The Loan Collection at the Academy

Daily Express, 5 December 1905, page 5, 344 words

“TO THE EDITOR OF THE “DAILY EXPRESS.”

Sir – I understand that the Royal Hibernian Academy has made arrangements which compel the closing of the Loan Exhibition of Modern Art in the second week of January. It is a matter of public notoriety that these arrangements might have been altered but for the fear of many of the Academicians that an Exhibition containing so many famous works may overshadow their own Spring Exhibition. It is very natural that they should take this view, for a modest man will say to himself, “Who will care for what I do when they have Manet and Corot to look at?” This seems to me a mistaken view. The difficulty is to arouse a taste for Art; but, once that taste is aroused, it will find expression somewhere. Once you bring a man to a Corot or a Manet and persuade him to like it, an acquisitive passion will arouse itself in him. His passion will seek an outlet, and, not being able to gratify itself on a Manet or a Corot, it will seek for other pictures, and I am sure that if Mr. Lane’s Exhibition succeeds in arousing this passion, however little, the spring sales at the Academy will exceed those of any previous year. Once a man has bought one picture, he is certain to buy two. The difficulty is not to get a man to buy twenty pictures, but to get him to buy one. If the Academy allows this Exhibition of Mr. Lane’s, got together at such expense of labour and of money, to close at the end of little more than a month, it will have made a disastrous if natural error. The Academy is at this moment agitating for a new building in a more central situation, and if it can create a taste for Art in Dublin, and make itself the leader of that taste, there will be many to help it upon its way. GEORGE MOORE.