In 1908 _Punch_ satirized a then prevalent fashion in his drawing of the "Problem Room" at Burlington House, crowded with perplexed spectators dropping their solutions into a box marked "Puzzle Picture Syndicate." When the "Rokeby Venus" was damaged by a militant suffragist in 1914, _Punch_ suggested that the offender ought to be made to serve her term of imprisonment in the Royal Academy--a remark quite in the spirit of his old art-critic, Charles Eastlake. The oblique and ironical method is admirably employed in the dramatized conversations of visitors to the Academy and other exhibitions. In the sketch "Round the R.A." in 1893 the schoolmistress and her bored pupils, the complacent Briton giving himself away at every turn to his French friend, and the prosaic and practical person, are all drawn from the quick. The orthodox verdict is "quite up to the average--such delightful puppies and kittens," while the rebellious pupil of the edifying Miss Pemmican remarks, "Bother the beastly old Academy. I wish it was burnt, I do!" From the same hand, seventeen years later, comes an equally illuminating sketch of the visitors to the Grafton Galleries--art-student, precious young painter, young City man, high-brow critic, matter-of-fact lady, and the frank and immortal Philistine only moved to unseemly mirth when his friend remarks, "Drawing to the Synthesist is entirely unimportant in solving the problem how the artist may best express his own temperament." _Punch_ often found himself driven into the ranks of the Philistines in self-defence; anyhow, he always preferred the way of Gath to that of gush. In "An Old Master's Growl" in 1895 the speaker declares that the mass of the people only enjoyed the annual summer show; the few who came to see the Old Masters mostly came to be seen. But the ancients were not annoyed, it was only what they expected:-- We expect it--I said just as much to Vandyck-- There's but one in a hundred that comes who'll descry The Beauty of Art. It's the sham I dislike: Well--good-bye! [Sidenote: _Leighton and Millais_] From the other end of the scale comes another "growl" in the same year--that of the professional model, in Phil May's picture, against Burne-Jones who had recently made a drawing of Labour for the _Daily Chronicle_: "I reckon 'e'll be on the pavement next." Personalities, rather than principles or theories, interested _Punch_ at this period, and in 1896 and 1897 the circle of his eminent Victorian friends was reduced by the passing of three ornaments of British Art, all of them Academicians and two successively presidents of the Academy. Of the two sets of verses on Leighton, the second is much the better. _Punch_ takes for his text Watts's saying that Leighton had painted many pictures, but that his life was nobler than them all:-- _Noblesse oblige_: his manners matched his art; Fine painter-skill, the bearing of a prince.