I have carefully read over the programme of your enterprise, and there is much in it with which I can warmly sympathise. I desire nothing more deeply than to see the love and knowledge of Art penetrate into the masses of the people in this country--there is no end which I would more willingly serve; but there is in your programme a paragraph which I cannot too emphatically repudiate--that, namely, which excludes from Art, as far as the public is concerned, that which is the root of the finest Art as Art, the human form, the noblest of visible things. That you should sternly and stringently exclude all work which reveals an offensive aim or prurient mind is what I should be the first to claim, but that you should lay down as a corner-stone of your scheme an enactment which would exclude by implication more than half the loftiest work we owe to Art--_nearly all Michael Angelo_, much of Raphael's best, Sebastiano del Piomba's "Raising of Lazarus," Titian's "Bacchus and Ariadne," Botticelli's "Birth of Venus"--this is indeed a measure from which I must most distinctly dissociate myself, and which makes it impossible for me to connect my name with an enterprise which would else command my sympathy. [Illustration: STUDY IN COLOUR FOR "GREEK GIRLS PLAYING AT BALL." 1889 By permission of Mrs. Stewart Hodgson] _From the "Manchester Courier," August 30, 1890._ SIR FREDERIC LEIGHTON ON THE MANAGEMENT OF ART GALLERIES. To the Editor of the _Manchester Courier_.