Mr. George Moore and the Evening Mail

The Mail, 5 August 1905, page 2, 393 words

TO THE EDITOR OF THE “EVENING MAIL.”

Sir, – I have just received your telegram, and hasten to say that if you publish the balance of the interview, including what I said about Sir Walter Armstrong’s purchases for the National Gallery and the composition of the Royal Commission to inquire into the state of art in Ireland, you may consider my telegram which you publish to-day as withdrawn. My reason for sending the telegram was that your reference to a future article, giving my views regarding art forgeries and the composition of the Royal Commission, did not convince me; newspapers sometimes publish future articles, sometimes future articles are not published; and the first instalment of your interview read like another attack on Mr. Hugh Lane. Mr. Lane is, in my opinion, an excellent judge of painting, and I don’t think, if he had been left to himself, he would have mistaken a Hungarian imitation of the Norwich school for a picture by Corot. But Mr. Lane was helped by a committee to select £20,000 worth of pictures from the Forbes’ Collection, and the mistake in question was the usual committee mistake. Moreover, Sir Walter Armstrong in his lecture selected the Hungarian for special praise. Mr. Lane was overruled; he was out-numbered. Now, what I think so unfair is that the Hungarian should be used as a means whereby the whole collection should be discredited. The picture can be removed. Even Hungarian art is not infectious; and the two beautiful Corots in the collection, a blue harbour and little picture with a cow in it, are still and will remain genuine Corots. I was careful to point out to your representative that no picture gallery in Europe would stand the test. Does this gallery contain a false attribution, and this is the test applied to Mr. Lane’s collection. All galleries contain doubtful pictures; it is often impossible to say who painted a picture. What is really intolerable are bad pictures, and after all the Hungarian is not very bad, not so bad as the pictures and drawings that Sir Walter Armstrong buys for the National Gallery. I mentioned some three or four attributions which raise a smile, and I could mention many others. – Very truly yours, GEORGE MOORE.