Manawatu Daily Times The Portland Vase Goes on Sale

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6902, 7 May 1929, Page 6

Manawatu Daily Times The Portland Vase Goes on Sale

'pHE offering for sale of the world-famous Portland vase is

more than a mere auction-room sensation. The motives of

private collectors may be those of personal glory or gain, or a mixture of both. But, whatever their motives, they are ready,

as recent sales in Europe and America have shown, to spend vast

sums of money on manuscripts or art treasures.

Measured in terms of money, there is little difference between the manuscript of Alice in Wonderland and a painting by Rembrandt. There is, however, a great intrinsic difference between the two, for while the painting or scuplturc or any other work of art wrought by the hand of the artist can be fully enjoyed only at first hand, a manuscript contains little of the author’s genius that cannot be obtained in a printed copy of his work.

Whatever the sentimental or emotional value of the thrill to he obtained from gazing at Shakespeare s signature, or even, as the manuscript of the Elizabethan play of Sir Thomas Mocre is claimed by certain scholars to have disclosed, at the pages of his handwriting, it is not the same effect as the imaginative impression which any of his plays conveys to those whose minds are open to receive it.

Yet Shakespeare's plays can be obtained 1 for a few shillings whereas his signature would easily fetch several hundred thousands. This strange disparity in value between the obviously valueles and the incontestably valuable may secin queer, but it is, on the whole, a harmless way of indulging the expensive ambition to be different from anybody else- by possessing not only what no one else does, but what no one else, or but very few, can possess.

It is not so, however, in the case of an object of graphic or plastic art. Though the money paid for a picture or a piece of sculpture or a finely wrought vase may not exceed that paid for

a manuscript or a first edition, the art collector without doubt keeps back from mankind the inheritance which is bequeathed 1 to it by its greatest artists, and the more so because there always exists a handful of men, not generally to be found among the friends of owners of private galleries, who are capable of moulding this experience into new forms of beauty.

Keats and Heine both gave to the world exquisite lyrics which would have remained unwritten had their imagination been untouched, in the one instance, by the constant contemplation of the Venus of Milo in the Louvre, and, in the other, of the rare Greek vases in the British Museum. Beauty begets beauty, and it is for this reason that the sale of the Portland vase, which has been on show in the gem room of the British Museum for more than a hundred years, cannot but be deplored. It is unique not only as a work of art, but as a work of historical and cultural value. Its purchaser, whoever he shall be, would deserve well of mankind if he made it again accessible to the public.