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New Zealand Herald, Volume XIX, Issue 6566, 2 December 1882, Page 4

Doubtless a public meeting would be well now for the erection of an Art Gallery. A few citizens have promised large sums for the purpose, and it. only needs a little general co-operation to have the thing done. A building to allow the contents properly, and hold them safely, is all that is wanted in the first instance —enlargement and architectural embellishment would come at a future time. An Art Gallery has to be constructed in a particular way, and the handsome hall of the museum was not intended or built for this service, and therefore dots not render it. The casts of statuary are seen at great disadvantage, and only a trained eye can guess at the paintings under the greatest difficulties of observation where they are necessarily placcd. It is not thus that such works can be agreeably or profitably contemplated—can prodace the results for which they were presented to us. We need not enlarge again on the benefits of art education. A noble branch of education that is which cultivates the eye, the taste, and the imagination—opening to the mind new enjoyments of iife, new and refining senses of pleasure ; and with a practical influence on the material employments —embellishing inanufacturesand touching the artizan as well as the artist. .No wonder importance has ever been attached to it. Art education rapidly spreads wherever the public have the opportunity of contemplating great works, and where there is a school of design. An occasional good artist may appear, like an occasional swallow in a summer, but the public must iirst be appreciative for the arts to really take root. As has been well said on this subject : "Let people see the works of the masters; train their eyes to judge and admire correct outlines, vigour of action, strength and beauty of limb, possibility of attitude, unity of frame and of expression, and they will understand nature, and faith, and power in works of art—they will appreciate the statues of Greece, the paintings of Italy and Deutschland—they will demand in new works the excellence they are accustomed to, and they will recognise and reward that excellence." So it is a precious service for a people to have in their view works of the great masters. Such can be rarely fetched away out of Europe, and it is one of the most difficult things for a new country to obtain them. Despite the large sums which are yearly spent from the public funds in purchasing paintings for the Melbourne Art Gallery, we are not aware that there is yet a single old master among them. It needs something more than ordinary zeal in the purchaser to secure one against European competitors. Even in the old conntry, except in the National Gallery in London and at Hampton Court, such works are almost exclusively—we believe exclusively—in the private collections of the nobility and wealthy men of taste. The finest works of modern art have no approximation in power to the wonderful sculpture of Greece or the paintings of the " Old Masters." But the statuary of Greece is thousands of years old, and 'the old master's paintings are hundreds of years old, and the consequence is that they have suffered from time, and other destroyers besides time. The successive waves of invading barbarians destroyed most antique works of art. "What remains to us of the Hellenic sculpture has been nearly all dug out of the bowels of the earth, where it was buried when the cities were overturned, or was intentionally hidden to save it from barbarian hands. The grand relics which have come down to us—and Auckland has been presented with casts of the finest of them—were disfigured in one or other degree when found. The right arm of the chief figure in the Laocoon group was wanting, and in the statue of the Apollo Belvidere the left hand and right forearm. Of course, the productions of the masters in painting—being only some hundreds of years old—did not sutler from barbarian invaders, but time, which does far quicker mischief on canvas than on marble, lias been their great enemy, and too often also the injudicious restorer. Nevertheless, through all such defacements their power stands out so impressively on the eye of the connoisseur, that not a few very eminent beholders have absolutely believed that all the obscuring of the colours and other confusion wrought by time must have really acted as an improvement. Even so great a critic as Hazlett, when descanting on the decayed cartoons of Kapliael at Hampton Coui't, said that their great qualities " perhaps are not all owing to geniussomething may owing to the decayed and dilapidated state of the pictures themselves, which are the more ma-

jjestic for being in ruins. . . The carnal is made spiritual," Others similarly spoke of the incrustations which dim the colours of such works as " venerable verdure"; even a man like Cornelius termed " the rust, the precious lerugo. ' Hogarth said, in contradiction to 'his, that " pictures can be only blackened and injured by age." And in an essay on the theory in the Athena-urn the late Henry Merritt, a well-known authority, says, " Colours do gradually soften in the drying, but this natural softening is a very different ell'eet to that which is produced by a hornlike incrustation. ... It may be said with confidence that the charms of pictures with fine colouring cannot be enhanced by this over-rated varnish of time." But certainly it would be difficult to imagine a greater tribute to the impressive power of those grand Old | Masters than the theory that the hand ' of time could bring out from the can- ' vas all the more strongly the inspiration J of such unrivalled works. The theory j

discovers a grace communicated even to the mischief. In the posaession of some of those pictures—a privilege not yet shared, we believe, by any other colonial city has treasures for an Art Gallery, and there ought to be no further delay about providing a building -where our art collection can be properly seen and studied.