“THEY ARE BLIND”

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIV, Issue 18832, 21 March 1931, Page 13 (Supplement)

“THEY ARE BLIND”

FASHIONABLE PAINTERS. Some outspoken words on “fashionable” portrait painters were used by Professor William Rothenstein, principal of the Royal College of Art, South Kensington, when he lectured at the Royal Academy, reports the “Daily Mail.” Professor Rothenstein said:— “To-day artists are more often expected to vie with the retouched photograph than to provide a dignified presentment of human beings. It is right that there should be artists who cater for wealthy people with cultured tastes. The so-called fashionable portrait painter, however, is too often a mere transcriber, whose intellect, on a level with that of his sitters, is not likely to offend by seeing in them either dignity or character. “Yet fashionable people, it appears, too often choose precisely those artists who are blind to the fineness of fashion. I know nothing more fatal to the virtue of fashion than many of the portraits annually shown at current exhibitions. No wonder many artists remain aloft, preferring experiment and adventure to inglorious popularity.” Professor Rothenstein urged that there was a danger of attaching too much importance to acquiring Old Masters for the nation’s galleries. “These pictures can always be found on another wall somewhere,” he said, “but by neglecting the few important artists who make this epoch we are actually impoverishing our own country.”

The Salisbury Cathedral clock has been working regularly with the same mechanism, since 1386.