Corot"s style changed; but it changed gradually, as nature changes, waxing like the moon from a thin, pure crescent to a full circle of light. Guided by a perfect instinct, he progressed, fulfilling the course of his artistic destiny. We notice change, but each change brings fuller beauty. And through the long and beautiful year of Corot"s genius--full as the year itself of months and seasons--we notice that the change that comes over his art is always in the direction of purer and more spiritual beauty. We find him more and more absorbed in the emotion that the landscape conveys, more willing to sacrifice the superfluous and circ.u.mstantial for the sake of the immortal beauty of things.
Look at the "Lac de Garde" and say if you can that the old Greek melody is not audible in the line which bends and floats to the lake"s edge, in the ma.s.sing and the placing of those trees, in the fragile grace of the broken birch which sweeps the "pale complexioned sky".
Are we not looking into the heart of nature, and do we not hear the silence that is the soul of evening? In this, his perfect period, he is content to leave his foreground rubbed over with some expressive grey, knowing well that the eye rests not there, and upon his middle distance he will lavish his entire art, concentrating his picture on some one thing in which for him resides the true reality of the place; be this the evening ripples on the lake or the shimmering of the willow leaves as the last light dies out of the sky.
I only saw Corot once. It was in some woods near Paris, where I had gone to paint, and I came across the old gentleman unexpectedly, seated in front of his easel in a pleasant glade. After admiring his work I ventured to say: "Master, what you are doing is lovely, but I cannot find your composition in the landscape before us." He said: "My foreground is a long way ahead," and sure enough, nearly two hundred yards away, his picture rose out of the dimness of the dell, stretching a little beyond the vista into the meadow.
The anecdote seems to me to be a real lesson in the art of painting, for it shows us the painter in his very employment of nature, and we divine easily the transposition in the tones and in the aspect of things that he was engaged in bringing into that picture. And to speak of transpositions leads us inevitably into consideration of the great secret of Corot"s art, his employment of what is known in studios as values.
By values is meant the amount of light and shadow contained in a tone.
The relation of a half-tint to the highest light, which is represented by the white paper, the relation of a shadow to the deepest black, which is represented by the chalk pencil, is easy enough to perceive in a drawing; but when the work is in colour the values, although not less real, are more difficult to estimate. For a colour can be considered from two points of view: either as so much colouring matter, or as so much light and shade. Violet, for instance, contains not only red and blue in proportions which may be indefinitely varied, but also certain proportions of light and shade; the former tending towards the highest light, represented on the palette by flake white; the latter tending towards the deepest dark, represented on the palette by ivory black.
Similar to a note in music, no colour can be said to be in itself either false or true, ugly or beautiful. A note and a colour acquire beauty and ugliness according to their a.s.sociations; therefore to colour well depends, in the first instance, on the painter"s knowledge and intimate sense of the laws of contrast and similitude. But there is still another factor in the art of colouring well; for, just as the musician obtains richness and novelty of expression by means of a distribution of sound through the instruments of the orchestra, so does the painter obtain depth and richness through a judicious distribution of values. If we were to disturb the distribution of values in the pictures of t.i.tian, Rubens, Veronese, their colour would at once seem crude, superficial, without cohesion or rarity. But some will aver that if the colour is right the values must be right too.
However plausible this theory may seem, the practice of those who hold it amply demonstrates its untruth. It is interesting and instructive to notice how those who seek the colour without regard for the values inherent in the colouring matter never succeed in producing more than a certain shallow superficial brilliancy; the colour of such painters is never rich or profound, and although it may be beautiful, it is always wanting in the element of romantic charm and mystery.
The colour is the melody, the values are the orchestration of the melody; and as the orchestration serves to enrich the melody, so do the values enrich the colour. And as melody may--nay, must--exist, if the orchestration be really beautiful, so colour must inhere wherever the values have been finely observed. In Rembrandt, the colour is brown and a white faintly tinted with bitumen; in Claude, the colour is blue, faintly flushed with yellow in the middle sky, and yet none has denied the right of these painters to be considered colourists.
