THIS book has something of the musty, nostalgic charm of
a provincial museum's cellars. It is the story of the names—painters, administrators and critics, forgotten, half-forgotten and sometimes all-too-well remembered—the galleries, schools, societies and exhibitions of the last hundred years, chronicled with a deliberate lack of emphasis or comment that gives it a curiously remote and somewhat unreal atmosphere. Mr. Hubbard sheds no new light on the painters of the century (unless it be the mural painters) but he does remind us of many interesting phenomena—for example the Art Unions that ran lotteries with pictures as prizes and the fabulous economics of those boom decades when sales amounted to no less than £70,000 a month. He has, however, become bogged down in his material. Although divided into decades, and sub. divided into the general picture of the art world and its personalities, the result is a slovenly book, which hops irritatingly from subject .to subject and date to date without much flow. The intention is good and the subject worth tackling. This particular record, however—which probably contains as much information as any popular résumé to date—is marred by numerous misprints and slipshod inaccuracies. Sources of quotations, too, would have been useful. The reproductions, deliberately, are the stock ones from
public collections and therefore familiar. M. H. M.
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