IRISH ARTISTS. DURING a month I lately remained in the Metropolis of Ireland, my attention was occasionally directed, by our friend Sketch, to the state of the Fine Arts. One of our first morning lounges was to the shop of Mr. Allen, in Dame-street, whose name has been associated for the last twenty years perhaps, and in the minds of two generations, with drawing-paper, prints, chalks, black lead pencils, and Indian rubber, and a swarm of little et-ceteras known only to the cunning artist or emulative amateur. Here you will almost always find a picture or drawing sent to be framed, or, peradventure, to be sold. Mr. Allen can also talk knowingly to you about the merits of the Dublin painters, give you their addresses, or shake his head in praise or blame on their claims to notice. Indeed, he is himself a liberal patron of more than one in the lower classes; constantly purchasing portfolios of pencil-drawings, flower-wreaths and baskets, red-chalk drawings of arms, legs, noses, and ears, and, now and then, batches of legitimate water-colour landscapes. An artist who once held a respectable rank in his profession, now chiefly subsists on Mr. Allen's "encouragement" in the latter-mentioned branch. This is certainly a man of talent; I saw some of his early drawings, which, though slight, pleased me considerably; but it is melancholy to thumb over the heaps of things he now brings in, per week, to his "employer's" market. It is still more melancholy to observe him bring himself into the shop, with his little portfolio chucked under his arm. He happened to enter it while I was there. Rubbing his shoes on the mat with scrupulous anxiety, he advanced, radiant in smiles lit up by Mr. Allen's brief salutation, and then slowly and deferentially deposited his humble pack on the counter. "So, so―ay, ay- nearer the thing-better, much better than the last but, C, don't you think this foreground wants a wash of bistre? and those hills a grayer tint?"-said the sagacious mercantile connoisseur, his nether lip protruded in the very easiness of in-felt power. I deemed myself getting angry at this scene, but a hearty laugh came to my relief, and I hurried out of the shop with Sketch, agreeing to seek elsewhere the character and respectability of Irish Art. : We turned towards the Dublin Society house, in Kildare-street, which at present may be called an epitome of our Royal Academy and British Museum for here, along with stuffed fishes, open-mouthed lions, and cases of fossils and butterflies, and all the other curiosities of a Museum, you are prepared to meet casts of the antique, drawing-schools of four kinds, figure, landscape, modelling and architecture, and a lifeacademy for practising artists. Here, also, the students of the different schools annually exhibit drawings for premiums, and by the committee of Fine Arts of the Dublin Society their claims are judged and rewarded. You may ask how many eminent artists find place in this committee? I answer, No artist of any kind. Who compose it, then? Connoisseurs ! With malicious precision Sketch detailed to me, as he walked along, all the imposing professions and theoretic economy of this institution, and I approached its gates with no little awe and interest. The Society house is a princely structure, terminating a good street, across VOL. VII. NO. XXIX. 2 D which, at the top, it stands. It was lately purchased by the Society from the Duke of Leinster, whose family residence it had been, for a thundering sum, half in hand, and the other half to be paid-yet, I believe: the same building, by the way, which, when Ned Evans inquired in his Welsh brogue its name and purpose of a Dublin basket-boy, caused the characteristic reply of—"O J—s! where was hur born at all, at all?" or something like it, and afterwards much personal inconvenience to the mettlesome hero. It is faced by an entrance of three gates, and you walk across a noble court-yard to the edifice itself. A tinselled porter opened one of these gates for us, and another stood in the hall of the mansion to require our names in a visitingbook. We passed up magnificent staircases to the museums and library, which occupy excellent apartments. Before this we had visited the board-room, and found it fit for the reception of Majesty. I , asked to see the gallery of casts. Sketch reconducted me first to the hall, and next introduced me to a little room off it; where, amid a few statues and the Elgin fragments, you have scarcely space to turn without breaking them or your nose. The rest are posted out of sight in the hall. I expressed my desire to turn upstairs again, to see the drawing-schools and life-academy. Sketch smiled bitterly, and led me out of the house across the court-yard. We reached the entrance gates, where I beheld a small red door in the side-wall of the yard, immediately opposite the porter's lodge, and this my friend shoved open and held for me to pass. We traversed, first, a narrow stable-lane, and then a stable-yard, grass grown and strewed with nuisance, and approached a row of mean brick buildings, which at a glance I recognized as, originally, the stables and dog-kennels of his Grace the Duke of Leinster. We gained them, and ascended by a dirty staircase to what had formerly been the hay-lofts of those stables; and after walking through narrow passages, floored with tiles, halted before a little low door, smeared with a dun raddle-colour, and upon which something was painted in large white letters. Sketch pointed and bade me read; and I deciphered words like the following. "The drawing-school to be opened such a day and hour-the landscape, such and such, &c-by order-John Wilson-house-keeper!" "This is the figure-school day and hour, so let us in"-said Sketch. pushed away and entered