They painted with the values--that is to say, with what remains on the palette when abstraction has been made of the colouring matter--a delicate neutral tint of infinite subtlety and charm; and it is with this, the evanescent and impalpable soul of the vanished colours, that the most beautiful pictures are painted. Corot, too, is a conspicuous example of this mode of painting. His right to stand among the world"s colourists has never, so far as I know, been seriously contested, his pictures are almost void of colouring matter--a blending of grey and green, and yet the result is of a richly coloured evening.
Corot and Rembrandt, as Dutilleux pointed out, arrived at the same goal by absolutely different ends. He saw clearly, although he could not express himself quite clearly, that, above all painters, Rembrandt and Corot excelled in that mode of pictorial expression known as values, or shall I say chiaroscuro, for in truth he who has said values has hinted chiaroscuro. Rembrandt told all that a golden ray falling through a darkened room awakens in a visionary brain; Corot told all that the grey light of morning and evening whispers in the pensive mind of the elegiac poet. The story told was widely different, but the manner of telling was the same: one attenuated in the light, the other attenuated in the shadow: both sacrificed the corners with a view to fixing the attention on the one spot in which the soul of the picture lives.
All schools have not set great store on values, although all schools have set great store on drawing and colour. Values seem to have come and gone in and out of painting like a fashion. One generation hardly gives the matter a thought, the succeeding generation finds the whole charm of its art in values. It would be difficult to imagine a more interesting and instructive history than the history of values in painting. It is far from my scheme to write such a history, but I wish that such a history were written, for then we should see clearly how unwise were they who neglected the principle, and how much they lost.
I would only call attention to how the principle came to be reintroduced into French art in the beginning of this century. It came from Holland _via_, England through the pictures of Turner and Constable. It was an Anglo-Dutch influence that roused French art, then slumbering in the pseudo-cla.s.sicisms of the First Empire; and, half-awakened, French art turned its eyes to Holland for inspiration; and values, the foundation and corner-stone of Dutch art, became almost at a bound a first article of faith in the artistic creed. In 1830 values came upon France like a religion. Rembrandt was the new Messiah, Holland was the Holy Land, and disciples were busy dispensing the propaganda in every studio.
Since the bad example of Greuze, literature had wound round every branch of painting until painting seemed to disappear in the parasite like an oak under a cloud of ivy. The excess had been great--a reaction was inevitable--and Rembrandt, with his Biblical legends, furnished the necessary transition. But when a taste for painting had been reacquired, one after the other the Dutch painters became the fashion. It is almost unnecessary to point out the influence of Hobbema on the art of Rousseau. Corot was less affected by the Dutchmen, or, to speak more exactly, he a.s.similated more completely what he had learnt from them than his rival was able to do. Moreover, what he took from Holland came to him through Ruysdael rather than through Hobbema.
The great morose dreamer, contemplative and grave as Wordsworth, must have made more direct and intimate appeal to Corot"s soul than the charm and the gaiety of Hobbema"s water-mills. Be this as it may, it was Holland that revived the long-forgotten science of values in the Barbizon painters. They sought their art in the direction of values, and very easily Corot took the lead as chief exponent of the new principle; and he succeeded in applying the principle of values to landscape painting as fully as Rembrandt had to figure painting.
But at the moment when the new means of expression seemed most distinctly established and understood, it was put aside and lost sight of by a new generation of painters, and, curiously enough, by the men who had most vigorously proclaimed the beauty and perfection of the art which was to be henceforth, at least in practice, their mission to repudiate. For I take it that the art of the impressionists has nothing whatever in common with the art of Corot. True, that Corot"s aim was to render his impression of his subject, no matter whether it was a landscape or a figure; in this aim he differed in no wise from Giotto and Van Eyck; but we are not considering Corot"s aims but his means of expression, and his means of expression were the very opposite to those employed by Monet and the school of Monet. Not with half-tints in which colour disappears are Monet and his school concerned, but with the brilliant vibration of colour in the full light, with open s.p.a.ces where the light is reflected back and forward, and nature is but a prism filled with dazzling and iridescent tints.
