HKB
"The reason of this is not far to seek.
"Taking up at random an annual report of the trustees, I read: 'The salaries of officials amount to L1,176, other expenses L591, the police L635, total L2,402.' And now we come to the interesting item: 'The money spent on the purchase of portraits L255'! But the particular section of the report dealing with this item says seven works have been purchased for L143 18s.--that is, L20 11s. 1d. each.
"Small wonder then that many works in the National Portrait Gallery of England--England where portraiture flourishes--are unworthy of the attendance of even L35 worth of policemen. Can we wonder when L635 is paid to the police to gaze at L143 18s. worth of portraits, the purchase of the year?" and so on.
The result of this "ridiculing the State," as the Times, in its leader, expressed it, for the penurious pittance it doles out of the revenues of the richest country in the world towards the maintenance of a National Portrait Gallery, was that I was the cause of arousing the Press of Great Britain to the miserable condition of the National Portrait Gallery, which ended in our having one in its place more worthy of the country.
Besides drawing public attention to the National Portrait Gallery, in the same lecture I put in a word for the struggling unknown portrait painters. Speaking of payment reminded me of the story told of Bularchus, a successful painter 716 B.C. Candaules, King of Lydia, paid him with as much gold as would cover the surface of the work. I told my audience that I doubted whether, if that system existed now, the portrait painters would leave any room at all on the Academy walls for subject pictures.
Would Meissonier or Alma Tadema, say, paint your portrait for three napoleons, and would you pay Slapdash, R.A., fifteen thousand for a larger one? I then made the assertion, "It is not too much to say that a fashionable portrait painter often receives L900 for his name, and L100 for the value of the picture to the sitter as a portrait. It is the artist's autograph with a dash of something attached." I asked, "Why should snobbery tempt those away from an honest, well-painted portrait by a less-known man, to accept a failure with a Society signature?" a query that was replied to by my receiving any number of letters from all over the country asking me to recommend artists; in fact, at the time I might have started an agency for portrait painters. One of the artists I suggested had already had a very striking portrait of the Chinese Ambassador, Marquis Tseng, hung in the Academy, and over that painting he had had a trying experience. His sitter, like Queen Elizabeth, objected to shadows, not like the conceited Queen through vanity, but, being an Oriental, he really did not understand what the shadows were, and rushed to the glass to see if his face was dirty. He was a high official in his own country, and naturally anxious not to be mistaken for the Dirty Boy. Again he got into a frightful state at the glazy appearance of his skin--it was an oil painting.
"Only opium-eaters have shiny skins, and I am free from that vice. This is a libel, sir, and will disgrace me at home."
Then he had no idea of perspective, but a great idea of his own rank, and commanded my bewildered brother-artist to paint the red button on the top of his hat, the feather down the back, the orders in front, and was disappointed that his different coats and sashes, three and four deep, could not all be shown at once.
Another illustration of the difficulties of portrait painters I gave in the same lecture has since been so frequently repeated in the Press that I fear it will be stale to most of my readers--the story of the man who called upon the portrait painter and asked him to paint his father.
"But where is your father?"
"Oh, he died ten years ago."
"Then how can I paint him?" asked the artist.
"Why, I've just seen your picture of Moses, and surely if you can paint the portrait of a man who died thousands of years ago, you can more easily paint my father, who has only been dead ten years!"