HL Deb 19 June 1899 vol 72 cc1466-73
*LORD STANLEY OF ALDERLEY

I desire to ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will give effect to the following recommendations of the Select Committee of 1836, and of the Royal Commission of 1863 with respect to the Royal Academy—

  1. 1. That the Academy should rest on a wider and more liberal basis, and be viewed as a national institution, and that it should have a Charter in lieu of the Instrument of 1768. (1836 and 1863):
  2. 2. That an animal report should be published of the proceedings of the Academy, with a statement of its income and expenditure, duly audited. (1863):
    3. 1467
  3. 3. That all voting for Royal Academicians or Associates should he open. (1863):
  4. 4. That the Academicians and Associates now existing should send four works as of right, and never more, and that Associates henceforth elected should send no work as of right, and never more than four. (1863):
  5. 5. That the charge for admission should be one shilling as heretofore, but on Mondays it might be raised to a higher sum, and that the Exhibition should be wholly free on Saturdays. (1836 and 1863):
  6. 6. That the system of teaching hitherto followed is not satisfactory. (1863):
  7. 7. The system of teaching which prevails in France seems well worthy of consideration. (1863):
  8. 8. That the annual balance-sheet of the accounts of the Academy should be printed and submitted along with the annual report to the General Assembly. (1863):
And to call the attention to the House to the repudiation by the Royal Academy of their responsibility as bailees for damage to works confided to their custody: also to the sixty thousand pounds of the Chantrey Bequest, of which the Chantrey Trustees give no account.

