NO WATER-COLOUR OR BLACK-AND-WHITE NEED APPLY.
"The Royal Academy has been the subject of many bitter attacks," wrote the editor of the Magazine of Art, "during the last hundred years—attacks which, directed against unjust or antiquated rules, have usually been well founded. But never, perhaps, has so effective a charge been made as that which Mr. Furniss brings in his entertaining volume; and if it be true that ridicule will pierce there whence the shafts of indignation will rebound, no little good may be looked for from the publication."
Precisely so. Others, serious and influential, had exposed the R.A.; I tried what ridicule would do. But the public did not take me seriously, and the Press took me too seriously; and as the public does not buy books on art, but is content with a réchauffé, my object to a certain extent was defeated.
My Lady Oil of Burlington House is a very selfish creature; she persistently refuses to recognise her twin-sister Water Colour, giving her but one miserable room in her mansion, and no share whatever in her honours. My Lady Oil is selfish; My Lady Oil is unjust to favour engravers and architects, and to ignore painters in water-colours and artists in black-and-white. She showers honours on her adopted sisters, Engraving and Architecture, because the former mechanically reproduces her work, and the latter builds her pretty toy-houses for her children to live in.
This is really altogether absurd when you reflect that it is in water-colour that English art excels, and that the copyist, the engraver's occupation will soon be gone, beaten away by slightly more mechanical, but more effective, modes of reproduction.
Sooner or later John Bull will open his inartistic eyes, and see that mediocrity in oil is not equal to excellence in water, and that those who originate with the pencil are far before copyists with the graver and drawers of plans.
I then advocated a National Academy, a Commonwealth of Art, presided over by a State Minister of Fine Art, in which mediocrity will find no space till a welcome and a place have been given to all earnest work, regardless of its nature.
Where the number of works of any one man will be limited, and where there will be no such mockery of good work as "rejection for want of space."
Where all the fine arts, and especially the national fine art (water-colour paintings), shall be recognised as arts, and the best of the professors of them shall at least be eligible for election.