Volume 9, Number 1 · July 13, 1967
Calling for "The Doctor"
By Ernst Gombrich
Victorian Painting
by Graham Reynolds
Macmillan, 208 pp., $14.95
Victorian Narrative Paintings
by Raymond Lister
Clarkson N. Potter, 160 pp., $7.50
'When praising the French artist and sneering at the English painter, we neglect to put ourselves in the place of each.' These revealing words were written ninety years ago by the American sea painter and free-lance journalist, S.W.G. Benjamin, who collected his reports on the European art scene for Harper's Magazine in a book on Contemporary Art in Europe (1877). Each of the European schools, he insists, 'possesses marked traits of its own, but no one of them can be said to be in all respects superior to the other.' The point of view of this gifted observer was that of Hippolyte Taine, which he distills into the words: 'The truest, highest art is the spontaneous outgrowth of the tendencies of an age or a race…what may be the best art for one age or country may not be the best for another.'
Review, 3782 words
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