Literature and the Fine Arts. xxxix 



agricultural hall ; or a successful grazier might have it ei-ected 

 in his front garden, but it is only a perplexing incongruity 

 where now it stands. It may help to teach a mere stone 

 cutter, but not a sculptor. 



We have a gallery of pictures, and some of them might 

 well enough remain where they are, both to please the public 

 and to instruct the students ; others might be removed to a 

 separate gallery, and kept as examples to show the students 

 what to avoid. And, indeed, it would do a great many 

 people, other than students, good to be taught what kind of 

 pictures they should not hang up in their houses. In the 

 dwelling-places of even well-informed people are to be found 

 literally chambers of pictorial horrors, and yet they excite 

 no distress in the minds of the possessors, because these ill- 

 advised, although possibly inoffensive, persons do not know 

 what a picture worthy of the name of picture is. But 

 another class of people are even worse than these, for they 

 suffer from a form of pictorial blindness, and variously paint, 

 or buy, pictures which make a healthy-minded man shudder 

 at the sight of them. We had some of these morbid 

 specimens in the Grosvenor Gallery when it was with us 

 twelve months ago, and I am afraid they did harm by 

 demoralising the feeble art principles of divers invertebrate 

 persons, who are much swayed by authority, and incapable of 

 thinking for themselves. Happily, we have in Mr. Folingsby 

 now a whole-souled, healthy-minded director of our art 

 school, and the students he fi'om time to time turns out are 

 similarly whole-souled and healthy-minded too. They paint 

 honest pictures, every one of which has a meaning, and sets 

 you thinking of their meaning,- an effect which every good 

 picture is capable of doing. I do not think our art students 

 are likely to be ever corrupted into the heresy of painting 

 " Scapegoats," or " Triumphs of Innocents." 



But Mr. rolingsb3''s good teaching should be extended, 

 and made a more general use of No doubt there are some 

 good drawing masters in Victoria, but judging by such 

 examples as I very often see, the drawing masters themselves 



