“He was quite able to hold his own among the best of them,” said the printseller. “He's coming well to the front, I assure you.”
“I don't think that it is at all fair to your customers to try and foist off upon them the work of a local man,” said the lady severely. “An ordinary local man! I wonder very much at your doing such a thing. I have brought the etching back to you, and you must change it for me. You really should have told me that Cuthbert Tremaine was nothing but a local man.”
So much for the encouragement of local talent in our county.
Quite recently a more striking instance of this peculiarity was offered us in a neighbouring town. A local artist held a sale exhibition of water-colour drawings of scenes within a radius of six miles. There were perhaps thirty of these, and every one of them was good, and every one of them was pleasing. There was no suggestion of slovenliness about any, nor was there a hint of an amateur. They were not the sort of drawings that might be referred to as “highly creditable”—nobody wants to possess “highly creditable” things: they must have positive merit, without taking into consideration the conditions under which they are done, before any one who knows something about art would wish to possess them; and the watercolours in this exhibition could certainly claim to be in this light.
Well, cards of invitation were sent to some hundreds of possible buyers, and were heartily responded to, for free exhibitions are very popular in our neighbourhood, especially those that take the form of a demonstration of a new breakfast cereal (with samples gratis). But in the matter of sales the response was not quite so hearty as it might have been. The artist did not clear five pounds during the fortnight that his exhibition remained open.
A month or two later, however, a stranger exhibited a collection of his drawings in the same town, and although they were infinitely inferior in almost every way to those of the local man, they found quite a satisfactory number of purchasers, notwithstanding the fact that there was not a drawing that was not priced at more than double the sum asked by the local artist for his sketches.
II.—ART AND THE SHERIFF
But before the end of the summer an opportunity was given to connoisseurs in the same town to acquire, at the expenditure of a few pounds, a collection of pictures that would do credit to any private gallery in the kingdom. Announcements appeared placarded on every dead wall that “by order of the Sheriff” a magnificent collection of paintings by Turner, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, George Morland, David Cox, and numerous other Masters, as well as drawings by Birket Foster, Keeley Hallswelle, George Cattermole, and a host of others. Being a Sheriff's sale this superb collection was to be disposed of without reserve, and the pictures were to be on view in the spacious commercial-room of an hotel.