Taste in Art. 123 



abundant themes ; but unless they can supply the intelligence 

 necessary to understand them, every new book they publish 

 seems likely to lead the artist astray. 



Our first-class landscape art is, on the whole, very good, but 

 we have few painters who seem to have any appreciation of the 

 variety of nature, and when a particular scene like Tintagel 

 Castle is done into oil and water, many times a year, it is 

 wearisome to find nobody entering into the spirit of the place, 

 or able to discern the magic web of changing colour which, 

 under favourable circumstances, the Cornish coast presents. 



In painting we are escaping from the conventional system 

 of the last generation. Dirty brown "old masters," as all 

 smoky bits of canvas used to be called, no longer exert a 

 despotic sway. Our artists are free to use their five senses, and 

 what thinking faculty they possess. Painting is emancipated, 

 and we may anticipate its advance. Sculpture is deeply in- 

 debted to Mr. Gibson for his tinted Yenus, which, whatever 

 may be its merits, is a contribution towards liberty in another 

 field of art. The tinted statue question is too big to come in 

 at the end of an article, but it is plain that the discussion which 

 Mr. Gibson has provoked must assist in removing a mass of 

 mere prejudice and cant. In other departments we want an 

 emancipation movement too. Why, for example, should Min- 

 ton's pottery halt between old notions and new ? If some skil- 

 ful maker of pots and platters in the middle ages did things 

 that were ugly, as well as things that were fine, why must we 

 suffer a descent of bad taste. It is because we admire Mr. 

 Minton's ware that we care to point out its defects. We want 

 to know why its grotesque should be ugly, when Cellini and 

 the mediaeval church builders have shown that the grotesque 

 and the beautiful may be combined. Why should so much 

 technical skill as this justly famous house has brought to bear 

 upon its work be sometimes degraded into constructing great 

 clumsy vases supported by miserable naked babies, with hydro- 

 cephalous heads, and distorted bodies, tied to their burden- 

 some task with fetters of silk ? We do not want monstrosities 

 which require a Geoffroy St. Hilaire to elucidate, but demand 

 from artists of all kinds that they shall exhibit to us 

 "Beauty" as Akenside depicted her, "the lovely ministress 

 of Truth and Good." 



