Velazquez? How his Excellency the Ambassador of his Most Catholic
Majesty, glorious Peter Paul Rubens, would have laughed!

It is this lack of sympathy and understanding between the artist and his
public--this fatal isolation of the artist--that is the cause of nearly
all the shortcomings of modern art; of the weakness of what is known as
official or academic art no less than of the extravagance of the art of
opposition. The artist, 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