I remember once writing about one of Monet"s innumerable snow effects: "This picture is in his most radiant manner. A line of snow-enchanted architecture pa.s.ses through the picture--only poor houses with a single square church tower, but they are beautiful as Greek temples in the supernatural whiteness of the great immaculate snow. Below the village, but not quite in the foreground, a few yellow bushes, bare and crippled by the frost, and around and above a marvellous glitter in pale blue and pale rose tints." I asked if the touch was not more precious than intimate; and I spoke, too, of a shallow and brilliant appearance. But if I had asked why the picture, notwithstanding its incontestable merits, was so much on the surface, why it so irresistibly suggested _un decor de theatre_, why one did not enter into it as one does into a picture by Wilson or Corot, my criticism would have gone to the root of the evil. And the reason of this is because Monet has never known how to organise and control his values.
The relation of a wall to the sky which he observes so finely seem as if deliberately contrived for the suppression of all atmosphere; and we miss in Monet the delicacy and the mystery which are the charm of Corot. The bath of air being withdrawn, a landscape becomes a mosaic, flat surface takes the place of round: the next step is some form or other of pre-Raphaelitism.
MONET, SISLEY, p.i.s.sARO, AND THE DECADENCE.
Nature demands that children should devour their parents, and Corot was hardly cold in his grave when his teaching came to be neglected and even denied. Values were abandoned and colour became the unique thought of the new school.
My first acquaintance with Monet"s painting was made in "75 or "76--the year he exhibited his first steam-engine and his celebrated troop of life-size turkeys gobbling the tall gra.s.s in a meadow, at the end of which stood, high up in the picture, a French chateau.
Impressionism is a word that has lent itself to every kind of misinterpretation, for in its exact sense all true painting is penetrated with impressionism, but, to use the word in its most modern sense--that is to say, to signify the rapid noting of illusive appearance--Monet is the only painter to whom it may be reasonably applied. I remember very well that sunlit meadow and the long coloured necks of the turkeys. Truly it may be said that, for the s.p.a.ce of one rapid glance, the canvas radiates; it throws its light in the face of the spectator as, perhaps, no canvas did before. But if the eyes are not immediately averted the illusion pa.s.ses, and its place is taken by a somewhat incoherent and crude coloration. Then the merits of the picture strike you as having been obtained by excessive accomplishment in one-third of the handicraft and something like a formal protestation of the non-existence of the other two-thirds. Since that year I have seen Monets by the score, and have hardly observed any change or alteration in his manner of seeing or executing, or any development soever in his art. At the end of the season he comes up from the country with thirty or forty landscapes, all equally perfect, all painted in precisely the same way, and no one shows the slightest sign of hesitation, and no one suggests the unattainable, the beyond; one and all reveal to us a man who is always sure of his effect, and who is always in a hurry. Any corner of nature will do equally well for his purpose, nor is he disposed to change the disposition of any line of tree or river or hill; so long as a certain reverberation of colour is obtained all is well. An unceasing production, and an almost unvarying degree of excellence, has placed Monet at the head of the school; his pictures command high prices, and nothing goes now with the erudite American but Monet"s landscapes. But does Monet merit this excessive patronage, and if so, what are the qualities in his work that make it superior to Sisley"s and p.i.s.saro"s?
Sisley is less decorative, less on the surface, and though he follows Monet in his pursuit of colour, nature is, perhaps, on account of his English origin, something more to him than a brilliant appearance. It has of course happened to Monet to set his easel before the suburban aspect that Sisley loves, but he has always treated it rather in the decorative than in the meditative spirit. He has never been touched by the humility of a lane"s end, and the sentiment of the humble life that collects there has never appeared on his canvas. Yet Sisley, being more in sympathy with such nature, has often been able to produce a superior though much less pretentious picture than the ordinary stereotyped Monet. But if Sisley is more meditative than Monet, p.i.s.saro is more meditative than either.
