SIX months into 'new ownership,' one of the nation's premier treasure houses of art this week sees the arrival of a new director to oversee collections which are deserving of acclaim as much for their diversity as for the great individual pieces they contain.

You haven't seen the centrefolds in the more upmarket of the weekend colour supplements? Watched the hour-long South Bank Show in which Melvyn Bragg's west-of-the-Pennines ego changed subtly to pan-northern as the camera focused on the fabulous building whose history and contents he was extolling?

No, you won't have. None of these journalistic extravaganzas took place. Such national tributes are routine whenever there occurs a topical peg on which the metropolitan media can hang a feature about any others among the top dozen fine and decorative arts collections in the country. But when it's the Bowes Museum, a place with a better story to tell than almost any other inspiring example of 19th-century British flair, there is a deafening silence. That is unfair, irrational and puzzling.

Even in the week when the centenary of the death of the Queen Empress has provoked detailed recall of Victorian-era endeavour ranging from, not necessarily in ascending order, the perfection of the flushing lavatory cistern to the colonisation of Africa, the latest angle on the John and Josephine Bowes phenomenon has gone largely unremarked.

The Bowes Museum is in the top league which also includes the V&A, the British Museum, the Wallace Collection, the Oxbridge duo of the Fitzwilliam and the Ashmolean and, in Glasgow, the Burrell Collection. Of course it is not the Manchester United of that elite but it is certainly a Premiership outfit which has had to survive on Dr Martens League income and exposure.

What makes the Bowes exceptional in a positive sense is the broad spectrum of its attractions: besides its 1,500 oil paintings - Canaletto, Goya, El Greco and Turner are the headlines leading to hundreds of lesser-known masterpieces - there are major collections of textiles, furniture, costume, toys, clocks and other automata and especially of European ceramics.

Also exceptional, unfortunately, is its remoteness from the main centres of population and thus its present reliance on the relatively small Durham county council to supplement the 60,000 entrance fees and money raised by more than 1,600 stalwart Friends.

After the latest financial crisis in 1998 caused Durham to threaten the Bowes with winter closing, a lingering-death sentence warded off only by a cheque from the Friends, the museum has become an independent trust.

Lord Eccles, son of the 1970s Arts Minister, is chairman. With a management team that includes other newcomers besides director Adrian Jenkins - a 35-year-old whose previous postings include Newcastle and the Bolton museum where he raised £1.5m to keep a Thomas Moran landscape in this country - he is brimming with marketing and sponsorship ideas. They intend to build on the success achieved by Mrs Elizabeth Conran, who has retired.

The task, though, is daunting in a country so rich in museums, some 2,500 of them in the regions, with even the smallest and the most obscure contributing to the gaiety of the nation. The network is so far-reaching that the official overseeing body is emboldened to give itself a fashionably obtuse moniker; it's now called 're:source.'

In the days when it was the plain Museums, Libraries and Archives Commission it began awarding 'designated' status to the most important museums. Bowes was on that first list of 21 and is of course still on it now that it has grown to 50-odd.

What re:source should do now, as it digests the implications of the government's kite-flying this week on free admission to a select few museums, is some prompt redesignating: it should recommend the Bowes be granted offical 'national' status so that it, too, would join this "free list" and thus receive sufficient funding from Whitehall to safeguard its future in the Premiership.

If there is any justice, that will happen.