Page:Joseph Drew - Art Treasures and their Preservation scan.pdf/8

96 its thousands of copies, whether in sculpture, painting, carving, or engraving, no matter how costly, for the higher the value the more likely it is to be copied for the use of the many, but as we have said before, we live in an age of imitation. The ancients built their houses upon rock; the moderns build them upon sand. Quantity and not quality, expediency and not principle, are the prevailing characteristics of the present age. Those matchless carvings which Gibbons left for our admiration and instruction—the throne at Canterbury, and the choirs of St. Paul's and Windsor—can now be imitated by machinery at a comparatively small cost over the price of the material. The portrait painter, with his hundred guinea portraits on canvas and panel, has been superseded—to a certain extent—by the photographer with his sixpenny pictures on paper and glass. The elaborate works of Benvenuto Cellini and his followers are supplanted by race cups and salvers, produced by the thousand at the factories of Sheffield and Birmingham. Lace work and tapestry, the goldsmith's art and enamels, stained glass and ornamental china, and even architecture itself, have all lost a certain amount of their native dignity in the art world through the inundation of inferior substitutes; but the producers say that mediocrity and cheapness pay the best, and these are the causes which will prevent many of the art treasures of the present century from occupying that place in the estimation of posterity which from our intelligence and wealth they would otherwise be entitled to claim. We cannot close this short paper without alluding to the fact that Weymouth has some slight associations with the art world. Sir Christopher Wren, whose celebrity as an architect and mathematician, is so fully attested by the monuments he has left us, was, in the year 1700, elected one of the parliamentary representatives of this borough, and Sir James Thornhill, the eminent painter, whose daughter married the inimitable Hogarth, was born at Weymouth in 1676, and also represented the borough for some years in Parliament, and, strange to say, Thornhill was the artist selected to paint the dome of St. Paul's—one of the greatest achievements of Wren's genius—and thus were the two men and Weymouth associated together. Thornhill was knighted by George I, who became his patron and friend. The altar-piece in St. Mary's Church, Weymouth, was the gift of Sir James to the town, and we rejoice to say this admirable work, representing the "Last supper of our Lord," is still in a most excellent state of preservation.

T. W. AND W. TARVER, "GUARDIAN" STEAM PRINTING WORKS, LOWER BOND STREET, WEYMOUTH.