Campaigns
During his career, MacColl campaigned for a number of artistically controversial causes.
In 1903, in the Saturday Review, he argued that the administrators of the estate of Sir Francis Chantrey, who had left the Chantrey Bequest to the Royal Academy to fund the purchase of artworks for the nation, were departing from the terms and buying mediocre works. After his subsequent book in 1904, Administration of the Chantrey Bequest, a government committee initiated reforms. He also campaigned for the government to spend more on art, resulting in the founding in 1903 of the National Art Collections Fund.
In the 1920s he campaigned, unsuccessfully, for the preservation of John Rennie's Waterloo Bridge. Herbert Morrison and London County Council were eventually successful in their advocacy for its demolition and replacement.
Other causes included his opposition, as a member of the Royal Fine Art Commission, to the 1925 proposal to build a sacristy under the north wall of Westminster Abbey. He was also a central figure in discussions of "Gothic" additions to Oxford colleges, and in efforts to preserve the Foundling Hospital.
Read more about this topic: Dugald Sutherland Mac Coll
Famous quotes containing the word campaigns:
“That food has always been, and will continue to be, the basis for one of our greater snobbisms does not explain the fact that the attitude toward the food choice of others is becoming more and more heatedly exclusive until it may well turn into one of those forms of bigotry against which gallant little committees are constantly planning campaigns in the cause of justice and decency.”
—Cornelia Otis Skinner (1901–1979)