Page:Cartoon portraits and biographical sketches of men of the day.djvu/26



English school of painters in oil, at the present day, may boast of some branches of the art in which it is not at all behind the French, Flemings, and Belgians. Nay, more, there is at least one living English painter who is unrivalled. It is true that making likenesses of dogs and pictures of deer are not to be counted as among the giddy walks of high art. Better, however, jump at a ditch and clear it than at a river and splash into the middle.

Now, in talking of British art to a foreigner, the question he asks at the Academy exhibitions of every year is, Where is your high art, where is the grand in your art? Well, it must be confessed that the grand is generally nowhere in English picture galleries, unless it happens to have been imported. Portraits, animals, fruit, and small landscape are as flourishing, and certainly as good, at Burlington House as at Paris or Brussels; but the Englishman must admit, with a sigh, that he has no grand art to show among the canvases that represent the year's labours of the exponents of British art. The majority of our painters go on, year after year, painting the same old hackneyed subjects, the same familiar portraits, the same bits of landscape. They are so generally successful because they are careful never to put themselves into the way of failure. They clear the ditch, and are satisfied. Should they essay the river? Should they try to rise above silk and satin in metallic folds, above pretty bits of landscape and portraits, whose mission of usefulness is to boil the family pot? Should they try to rise above themselves, above the dead-level of domestic prettinesses in their compositions, and strive to be, some of them, worthy successors of Sir Joshua, and Turner, and the few other great men who have kept the British School above contempt?

The foreign artists have answered the same question abroad by setting an example—they have a grand school, and they ask for it here.

But while so few of our painters become great enough to earn a