COMING RESCUE OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY.
Avrwoucia the official Legit; extended over M. Otto Miindler might suggest some doubt as to the course promised by Mr. Disraeli, but not explained, we are inclined to think that the vote of the House of Commons on Tuesday last is less " a defeat of Ministers " than an admonition to them, and that they will regard it as such. It is therefore really an advantage that Mr. Disraeli should not have explained the course which he and his colleagues intend to take : they are now free to amend it before they have oommitted themselves to a false path, and we believe that their deliberations will profit by this practical hint. It is less a hint of what the House will enforce, than of what it will support. The principal points connected with the public interests in the National Gallery are, first, a proper appropriation of the building which passes by that name because at present it contains the nucleus of our National Gallery; secondly, a final guarantee that the public property in the shape of pictures will be protected from those destructive vermin, the "cleaners" and their official accomplices ; and thirdly, a separation between private interests and public privileges, whose union has been so fertile in jobs, and has entailed so much hazard upon the property in question. Now on all these points the lesson of Tuesday night was eloquent. Mr. Disraeli avows that " adequate premises must be supplied " in order, not merely to afford space for purchases, but to avoid holding out the discouragement with which the country has hitherto met spontaneous gifts. There exists, he says, sufficient experience to guide any persons who do not shrink from respon- sibility ; and he promises " with reference to the National Gal- lery, and, he would say, even with reference to other institutions, arrangements calculated to remove the great deficiencies now so generally acknowledged." Under cover of these wide words, Mr. Disraeli may do all that is required in the way of affording a permanent abode for the public property: It has already been settled that the National collection of pictures is not to be re- moved from Charing Cross to South Kensington ; an additional guarantee for obedience to that decision has already been ob- tained through the welcome severance between the State and the South Kensington institutions, which are to become a sort of half public, half private corporation, like the Society of Arts, or the Fishmonger's Company. It was Commissioners of Taste, and other dilettante meddlers, who cramped poor Wilkins, the Archi- tect, drove him mad, and killed him with mortification at pro- ducing that burlesque of a public building which disfigures Tra- falgar Square. The building itself is a cruel Hie facet over the tomb of the man whose incapacity it seems to commemorate, while it really immortalizes the moral, or rather immoral, force put upon him. Perhaps we are not in funds just at present to build another public institution in lieu of that bad building, but at all events Mr. Disraeli can hand it over to the National:Gal- lery without any co-tenant, and can thus secure the space for a better design, as soon as the National Picture Collection shall have grown big enough to need another house. But while setting the house in order, he must better the or- ganization of the household. The Tories who have succeeded to power might make a splendid allegory of the National Gallery, and earn public gratitude by dramatizing that allegory in their own persons. They might say, most justly, that the pictures of the nation, like its institutions and charters, should be preserved against any defacement, still more against destruction ; that the cleaners, like some so called Reformers, were, under the name of purification, really eating away the substance of the national monuments ; and that, under the name of multiplying our pic- torial institutions, they were keeping up jobs for the profit of private hangers-on. The late Government seemed bound by its Liberal principles to support this destructive and jobbing ten- dency. The late Secretary to the Treasury was the grand cham- pion of a lavish outlay of the public money in doubtful purchases, by a German gentleman of doubtful capacity, who travelled over the continent giving his card, says Lord Elcho, as "M. Otto Windier, Expert de la Gaelic Nationale de Londres," and positively raising the price of the paltry pictures which he deigned to purchase by spontaneously offering larger sums than their owners were asking in the maket. Perhaps Lord Derby, having succeeded to a Liberal regime, might at first think himself, amongst Liberal measures, such as the Abolition of Property Qualification, Admission of Jews to Parliament, &c., bound to continue the official patronage for M. Otto Windier ; but if he and Mr. Disraeli did labour under that serious delusion, the vote of Tuesday night, deciding by 128 to 110 that Otto should have no salary, has corrected the ingenuous mistake of the new Minis- ters ; and Mr. Disraeli has discovered that in the important re- forms which he contemplates for 'I rafalgar Square, he needs not be encumbered by the German commercial Traveller of the Na- tional Gallery.
His reform bill of art will be the more perfect if it should in- clude another amendment, strictly in accordance with the whole of the arrangements that he has in view. 'The Royal Academy of Arts was founded under royal patronage, at a time when there was comparatively little other patronage for it ; and with good reason. If Thornhill had bad some success in imitating the pe- dantic fancies of the kwer 'Italian schools—if Sir Joshua Rey- nolds had shown that a Devonshire boy can attain some, though fleeting, power in colouring—if an American boy was afterwards able to teach the English people the accidence of " taste" by fa- miliarizing them with flat and vapid classicisms—and if Thorn- hill's son-in-law, Hogarth, had struck out a school of his own,
which is as much without following as it was without precedent-- yet art had done little in the days when George the Third was King to show that it could subsist by native genius alone, especially in the higher walks. The King gave it lodging, countenance, and a modicum of patronage; the countenance and patronage have been continued; while, from being a lodger in chambers, the Royal Academy so far encroached as to aim at being sole tenant by its own royal authority of "the finest site in Europe" ; and that happened, although it makes a revenue, which shows a much larger percentage of profit on the outlay than some of our public departments,—the Post-office, for instance. In that at- tempt, the Academy overreached itself ; it drew attention to the broad fact that it can now well stand alone. In its administra- tion it has not been more " national" than other institutions of the same kind,—the Water-colour Society, for example, or the New Water-colour Society. Indeed, there is great reason to sup- pose, that if it were not misled by a reliance on official support, it might improve its administration in order to secure a still larger support from the profession and the public. There is the best ground for concluding, that if the alliance between State and Association were terminated the State would be relieved of an embarrassing encumbrance, and the Academy would become at once more popular, more powerful, and more rich. The sever- ance would be in exact harmony with the precedent which is now about to be set in South Kensington by a species of society quite as " national" as the Royal Academy, and more personally allied with Royalty than even that venerable institution. By adding this clause to his Art-Reform Bill, Mr. Disraeli would accomplish a liberal reform in the best spirit of conservatism.
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