PATRONS OF ART

Evening Star, Issue 19550, 7 May 1927, Page 9

PATRONS OF ART

AM OLD SYSTEM REVIVE® When a fifteenth century Florentine patron of art, such as Cosimo De Medici, noticed a painter of promise, he supplied him with painting materials and locked him up in a cell. This is the story, elaborated in so picturesque a form by Browning, of Fra Lippo Lippi. Lippi was a monk of Florence "’ho, if contemporary scandals are to be believed, was too often to be found with the fair sex. He was imprisoned by his artistic, if imperious, patron, in order to paint “saints, and saints, and saints again!” This treatment proved too irksome for the temperamental painter. FRA LIPPO LIPPI ESCAPES.

One night, as be leaned cut oTTu# narrow window for fresh air, he heard: A" hurry of feet and little feet, A sweep of lute strings, laughs, and whiffs of song. This was too much for flesh and blood. Sheets and blankets have often been found serviceable material for the construction of a rope. Down into the moonlit alley went Fra Lippo. And yet his lot was fortunate as compared with that of many modem young men of artistic genius. Lippi had a patron, oven if Cosimo possessed somewhat arbitrary ideas on art production. We owe some very lovely Madonnas to the zeal of this merchant prince of medieval Italy, who recognised that Lippi, liko_ most men endowed with the artistic temperament, needed fostering and pushing. Lippi’s own ideas about making a living, out of painting were, like those of most men of his craft, exceedingly nebulous. As Sir William Orpen recently said, the tragic paradox of an artist’s life is that he cannot live by painting, but only by selling what ho paints—and no artist ever had the haziest notion# of salesmanship. SCHEME TO ASSIST BRITISH ARTISTS. Thus, after the fashion of patronage had died out, artists were left to struggle against unequal odds. To-day the old system is being revived in a new form. The scheme to assist British artists which has been planned by *hat famous dealer and art critic, Sir Joseph Duveen, is the modern version of patronage as practised by the Florentine merchant princes. Although it does not include the imprisonment of youthful genius in a cell, it certainly aims at tho lelenjjo of producers ol fine work from that state of penury which is so attractive in fiction and so tragic in reality. A novel and charming feature of the scheme is that some of the most wellknown artists of the day are co-opera-ting to help their less fortunate fellowcraftsmen. _ Under Sir William Orpen’s chairmanship, leading representatives of all British schools will select those works of the lesser-known British artists to bo exhibited for sale. These “ British Artists’ Exhibitions,” the first of which opens at the Leeds Municipal Art Gallery this month, should thus be characteristic of all sides of contemporary British Art.—‘John «’ London’s Weekly.’ 1