a place, the joists of the low and squalid roof of which slanted down to the ground. That ground was earthen, and burrowed into sundry holes. The light streamed in through oblong windows, patched, like harlequin, with a kind of glass called by "the trade" bulls-eyes, I believe. The walls were of a raddle colour to suit the door, and rugged and unfinished. School-desks and forms ran round, at and upon which sate some twenty or thirty shabby little boys, more than one of them bare-legged. In the middle of the loft was a stove, before which I descried a stool, and a little gentleman, to whom Sketch immediately introduced me as "Master of the figure academy." He bowed with an air, flourished his hand over his bald pate, as if to winnow together a few lank and desolate hairs, the last of their race, and shy, I thought, of being caught airing his shins at the stove; then smirked his way to a pedagogal desk, but-as garden-snails carry their shells wherever they go-taking the precaution to bring his stool along with him. We talked--pshaw! we talked" of Raphaels, We Corregios, and stuff;"--and I wished for Reynolds's trumpet. But this is the home afforded to the Arts of their country by the all-professing Dublin Society. I had nearly forgotten, though I should not forget, that inside this nice school-room is another apartment, of the same appropriate physiognomy,-in fact, another hay-loft, dedicated to the established artists of Dublin for the purposes of their figure-academy. I described to you the absolute splendour of the interior of the Societyhouse itself; its museums, library, and, above all, its board-room. Let me add that the house-keeper, who orders the school-professors to keep their hours, has elegant apartments; that the meanest servant is accommodated under the Society's roof, while the arts and artists, with all their bag-and-baggage, are thus bundled out of the house, nayextra muros-beyond the precincts of the court-yard, into, as I have truly described it, the dog-kennel and stables. Suffer me, to subjoin an anecdote or two illustrative of the general feeling held by the Fine Arts Committee of the Dublin Society towards the Fine Arts. I state authentic facts. In their old house in Hawkinsstreet, now transformed into the Theatre Royal, some lads who had gained premiums in different classes, were, on a particular occasion, huddled up to the very immense secretary to-be paid. Among them were two or three educated young persons, who had won prizes in the head class-to wit, drawing from the life. They found the secretary discharging the accounts of a labourer, a bill-poster, and what appeared to be a char-woman. He took no notice of them as they entered, and they stood duteously at a window. They stood till the worthier clai mants were paid off, and at last the man of patronage turned with a"Have you got a sixpence among you, and I'll settle with you?" And behold the ceremony of a distribution of prizes at the Dublin Academy! Again about the time to which I allude, a few liberal-minded students in the gallery of casts formed themselves into a friendly association to assist each other in their studies, and to preserve some order around them. The servants of the house, who had been in the habit of plucking their predecessors out of their seats to wrestle and riot about the gallery, did not approve this innovation, and through these, the magnificent house keeper waxed sceptical of its propriety, and through him the Fine Arts Committee frowned ill omens. By the servants, or by some little boys out of the schools, one of the casts was scratched, when, without investigation or other preface, a leading member came to the door and hollowed out-" D'ye hear me-the next time any fellow of you does this, you shall all be turned out of the house." I have ascertained the name and connoisseur pretensions of this gentle remonstrator. He is the same remarkable individual of whom Curran observed in the year 98 in Dublin, "It is only in the hot-bed of a Revolution that such premature buds can be accelerated without being matured." Since his notoriously active life at this period, he has had time on his hands; and so, out of very lassitude, became a connoisseur and old picture-broker: trades that, in his estimation, would seem as facile in acquirement as the peculiar notoriety glanced at by his foren sic commentator. I do not blame the Dublin Society for not having done more, but I blame them for having done so much. Let me explain myself. Their patronage of the arts appears singularly gratuitous. Neither the spirit nor letter of their constituting laws compelled them into such exertion. Those laws recognize the existence of schools "for the benefit of the trades and manufactures of the country"* solely; yet in time the Dublin Society had its Committee of Fine Arts, and the schools described in its own laws as schools for artizans, and "for admission into which scarcely any thing but the application is necessary,"+ became schools for professional artists also. This Society, further, applied to, and received from Parliament, additional grants for the use of the Fine Arts, and during many years legislated, in every way that appeared to them best, for the interests and name of Art in Ireland. Behold the subject of my complaint! The original pretensions of the Dublin Society did not extend to the manufacture of artists; and had they been content with the useful discharge of their imposed duty, we could have no possible objection, but the contrary, to their laudable efforts. We should have witnessed and praised the beneficial results, in the ornamenting of chimney-pieces, of tomb-stones, and of the fronts of fancy shop-windows. When, however, they invite Fine Art students into their mechanical