The Royal Academy must feel flattered at the indignant protests
made on behalf of well-known " outsiders " whose works have been rejected this year. Mr. Frank Salisbury, for example, wrote to the Times of Tuesday to lament the " tragic " fate of " artists of reputation and distinction who have continuously exhibited for ten, twenty, or forty years," and who have now been " ruthlessly thrown aside " by a hanging com- mittee " mostly of the new school." The assumption is, clearly, that the Academy exhibition is the only one in which those distinguished artists care to show their works, or to which the public will go to look at them. Surely that is no longer the ease, although it is true that London is ill provided with large exhibi- tion galleries comparable to Burlington House. Most visitors to the Academy will, we think, agree that the present exhibition is more attractive than usual because the pictures are fewer in number and are hung mostly in two rows instead of four. If some of the older " outsiders " have suffered, the younger men and women painters have benefited, and it is to them that we look for the now ideas and new methods which are essential to the vitality of the arta.
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