Of The
Pictures In The Place Seem To Have Been Painted As Advertisements
For Somebody's Home-Grown Seeds, Or As Coloured Supplements To Be
Given Away With The Summer Number Of The Leading Gardening Journal
Of The Period.
"What could have induced these old fellows," I said to B., "to
choose such very uninteresting subjects?
Who on earth cares to look
at the life-sized portrait of a cabbage and a peck of peas, or at
these no doubt masterly representations of a cut from the joint with
bread and vegetables? Look at that 'View in a ham-and-beef shop,'
No. 7063, size sixty feet by forty. It must have taken the artist a
couple of years to paint. Who did he expect was going to buy it?
And that Christmas-hamper scene over in the corner; was it painted,
do you think, by some poor, half-starved devil, who thought he would
have something to eat in the house, if it were only a picture of
it?"
B. said he thought that the explanation was that the ancient patrons
of art were gentry with a very strong idea of the fitness of things.
For "their churches and cathedrals," said B., "they had painted all
those virgins and martyrs and over-fed angels that you see
everywhere about Europe. For their bedrooms, they ordered those -
well, those bedroom sort of pictures, that you may have noticed here
and there; and then I expect they used these victual-and-drink-
scapes for their banqueting halls.
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