Page:Lisbon and Cintra, Inchbold, 1907.djvu/106

Rh absorbed too many of the pictures of Portuguese artists to allow of their usual national one. A new edifice, to be specially devoted to art exhibitions, is on the point of erection through the exertions of the National Society of the Fine Arts, in the north-east of the city, a scheme which will realize one of the strongest desires of local artists.

The names of El-Rei D. Carlos and Carlos Reis head the list of Portuguese artists to-day. Carlos Reis was the pupil of Silva Porto, a well-known landscape and animal painter of the Lisbon Academy. He studied later in the Paris studios, and ten years ago was appointed to the landscape chair of painting in the School of Art in this city. By him was initiated the Sociedade Silva Porto, a society whose members are students who go into the country every summer to study art from nature, and hold annual exhibitions of their work in the well-lighted Salon of the Illustraçao Portuguez at the top of the big building of the chief daily paper of Lisbon, O Seculo. The taste for art is diligently propagated by the critics of this and other journals. "The want of æsthetic education in a people and its neglect of artistic talent demonstrate disgraceful mental inferiority, and the incrustation of faculties which should be maintained clear and integral during a well-balanced development," is the little sermon of one art critic writing on the last exhibition of this Society.

In more branches than one Portugal has a past of distinctive merit. A visitor to the Sala of the Museum devoted to the display of Church orfèvrerie will be amazed at the exquisite specimens of gold- and silver-smiths' craft, once priceless possessions of the suppressed monasteries and convents and now the property of the State. Custodia, crosses, chalices, monstrances, caskets, in gold and silver, richly embellished with rare and 78