Studio: international art (14.1898)

The International Society

so many others ! In what way do they honour the
English nation ? Their presence there is a dis-
tinct proof that there have been, and are, English-
men of the highest intelligence who have appre-
ciated, selected, and brought together a great
number of the finest works of art of past centuries,
regardless of the birthplace of the artist, not con-
sidering the high or low price (for I dare say some
of these beautiful works have been bought for very
little money), but solely their artistic value.

Well, this superior institution is called the
“National Gallery,”—it may be, with right, a
nation’s pride—but it may with equal right be called
the International Gallery. It is true the National
Gallery includes great names which are purely
English, such as Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney,
Constable, Turner, Crome, &c., and splendidly they
hold their own. The excellent arrangement of this
gallery is another point for admiration, for you feel
that each of the artists represented is thoroughly
at home there, and would be well satisfied with his
quarters, particularly the foreigner.

I should like for a moment to compare this insti-
tution with another of which Sir Joshua Reynolds
was the founder, and which ranks almost first in
the heart of the majority of the British public. It
was founded at a time when the art of different
nations could not so easily intermix as in our days
through easy communication by rail, post, &c., and
when international exhibitions were unknown. How
would the development of his creation into its
present state please the great founder? I am
afraid very little; for he impresses us, in his work,
as a strong individuality—a man who would surely
have advanced with the progress of the century.

You all know that I am thinking of the Royal
Academy, the best market for home-made English
pictures and occasionally for Scotch and Irish work
also.

Now, these two institutions have scarcely any
resemblance one with the other. One great point of
dissimilarity between them is this : the one is inter-
national, the other essentially national. Not only
are foreign names almost absent from the Academy,
but the artists there represented are, the great
majority of them, entirely unknown upon the Con-
tinent. There are certainly great exceptions, such
as Watts, Swan, Sargent, Orchardson, for all of
whom artists abroad have the highest possible
admiration. But one cannot help wondering how
these men ever got into the Academy, for the
majority of the pictures exhibited there impress
you as though they were the crowded-out ones of
past centuries which have been magically preserved
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at the bottom of the sea, floated up on the shores
of England and exhibited for the punishment of
the people. Bewildering to the eye, moreover, is
the arrangement of this wild bazaar, where the only
considerations of the Hanging Committee appear
to be the spaces to be filled and the shape and
size of the frames.

How the English race can put up with this state
of things from year to year the outsider completely
fails to understand. This race, which boasts of
freedom, does not see that all the while it is
shackled by the constraint of convention. It is this
constraint of convention which makes the people
run in their legions to the Academy and admire
the “lovely ” pictures, content and thoughtless, and
go home well satisfied, and talk about them with
the frankness of a fool delighted with his puppet.

Is it constraint of convention again—or can it be
bread and cheese, can it be fear, can it be vul-
garity, can it be ignorance, can it be want of any
feeling of courtesy, or all and more combined—-
which have prevented the authorities at Burlington
House from hitherto recognising artists of the
highest merit and reputation, not only of foreign
countries, but also of Great Britain (who do not
belong to the inner circle), say of Scotland, for
instance ? Ah ! Whistler and Glasgow, I am
afraid, must always be a dark page in the annals of
Burlington House.

But now, before I leave the Academy, I must do
justice to it for having, by this very constraint of
convention, thrown together a number of artists
whom it had failed to understand—artists who are
members and honorary members of the first artistic
institutions of the Continent, whose works have
been bought by foreign Governments and placed
in the Luxembourg in Paris, the Pinakotek in
Munich, Berlin, and elsewhere, who received years
ago the highest recognition that their brother artists
abroad could give them.

It has been the means of drawing them together
by a common feeling, not merely of the need of
self-preservation, but of the necessity for action if
the art of this country is not to become extinct.
For all this the enlightened part of the public may
grimly thank the Academy.

The International Society is itself an “Academy”
in the highest and truest sense of the word, the
meeting-place of professors who come with their
reputation in their hands, and whose gathered
works each year shall represent, with the authority
of their distinguished names, the actual condition
of art in all parts of the world.

G. Sauter.