ART

Many attempts to define ‘art’ have been made, but no very satisfactory results have been achieved. Dr. Johnson’s definition runs: ‘The power of doing something which is not taught by Nature or by instinct;’ Pope says: ‘True art is Nature to advantage dre ed;’ while Sir Thomas Browne tel is us: ‘Nature is the art of God.’ If it be conceded, however, that art includes everything which we distinguish from Nature, it will readily be seen that Johnson’s definition is very wide of the mark. It is the busine of art to develop Nature, and no art can exist either in form, color, sound, speech, or movement, which is not in the first place inspired by Nature. The earliest attempts at pictorial art which have been discovered amongst the remains of primitive peoples invariably take the form of rude drawings of birds and beasts. It may therefore be supposed that early man had been impre ed by the physical beauty of these animate objects, and had, from an instinctive love of the beautiful, attempted to perpetuate them. It has been said that ‘A man’s the noblest work of God,’ and thus it came about that those early masters of Sculpture, Phidias and Praxiteles, casting about for objects upon which to exercise their genius, found their ideal in reproducing the perfect beauty of the human form. So with Painting, with Poetry, and with Music, Nature is ever the first means of inspiration. The glory of the sunrise, the terror of the storm, the song of the lark, the beauty of the summer landscape, each in its own way arouses to noblest effort the painter, the musician, and the poet; and so Nature, working een man, produces what we term Art Galleries —National, munic., or private buildings for the exhibition of paintings, sculptures, and other works of art, for the purpose of fostering and educating a taste for esthetics. Amongst buildings of the kind the National Gallery, London (founded 1824), holds a deservedly high place. It is maintained by a government grant, and has been enriched by numerous private bequests. With the exception of the French, the gallery is well represented by practically every school, some outstanding pictures being Raphael’s Madonna (bought for £70,000), Van Dyck’s Charles I. (bought for £17,500), and Velasquez’s Venus. The National Portrait Gallery (founded 1856), the Tate Gallery, and the Wallace Collection should also be mentioned, while other galleries in London and provincial towns are too numerous even to be named. Amongst great continental galleries the place of honor should undoubtedly be given to the Louvre, in Paris, while other institutions of world-wide fame are the Imperial Gallery at Vienna, those at Berlin, Dresden, and Munich, and the Hermitage Gallery at Petrograd. Among the famous galleries in U.S. are the Museum of Art, New York, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which represent all schools; the Academy, Philadelphia, the Chicago Collection and Public Library, New York, rich in Flemish and Fr. pictures; and. there are the splendid collections of the late J. Pierpont Morgan, and Mrs. Gardner. In Italy the Pitti and Uffizi Galleries, at Florence, are of the first importance the former being especially rich in examples of Raphael, Giorgione, Perugino, and Andrea del Sarto, the latter in works by Michelangelo, Bott i cell i and, Leonardo da Vinci. Other celebrated galleries are at Rome (Corsini and Borghese Galleries), Venice, Genoa, Milan, Pisa, Verona, Perugia, and Padua; at The Hague, Harlem, Rotter dam, and Leyden; at Antwerp, Bruges, and Cologne; and‘at Seville and other cities of Spain.