Abstract

Fine Arts

This article presents information on an exhibition of paintings, in Broadway, New York City. The fine arts of design had become very tiresome, from the way painters had been practised, and people were impatient of them. Historical painting, having been the most pretentious and the least valuable, for half a century at least, of all the arts, was the most irritating and the least beloved. Here and there, an artist has painted pictures which are really historical in the truth of both the greater and lesser details of scenes reproduced from past time; and the widely diffused and popular art of book illustration, harmful to art in some respects, has made possible a general familiarity with historical truth in art, and compelled the painters to avoid anachronisms under penalty of even popular ridicule.