My Lords, the eight recommendations contained in this notice are all taken from the Reports of the Royal Commission of 1863, and the recommendations which have the date 1836 upon them are those which were also recommended by the Select Committee of the House of Commons. Your Lordships may naturally have wondered why these recommendations were not attended to. I think the probable explanation is that in 1836 Lord Melbourne was Prime Minister, and his maxim was to let things alone, and that in 1863 Lord Palmerston was Prime Minister, and he was then 80 years of age. This explanation is strengthened by the similar neglect of two other Parliamentary recommendations of about the same dates, 1837 and 1862, with respect to first fruits paid by poor benefices. The noble Marquess at the head of the Government may ask me why I expect him to carry out the recommendations of these past and gone Commissions. There are several reasons. In the first place, the subject has been refreshed and revived by the recently published book by Mr. Laidlay, which the Royal Academy has not attempted to answer or contradict in any way; and, in the second place, discontent of the artists and general public has now reached mid-winter. There is also the noble Marquess's own argument of continuity of Government, since there has been nothing to break it since 1863. The first recommendation was that the Academy should rest on a wider and more liberal basis, and be viewed as a national institution, and that it should have a charter in lieu of the instrument of 1768. I will ask your Lordships to observe that this was recommended by the Select Committee in 1836, and by the Royal Commission in 1863. This recommendation does not require any answer from the noble Marquess, because, supposing he is in favour of reform, it would be a matter for negotiation with the Royal Academy as to the conditions under which a new charter should be given. The same observation applies to Recommendation 8. The General Assembly is not a general assembly of Royal artists, but only of members of the Royal Academy. The junior members of the Royal Academy have very little voice. In any new charter it would be necessary that these matters should be remedied, and the present tyranny removed. The second recommendation is that an annual report should be published of the proceedings of the Academy, with a statement of its income and expenditure duly audited. At present the Academy play fast and loose, sometimes claiming to be a public institution, and at other times a private institution, and they also claim a right to deal with their own funds as they like. The result is that nobody knows how the funds are applied, or where they go. The third recommendation is that all voting for Royal Academicians or Associates should be open. That is very necessary, for at the present nobody knows why they are appointed. A great number are appointed chiefly because they have called for reform; it is known that once inside the Academy they cease all their further arguments in favour of improvements in administration. The fourth recommendation is that the Academicians and Associates now existing should send four works as of right, and never more, and that Associates henceforth elected should send no work as of right, and never more than four. I have put in these recommendations exactly as they stand in the report, but the general opinion now is that the Academicians should be limited to still fewer works, but that at any rate they should pass a competent jury and not send in pictures which are really of no value. I remember a picture entitled "The Flight into Egypt," in the centre of which was a picture of the Holy Family. This occupied the whole side of the room, and the chief impression produced upon my mind was the greediness of this Academician in taking up so much space at the expense of others. The great complaint made by the public and the artists is that favouritism is displayed in the admission and rejection of pictures. Even supposing there was no favouritism, the enormous number sent in render it absolutely impossible for any jury to devote the necessary time to them. There are too many pictures sent in, and in this case, as Seneca said of the Alexandrian library bunted by Julius Caesar, excess is everywhere prejudicial. The fifth recommendation is that the charge for admission be raised to a higher sum, and that the exhibition should be wholly free on Saturdays. Your Lordships will observe that this recommendation was made in 1836, at a time when there was no attempt at vote-catching or much care for popular amusement, and that the recommendation was made with the idea that it would benefit the people of this country by instilling a love for art. There would he no loss to the Academy by allowing the exhibition to be wholly free on Saturdays, for they could charge 2s. on Mondays. This particular recommendation has attracted a good deal of attention out of doors, and many newspapers have strongly supported it. The sixth recommendation says that the system of teaching hitherto followed is not satisfactory, and the following recommendation is to the effect that the system of teaching which prevails in France seems well worthy of consideration. The present system of teaching is very bad. The teacher is changed every month, the result being that you have a landscape painter recommending almost exclusive attention to colour one day, and another painter recommending exactly opposite the next day. I agree that the system of teaching which prevails in France is well worthy of consideration. This is evident by the number of British students who go to France. Nearly the whole of the United States market for pictures is lost to this country because Americans who go to Paris find the studios full of English students, and naturally conclude that if the Academy teaching is bad, English art must be bad also. This is a question for the Board of Trade: from accounts of duty on pictures imported into the United States, furnished by the U.S. Consul in Paris, for the years 1889–90, 1890–91, and 1891–92, the average sum of £1,600,000 was spent in each of those years in Paris by United States citizens. I now have to call the attention of the House to the repudiation by the Royal Academy of their responsibility as bailee for damage to works confided to their custody; and also to the £60,000 of the Chantrey Bequest, of which the Chantrey Trustees give no account. The action of the Royal Academy in repudiating responsibility as bailees is against the common law, as is proved by the fact that the Liverpool and Manchester Galleries have both repeatedly paid for damages. At the present time I have been informed of a poor man having been offered £2 10s. by the Academy for damage done to his picture. The Liverpool Academy admits pictures protected by glass, but this the Royal Academy refuses to sanction. Perhaps the bringing of the question before your Lordships' notice may have the effect of shaming the Academy into action. As Mr. Laidlay has said in his book, the Academy can reform itself from within, and do so much better than outsiders can do, but pressure is required if anything is to he done. With regard to the £60,000 of the Chantrey Bequest, Mr. Charles Mains-Jackson has written a letter in the April number of a magazine called The Windmill, quoting from Mr. Cook's Handbook to the Tate Gallery, to say that Chantrey left £150,000 to the Academy subject to a life interest to his wife, and that the Academy devote the interest on £90,000 to buying pictures; but what has become of the remaining £60,000. Mr. Kains-Jackson also points out that the Chantrey Trustees pay more than the market value for the pictures they buy. it would be better if the Charity Commissioners paid some attention to this matter, instead of depriving small parishes of endowments in order to devote the money to secondary education. The noble Marquess at the head of the Government made a speech at the last Academy banquet, and I need not repeat to him his own speech. But I should like to ask him, if I may, whether, when he spoke of Commissions on the right and Commissions on the left, this was merely a reminiscence of Tennyson's "Balaclava Charge," and referred to future Commissions, or whether he was aware that the Royal Academy was already flanked by two Commissions. My first impression of his speech was that he had heard there was to be an attempt to reform the Royal Academy, and his speech was a warning. I am certain the noble Marquess would not wish to imitate Lord Beaconsfield in being a Sphinx and a Mall of mystery, but his speech certainly had a misleading effect. This is shown by the remarks of the Morning Post next day. That journal said: Nobody is more given to telling the truth in the guise of a jest than Lord Salisbury.…Lord Salisbury foreshadowed a time when the Academy might have to be managed by the Government; and, though he confessed that he did not think it would then be managed particularly well, we are not at all certain that he did not foretell the thing which is bound to happen sooner or later. The Royal Academy really is a Government Department in all but name. It cannot make a painter, but it can secure the prosperity of any tradesman who has learned the rules of drawing, and can use a brush to pat colour on canvas. The man who is scorned by this body is scorned by the vast majority of the picture-buying public. …The business of the Academy would probably not be well done if it became a Government Department, but half-a-dozen Civil Service clerks would introduce improvements. Through mere laziness they would put some limit to the number of canvases that may he sent in, and, believing in their ignorance that pictures are exhibited in order that they may be seen, they would arrange the galleries as almost all galleries, save those of the Academy, are arranged. I begin to have doubts as to whether the noble Marquess does not wish to shelter himself under the vis inertiœ of Lord Melbourne and Lord Palmerston. If that is not so, there is a very simple way for the noble Marquess to take action. He need not even write a letter to the Royal Academy. It would he quite sufficient if he were now to say that, until the Academy reformed itself, he and his colleagues would not accept the next invitation to the Academy banquet. This would, of course, be a self-denying ordinance, not for the loss of the dinner, but fur the loss on the part of the Government of the opportunity, if I may say so, of blowing its own trumpet. The Members of the Government have two opportunities during the year of doing this—the Lord Mayor's banquet and the Royal Academy banquet. But if the noble Marquess and his colleagues would take the step I have suggested, they would escape the danger they now incur of being charged with insincerity in the matter. In the spring the papers referred to what Lord Beaconsfield said at the Academy. In his speech to the Academicians he praised the paintings he saw about him for their imagination, but immediately afterwards he said to Mr. Browning they showed no imagination whatever. This story shows the danger of the insincerity to which the Academy banquet exposes a Minister. I have nothing more to say, except to, make a formal motion for Papers, in case I wish to reply.

