EXHIBITIONS OPEN DURING APRIL GREAT BRITAIN : Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colour. Royal Institute of Painters in Water- Royal Society of British Artists. Dowdeswell Galleries. Crayon Drawings Dunthorne's Gallery. Water-Colours by Fine Art Society. Holman Hunt's Light Goupil Galleries. Priestman. Works by Bertram FRANCE-continued. Paris-continued. Grand Palais des Beaux-Arts. Salon de la Société Nationale. The Salon du Champ de Mars. (April 16 to June.) Grand Palais des Beaux-Arts. Salon des Durand-Ruel, 16 rue Laffitte. Retrospective AMERICA: Universal Exhibition. (April 30.) The Fine Art Section will contain the largest collection of works by contemporary painters which has been seen of recent years. Among forthcoming exhibitions, that at Düsseldorf, of works by the primitive masters of the Rhine schools, and the Inaugural Exhibition at Bradford, best deserve notice. The Bradford exhibition, we understand, is to be organized on the lines of that held at Wolverhampton in 1902. I-THE WINTER EXHIBITION: AN APOLOGY HAT the winter exhibition of the Royal Academy does harm to contemporary painting is no new complaint, although it has hitherto been made by painters whose want of success might be explained on more obvious and commonplace grounds. The idea, however, demands more attention when it is voiced by a magazine which appeals to art students all over the world. For the sake of clearness we will group our quotations from the article in The Studio, to which we refer. 'The Lay Figure' asserts that 1. The present-day collector would rather give ten thousand pounds for a poor thing by what is conventionally called an old master, than a hundred for a canvas which does not pretend to be anything else but a recent performance. 2. The Royal Academy encourages the craze and hangs on its walls such oddities as now make up its winter exhibition. things that if they were sent in for its summer shows would be received by the council with roars of laughter. 3. So Burlington House has become a valuable ally to the dealers. . . . Modern art does not have a fair chance . . . and we who have the misfortune to be alive must sit in studios crowded up with unsold works, and see the houses of collectors filled with stuff that the veriest beginner amongst us would be ashamed to paint.' We have no wish to be unkind to a critic whose works we have often read with interest and amusement, but we confess that the delightful modesty of the last sentence makes us doubt whether we should take him seriously. Nor can we imagine why he should select the winter exhibition as a point from which to attack the Royal Academy, when other questions, such as the Chantrey bequest affair, seem to lay bare far more vulnerable spots. It would, indeed, be hard to name any action of the Royal Academy so universally approved as that which offers to all lovers of pictures, year after year, the sight of an ever-varying collection of things which, whatever their absolute merit, are of incalculable value in the eyes of the educated world. Can it be that some belated echo of the fiscal question has penetrated to those 'studios crowded with unsold works' and is responsible for this astonishing plea for Protection against the old masters? The goodness or badness of ancient art as a whole must always be to some extent a matter of personal opinion. For the moment we must abide by the common consent of several centuries of culture, instead of attempting to prove to 'The Lay Figure' that the pictures in the winter exhibitions are not ridiculous oddities. Limits of space alone would preclude so tremendous and so desperate an effort. Nor shall we attempt to prove that poor pictures by old masters do not fetch ten thousand pounds, or ten thousand shillings, except when the seller is a knave or the buyer a fool. The Studio critic can find that out for himself by attending a single sale at Christie's. These, after all, are but minor matters compared with the essenceofhiscomplaintthe neglect of good modern work. In that he has our entire sympathy, and we have ventured to appeal to him only because his cause is so good that we do not wish to see it hurt by impatient advocacy. We have just as good reasons as he for regretting the frequent worldly success of bad work, and the almost universal neglect of good work till the worker is in his grave. None the less our regret does not blind us to the cause of troubles that began long before Burlington House was built. The fault does not lie with the great masters of the past in whose inspiration and example, in spite of our local efforts at novelty and revolt, all artists live and move and have their being. When they try to do the best that is in them, surely they are the companions of the mighty dead, and not their rivals companions handing on the torch of artistic life in a race that lasts far longer than the brief span of any single runner, in which we may share the victory of those who started long before us. The essence of our present