AN IMPERIAL PORTRAIT GALLERY.
FOR a private Englishman to acquire a famous painting with a view to exhibiting it in the Colonies, purely from philanthropic motives, is, we believe, an entirely new departure in the history of picture-buying, and, we may add, the history of education. Mr. Charles Booth deserves the congratulations and the thanks of all British subjects for his latest enterprise. He has acquired from Mr. Holman. Hunt a replica of that artist's great picture, "The Light of the World," which Mr. Hunt has repainted twice the size of the original belonging to Keble College ; and he intends to present it to one of the National Galleries, but first to send it the round of the Empire on exhibition, so that all British-born subjects may have the opportunity of realising for themselves the strength of the picture which compelled so much attention when first exhibited fifty years ago. It was in 1872 that " The Light of the World" was presented by Mrs. Combe to Keble College ; and since then the Keble library and chapel, to which the picture was removed ten years ago, have been visited by thousands. But Mr. Hunt was anxious that the circle to which the picture should be known should be even wider; and Mr. Booth, with the broadness of mind and generosity with which his name is associated, has taken the surest means to attain what is, perhaps, a new ideal. That is the ideal of federating, as it were, the minds of those who possess the great inheritance of British freedom in a common love and veneration for great British pictures, revealing as they do the mind, the personality, and the aspira- tions which belong peculiarly to the Anglo-Saxon race.
Mr. Booth's idea is worthy of all praise and encouragement, and we heartily join in the wish of the Warden of Keble, ex- pressed in a letter published in the Times of Thursday, that the replica of a picture which " has helped many of us to a stronger faith and a greater confidence in that Light guiding us in our studies," which " has inspired some of our members to take part in spreading that Light throughout the world," may indeed have " something of the same influence in the Colonies as the original has had here." But in the con- templation of the results possibly contingent to the exhibition in Australia and the Colonies of a picture such as " The Light of the World " a fresh idea arises. " The Light of the World '' is a painting essentially connected in its conception with revealed religion, with the Gospel given to the Western races. That Gospel belongs no more to the British than to other Western nations. But there are gospels which belong to the British nation alone,—traditions which are the pride only of British-born subjects ; history which spurs the imagination and stirs the blood of the fellow.. countrymen of Cromwell, Hampden, Chatham, Wellington, and Nelson as it can stir the blood of no other people. Might it not be possible to enlarge on Mr. Charles Booth's idea, and to exhibit—perhaps, indeed, eventually to establish—in Australia and the Colonies a truly Imperial Gallery of portraits of great Englishmen ? We possess such a collection of pictures in London in the National Portrait Gallery, and in St. Martin's Place every visitor to London has the opportunity of seeing, in the flesh as the artist saw it, the men who made the laws and won the battles of Great Britain. But bow many of the millions of citizens of Great Britain's Empire beyond the seas have had, or ever will have, the opportunity of looking at such a Gallery as this ? There is no other representative Gallery of portraits of Englishmen in the world.
Yet there are some reasons why the citizens of Greater Britain should look with almost an intenser interest, if that were possible, on the portraits of famous British statesmen and soldiers and pioneers than natives of Great Britain themselves. They would feel, of course, the same pride in the possession of race-kinship with the victors of Trafalgar or Waterloo as is felt by those to whose lot it has not fallen to seek their fortunes oversea ; yet they would look at their portraits not quite in the same spirit as natives of England or Scotland. To the Australian or the Canadian, for instance, the command of the sea means perhaps even more than it means to English- men. The English nation did not begin and continue simply because English ships ruled the sea; but it would have been impossible for the British Colonial Empire to come into and to continue in existence if it had not been that British ships determined who should and who should not land on the great islands and continents. " If that man had not done what he did, I should not be here," is a reflection which must come home to the Colonist looking at a portrait of Drake or Frobisher or Nelson, even more strongly than to the citizen
lUoks with especial veneration on the founders of British sea- 'sewer, must he not also feel an intense interest in the history and the personality of the British-born inventors and pioneers, —the harnessers of steam and electricity, for instance, who, because they were the annihilators of distance, allowed him to sail from the shores of his birth to other soils, yet kept him in constant and immediate touch with the land he had left ? Watt and Stephenson and Rowland Hill, and the heralds of electric telegraphy,—how much more those names must mean to those who are separated by thousands of miles from the centre of- things than to those who for hundreds of years have never been separated by more than a few hours' journey from the Metropolis.
Suppose, then, that it were suddenly made possible—perhaps by the bequest of a millionaire desirous that natives of the Empire should realise to the full the antiquity and the worth of their inheritance—for the National Portrait Gallery, or the best part of it, to be exhibited in replica in the great centres of activity of Australia and Canada and the other Colonies, who will suppose that such an exhibition would have no effect on the imaginations of the "citizens of no mean country " cares- " When Drake went down to the Horn And England was crowned thereby, 'Twist seas unsailed and shores -unhailed Our Lodge—our Lodge was born (And England was crowned thereby !)" Mr. Kipling's stirring lines sum up the spirit that would be in the Australian or Canadian standing before the portraits of great English sailors. But he would not stand to look at the portraits only of sailors and soldiers. He would find in the " travelling Imperial Gallery " which we have suggested portraits of the statesmen and inventors and explorers who have shared in moulding the destinies of emigrants from England. He would stand to look at Havill's portrait of Livingstone, who first lit English minds with a knowledge, however ditnosf the heart of Africa ; Minter's Rowland Hill,
the man to whom Isis country almost hesitated to pay part of a debt which it cool a never pay in full; de Breda's James Watt, the energy of whose mind may some day connect Cairo with Cape. Town with a belt of steel ; Smeaton, quaintly wrapped and befurred, who first put a match to the lamp that so many; thousands of emigrants have watched streaming out
over British waters; Millais's Disraeli, Collier's Darwin and Huxley, Watts's Tennyson, Carlyle, Browning, and Mill ; Herkomer's •Sir George Grey, Governor successively in his time of South Australia, New Zealand, and Cape Colony ; the strong, peaceful face of Cardwell, Colonial Secretary forty years ago, one of the first Englishmen to come to grips with qneations of Imperial defence ; Arkwright, who settled difficulties of machine labour which, because of his intellect, have never troubled British Colonies; and unnumbered figures living further back in the nation's history,—Cromwell, Marlborough, Pitt, Chatham, Castlereagh, Wellington.
Would it not be a Gallery worth showing, as it in London stands, to those who can never see it in London ? " Whatever is to be truly great and truly affecting," Ruskin wrote, " must have on it the true stamp of the native land. Not a law this, but a necessity from the intense hold on their country of all truly great men." And surely such a "travelling Imperial Gallery" as this, certainly possessing " the true stamp of the native land," would be in the completest sense of the words " truly great
11,124 truly affecting." It would awaken and it would stimu- late. "Why is it," as Carlyle asked, "that Pictures exist in
the, world, and ,to what end was the divine art of painting bestowed, by the earnest gods, upon poor mankind ? I could advise, once, for a little," he goes on. " The flaying of St. Bartholomew, the Rape of the Sabines, the pipings and amoura of goat-footed Pan, Romulus suckled by the wolf ; all this and muck-else of fabulous, distant, unimportant, not to say, ugly and unworthy shall pass. But I say, Herewithal is something not phantasmal ; of indisputable certainty, home-grown." Carlyle's words might serve as a text for an Iinperial Gallery, just as there is a text from Ruskin given to every visitor who stands to look at Holman Hunt's great picture in Keble Chapel. The text only awaits the Gallery,— a. Gallery of memories and inspirations, of "indisputable certainty, house-grown."
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