THE PRIME MINISTER AND SECRETARY OF STATE FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS (The MARQUESS OF SALISBURY)

My Lords, I will try to give some sort of answer to the question which my noble friend has put on the Paper. He has, as usual, surrounded the question with a graceful haze of irrelevant matter upon which it is not necessary for me to touch. I think, if we once attempt an inquiry as to what any newspaper says in this or that leading article, we shall have a great number of subjects for useless debate. I think that the ground fallacy of my noble friend's speech is the impression which he appears to entertain that the Report of a Commission must always be attended to, and that, as a matter of fact, its Report always is attended to. That is not my experience of public life. I have witnessed the appointment of a great number of Commissions, but my impression is that a very small percentage have received any notice from legislators or from Parliament. My noble friend is a man of very great industry, and if he will devote himself to ascertaining how many Commissions during the last 60 years have reported, and how many of those Reports have given grounds for any action, he will furnish a very important contribution to the history of his time. I think I know several Commissions now pending that have not the slightest probability of any action being taken upon them. But my noble friend appears to look forward to a period, which Lord Wemyss glanced at on a previous occasion, when the Government should undertake the management of the Royal Academy. I confess that I think this undertaking is reserved for holder hands than mine. I hope that if there is to be an artistic Party in Parliament, which will prescribe for the various artistic bodies what they ought to do, they will organise themselves in some such way that all their recommendations may have a unanimous tendency. I am afraid my noble friend and Lord Wemyss are still far apart in the remedies they recommend for the consideration of Parliament. But the practical point is—Are the Government going to introduce any measure this session to alter the constitution of the Royal Academy? I have had the privilege to hear the exposition of the state of public business which my right hon. friend the Leader of the House of Commons has to-day made before that body. I think that when my noble friend comes to read it he will agree with me that the task of introducing any such thorny and difficult subject as the reform of our artistic institutions is not likely to be undertaken in the two months which yet remain of the session. There is no subject which produces such a healthy difference of opinion as questions which relate to art, and, consequently, there is no subject which is likely to make so great a demand On the time of Parliament. I certainly should think it very imprudent of any Minister to undertake such a task, unless he were driven by very much greater evils and defects than it is possible to show in the present management of the Royal Academy. On the whole, the results appear to me to be quite as good as they are likely to be by introducing the Civil Service element into the management of the Royal Academy, and I doubt whether any large addition of politicians to the governing body of our great art institution will add much to the value and beauty of its work.

*LORD STANLEY OF ALDERLEY

My Lords, on the whole I am perfectly satisfied with the answer given by the noble Marquess, because he indicates that at some future time something will be done. I shall find the observations of the noble Marquess with regard to Royal Commissions very useful in dealing with another matter I intend to call your Lordships' attention to, and of which I have given notice. House adjourned at twenty minutes before Six o'clock, till To-morrow, half past Ten o'clock.