distress surely lies in the fact that Providence, when endowing the collector with money and a love of beautiful things, has not always endowed him with confident insight. He is thus continually afraid of making a purchase which may prove a discredit to his taste and a bad investment too. If he takes official and social rank as a criterion he has to reckon with the unhappy example of the Tate Gallery and the utter collapse of academic prices at Christie's. Yet if he wishes to invest in the work of the best 'outsiders' he is at once dragged into a chaos of conflicting opinion through which no clear road is visible. Critics and painters too often set the momentary needs of journalism before the permanent good of our fellows. To rouse the languid interest of a philistine public, they indulge in controversy and recrimination, and so irritate and puzzle the men who have a real taste for art and a means of gratifying it. Our praise is apt to be as indiscriminate as our abuse, and a hundred articles of the Thomas Rotte-The Man and His Work' type are of hardly more service to the prospective immortals they discover than so many blank pages would be. Often, of course, painters are their own worst enemies. Sometimes they paint as if their pictures were advertisements, making a needless parade of ugliness, eccentricity, and forcing tone and pigment with The Winter Exhibition the single aim of compelling attention, till the result is something which could never be hung in a private house. This excess is perhaps a desirable relief from the shoddy finish of British painting twenty years ago, but it often hinders the recognition of real talent. Nevertheless, good modern pictures, it only the collector could disengage them from the mass of mediocrity that surrounds them, ought not to be bad investments. Their present prices are reasonable, since most dealers have neglected them for old masters, on which they can make a far larger profit. Yet the supply of fine works by old masters is almost exhausted, and the consequent rise in prices has made them unattainable by men of moderate means. The device of exalting second-rate pictures to the level of great ones, as in the case of the minor eighteenth-century painters, is a practice which can delude only the most ignorant class of purchaser for any length of time. In fact in a few years the only good pictures which the ordinary collector can hope to obtain may be modern pictures, so that the wise collector of them will reap his reward in due season. Can the needful wisdom be found? We think the discovery possible. A retrospect over more than five centuries of painting indicates that certain forces and certain qualities in that art have a permanent attraction for the human mind. A little reflection might even evolve from such a retrospect certain almost mathematical canons-crude, perhaps, but in their way effective—that might be applied to the painting of the present day. Such a form of constructive criticism, if any critic had the pluck to risk ridicule by attempting it, would be of immense service to lovers and collectors of works of art, and through them to the good artists living and working among us, who have the first claim upon our friendship, as the mighty dead have the first claim upon our veneration. D URING the last few weeks art has been more talked about in Germany than ever before. A great struggle has taken place between the German Emperor and German artists, and in the first engagement the Emperor has been defeated. The battle should be an instructive one to us, for the conditions in many respects are similar to those which embarrass the welfare of art in England. On the one side stood the academic group at Berlin, with the German Emperor as its tutelary divinity, maintaining the formulae of a narrow and pedantic classicalism. Not content with appropriating the whole of the state subsidies for the purchase of works of art, they did all in their suppress all indivipower to persecute and suppress duality or novelty shown by younger artists. On the other side stood the artists against whom this persecution has been directed. For some years the States of the Empire which devoted serious attention to art had each a little group of independent painters who refused to bow the knee to the official cult. These 'Secessions' were individually weak, since each was a local institution; but they included all the artists in Germany whose fame was more than local. While affairs stood thus the question of arranging for a fitting display of German for art at the St. Louis Exhibition came up settlement. The government began fairly enough. By agreement with the States of the Empire a commission was appointed to elect an impartial jury for settling all details. Such a commission could have had only one result: a triumph for the universally recognized artists of the various 'Secessions.' Suddenly, at the Emperor's desire, without even consulting the Federal States, the commission was put an end to by the government, and