Monet had arrived at his style before I saw anything of his work; of his earlier canvases I know nothing. Possibly he once painted in the Corot manner; it is hardly possible that he should not have done so.
However this may be, p.i.s.saro did not rid himself for many years of the influence of Corot. His earliest pictures were all composed in pensive greys and violets, and exhaled the weary sadnessof tilth and grange and scant orchard trees. The pale road winds through meagre uplands, and through the blown and gnarled and shiftless fruit-trees the saddening silhouette of the town drifts across the land. The violet s.p.a.ces between the houses are the very saddest, and the spare furrows are patiently drawn, and so the execution is in harmony with and accentuates the unutterable monotony of the peasant"s lot. The sky, too, is vague and empty, and out of its deathlike, creamy hollow the first shadows are blown into the pallid face of a void evening. The picture tells of the melancholy of ordinary life, of our poor transitory tenements, our miserable sc.r.a.pings among the little mildew that has gathered on the surface of an insignificant planet. I will not attempt to explain why the grey-toned and meditative p.i.s.saro should have consented to countenance--I cannot say to lead (for, unlike every other _chef d"ecole_, p.i.s.saro imitated the disciples instead of the disciples imitating p.i.s.saro)--the many fantastic revolutions in pictorial art which have agitated Montmartre during the last dozen years. The p.i.s.saro psychology I must leave to take care of itself, confining myself strictly to the narrative of these revolutions.
Authority for the broken brushwork of Monet is to be found in Manet"s last pictures, and I remember Manet"s reply when I questioned him about the pure violet shadows which, just before his death, he was beginning to introduce into his pictures. "One year one paints violet and people scream, and the following year every one paints a great deal more violet." If Manet"s answer throws no light whatever on the new principle, it shows very clearly the direction, if not the goal, towards which his last style was moving. But perhaps I am speaking too cautiously, for surely broken brushwork and violet shadows lead only to one possible goal--the prismatic colours.
Manet died, and this side--and this side only--of his art was taken up by Monet, Sisley, and Renoir. Or was it that Manet had begun to yield to an influence--that of Monet, Sisley, and Renoir--which was just beginning to make itself felt? Be this as it may, browns and blacks disappeared from the palettes of those who did not wish to be considered _l"ecole des beaux-arts, et en plein_. Venetian reds, siennas, and ochres were in process of abandonment, and the palette came to be composed very much in the following fashion: violet, white, blue, white, green, white, red, white, yellow, white, orange, white--the three primary and the three secondary colours, with white placed between each, so as to keep everything as distinct as possible, and avoid in the mixing all soiling of the tones. Monet, Sisley, and Renoir contented themselves with the abolition of all blacks and browns, for they were but half-hearted reformers, and it was clearly the duty of those who came after to rid the palette of all ochres, siennas, Venetian, Indian, and light reds. The only red and yellow that any one who was not, according to the expression of the new generation, _presque du Louvre_, could think of permitting on his palette were vermilion and cadmium. The first of this new generation was Seurat, Seurat begot Signac, Signac begot Anquetin, and Anquetin has begotten quite a galaxy of lesser lights, of whom I shall not speak in this article--of whom it is not probable that I shall ever speak.
It was in an exhibition held in Rue Lafitte in "81 or "82 that the new method, which comprised two most radical reforms--an execution achieved entirely with the point of the brush and the division of the tones--was proclaimed. Or should I say reformation, for the execution by a series of dots is implicit in the theory of the division of the tones? How well I remember being attracted towards an end of the room, which was filled with a series of most singular pictures. There must have been at least ten pictures of yachts in full sail. They were all drawn in profile, they were all painted in the very clearest tints, white skies and white sails hardly relieved or explained with shadow, and executed in a series of minute touches, like mosaic. Ten pictures of yachts all in profile, all in full sail, all unrelieved by any attempt at atmospheric effect, all painted in a series of little dots!
