HEN THE BURRELL COLLECTION opened in a park just south of Glasgow on 21 October 1983, it made a big impact. Here was a collection of a private individual equivalent in its scope to some of the great collections in the United States — not quite at the level of the Frick Collection or the Morgan Library, but all of it of the highest quality: tapestries equal to those of the V&A; Persian carpets; eighteenth-century paintings; some antiquities; and a wonderfully wide-ranging collection of work by Degas, which was recently shown
