This morning (it being the second day of the press view) I
spent an hour at the [Royal] Academy. The number of portraits seems to increase
year by year. For a man who is engrossed in a single art, this comprehensive
selection of portraits of celebrities cannot fail to have a moral value. They
remind him that there are several other arts and several hundred other
occupations besides his own in which men to genius and men of talent can actually
and deeply interest themselves: a fact he is in danger of forgetting. And they
do this quite independently of their artistic worth, which in the majority of
cases is nearly nil. To study these faces of men and women brings one in
contact with activities, ideals, ambitions, of which otherwise one would know
little besides the mere names. The attitude of the general public towards a
picture – by which they apparently regard it as a story first and a work of art
afterwards – is not so indefensible as it seems, or at least not so
inexcusable. In the attitude of the perfectly cultured artist himself, there is
something of the same feeling – it must be so. Graphic art cannot be totally
separated from literary art, nor vice versa. They encroach on each other.
- Journ als of Arnold Bennett, April 30, 1896
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