Engravers in 1898 is an example of the leaguing together of particular workers to call attention to their interests. Original and translator engravers, together with collectors and connoisseurs, comprise the membership. The decaying art of wood engraving is also fostered by the International Society of Wood Engravers, and the Society of Designers, founded in 1896, safeguards the interests of professional designers for applied art, without holding exhibitions. Special practice and protection are also considered by the Society of Illustrators, composed of artists who work in black and white for the illustrated press. This society was inaugurated in 1894, and fifteen of the members of the committee must be active workers in illustration. As an instance of the tendency of art workers to combine, the Society of Art Masters is a good illustration. This is an association of teachers of art schools, controlled by the art branch of the Board of Education, and has a membership of over 300. Good work of another kind occupies the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. The council of the Trust includes representatives of such bodies as the National Gallery, the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours, the Society of Antiquaries, the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Universities, Kyrle Society, Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and the Selborne Society.
Foreign Art Societies.—The following are brief particulars of the chief art societies elsewhere than in Great Britain:—
Austria.—Vienna, Vereinigung bildender Künstler Österreichs (Society of Austrian Painters) and the Wiener Künstlergenossenschaft (Association of Viennese Artists).
Belgium.—Brussels, Société des beaux-arts, the Libre Esthétique, Société des aquarellistes et pastellistes, Société royale belge des aquarellistes, and numerous private societies (cercles) in Brussels, Antwerp, Liége, Ghent and other cities.
France.—Paris, the Société des artistes français (The Salon), Société nationale des beaux-arts (The New Salon), Société des aquarellistes. Exhibiting societies are the Société des artistes indépendants, Société des orientalistes, and Salon des pastellistes.
Germany.—The small local societies are affiliated to one large parent body, the Deutsche Künstlergenossenschaft, in Berlin under the presidency of Anton von Werner. The Deutsche Illustratorenverband watches over the interests of illustrators and designers. In Munich there are two bodies—the Künstlergenossenschaft (old society of artists), holding its exhibitions in the Glaspalast, and the Verein bildender Künstler, the Secessionists.
Italy.—Four exhibiting societies: Rome, Società in Arte Libertas, Scuola degli Aquarellisti; Milan, Famiglia Artistica, Società degli Artiste; Florence, Circolo Artistico; Naples, Instituti di Belli Arti.
Portugal.—Sociedade promotora das Bellas-Artes and Gremio Artistico.
Russia.—There is no exclusively art society of importance, but there is at St Petersburg the Société littéraire et artistique.
Spain.—Madrid, L’Association des artistes espagnols.
Sweden.—Stockholm, Svenska Konstuareruas Forening.
Switzerland.—Berne, La Société des peintres et sculpteurs suisses.
United States.—New York, National Academy of Design, American Water Color Society, and National Sculpture Society. (A. C. R. C.)
ART TEACHING. It is the tendency of all departments of the human mind to outgrow their original limits. Traditions of teaching are long-lived, especially in art, and new ideas only slowly displace the old, so that art teaching as a whole is seldom abreast of the ideas and practice of the more advanced artists. The old academic system adapted to the methods and aims in art in the 18th century, which has been carried on in the principal art schools of Great Britain with but slight changes of method, consisted chiefly of a course of drawing from casts of antique statues in outline, and in light and shade without backgrounds, of anatomical drawings, perspective, and drawing and painting from the living model. Such a training seems to be more or less a response to Lessing’s definition of painting as “the imitation of solid bodies upon a plane surface.” It seems to have been influenced more by the sculptor’s art than any other. Indeed, the academic teaching from the time of the Italian Renaissance was no doubt principally derived from the study of antique sculpture; the proportions of the figure, the style, pose, and sentiment being all taken from Graeco-Roman and Roman sculptures, discovered so abundantly in Italy from the 16th century onwards. As British ideas of art were principally derived from Italy, British academics endeavoured to follow the methods of teaching in vogue there in later times, and so the art student in Great Britain has had his intention and efforts directed almost exclusively to the representations of the abstract human form in abstract relief. Traditions in art, however, may sometimes prove helpful and beneficial, and preservative of beauty and character, as in the case of certain decorative and constructive arts and handicrafts in common use, such as those of the rural waggon-maker and wheelwright, and horse-harness maker.
Some schools of painting, sculpture and architecture have preserved fine and noble traditions which yet allowed for individuality. Such traditions may be said to have been characteristic of the art of the middle ages. It often happens, too, when many streams of artistic influence meet, there may be a certain domination or ascendancy of the traditions of one art over the others, which is injurious in its effects on those arts and diverts them from their true path. The domination of individualistic painting and sculpture over the arts of design during the last century or two is a case in point.
With the awakening of interest in industrial art—sharply separated by pedantic classification from fine art—which began in England about the middle of the 19th century, schools of design were established which included more varied studies. Even as early as 1836 a government grant was made towards the opening of public galleries and the establishment of a normal school of design with a museum and lectures, and in 1837 the first school of design was opened at Somerset House. In 1840 grants were made to establish schools of the same kind in provincial towns, such as Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds and Paisley. The names of G. Wallis in 1847, and Ambrose Poynter in 1850, are associated with schemes of art instruction adopted in the government art schools, and the year 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, was also marked by the first public exhibition of students’ works, and the first institution of prizes and scholarships. In 1852 “the Department of Practical Art” was constituted, and a museum of objects collected at Marlborough House which afterwards formed the nucleus of the future museum at South Kensington. In 1853 “the Department of Science and Art” was established, and in 1857, under the auspices of Henry Cole, the offices of the department and the National Art Training School were removed from Marlborough House to South Kensington. Classes for instruction in various crafts had been carried on both at Somerset House and Marlborough House, and the whole object of the government schools of design was to give an artistic training to the designer and craftsman, so that he could carry back to his trade or craft improved taste and skill. The schools, however, became largely filled by students of another type—leisured amateurs who sought to acquire some artistic accomplishment, and even in the case of genuine designers and craftsmen who developed pictorial skill in their studies, the attraction and superior social distinction and possibility of superior commercial value accruing to the career of a painter of easel pictures diverted the schools from their original purpose.
For some time after the removal to South Kensington, during the progress of the new buildings, and under the direction of Godfrey Sykes and F. W. Moody, practical decorative work both in modelling and painting was carried out in the National Art Training School; but on the completion of these works, the school relapsed into a more or less academic school on the ordinary lines, and was regarded chiefly as a school for the training of art teachers and masters who were required to pass through certain stereotyped courses and execute a certain series of drawings in order to obtain their certificates. Thus model-drawing, freehand outline, plant-drawing in outline, outline from the cast, light and shade from the cast, drawing of the antique figure, still life, anatomical drawings, drawing and painting from the life, ornamental design, historic studies of ornament, perspective and geometry, were all taken up in a cut-and-dried way, as isolated studies, and with a view solely to obtaining the certificate or passing an examination. This theoretic kind of training, though still in force, and though it