Great as was my wonderment, it was tenfold increased on discovering that only five of these pictures were painted by the new man, Seurat, whose name was unknown to me; the other five were painted by my old friend p.i.s.saro. My first thought went for the printer; my second for some _fumisterie_ on the part of the hanging committee, the intention of which escaped me. The pictures were hung low, so I went down on my knees and examined the dotting in the pictures signed Seurat, and the dotting in those that were signed p.i.s.saro. After a strict examination I was able to detect some differences, and I began to recognise the well-known touch even through this most wild and most wonderful transformation. Yes, owing to a long and intimate acquaintance with p.i.s.saro and his work, I could distinguish between him and Seurat, but to the ordinary visitor their pictures were identical.
Many claims are put forward, but the best founded is that of Seurat; and, so far as my testimony may serve his greater honour and glory, I do solemnly declare that I believe him to have been the original discoverer of the division of the tones.
A tone is a combination of colours. In Nature colours are separate; they act and react one on the other, and so create in the eye the illusion of a mixture of various colours-in other words, of a tone.
But if the human eye can perform this prodigy when looking on colour as evolved through the spectacle of the world, why should not the eye be able to perform the same prodigy when looking on colour as displayed over the surface of a canvas? Nature does not mix her colours to produce a tone; and the reason of the marked discrepancy existing between Nature and the Louvre is owing to the fact that painters have hitherto deemed it a necessity to prepare a tone on the palette before placing it on the canvas; whereas it is quite clear that the only logical and reasonable method is to first complete the a.n.a.lysis of the tone, and then to place the colours which compose the tone in dots over the canvas, varying the size of the dots and the distance between the dots according to the depth of colour desired by the painter.
If this be done truly--that is to say, if the first a.n.a.lysis of the tones be a correct a.n.a.lysis--and if the spectator places himself at the right distance from the picture, there will happen in his eyes exactly the same blending of colour as happens in them when they are looking upon Nature. An example will, I think, make my meaning clear.
We are in a club smoking-room. The walls are a rich ochre. Three or four men sit between us and the wall, and the blue smoke of their cigars fills the middle air. In painting this scene it would be usual to prepare the tone on the palette, and the preparation would be somewhat after this fashion: ochre warmed with a little red--a pale violet tinted with lake for the smoke of the cigars.
But such a method of painting would seem to Seurat and Signac to be artless, primitive, unscientific, childish, _presque du Louvre_--above all, unscientific. They would say, "Decompose the tone. That tone is composed of yellow, white, and violet turning towards lake"; and, having satisfied themselves in what proportions, they would dot their canvases over with pure yellow and pure white, the inters.p.a.ces being filled in with touches of lake and violet, numerous where the smoke is thickest, diminishing in number where the wreaths vanish into air. Or let us suppose that it is a blue slated roof that the dottist wishes to paint. He first looks behind him, to see what is the colour of the sky. It is an orange sky. He therefore represents the slates by means of blue dots intermixed with orange and white dots, and--ah! I am forgetting an important principle in the new method--the complementary colour which the eye imagines, but does not see. What is the complementary colour of blue, grey, and orange? Green. Therefore green must be introduced into the roof; otherwise the harmony would be incomplete, and therefore in a measure discordant.
Needless to say that a sky painted in this way does not bear looking into. Close to the spectator it presents the appearance of a pard; but when he reaches the proper distance there is no denying that the colours do in a measure unite and a.s.sume a tone more or less equivalent to the tone that would have been obtained by blending the colours on the palette. "But," cry Seurat and Signac, "an infinitely purer and more beautiful tone than could have been obtained by any artificial blending of the colours on the palette--a tone that is the exact equivalent of one of Nature"s tones, for it has been obtained in exactly the same way."
Truly a subject difficult to write about in English. Perhaps it is one that should not be attempted anywhere except in a studio with closed doors. But if I did not make some attempt to explain this matter, I should leave my tale of the decline and fall of French art in the nineteenth century incomplete.
