[Speech of Sir Frederic Leighton, as President of the Royal Academy, at
the banquet held by that society, May 5, 1894. This speech followed
upon that of Dr. Mandell Creighton, Bishop of Peterborough, who had
proposed the "Prosperity of the Royal Academy," and the health of the
President.]
MY LORD BISHOP:--I thank you for the appreciative tone in which
you have spoken of art in general and of English art in particular. The
kind terms in which you have commended this institution and its work to
this distinguished assembly must have gratified my colleagues as much as
it has gratified me, and we thank you most warmly. I would also
gratefully acknowledge the lenient words you have addressed to the
occupant of this chair. More fortunate than last year at this season, I
have to note to-day the loss of one only among the acting members of
this body--that of a sculptor of much repute, whose first steps in art
were taken under the stimulating guidance of a powerful artist, whose
name is a just boast to the green island which gave him birth--John
Henry Foley. Less vigorous, no doubt, than his eminent master, Charles
Bell Birch, he yet imparted to his works great life and spirit, and the
charm of a facile and picturesque execution, and, even in this day of
renovation and growing strength in the practice of that stately art,
sculpture in this country will miss him in its ranks. ["Hear! Hear!"]
From amongst the honorary retired Associates of this body another
sculptor, W. F. Woodington, has been removed by death--an artist whom,
for many years, age and infirmity had withdrawn altogether from public
ken. The work of his vigorous prime may still be appreciated on the base
of the Nelson column of Trafalgar Square.
But whilst our active ranks have suffered diminution by one death only
within the year, two justly conspicuous men have fallen in the wider
field of English art, both of them men of marked and distinctive
personality--both painters, both, to me, deeply interesting. One of
them, Albert Moore, an unbending upholder of the sufficiency in art of
whatever is nobly decorative, was a devoted student of the severer
graces of Hellenic art, and married in his works spontaneous and supple
gesture with forms of chaste sobriety, clothing them in delicately
harmonious tones, of which the studied arrangement announced to the
first glance the refined idiosyncrasy of his artistic temper. ["Hear!
Hear!"]
How great a psychological contrast is offered to the placid charm of
these works by the fervor of those of the artist whom I have next to
name, an artist of strong intellectual bent and steeped in human
sympathies, the originator of the movement which startled humdrum people
forty or more years ago, and produced a most interesting phase of
English art! I speak of Ford Madox Brown, who recently passed away in
the fulness of respected years and in the unabated intensity of his
convictions. I am not here to defend in every point the nature of those
convictions; I am not wholly at one with them. Ardently admired by many,
stimulating and highly interesting to a still larger circle of the
intelligent, who did not, perhaps, wholly follow his doctrine, he was
not altogether acceptable to the wider and less cultured public, which
so largely influences the creation of that empty and fickle thing called
popularity; for there was that in his work which was apt to rouse the
uneasy dread of the not usual, which mostly marks the middling mind. But
this, I fearlessly affirm, apart from his technical endowments and rare
vividness of dramatic vision, in the work of no English hand burns a
more ardent sympathy with human emotion or is revealed a more subtle
observation of the outward signs and gestures by which these emotions
are conveyed. [Cheers.]
The artistic memories which associate themselves in our mind with Madox
Brown and his concentrated energies, bring vividly before us, as we look
upon the walls of this exhibition, or glance in thought over the wide
area of contemporary production in England, the changes which two-score
years have wrought in the character and tendencies of art in this
country. As we wander through these--I rejoice to say, more than ever
catholic and hospitable--galleries, within which the still young unfold,
this year, so much vitality and promise--and, gentlemen, to us, the old,
there is, believe me, no gladder sight or one more full of comfort--we
are struck, not with a concentration of aim or purpose in the school,
but rather with a radiation and scattering of effort in innumerable
directions. No one, I think, can fail to observe the extraordinary
differences of mood and manner shown in the works which have found equal
shelter on these walls, and the wide multiplicity of individual
personalities which they proclaim. In the range of figure painting, for
instance, what variety of subject as well as of temper meets us! We see,
not historic or domestic scenes alone; not alone scenes in which the
rhythmic dream of beauty and of style is aimed at; but works also, not a
few, of purely imaginative character--fanciful, mythological,
allegorical, symbolic--amongst which latter, one especially, I think, is
dominant in its powerful originality and the weird charm of its
decorative pomp. In the region of landscape, no less, every mood is
touched, and every association evoked, from the infinite solemnity of
the silent Arctic solitudes to the infinite sweetness of a Surrey
homestead nestling within its sheltered nook, or the laughter of the
flower-fields of the Alps in June. What various temperament, too, we
note in the expressional use of tone and color--here vivid and
vibratory; there grave and soberly subdued.
In sculpture, again, though the display is numerically small, there are
amongst various good works some that are salient. I will name one by a
late alumnus of these schools, which has passed into the hands of the
nation, and, in another room, the dazzling sketch of a monument deeply
pathetic in its occasion, and of which this country will, I believe, be
justly and lastingly proud. On all hands then, in sum, we are conscious
of Life. With it, we are aware in much of the art of the day of a
certain feverish tentativeness, groping, as it were, sometimes after a
new spirit, sometimes after a repristination of the old in a modern
form; but everywhere, I repeat, we see Life. And, gentlemen, to those
who, like myself, believe in the necessary triumph of the high over the
less high, in the eventual sure survival of the wholesome and the
strong, and in the falling away and withering of the vicious or the
morbid, this sign is the most welcome, the most inspiriting, and the
most hopeful sign of all. [Loud cheers.]