ART FOR THE PEOPLE

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1523, 19 March 1886, Page 4

ART FOR THE PEOPLE

Beauty within all reasonable limits is a most precious elf-v.il in? it fluence. But the se'fishness of the rich does much to keep down an 1 degrade the poor who lave not many attractions in their homes nor outside them Tho j:.me selfishness has destroyed originality in England. We (ret hardly any cood new designs, hardly any ideas, because the few we have wo keep po much to ourselves It was different in old Italy and in oMer Greece where tho people's feeling for art was born and nursed in the open studios, and where pood art surrounded them freely at every turn. Then the veriest street-boy knew a good statue from a bad, and many a Thorwaldsen arose from the gutter. There ought to be a freemasonry in art and the love of beauty and order, as among the masses there is a freemasonry only in the pint-pot. One of the great causes of our National want of originality in desiun and general indiscrimination is the hermetical sealing of our artists' studios and the fine of Is at art exhibitions. The Royal Academy Collection excepted (and here there should he free davs) it is monstrous to be required to pav Is per head per prep at perhaps "a single picture, in a eountrv where 1 Shakspeare's plavsand Dickens's novels can be had for a penny, and a poor mm who paid it would be j criminally lavish. Why are the pain-j t«r»' best works less accessible than i the architect's facade, the poet's ode. good mu°ic, good books, pond lectures ? Literature, music, painting, sculpture, I architecture, are all but forms of pub- j lie speech, and properly destined for : the public good. Self interest might remind us that the tradesman who exhibits his ware> free sells the better for it. Put whilst the well to do public sanction t'-e had svstem of forming nut single pictures in small galleries by dealers to enrich themselves when they raiaht see them free in the artists' studios, they are withholding from the poor one fruitful source of refinement and education, and impoverishing the common fund of ordinal thought ar.d farcy. Fancy grows on that which feeds it—c-very beauti r ul thought may begft another in some unexpected direction And everv pretty thing we place within reach of others stimulates the instinct of imitation if it does nothing else,— M. E. II a weisx, in Belgravia.