Roughly speaking, these new schools--the symbolists, the decadents, the dividers of tones, the professors of the rhythm of gesture--date back about ten years. For ten years the division of the tones has been the subject of discussion in the aesthetic circles of Montmartre. And when we penetrate further into the matter--or, to be more exact, as we ascend into the higher regions of _La b.u.t.te_--we find the elect, who form so stout a phalanx against the Philistinism of the Louvre, themselves subdivided into numerous sections, and distraught with internecine feuds concerning the principle of the art which they pursue with all the vehemence that Veronese green and cadmium yellow are capable of. From ten at night till two in the morning the _bra.s.series_ of the b.u.t.te are in session. Ah! the interminable bocks and the reek of the cigars, until at last a hesitating exodus begins.
An exhausted proprietor at the head of his waiters, crazed with sleepiness, eventually succeeds in driving these noctambulist apostles into the streets.
Then the nervous lingering at the corner! The disputants, anxious and yet loth to part, say goodbye, each regretting that he had not urged some fresh argument--an argument which had just occurred to him, and which, he feels sure, would have reduced his opponent to impotent silence. Sometimes the partings are stormy. The question of the introduction of the complementary colours into the frames of the pictures is always a matter of strife, and results in much nonconformity. Several are strongly in favour of carrying the complementary colours into the picture-frames. "If you admit," says one, "that to paint a blue roof with an orange sky shining on it you must introduce the complementary colour green--which the spectator does not see, but imagines--there is excellent reason why you should dot the frame all over with green, for the picture and its frame are not two things, but one thing." "But," cries his opponent, "there is a finality in all things; if you carry your principle out to the bitter end, the walls as well as the frame should be dotted with the complementary colours, the staircases too, the streets likewise; and if we pursue the complementaries into the street, who shall say where we are to stop? Why stop at all, unless the neighbours protest that we are interfering with their complementaries?"
The schools headed by Signac and Anquetin comprise numerous disciples and adherents. They do not exhibit in the Salon or in the Champ de Mars; but that is because they disdain to do so. They hold exhibitions of their own, and their picture-dealers trade only in their works and in those belonging to or legitimately connected with the new schools.
If I have succeeded in explaining the principle of coloration employed by these painters, I must have excited some curiosity in the reader to see these scientifically-painted pictures. To say that they are strange, absurd, ridiculous, conveys no sensation of their extravagances; and I think that even an elaborate description would miss its mark. For, in truth, the pictures merit no such attention. It is only needful to tell the reader that they fail most conspicuously at the very point where it was their mission to succeed. Instead of excelling in brilliancy of colour the pictures painted in the ordinary way, they present the most complete spectacle of discoloration possible to imagine.
Yet Signac is a man of talent, and in an exhibition of pictures which I visited last May I saw a wide bay, two rocky headlands extending far into the sea, and this offing was filled with a mult.i.tude of gull-like sails. There was in it a vibration of light, such an effect as a mosaic composed of dim-coloured but highly polished stones might produce. I can say no good word, however, for his portrait of a gentleman holding his hat in one hand and a flower in the other. This picture formulated a still newer aestheticism--the rhythm of gesture.
For, according to Signac, the raising of the face and hands expresses joy, the depression of the face and hands denotes sadness. Therefore, to denote the melancholy temperament of his sitter, Signac represented him as being hardly able to lift his hat to his head or the flower to his b.u.t.ton-hole. The figure was painted, as usual, in dots of pure colour lifted from the palette with the point of the brush; the complementary colours in duplicate bands curled up the background.
This was considered by the disciples to be an important innovation; and the effect, it is needless to say, was gaudy, if not neat.
A theory of Anquetin"s is that wherever the painter is painting, his retina must still hold some sensation of the place he has left; therefore there is in every scene not only the scene itself, but remembrance of the scene that preceded it. This is not quite clear, is it? No. But I think I can make it clear. He who walks out of a brilliantly lighted saloon--that is to say, he who walks out of yellow--sees the other two primary colours, red and blue; in other words, he sees violet. Therefore Anquetin paints the street, and everything in it, violet--boots, trousers, hats, coats, lamp-posts, paving-stones, and the tail of the cat disappearing under the _porte cochere_.
