The Academy has been subventioned by the State to
the extent of three hundred thousand pounds, and that money has been
employed in arrogant commercialism. The Academy holds a hundred
thousand pounds in trust, left by Mr. Chantry for the furtherance of
art in this country; and this money is spent on the purchase of
pictures by impecunious Academicians, and the collection formed with
this money is one of the seven horrors of civilisation. The Academy
has tolerated genius when it was popular, it has trampled upon genius
when it was unpopular; and the business of the new art criticism is to
rid art of the incubus. The Academy must be destroyed, and when that
is accomplished the other Royal institutes will follow as a matter of
course. The object of the new art criticism is to give free trade to
art.
LONG AGO IN ITALY.
Come to the New Gallery. We shall pass out of sight of flat dreary
London, drab-coloured streets full of overcoats, silk hats, dripping
umbrellas, omnibuses. We shall pass out of sight of long perspectives
of square houses lost in fine rain and grey mist. We shall enter an
enchanted land, a land of angels and aureoles; of crimson and gold,
and purple raiment; of beautiful youths crowned with flowers; of
fabulous blue landscape and delicate architecture. Know ye the land?
Botticelli is king there, king of clasped hands and almond-eyed
Madonnas. It was he who conceived and designed that enigmatic Virgin's
face; it was he who placed that long-fingered hand on the thigh of the
Infant God; it was he who coiled that heavy hair about that triangle
of neck and interwove it with pearls; it was he who drew the graceful
lace over the head-dress, and painted it in such innumerable delicacy
of fold that we wonder and are fain to believe that it is but the
magic of an instant's hallucination.
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