Page:The Academy Of the Fine Arts and Its Future, Edward Hornor Coates, 24 January 1890.djvu/5

 By the courtesy of the Art Club this opportunity is offered of saying a few words in behalf of the Academy of the Fine Arts; what it is doing, what it asks of the community, and what it hopes to accomplish in the future.

Matthew Arnold says that "Culture is the acquaintance with the best that has been said and known in the world." To further such acquaintance, and in the words of the Charter, "to promote the cultivation of the Fine Arts, by introducing correct and elegant copies from the works of the first masters in sculpture and painting," was the purpose of those who, in 1805, founded the Pennsylvania Academy, the oldest art institution in the United States. It gives us a thrill of patriotic pride, as for a moment we feel ourselves present in that Hall, already filled with sacred associations, where twenty-nine years before, the forefathers signed the Declaration of Independence, and where now seventy-one of our citizens, of whom forty-one are lawyers, are met to subscribe to the articles of association for this our first art academy. The list of signers is a distinguished one. It includes George Clymer, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Joseph Hopkinson, author of "Hail Columbia," William Tilghman, president of the Common Pleas, and afterward Chief Justice, William Rush, Charles Willson Peale and Rembrandt Peale, artists, William Meredith, Joseph B. McKean, William Rawle, Horace Binney, Simon Gratz, A. J. Dallas, Richard Rush, William Lewis, Charles Biddle, Jacob S. Waln, John Redman Coxe and Edward Penington.

From such names the first board of twelve directors, including two artists and seven lawyers, was 5