The Spanish Gallery review – would you like a scary fresco with your sherry and tapas?

Bishop Auckland, County Durham
This new museum has big dreams – but that old Spanish magic doesn’t hit you until you reach the frescoes. Great place for a tapas bar, though

Great Spanish geniuses of the Renaissance and baroque era are celebrated by Bishop Auckland’s newest museum but it makes no mention of the most influential of all, Miguel de Cervantes. Perhaps because Cervantes’ Don Quixote tilting at windmills would strike too close to home. For this gallery, in a converted Victorian bank in a small British town, is tragicomically quixotic.

It wants to be the Prado of the north. There seems to be plenty of good will towards that dream from institutions such as the National Gallery and the New York Hispanic Society, who have loaned works. And who wouldn’t wish it well, a gallery standing up for the high culture of a fellow European nation in this age of shallow populism? But what promises to be brave, rigorous and idealistic often looks like a vanity project. The Spanish Gallery is the brainchild of collector and philanthropist Jonathan Ruffer, part of what he calls the Auckland Project, a one-man regeneration scheme in the centre of this beautifully set but economically embattled place that includes Auckland Castle, a gallery of miners’ art, and – coming soon – a museum of faith. Yet the generosity of Ruffer’s patronage goes with a determination to impose his views that makes it very hard to find your own pace and emotional connection with The Spanish Gallery.

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