medals and prizes; that he may not starve they have made government purchases.  And these well-meant efforts have resulted in the creation of pictures which have no other purpose than to hang in exhibitions, to win medals, and to be purchased by the government and hung in those more permanent exhibitions which we call museums.  For this purpose it is not necessary that a picture should have great beauty or great sincerity.  It is necessary that it should be large in order to attract attention and sufficiently well drawn and executed to seem to deserve recognition.  And so was evolved the salon picture, a thing created for no man’s pleasure, not even the artist’s; a thing which is neither the decoration of a public building nor the possible ornament of a private house; a thing which, after it has served its temporary purpose, is rolled up and stored in a loft or placed in a gallery where its essential emptiness becomes more and more evident as time goes on.  Such government-encouraged art had at least the merit of a well-sustained and fairly high level of accomplishment in the more obvious elements of painting.  But as exhibitions became larger and larger and the competition engendered by them grew fiercer, it became increasingly difficult to attract attention by mere academic merit.  So the painters began to search for sensationalism of subject, and the typical salon picture, no longer decorously pompous, began to deal in blood and horror and sensuality.  It was Regnault who began this sensation hunt, but it has been carried much further since his day than he can have dreamed of, and the modern salon picture is not only tiresome but detestable.

The salon picture, in its merits and its faults, is peculiarly French, but the modern exhibition has sins to answer for in other countries than France.  In England it has been responsible for a great deal of sentimentality and anecdotage which has served to attract the attention of a public that could not be roused to interest in mere painting.  Everywhere, even in this country, where exhibitions are relatively small and ill-attended, it has caused a certain stridency and blatancy, a keying up to exhibition pitch, a neglect of finer qualities for the sake of immediate effectiveness.

Under our modern conditions the exhibition has become a necessity, and it would be impossible for our artists to live or to attain a reputation without it.  The giving of medals and prizes and the purchase of works of art by the state may be of more doubtful utility, though such efforts at the encouragement of art probably do more good than harm.  But there is one form of government patronage that is almost wholly beneficial, and that the only form of it which we have in this country—­the awarding of commissions for the decoration of public buildings.  The painter of mural decorations is in the old historical position, in sound and natural relations to the public.  He is doing something which is wanted and, if he continues