3. The artists, if they are painters, need better pigments than they are now able to get; not that the general run of colors and the like supplied to them by the dealers are of inferior make and are no longer trustworthy, but because some most precious and costly colors are absolutely unknown to the world of trade, and can only be purchased at first hand and under special conditions of care and watchfulness. An Industrial Union might care for such things as this: but some society, without taking that hard and repulsive name, might do the needed work.

4. The artists want to see precious natural materials guarded, preserved, watched, that they may be utilized in good time. A wellknown expert, in the Dictionary of Architecture and Building, (Vol. III., article Stone), says that commercial interests will not tend to save the splendid blocks and bowlders of alabaster and porphyry, quartz and agate. Beautiful masses of clear Rose Quartz go to the making of road materials or abrasives. . . . Such are neglected simply because the material cannot be quarried by the ton;" or, as the writer goes on to say, a permanent business built up by extracting and shipping it. Well! the artists require that other than commercial considerations shall govern the supply of such precious material; and if they have not learned to demand it, that is merely a voiceless condition from which the right society would save them.

5. The artists, if they are sculptors, require some place of deposit for the plaster casts of the larger original models. In those plaster casts are preserved the essential thoughts of the artist. These casts, if kept safely, in no matter what fire-proof shed, would serve for decades as a valuable lesson to the successors and intellectual heirs of each sculptor, as well as memoranda of importance to himself. This place of accessible safedeposit might be brought into successful existence by a society in which the Industrial Union should be modified by the Museum idea.

6. The artists require good models, male and female; and such a recognition of the comparative worth and importance of the model to art that the matter shall not be relegated to silence and, as it were, ignored; the public being supposed to believe that the painter and modeller of the nude does so without any intimacy with the unclothed living body.

7. The artists, if they are architects, or working in connection with architecture, need ready access to such memoranda, photographic or other, as may be obtainable of all modern buildings of interest, and of those applied and decorative sculptures, those mural paintings, which go to make the buildings more worthy. This access they need especially because of the lack in this modern world of natural and normal evolution. There is so much too much of separate work; every man for himself, with no guide but the easily obtained plates and photographs of old work everybody studying ancient detail, from which he borrows too freely and much too directly.

8. The artists, if they are makers of furniture, silverware, textiles, and bookbindings, or workers in any admittedly artistic industry, require even more than their fellows such aid and comfort, such help from their contemporaries in other lands than their own. They have their claims to be thought artists and to live and think as artists do-claims which have lain in abeyance merely because sculptor and painter have come up in the social world and have obtained a place like that of the professional man--claims which in their turn have been admitted by the modern world. Now the most inaccessible piece of knowledge will be found that which belongs to wholly modern work in pottery, glass, mosaic, metal-work, and the like. The young artistic industries of the United States are the least known of all; nor can the most ardent student of such things name the men or the localities.

9. The artists want exhibitions like those of the Burlington Fine Arts Club, in which one subject at a time is treated exhaustively, in a tranquil little show which will not at tract the larger public. The latest Burlington exhibition was limited to work in wrought steel. Once, the subject taken was Rembrandt's etchings; and then Francis Seymour Haden prepared the catalogue with, as introduction, that memorable analysis of those etchings which are generally classed as Rembrandt's. Once it was bookbinding; and from this and from the first above-named show, as from others, noble folio books of illustration have grown.

10. The artists want exhibitions of sketches: summer studies by the landscapists; figure studies by the mural painters; wax models in small by sculptors. It is one of

the serious needs of younger men that they should learn how their seniors are doing their work; nor are the seniors generally adverse to showing some part of their preparation. The annual shows of the New York Architectural League give evidence as to that.

11. The artists want all the seceders and all the come-outers, and all the protestors and the prescribers of new or admired old ways of seeing nature and painting thoughts about nature--all of them--to hold their exhibitions too, and prove their worth.

III

So much of what the artist needs from his fellows and from a chosen part of the nonartist community. There is also the question of what the community at large needs and which certain art societies may render. Owing to the condition of public affairs in the United States, where the important posts in municipal or State affairs are seldom filled by men of much cultivation, or of even such intelligence as appertains to mercantile, legal, or manufacturing business carried on in other than a small way, a peculiar direction has been given to the numerous American attempts at refinement and improvement in public matters. The commission, composed wholly or in large part of men not in public office, takes on an importance which it could hardly possess in a highly organized and much governed and policed community. Boston has an art commission; Chicago has an art commission. New York's art commission consists of four men ex-officio, viz.: the Mayor and the heads of three incorporated institutions of fine art and learning, and three artists and three non-artist citizens appointed by the Mayor from a list furnished by a certain artistic association. Each of these city commissions is the offspring of art societies: no one of them would have existed but for the constantly applied and always strenuous and eager suggestion of associations of artists and "laymen" interested in art. The duty of these art commissions is indeed negative rather than positive; they deal with keeping out of the streets and squares, parks and parkways, all works of art thought to be unworthy. In no instance has the commission obtained or assumed such public state that it has "hearings" and listens to arguments pro and con of invited or volunteering citizens and yet this would

