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ART AND ARTISTS. 

 MR. EDITOR, 



IT gave me great pleasure to learn 

 from your pages, that we are to have another exhibition 

 of pictures this season ; it would indeed be somewhat 

 singular if such a proposal should fail to meet due en- 

 couragement in a district, nay, in a town that has, from 

 time to time, produced a series of artists, who have at- 

 tained the highest professional honors, and have shed 

 a glory on their native country, that has silenced the 

 silly, but too commonly received opinion, that the cli- 

 mate of our favored isle was unpropitious to the culti- 

 vation of the Fine Arts, The names of Reynolds, 

 Northcote, Eastlake, Haydon, Ball, Prout and Rogers 

 need only be produced in proof of what is advanced. 

 All these have arisen within little more than half a 

 century and, during that brief space, have given to 

 British Art a rank which may fairly dispute the palm 

 of excellence with the first schools of painting in 

 Europe. The foregoing remarks are made with a view 

 to introduce occasionally, through the medium of your 

 useful little book, not only notices of works in the 

 hands of native living painters, but likewise an account 

 of the various private collections in our neighbourhood, 

 frith anecdotes connected with portraits or painters, or 

 any of the pictures which form a part of them, toge- 

 ther with reminiscences of amateur artists in this vici- 

 nity, and their works, within the last forty or fifty 

 years. It is presumed that a large number of your 

 readers will be gratified by being thus brought ac- 

 quainted with the gradual developement of an art, of 

 the nature and practice of which, though now so gene- 

 rally understood, the inhabitants of these towns, with 

 very few exceptions, were, not many years since, de- 

 plorably ignorant ; as it is still within the recollection 

 of every individual of thirty years standing, that the 

 mantel-pieces of our respectable burghers exhibited no 

 better proof of their advancement in art than the pat- 

 ronage they bestowed on noddling rabbits and painted 



