The most remarkable, and the most devastating, event in this winter's history of the Fine Arts in England has been the bequest to the Nation and the prompt exhibition in the National Gallery, of the nine portraits of the Wertheimer family by Mr Sargent. I am told that every public picture-gallery in the States wants to procure an example of Mr Sargent's painting. I know he is an American, but I should have thought there were limits even to patriotism; and it seems anyhow a mistake to buy at the top of the market. But perhaps this story like so many that reach us from abroad is untrue, and it 1s only here, in a country not his own, that this prophet has an honour that no other living painter, native or foreign, is given. Mr Roger Fry in an admirably balanced article has assized the exact aesthetic value of these portraits, but without attempting to describe their immeasurable vulgarity. Most men of aesthetically good will would agree that they are blasphemously out of place in the National Gallery, and that in allowing them to crowd real pictures off the walls and into the cellars, our officials have committed an extravagant and unpardonable error. But is it irretrievable? No one has, I think, yet suggested what seems to me the obvious solution of the difficulty. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs at Paris contains a number of rooms illustrating the styles of art at every period from early times right up to the present. Last before the room containing contemporary work is one of fascinating fearfulness. It is devoted to Art Nouveau. The most enthusiastic aberrations of late Victorian taste never attained such a height as this. But what a noble nucleus for an Edwardian room the Wertheimer portraits would make, and what a perpetual lesson in social and aesthetic history they would teach. It would have to be the carefullest reconstruction of a drawing- or dining-room of the period, the furniture either carved oak of the best Boer War period, or painstaking but "improved" imitations of the florider sorts of Boulle; the piano-cover or table-centre a choice piece of ribbon-work; about the room a little beaten metal from India; an octagonal table encrusted with mother-of-pearl from Morocco; a great many photographs in silver frames; and above a dado of lincrusta, upon the most expensive satin-finished wall-paper, the nine portraits from the National Gallery. They would rehearse unendingly the bankruptcy (the commercial metaphor is appropriate)—the catastrophic bankruptcy in taste of the age which hailed Kipling as its prophet,