But if in my description of these schools I have conveyed the idea of stupidity or ignorance I have failed egregiously. These young men are all highly intelligent and keenly alive to art, and their doings are not more vain than the hundred and one artistic notions which have been undermining the art-sense of the French and English nations for the last twenty years. What I have described is not more foolish than the stippling at South Kensington or the drawing by the ma.s.ses at Julien"s. The theory of the division of the tones is no more foolish than the theory of _plein air_ or the theory of the square brushwork; it is as foolish, but not a jot more foolish.
Great art dreams, imagines, sees, feels, expresses--reasons never. It is only in times of woful decadence, like the present, that the bleating of the schools begins to be heard; and although, to the ignorant, one method may seem less ridiculous than another, all methods--I mean, all methods that are not part and parcel of the pictorial intuition--are equally puerile and ridiculous. The separation of the method of expression from the idea to be expressed is the sure sign of decadence. France is now all decadence. In the Champ de Mars, as in the Salon, the man of the hour is he who has invented the last trick in subject or treatment.
France has produced great artists in quick succession. Think of all the great names, beginning with Ingres and ending with Degas, and wonder if you can that France has at last entered on a period of artistic decadence. For the last sixty years the work done in literary and pictorial art has been immense; the soil has been worked along and across, in every direction; and for many a year nothing will come to us from France but the bleat of the scholiast.
OUR ACADEMICIANS.
That nearly all artists dislike and despise the Royal Academy is a matter of common knowledge. Whether with reason or without is a matter of opinion, but the existence of an immense fund of hate and contempt of the Academy is not denied. From Glasgow to Cornwall, wherever a group of artists collects, there hangs a gathering and a darkening sky of hate. True, the position of the Academy seems to be impregnable; and even if these clouds should break into storm the Academy would be as little affected as the rock of Gibraltar by squall or tempest. The Academy has successfully resisted a Royal Commission, and a crusade led by Mr. Holman Hunt in the columns of the _Times_ did not succeed in obtaining the slightest measure of reform.... Here I might consult Blue-books and official doc.u.ments, and tell the history of the Academy; but for the purpose of this article the elementary facts in every one"s possession are all that are necessary. We know that we owe the Academy to the artistic instincts of George III. It was he who sheltered it in Somerset House, and when Somerset House was turned into public offices, the Academy was bidden to Trafalgar Square; and when circ.u.mstances again compelled the authorities to ask the Academy to move on, the Academy, posing as a public body, demanded a site, and the Academy was given one worth three hundred thousand pounds. Thereon the Academy erected its present buildings, and when they were completed the Academy declared itself on the first opportunity to be no public body at all, but a private enterprise. Then why the site, and why the Royal charter? Mr. Colman, Mr. Pears, Mr. Reckitt are not given sites worth three hundred thousand pounds. These questions have often been asked, and to them the Academy has always an excellent answer. "The site has been granted, and we have erected buildings upon it worth a hundred thousand pounds; get rid of us you cannot."
The position of the Academy is as impregnable as the rock of Gibraltar; it is as well advertised as the throne itself, and the income derived from the sale of the catalogues alone is enormous. Then the Academy has the handling of the Chantrey Bequest Funds, which it does not fail to turn to its own advantage by buying pictures of Academicians, which do not sell in the open market, at extravagant prices, or purchasing pictures by future Academicians, and so fostering, strengthening, and imposing on the public the standard of art which obtains in Academic circles. Such, in a few brief words, is the inst.i.tution which controls and in a large measure directs the art of this country. But though I come with no project to obtain its dissolution, it seems to me interesting to consider the causes of the hatred of the Academy with which artistic England is saturated, oftentimes convulsed; and it may be well to ask if any inst.i.tution, however impregnable, can continue to defy public opinion, if any sovereignty, however fortified by wealth and b.u.t.tressed by prescription, can continue to ignore and outrage the opinions of its subjects?