Such opinions met us at every turn when we first began to think of having an Art Exhibition in Whitechapel. But we knew that it is not only indifference which keeps the people living in the far East away from the West End Art Treasures. The expense of transit; the ignorance of ways of getting about; the shortness of daylight beyond working hours during the greater part of the year; the impression that the day when they could go is sure to be the day when the Museum is ‘closed to the public’--all these little discouragements become difficulties, especially to the large number who have not yet had enough opportunities of knowing the joy which Art gives. ‘Well, I should not have believed I could have enjoyed myself so much, and yet been so quiet,’ describes a lesson learnt from an hour spent in Mr. Watts’s Gallery at Little Holland House; and once, after showing a party of mechanics a large photograph of the Dresden Madonna, I was asked, ‘Where now can we see such things often?’ while further talk on the picture elicited from another of the same group, ‘But that’s more the philosophy of pictures; one wants to see a great many to learn how to see them so.’ Such remarks, by no means isolated, and the proposal that we should ‘get up a Loan Exhibition’ from one of our active working-men friends, turned inclination into determination. The resources at command were hardly enough to promise success in the undertaking. They were but three schoolrooms, thirty feet by sixty, behind the church, not on a central thoroughfare, and approached by a passage yard; the light was much obscured by surrounding buildings; the doorways were narrow and the staircase crooked. But friends came forward to help, and there was soon formed a large committee, which, after meeting two or three times to discuss general principles and plans, divided itself into sub-committees to carry out special branches of a work which, though to a large extent one of detail, was by no means slight. The hanging committee undertook to measure space, obtain the sizes of pictures, and see to the strength of rods and thickness of walls, but to the general committee was left the duty of refusing undesirable-sized or inappropriate pictures. This last was by no means the least difficult labour, so extraordinary were some of the loans offered to us; a dreadful portrait of an uncomely old lady was sent because ‘she was the maternal grandmother of a man who used to keep a shop in the High Street,’ this recommendation being considered sufficient to obtain for the picture a place in an Art Collection; a pencil drawing ‘done by John when he was only fifteen, and now he’s doing well in the pawnbroking line,’ was held worthy by a proud mother.