Studio: international art (1.1893)

Galleries, National and Provincial

represented there by a sublime work depicting a
scene from the Bible. And it is curious to note
that with the people Mr. Frith's work is the
most popular in the Gallery; it is never without
its little crowd of gaping spectators, for it is a
common scene, commonly observed, commonly
painted, and the painter who can achieve a feat
of this kind need never be without the pudding of
applause. Even when the man in the street leaves
the Royal Academic Art he delights in, and clamours
for the purchase of an old master, a blunder is the
result, as witness the Marlborough Raphael. For
the ^70,000 it cost, a collection of French
pictures, of which the Gallery possesses singularly
few, could have been purchased, which would have
done much to make our noble collection com-
pletely representative ; but the voice of the people,
strengthened by a vague feeling that the picture
should not leave England, prevailed, and the
Raphael was purchased. To put the matter in a
nutshell, it is clear that the share of the people in
the management of a national gallery should be
limited to finding the money. One man must be
supreme, a man strong enough, moreover, to resist
outside pressure, and to set his face against any
gifts, however well intended, which would lower the
standard of the Gallery. How admirably the one-
man system works when the man is a good one,
the present condition of our own National Gallery
is proof, no less than the administration of the
National Gallery of Ireland by Mr. Doyle. That
mistakes have been made in Trafalgar Square it
would be idle to deny; the museum aspect of
the institution has perhaps been too persistently
emphasised ; possibly there is a superfluity of Pre-
Raphaelite rigidity; but the net result of the
administration is a collection containing very little
that is ill-chosen. Suppose for a moment that
additions had been made by popular vote—but the
thought is too painful. The English people,
however, are sensible in the main, and they have
abstained from sacrificing their picture-gallery to
their vanity.

The satisfactory condition of the National
Gallery is probably due to the fact that what is
everybody's business is nobody's business; the
number of those who contribute towards its main-
tenance is so enormous, their individual contribu-
tion so infinitesimal, that they do not concern
themselves with it. In the great politics of the
State it is an unconsidered trifle. The case of the
municipal gallery is, however, quite different. A
subject which is not sufficiently important to con-
centrate on itself the attention of a nation may

very well become a burning question of municipal
politics. The professed object of the municipal
gallery is the elevation of the taste of the citizens :
the purpose it really serves is that of a lordly
pleasure-house, in which the humble citizen can
enjoy warmth and colour, and a momentary immu-
nity from squalor, while the well-to-do burgess can
persuade himself that he is in the atmosphere of
art, and hug the delusion that he is a connoisseur.
The people of the city have to pay the bill, and
they take particular care that they get, not what
they ought to like, but what they really do like.
It is useless to ask them to pass a self-denying
ordinance. You may talk of your " Raphaels,
Correggios, and stuff, they will shift their trumpets
and simply take" ■— the last favourite of the
Chantry Trustees. For as Mr. George Moore
points out in one of the most interesting essays in
his latest book, the average provincial collection is
an echo of the Chantry collection. I take it that
under present conditions it would be little short
of a miracle if a municipality should form a really
fine collection of pictures. The policy of the Art
Committee of the Council is essentially sensational,
as sensational indeed as it is extravagant. No
sooner does it go forth that So-and-so has sold a
picture to a famous dealer for a large sum, that he
has so many commissions that he finds it neces-
sary to keep a lithograph letter in stock refusing
more, than the Aldermen deputed by the Council
to select the gems from the year's Academy imme-
diately secure his next available work. Of the art
of England in the eighteenth century—an art so
suave, so gentle, so refined, and withal so racy of
the soil—our provincial galleries give hardly a hint.
It is true that masterpieces of Reynolds, Gains-
borough, and Romney cannot be bought now for
the same price as one of the pictures of the year;
but it is true also that for a single popular Academy
landscape you could have half a dozen beautiful
little works by such painters as Morland and Crome.
The great municipality, however, prides itself on
being the patron of contemporary painting, on
being a sort of democratic variation of Francois I.;
but if the matter be looked at closely it will be seen
that what it encourages is precisely that which is
most trivial and most stupid in the painting of the
day. Of discrimination it is entirely innocent, it
is simply the slave of the boom. Of course fine
pictures do occasionally creep in to leaven the lump
of commonplace. The glory of the Manchester
collection is Cecil Lawson's Ministers Garden, a
splendid descendant, as Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson
has recently pointed out in these pages, of Rubens'

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