NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIV, Issue 16560, 8 June 1917, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

NEW ZEALAND PRODUCE. The opportunity afforded by the war to develop the demand for New Zealand butter is emphasised in an article published in the official organ of tho British Institute of Certificated Grocers. Owing to the interference with supplies from Denmark and Holland, there has been a sudden demand in the North of England for Australian and New Zealand dairy produce, and the journal suggests that by a little energy and enterprise this demand may be made permanent. It continues: —Foreign producers have, through their various commissioners, made it their business to find out exactly what is re quired by the different markets. Take a leaf out of the foreigners' book, and push the trade in a thoroughly intelligent, persistent, and business-like way. The colonies, with possibly one exception, South Australia, have lamentably failed in this matter. At grocers' exhibitions all over the Kingdom, in the past, thero have been excellent displays of colonial produce from South Australia, and of produce from foreign countries. We have looked in vain for tho stacks of fresh, sweet butter, and other products of farm and field, from New Zealand, which should have been there, which could hav» been there at ridiculously small expense, had New Zealand only been alive to the situation. This is but a sample of the opportunities which have been missed. Meanwhile the "man in the street," and more certainly the woman in the shop, have been left in ignorance of the produce of their brethren beyond the seas, and small wonder is it therefore that it has not been liked, sought after, and demanded.

ST. QUENTIN MUSEUM. Anxiety is expressed by Sir Claude Phillips, writing in the London Daily Telegraph, regarding the fate of the chief glory of St. Quentin—the small yet | famous museum which contains a finer i selection from the life-work of the great] pastellist, Maurice-Quentin de la Tour, than any other gallery, even the Louvre itself, can boast. In the Louvre la Tour is magnificently represented by 13 pastels, but in the museum of St. Quentin "is an entire gallery, hung from ceiling to floor, peopled, encumbered, overflowing with the work of the master; a collection of' more than 80 portraits, completed or pro. \ pared, finished, or merely sketched in, j constituting a veritable procession of his j contemporaries." Recalling the horrors recently perpetrated by the Super-Huns in these regions, says the article, we ask: with dismay what will be the fate of these ' marvels, which are the quintessence not! only of French eighteenth-century art,' but of French keenness in observation, of the French temperament at its best? Pastel is imperishable as regards its colours, its "values;" but terribly perishable in other ways. A blow a fall a violent shaking, a wetting, any one of these accidents is sufficient to obliterate all that i 8 real beauty in a fine pastel. Still more fatal might be hasty packing up and hurried transport to distant regions. Some three months ago M. Paul Lepriour, keeper of tho paintings and drawings in the Louvre, informed the writer that by express injunction of the German authorities the Museum of SaintQuentin remained open, with all its contents hung and displayed as heretofore. This is, moreover, the system which the enemy has recently adopted and enforced in the great cities of Belgium, Bruges, I Ghent, Antwerp, and Brussels ; with what ( Ultimate object, whether protection or deIstroction, we cannot with any certainty make out, ,