the business entrusted to the academic body. This arbitrary act at once united the 'Secessions.' Not content with absolutely refusing to exhibit, they met at Weimar and formed an association called the Künstlerbund. Its aims are explained in a pamphlet by Count Kessler, one of the vice-presidents of the body, which originally appeared in Kunst und Künstler (Berlin, Bruno Kassirer). We have no space to include even a summary of this remarkable document. Its scheme is almost utopian in completeness. The general purpose is to support and organize individuality of thought, against academic and official fetters. In practice it will consolidate the existing Secessions' by holding united exhibitions instead of separate ones, it will see that they are properly represented abroad, and will use a portion of its funds for forming a good museum of modern art in which artistic distinction and not official privilege will be the dominant spirit. The project will even include courses of lectures and technical instruction. The Künstlerbund soon proved that this programme was not a mere theory. It took up the St. Louis matter, and for a whole day the question was debated in the Reichstag. The arbitrary action of the Emperor in ignoring the Federal States had perhaps as much to do with the result as the feebleness of the official defence. The defeat of the government was overwhelming, and half the annual national subsidy was given to the Künstlerbund. The moral is one which we need hardly point. THE ROYAL COLLECTIONS ARTICLE I-H.R.H. PRINCE ALBERT AS AN ART COLLECTOR sort, and treasured by Her late Majesty, partly at Buckingham Palace and partly at Osborne House. in Now that the pictures have been removed by command of the King from Osborne to Buckingham Palace, the collections formed by H.R.H. Prince Albert have been found to supplement the existing royal collection many unusual and particularly interesting ways. For this reason, the present writer, in his capacity as Surveyor of His Majesty's Pictures and Works of Art, has obtained special permission from the King to describe and reproduce some of the more interesting pictures from the Prince Consort's collections in the pages of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE. BY LIONEL CUST, M.V.O., F.S.A. HE extent and value of the royal collections of pictures and other works of art is known to all connoisseurs. The accession of King Edward VII after the long and happy reign of Queen Victoria was of necessity a reason for a complete rearrangement of the royal residences, which had undergone little change during the last forty years of Queen Victoria's reign. Many works of art, which had remained secluded through the pressure of other pictures and objects which were of greater personal interest to Her late Majesty and the royal family, now resumed their place among the treasures, not only owned, but thoroughly appreciated by the King. The interval since the last rearrangement of the royal collections had been so long that many pictures, much of the armour, china, furniture, etc., now brought forward seemed like new discoveries to those who were privileged to examine them. It was well known that many pictures from the original collection of Charles I still survived, including some which dated from the reign of Henry VIII. The important additions made by Frederick Prince of Wales, and in his earlier years by George III, were, if little known, by no means new discoveries. The extraordinary good fortune which enabled George IV to acquire so many art treasures from France after the dégringolade of the French royal house and the nobility had been long notorious, and only to be compared with that good fortune which led to the formation of the now world-famous Wallace collection. Few persons were, however, aware of the nature and value of certain collections of pictures formed in the early days of his married life by H.R.H. the Prince Con It is now a commonplace for the English nation to look upon the late Prince Consort as one who not only loved art for its own sake, but sought to apply it in every way possible to the improvement of the homes and manufactures of the country into which he had been adopted. As a youth Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg had been brought up in that peculiar atmosphere of archaic tendencies and national aspirations which portended the eventual birth of Germany as a united country. Goethe, in the second part of his immortal Faust,' has striven to depict the blending of the pure classical ideal of beauty with the romantic chivalry of the middle ages. From the union of Helen with Faust is born Euphorion, in whom the perfect idea of beauty was to be revealed. But even Goethe realized how frail and evanescent was this creation, and Euphorion vanishes like an iridescent bubble, leaving nothing but his raiment and a soundless lyre to record his existence. It was on such ideas that the young prince's mind was nurtured, though the surrounding atmosphere was chilly and |