Studio: international art (1.1893)

Exhibition

turns, like other people with no honest means of
making a living, to the State; and he becomes
aware of an extraordinary fact—the existence of two
national institutions, which, the one by its contents,
the other by its pretensions, seem actually to aim
at the exhibition of poetic painting. There is the
National Gallery, evidently for dead excellence;
there is the Academy, he reasons, for living ex-
cellence. The good luck by which the first has
come together need not be too closely scrutinised
—the private benevolence of the picture enthusiast,
the taste here and there of a statesman or his idea
that culture is a duty, the respect of the taxpayer
for expensive objects, and that scientific spirit
which can exercise itself on pictures with almost
the same complacency as upon black beetles, and
can make a gallery a reputable affair under the
guise of a museum. The Academy is a somewhat
more elusive combination when it is examined.
Its French prototype was a device for adding
painters to the other courtiers and servants of the
State. Our Academy, modelled as it was under
the hand of Reynolds, reflects a good deal his
personality. Sir Joshua was as brilliant a social
figure as he was a painter, and it was with a natural
pride that he saw the " face-painter" stamped with
a social prestige. This joy is represented by the
annual Academy dinner, at which Royalty, the
Services, and the Arts kiss and compliment one
another with circumstance of becoming glory.
An unavoidable consequence of this idea was the
status of Academician given to forty painters, at a
time when all reasonable claims could be thus met,
or compromised with by the uncomfortable posi-
tion of painter-in-waiting, known as associateship.
Whether this kind of distinction is a desirable one
for painters is a matter open to dispute ; literary men
in our country have escaped it, and may congratu-
late themselves when they observe the weary pangs
and intrigues of their French neighbours. The
crown, even if fairly earned, is not likely to be in-
vigorating, not certain to be permanently fitting;
it may become a mockery or a fraud. Besides,
there are either too many or too few. At the worst,
however, the distinction is one which can be lived
down. A more important feature of the scheme
was the School. A free endowed school is for the
art student a great piece of luck, and it is perhaps
an accident that the Academy School has been so
poorly conducted that its pupils have to go else-
where to unlearn what they have been taught.
But lastly, we come to the feature which directly
concerns us—that of a select exhibition of painting.
The Academicians surely on this side of their

institution were made trustees, and trustees for the
poets among painters, just for those victims of the
passion of painting and the passion of excellence
who are not provided for by the desires of the
public or the arrangements of trading bodies.
The only force in having an Academic exhibition
is to have it exclusive and excellent; to refuse
history if it is not also a picture, to refuse illustra-
tion if it is not also a picture, to do honour to the
picture which is a poem and nothing else, and to
say to the public, These are pictures, whether you
like them or not; here is the standard in an art
for which you probably do not care ; if you want
to know and are capable of coming to care, look at
these ! Now, instead of doing anything of this sort
—the only excuse for the existence of an Academy
exhibition—the Academy notoriously takes another
line : gives the public exactly what the public
likes in indiscriminate profusion, and competes
with trading concerns on trading terms. It is
not true that the poets never get in; the idea
that there is a crowd of talent and genius vainly
clamouring at the Academy doors is a myth and
superstition. But when they do slip in they are
lost in the general flood, even if they are not hung
so as to be invisible. The Academy, instead of
suggesting to the public the truth that there are
very few good pictures produced in the course of
the year, debauches them with a bazaar in which
attention is called to the cheapest and most mere-
tricious.

And it is here that the glaring defect of the
Academy constitution comes in. The trustees
are by the charter of the institution secured
the privilege of benefiting by their trust. The
Academician not only receives his laurel, but has
also the prerogative of exhibiting, whether he con-
tinues to paint well or takes to painting badly
(assuming that he did once paint well). Now, no
one would wish to lay a self-denying ordinance on
those distinguished people to the extent of pre-
venting them from exhibiting at all. But between
the pictures admitted ex officio and the pictures
admitted to please the public, what becomes of
our exhibition of excellent pictures of the standard
which is the only justification of an Academy?
The fair thing surely would be to set apart from
the too many rooms one or more into which it
would be understood that the pictures of the
Academician might go ex officio; to set apart
other rooms for the bazaar, if that is necessary to
make both ends meet j but to have one room in
which a standard should be steadily maintained, to
which the Academician should only be admitted in