FINE ARTS.
The Liverpool Fine Arts Institution has awarded the prize on account of the best work contributed to its annual exhibition, to Mr. W. Holman Hunt, for his picture of " Claudio and Isabella," which made its original appearance at the Royal Academy this year. This is the second time we have announced the bestowal of the prize by the same provincial society upon the same artist. On the first occasion, at a period when " Pre- raphaelitism," branded as utterly contemptible by almost all the organs of public opinion, was a subject for the small wit of most men, and for unequal controversy among a few, the award argued an eminent degree of independence and right perception on the part of the Liverpool Com- mittee. Now, men can act upon the same judgment in this matter with- out being singular : yet it is no less to the credit of the Institution that it should have given its prize for the work which, more than any other exhibited within the year, displayed lofty aspiration in conjunction with the highest technical excellence. What may have been the precise degree of inferiority of the other works sent to Liverpool, and the consequent ease of decision, we have not the means of saying. But, however great we may infer this to have been, it is still certain that, in these days of Art Unions and meretricious imbecility, many a body of greater pretension than the Liverpool Fine Arts Institution would have succeeded in going wrong.
Liverpool supplies us with a second item of fine, arts news, in the shape of an address by Cardinal Wiseman,* entitled "The Highways of Peace- ful Commerce have been the Highways of Art." The Cardinal enforces the position of his title with an ample and detailed knowledge of the sub- ject, and with an effective eloquence, which is here exercised upon art not for the first time. He negatives the notion that art ever followed in the track of war ; traces that of Greece, and its enduring type, not, as has hitherto been popularly done, from an Egyptian origin, but from the Assyrian monuments, with which the Greeks were brought into ac- quaintance by commerce ; the Etruscan, similarly from commerce with Greece ; the modern Italian through Venice, from commerce with the Byzantine empire. "The great cities of Italy, at the very time when their arts most flourished, were the most enterprising in their commerce, but at the same time were manufacturing states. It has been shrewdly remarked, that Tyre, for many ages the greatest commercial city of the world, perished entirely, because it had not a productive but merely a transit trade." Hence the application to manufacturing England is ob- vious, and pregnant of suggestion for our Schools of Design.
"The Highways of Peaceful Commerce have been the Highways of Art. An Address, delivered at Liierpool, on Tuesday, August 30, 1853, on occasion of the Opening of the Catholic Institute. By his Eminence Cardinal Wiseman."
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