Page:Joseph Drew - Art Treasures and their Preservation scan.pdf/7

Rh prolific source of destruction to these works of art, added to which even the air of London itself has been declared by competent authorities to be very prejudicial to the preservation of paintings, owing to the excess of carbonic acid and other deleterious gases in the atmosphere; and if this hypothesis is correct then all other crowded cities must be the same. In watching the progress of this decay in a modern picture we noticed that when these cracks once made their appearance their edges were immediately eaten away by becoming oxidised, and as the erosion went on the fissures gradually widened, and although a thin coat of the finest mastic varnish would for a while stop the process of decay, still we have even seen the varnish itself rent asunder by the contractive and expansive action of the materials beneath. In fact, so justly alarmed have the patrons of art become upon the question of the durability of our modern paintings—for some of them have invested large fortunes in their purchase—that Sir Francis Grant, the president of the Royal Academy, has suggested that a chair for chemistry should be founded and a professorship established in connection with the Academy, so that the painter's art might receive the assistance of the science of chemistry, in order, if possible, to check the spread of this terrible blight which is destroying some of our noblest works of modern art. This difference in the durability of paintings is painfully manifested, and can be readily studied by comparing the pictures of the Peel collection in the National Gallery—which are generally productions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—with the Turner collection under the same roof, which may be called examples of our own day. In the former they are as perfect as when they were painted, whilst in the latter many are already in ruins. Indeed the possessors of some of the best works of Reynolds, Turner, Wilson, Hilton, and a score of other modern men, look with increasing dismay on the widening cracks and fading colours of those otherwise matchless productions of art, and they feel they have a right to invoke the aid of the Royal Academy, whose council are supposed to be the conservators of this particular art, to investigate the cause and point out the remedy for this gigantic evil, which is robbing posterity of the art treasures it is our duty to hand down to them in as good a state of preservation as possible. But as we have remarked, we do not believe that the art has waned, but we do believe that all this mischief can be traced to the present rage for cheap productions. The age in which we live is essentially an age of electro-plate, and lath and plaster, not through the lack of genius, but owing to the inordinate spirit of competition, and the desire of all classes to imitate the grades above them in society. Scarcely a single work of art is in existence that has not