The great prices obtained at public auctions for the earlier masters of our School are sometimes quoted in support of the view that the taste for art remains unimpaired. As a matter of fact I think they may be taken to warrant an exactly opposite conclusion. The buyers of thirty or forty years ago who helped to encourage the painters of their own day were guided for the most part by their own individual preference. Their taste may often have been uninstructed, but at least it was their own. They loved the pictures which they sought to acquire, and, as their collections grew, a better taste grew with them. The modern buyer, on the other hand, is for the most part the mere puppet of the dealer. He buys at the top price of the market because he believes the market will maintain its price, and with a prudence that the dealer is careful to foster he makes his choice from among those older pictures whereof the market value has been appraised by time. And so long as these purely commercial considerations dominate the taste of the time, the cause of contemporary painting must surely suffer. That a truer feeling will come again with the passing of time need not be doubted, but any one who has followed the movement in English painting since the middle of the last century must perforce experience a feeling of melancholy at the listless apathy and indifference which has taken the place of the earnest enthusiasm of an earlier day. That enthusiasm was still at its height when Sir Coutts Lindsay founded the Grosvenor Gallery; it survived with scarcely diminished force when Mr. Hallé and I succeeded in establishing the New Gallery, and I look back without regret to my long association with both these institutions. As the child of our own creation the New Gallery has claimed from both of us the larger and the longer service. At the inception of our task we had the loyal support of Burne-Jones, whose art we both deeply loved, and when he died I think we both felt that a part of our mission had gone. CHAPTER XI WHISTLER AND CECIL LAWSON Apart from Burne-Jones, whose gathered works, the fruit of many years’ labour, naturally occupied the dominant place in the first exhibitions of the Grosvenor Gallery, there were two painters, Whistler and Cecil Lawson, whose pictures made it in their different ways notable and interesting. At that time Whistler’s claims as an artist were not seriously entertained beyond the limits of a very narrow circle. I had known him personally for some little time, and had included his work in that series of articles written in 1873 to which reference has already been made. Writing of him then, I had said, “Opinions as to his merits differ widely enough, but there is nothing vague or uncertain about them. He is either blamed or praised heartily, and for the most part he is heartily blamed.