ke rank amongst the best
of their generation will have to be answered very carefully by those
who wish to disallow it. Behind them press half a dozen less formidable
but still serious candidates, and I wish Mr. Fry would bring together a
small collection of their works. It would be interesting to see how and
how much they differ from the men; and, unless I mistake, it would
effectively give the lie to those who fancifully conclude that because
the Muses were women it is for women to inspire rather than create.

FOOTNOTE:

[20] This article was written for the _Nation_, but owing to a series of
misfortunes could not be published until the exhibition was over. It
then seemed best to reserve it for this collection.

CONTEMPORARY ART IN ENGLAND

[Sidenote: _Burlington Magazine July 1917_]

Only last summer, after going round the London galleries, a foreign
writer on art whose name is as well known in America as on the
Continent, remarked gloomily, and in private of course, that he quite
understood why British art was almost unknown outside Great Britain. The
early work of Englishmen, he admitted, showed talent and charming
sensibility often, but, somehow or other, said he, their gifts fail to
mature. They will not become artists, they prefer to remain British
painters. They are hopelessly provincial, he said; and so they are.

Of our elder living artists--those, that is to say, who had found
themselves and developed a style before the influence of Cezanne became
paramount on the Continent--Mr. Sickert is probably the only one whom a
continental amateur would dream of collecting; and he, be it noted,
escaped early from British provincialism and plunged into the main
stream of European art. On the other hand, the names of Mr. Steer, Mr.
John, Mr. Orpen and Mr. McEvoy, here only less familiar than those of
Cabinet Ministers or County Cricketers, abroad are as obscure. Mr.
Steer, to be sure, has his portrait in the Uffizi, but then, as likely
as not, the Poet Laureate has his birthday ode in the _Bibliotheque
Nationale_. If Mr. Steer and Sir Edward Poynter are treated civilly
abroad, that may be because England is an important country rather than
because they are important artists.

No wonder patriots are vexed to find English art esteemed on the
Continent and in America below the art of Germany or Scandinavia, seeing
that English artists seem to possess more native sensibility than either
Germans or Scandinavia