schools, establish a life-academy, and distribute prizes —when, at their leisure, they build a national exhibition-room, and, mark you, with money obtained from our Government for the purpose -under such circumstances I must beg leave to consider their first arrogation of the ability to be umpires in all questions of Art, as, at the least, not very modest; and I have no hesitation, from patient examination of facts, to declare, that the money so obtained has been injudiciously appropriated. If to these considerations we join the curse of their periodical crop of quack artists, sent out with their counterfeit stamp alone, without the sanction, as is the case at Somerset-house, of bodies of accomplished professional men, who must be the sole judges of the fitness of professional candidates-without, in a word, the sanction of a single artist-yet thrust forth to jostle and scramble among established artists; if we contemplate this consequence of uncalculating and unqualified pretension, this leprous multiplication of bad art ;-and if to all we add the swagger and domineer of the self-elected, self-called, selfendowed patrons-the very contumely with which they treat the Arts and every thing bound up with and clinging to them,-in such a view am fairly warranted in denouncing the Dublin Society, not only for the insult of its system, but also for the temerity of its interference. Until within a few years, you have before you, in the existence and policy of the Dublin Society, the only opportunities for self-assertion afforded to the Irish artists. Lately, however, appeared the Royal Irish Institution-a body imitative of our British Institution. Much was naturally expected from this high-sounding establishment, upon whose list of members-though in no other, as necessary, places-we meet all the rank, title, and talent of the country, to say nothing of the royal blood that typically meanders through the printed names of its patrons. The Irish Institution, by the persevering tingle of its professions in the ears of the public, accumulated a round fund, and proposed premiums for native pictures; premiums that became the mouthbell. Historical and landscape painters rubbed their hands and * Quoted from reports of the Dublin Society. + Ibid. One smacked their lips; set their pallets and strained their canvasses. curious codicil was, however, soon tacked to the liberal promises of the Institution. They begged to be understood as reserving to themselves the right of giving nothing at all when the aspirants for premiums in the first classes of art should come into the field. The artists stared, as well they might, you will say; and no professional gentleman could be found to hang up his character for the re-adjustment of a connoisseur jury. Other evidences of the good taste and good feeling of the new patrons rapidly followed; until at last the riddle became soluble in the detection of a melancholy fact. The old Committee of the Dublin Society had passed, almost individually, into the Committee of the Royal Irish Institution. The same men, who, for a series of years, had catered with but a step-mother's liberality for the well-being of Irish art, now re-appeared as governors of the new fund, carrying into office all their habitual incompetency and inveterate pettiness of view. A rather amusing proof of the identity of these nominally distinct bodies is on record, and may be worth subjoining. The Royal Irish Institution had need of the exhibition-room of the Dublin Society, to bring forward their periodical display of old masters their committee accordingly met, and drew up a request for it; then proceeded to the Dublin Society house; there sat as the committee thereof; gravely presented themselves with their own petition, and were graciously pleased to consider and grant the prayer it contained. Having thus shewn you the constitution of this second assemblage of Irish patronage, I am surely saved any farther comment upon its worse than inutility. When you recollect the true statement already made of the economy of the Fine Arts Committee of the Dublin Society, and when you here recognize the same men, and, of course, the same measures, it does not become necessary for me to add, that, since the establishment of the Royal Irish Institution, no novel advantages have resulted to native art, and no yearnings of sympathy or confidence grown up between artists and their patrons. I have now to lay before you some facts of considerable interest and importance. Very lately the artists of Dublin awoke to a sense of their disgraceful dependence on the smile, frown, or shrug, of a few unqualified lawgivers, and applied to his Majesty for permission, by charter, to form themselves into a Royal Academy. Immediately previous to his Majesty's visit to Ireland, the permission was granted, and they became an independent, and, what is better, a recognized body; remaining however without any means to build a house, or, in other respects, surround themselves with necessary appendages to their new rank and character. Soon after his Majesty's visit, the great event was followed by a public subscription to commemorate, in a national testimonial, a national era, which Irishmen of all sects and classes seem willing to regard as the most auspicious one in the annals of their country. It was expected that the fund would have been able to accomplish great things; such as the erection of a Royal Palace, I believe; but poor Ireland, widowed as she was, could only come forward with her widow's mite, and the subscription stopped short at between 12 and 13 thousand pounds. A question arose as to the appropriation of this sum, and there were many opinions on the point. Among the rest, in Jan. 1822, an advocate for the Fine Arts gave his, |