6 Mr. Ernest Normand on 



well within the province of a painter, might perhaps also be made 

 of interest to a lay audience if treated not too technically. Only 

 ten years ago, when he received his first invitation to that neigh- 

 bourhood, he was assured by several prominent men that any 

 attempt on his part to galvanize the community into even a 

 semblance of interest in matters artistic could but end in vexatious 

 futility. Belfast was said to be so intent on building up fortunes 

 that its citizens could not possibly be deflected from that all- 

 absorbing pursuit by any such topic as the one he then proposed 

 to introduce, which was the establishment of a municipal art 

 gallery in the city. Now, however, he returned on a similar 

 invitation to the one which first brought his wife and himself 

 amongst them, and it was borne in upon him that the necessary 

 incentive, not only in the interim spontaneously generated from 

 within, but that it had already borne fruit of surprising dmiensions 

 and quality. An undeniable aesthetic impulse was manifesting 

 itself in that great city; celebrated musicians found it worth their 

 while to win the approbation of the citizens, art was being dis- 

 cussed intelligently, things were moving in the right direction, 

 and a healthy spirit was evident on all sides. In Belfast they had 

 the inestimable advantage of being able to profit by the failures 

 and the successes of some twenty municipal galleries in England. 

 When once they had their gallery, with its annual exhibition of 

 invited works, they would speedily find a vast improvement in 

 the works of their local artists. They had excellent talent 

 amongst their designers, many of whom were seeking to express 

 themselves in pictorial effort, but they were necessarily groping in 

 the dark, and had only the standard of their own work by which 

 to measure themselves. For want of a properly constituted con- 

 trolling body, such as one found in Paris, they were running a 

 grave risk of interfering with the grandeur of their City Hall by an 

 indiscriminate introduction around it of statues, most of which 

 were out of scale to the building they were hemming in. They 

 started extremely well with the Dufterin Memorial, and it did not 

 need a trained eye to convince the spectator that its architectural 



