being no longer a craftsman, working to order,
but a kind of poet, expressing in loneliness his personal emotions, has
lost his natural means of support. Governments, feeling a responsibility
for the cultivation of art which was quite unnecessary in the days when
art was spontaneously produced in answer to a natural demand, have
tried to put an artificial support in its place. That the artist may
show his wares and make himself known, they have created exhibitions;
that he may be encouraged they have instituted 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