7 APRIL 1855, Page 18

inp arts.

THE NATIONAL GALLERY.

The appointment of Sir Charles Eastlake to the new office of salaried Director of the National Gallery carries out the most important recom- mendation made by the Parliamentary Committee of 1863, and, taken together with the Secretaryship of Mr. IVOrnum, promises great improve- ment for the future. We understand that the salary is to be 10001. per .annum; enough to make the office one of substantial dignity, and to de- mand solid, systematic, and active services from its recipient. Indeed, it is to be anticipated—and hoped—that, with a Director so distinguished and so placed, the Committee's half-measure of retaining supreme 4.- vemment by Trustees will prove in practice the farce it looks like in prut- ciple, and will eventually die out by the force of facts.

Sir Charles's instalment will, we believe, give general satisfaction ; though it cannot .fail to excite vehement protest and opposition in some quarters. Apart from the interminable question of the cleanings, it may be conceded that the new Director's quondam Keepership was not an epoch of unmixed success. Sir Charles at that time stipulated that he -would not be responsible for judgments save on works of the Italian school; and, when circumstances brought him to travel beyond his tether, the acquisition for which the nation is indebted to him, by dint partly of this prescribed limitation, partly of pique or the pococurante principle of doing business, was the spurious Holbein abortion. But the conditions ought now to be altered. The salaried Director should be a different being from the Keeper—lorded over by amateur and ex-officio Trustees, each with a crotchet or predilection of his own, and coerced into an un- congenial service. One has a right to expect that his refined feeling anti .cultivated knowledge of art shall have fair play henceforward; that his personal bias towards the best schools shall be perceptible in a higher tone infused into the Gallery in cases where he acts proprio motif ; and that, where it may prove advisable to widen the range of selection, he shall be seconded by equal knowledge and discernment on the part of those to whose judgment he may have recourse. Let us regard Sir Charles Eastlake not as the late Keeper of the National Gallery, but as the adept and the critic, and we shall have reason for confidence.