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1828. ] Old Pictures. 37 
on works by the old masters; and then, in order to preserve, at the 
same time, their assumed characters, as patrons and protectors of living 
artists, they pay, almost without a murmur, their ten guineas a year, 
to provide a place for the exhibition and sale of the said artists’ pro- 
ductions ! 
Let it not be supposed that we are uttering the language of com- 
plaint. We have too deep a reverence for art, and too firm a belief in 
the irrepressible vitality of the principles out of which it springs, and 
upon which it rests, to suppose that it requires any thing ‘in the shape 
of private support to keep it where it is, or to lift it to where it might 
and ought to be. No private patron ever yet made a first-rate artist, or 
even helped to make one: though kings, princes, popes, and even 
ministers of state, wielding the resources, and acting in the name of a 
whole people, may have done so, and undoubtedly have. In fact, to 
speak an ungracious truth, for any private person to set himself up, or 
permit others to set him up, as a patron of the arts, is altogether an 
impertinence ; because it is altogether a pretence, which neither springs 
from, nor can lead to good. But for kings, princes, and ministers of 
state to patronize art, in their public capacities, is a different case. It 
cannot perhaps be ranked among their duties ; but it is one of the very 
few privileges of their class and calling, which they can exercise with 
honour to themselves, and with benefit to those over whom they rule. 
In fact, art is the offspring of a national call for and craving after it. 
Where that is not, art can never exist in a very high degree: and where 
that is, nothing can long repress or keep it back. 
To arrive at once at the subject which has induced us to touch upon 
this matter, the British Institution has, since its establishment, produced 
no positive effect whatever on the progress or the prospects of art in this 
country: for what no one man can stir a step towards producing, no 
association of men can arrive at—we mean where the case relates to a 
moral result. A company of private individuals may build a bridge, 
or found an hospital: because any one of them can lay down a stone 
_ towards the one, or a guinea towards the other. But a hundred or a 
thousand private patrons of art, collected into a body, and calling them- 
selves by any name they please, cannot produce a single artist, or lift 
art a single step above the level on which it has for these last hundred 
years been grovelling. A patron may make the fortune of a painter ; 
and an association of patrons may produce an exhibition of a hundred, 
or a thousand, or ten thousand pictures. But “a crowd is not com- 
y;’ and an exhibition of pictures is not art, and no more leads to 
it than proceeds from it. 
Do we hold, then, that the British Institution has done no good, and’ 
that we (the British public) had been better, or as well, without it? 
Not at all. If it had produced no other result than the exhibition of 
old pictures, now open to public inspection at its rooms in Pall Mall ; 
all the money that it has cost its aristocratic promoters, and all the jea~ 
lousies, and envies, and heart burnings, and intrigues, and what not, that 
it has, from time to time, cherished and called forth in those breasts 
(wherever they are to be found) in which there is room for nothing 
better, we should look upon as well laid out. In a word, it has, by 
means of these annual exhibitions of the élite of the works of old masters 
in the private collections of England, done more good than—than what, 
shall we say?—why, than even the Royal Academy itself has done 
E 2 
