conserve them in prime exhibition condition.

A provincial pearl

This was exactly the problem that faced the Southampton City Art Gallery, located in this port city on the south coast of England. Compared to others of its type, Southampton's gallery is still a spring chicken, having opened in 1939, quite late for a major municipal collection in Britain. Nevertheless, it is one of only 15 nonnational British art collections to have been designated as possessing special national significance.

In Southampton's case, it was the wisdom of the founding benefactor that ensured the collection's high quality right from the start. When he left his personal collection and a substantial trust fund to the gallery, Robert Chipperfield, a local pharmacist, stipulated that subsequent artworks for the collection be chosen only after consultation with the director of the National Gallery in London. So it was that the leading art historian of his day, Kenneth Clarke (later Lord Clarke), came to set the standard. Unlike many other municipal galleries, Southampton acquired its main collection systematically, rather than in a haphazard fashion dictated by contemporary trends.

The collection was also bolstered by other significant bequests, such as the 1963 gift of 99 works from the collection of the art dealer Arthur Tilden Jeffress. The gallery owes to Jeffress its collection of paintings by Graham Sutherland, Paul Delvaux, Louis Vivin and Lucien Freud. This group -- balancing a small collection of old master paintings -- makes Southampton unusually strong at both ends of the historical scale. From its earliest work, a 14th-century Nuzi altarpiece, the collection proceeds historically through a representative selection of 19th-century paintings to modern watercolors and drawings and a growing number of contemporary works, including one by this year's Turner Prize winner, Chris Ofili. Southampton was the first to mount a major exhibition of Ofili's work and thus introduce him to a wider public.

Among these pearls, however, are some less distinguished works -- both gifts and purchases -- that for many years rarely saw the light of day.

Perhaps because it has always had to share its premises, Southampton was one of the first public art galleries in the country to feel pinched for space, a situation that was soon aggravated by wartime damage. When it opened in 1939, it was part of a civic complex that included the guildhall, the law courts, the library, an art school and the council offices. The following year, it was hit by a bomb, which destroyed part of the art school and killed several students. The collection was then moved to rural Bletchley, an area less vulnerable to German bombing raids than Southampton, which was, and still is, one of Britain's major commercial ports.

In 1946, one wing of the gallery reopened, but it was not until 1960 that the gallery regained most of the space it had lost. By then, many of its pictures were gracing the walls of council offices and other public buildings -- an ad hoc arrangement that did the paintings no good. Tim Craven, Southampton's current collections manager, talked recently about how the gallery solved its storage problem, created the first rational art-lease scheme in the country and achieved many other things besides.

Borrowers and lenders

"In 1950, the City Art Gallery started the first (formal) picture-loan scheme," Craven said. "This being the civil service, they would go out to officers' messes and that kind of venue. Each time, the client would insure them, but pay no money over to us as a fee -- but the conservator would visit the work annually and have a free lunch.

"When I first came here in 1980, the army would turn up in a three-ton truck to collect (its) paintings, and damage ensued. But, of course, the (insurance) money would disappear into the corporate coffers, so there was no incentive to develop the scheme and it was a bit of a burden on staff resources and the welfare of the paintings in the scheme."

By 1985, the keeper of art, or curator, had decided to wind the whole thing down, since the income it generated barely covered the gallery's expenses and it had, in any case, become impossibly time-consuming for staff members with too much to do already. Unlike Japanese museums, those in Britain are seriously understaffed and underfunded, and, while they might be wellsprings of bright ideas, the funds and personnel needed to carry those ideas out is often lacking. Luckily, however, at this point in the story a new and well-heeled client appeared to revive the gallery's moribund scheme.

"They were called Style Conferences Ltd.," Craven explained. "They were buying up country houses in the south of England, mainly in Hampshire, and converting them into high-tech conference centers. But they had no pictures on the walls and they rightly wanted to give these places the right ambience. It was a case of the interests of two quite different parties coinciding.

"Conservation and cleaning of the collection was an important issue," Craven added, "and not only of the pictures. The frames had suffered and were in a poor state and had often been poorly conserved. The (new) scheme was the snowball that started it unknowingly again, because my interests were really in conservation." he said.

The income increasingly being generated by the scheme enabled the gallery to buy equipment for the conservation studio and hire a part-time colleague to assist Craven with the scheme.

There was even enough left over for other things: "It (was) refreshing because most museum-based conservation departments are quite inward-looking, but we had a direct link with the outside world through the clients and their briefs. The curator was buying pieces of art with some of the income, but I was actually helping to fund part of the educational outreach program, and the fact that it was sponsoring museum activities was very satisfying. But especially (satisfying was the) conservation and collection care."

Pictures for the populace

Under Craven's guidance, Artlease, as it is now called, has not looked back since, placing between 250 and 300 works annually. Local topographical scenes are the most popular, followed by maritime and figurative works from the 19th and early 20th centuries. "It's so subjective," said Craven. "What you're going to love, the next person's going to hate. Some paintings have been out for years, and some clients like to change their paintings every year -- but we try to discourage that, because moving is not good for works of art."

The paintings are lent out on a one-year contract, with Craven and his assistant screening the site first to ensure that the strict conservation guidelines can be adhered to: no paintings over radiators, in direct sunlight or exposed to other sources of heat. They must be securely attached in two places to the wall and securely guarded. The client must also bear the cost of insurance and glazing if necessary. It is this sponsorship arrangement that has been so beneficial to the paintings.

Schemes like Artlease have been operating concurrently at other larger museums as well; the National Maritime Museum in London leads the pack, with a thriving program that generates significant income. Few of the schemes at smaller galleries, however, have prospered to the same degree as Southampton, and one has actually come under fire from artists themselves. The Arts Council, which has one of the largest public collections, has leased a series of works to the Marriott Hotel on the South Bank of the Thames in London, where they are displayed in the corridors, bars, restaurants and even a health spa on the fifth floor. They include drawings by David Hockney and Walter Sickert and six photographs by John Benton-Harris, who has objected strongly to what he sees as the blatant commercializing of the collection for profit "without first consulting the artists or their estates, and making fair financial provision for all artists involved."

This is a difficult charge to answer. The fact is that art institutions are now caught in a double bind. On the one hand, they must preserve the works in their collections and simultaneously ensure access to them for as wide an audience as possible. On the other hand, they need to find ways of generating the kind of income that will allow all that to happen in these cash-strapped times.

The Southampton City Art Gallery seems to have resolved the problem intelligently in a Robin Hood sponsorship arrangement that benefits everyone. It remains to be seen whether other galleries can do the same.