seem to be peculiarly desirable now that the tendency in city government is toward the supplanting of bodies of men, "Boards" of parks, of public works and the like, by singleheaded public offices. Commissions will be as timid in art as they have been thought in war. Their business will be to show all the boldness they have in the selection of the artists who are to do any piece of public work; and for that purpose it is obviously requisite that the members of such commissions shall be other than amiable and unconvinced men, other than those of whom we have so many in our social life, who are strong in kindliness, in sympathy, in good fellowship, and in public virtue, but weak in the power to discriminate, and timid when it comes to saying No. And for all these reasons the selection of the members of such a public art commission, which is indeed the very foundation and origin of its status and power, should be largely controlled by the art societies.

IV

HERE again the opponent of the modern tendency toward many and diverse art societies will be heard to say that such influence could be brought so much more forcibly to bear if the artists and their trusted allies were combined in one great association. This is the ground of the forcible-seeming arguments on that side of the question, and it is here that those arguments may best be considered.

And first the reader must recall the wellknown fact that membership in one society does not debar membership in another. The Fine Arts Federation of New York, alluded to above as the association from which sprang the New York Art Commission, is a league of eleven art societies; but the Federation in itself is nothing but a council of delegates, dealing with a few duties which are definitely defined and described. Now, many a delegate out of the whole number of sixty-six belongs to four, five, or six of the constituent societies. There are, indeed, certain limits to membership; and yet for all the restrictions there are some men who might belong to every society in the whole list of eleven, and there are few who would not find it feasible to belong to four or five.

Hence arises a curious sense of uniformity of interest and even uniformity of aim. The opinion of any one society, taken at a late hour

in the evening, taken as a kind of snap judgment after a brief discussion, may indeed be totally different from the opinion similarly obtained from another society; but there are accommodations and second thoughts; and no matter what the public may think, there are no more reasonably minded men than the artists and their allies; nowhere is it easier to have votes rescinded and ignored and the deliberate second thought of the association prevail. It was eminently a good thought to establish the Fine Arts Federation (and for the urgency of its presentation to the artistworld let us all thank the man whose name should be remembered in connection with it, George Louis Heins); the Fine Arts Federation has proved its immense value, and may be of vastly greater service yet if the need should come and should find a strong and well-chosen body of delegates in the Federation. But no one familiar with the Federation has dreamed of doing away, by its means, with the separate societies themselves. Those who sit as delegates in the meetings of the Federation know too well what a power for good are the separate societies, even the smallest ones; they having each its own point of view, and one so clear and easily differentiated that any individual artist or layman, A. B., or Y. Z., sitting in the rooms of one society, becomes almost a different man from that which he was, three days before, in the meeting of another association.

V

THE Community has need of still other societies which artists and the allies of artists must conduct. Let us continue our numbering-omitting the F. A. F., as it is fondly called, because that is a congress only.

12. There is wanted in each urban community a society to undertake what the "Arts and Crafts" may be thought to strive for, in London or in Boston. This is to keep on teaching the lesson that there is no designer but the maker. The rightly designed gas fixture is not to be drawn on paper in one quiet room and then cast, drawn, hammered, chased, bronzed, put together in a series of

rooms full of workmen doing each his little piece of the work. He who will make the whole of a silver pocket-flask, from the first sketch on an envelope to the object ready for delivery, is to be encouraged in every way. And hand-work, in contradistinction to machinery, is to be insisted on, with the most severe and most exact regulations as to what and how much aid from mechanical devices is to be accepted.

13. There are wanted societies to undertake what the Municipal Arts Society used to try to do in New York; to raise money in considerable sums, and expend it in the direct purchase or ordering of important works of fine art for the public buildings and the public places of the city. The society above named was able to do this well and honorably in two cases. Two important groups of works of art exist, and should exist forever, which would never have been but for that organization. There is, however, the need of gaining such and so strong a hold upon the community that its membership shall be large, or wealthy, or both. Twenty thousand a year might be had from 2,000 members, or from 500: the only question is the practical oneHow do you mean to beat up recruits?

14. There is need of societies to undertake business of Municipal Art, in the recently accepted, popular sense; and although this may be done very largely by societies which are wholly non-artistic (for what need of architects to insist upon broad streets and sunshine, frequent and thorough cleaning, or decent street-signs and street-lamps ?), yet the artist's world is soon found to touch the cityreformer's world, and they must consent to be accepted as mutually dependent. There is, then, the possible society of purely artistic aims, made up of men who are convinced that the one important thing is the separate

the individual and unique-work of fine art, and that this is as likely to appear amid the crowded and black streets of an ill-kept and seemingly unsanitary old town, as in the most carefully policed modern capital. There is also the society as described in 13. And each of these will be purely a society of artists and friends of artists.

RUSSELL STURGIS.