"A Felt Want."

In a letter to the Boston Post a few days ago, attention was called very earnestly to a great defect now existing at Harvard in the facilities offered for the study of art. The writer took the position that art could not be studied intelligently at Harvard, because the apparatus most needed, namely a collection of pictures, is entirely wanting. The student knows little of art and his knowledge can be little increased by attendance upon lectures or by perusal of books on art. Nothing can make up for the absence of the actual picture by which alone the impression of form and color can be conveyed. The present modes of instruction at Harvard may help a student to talk about art, but fails to give him a definite understanding of the subject. With a picture or series of pictures before him, the student may gain in a few minutes a better idea of the principles of art than the readings of columns can convey; if the two methods of reading and practical study of illustration are combined, rapid advance is possible. The library of the University is poverty striken as far as classical and contemporary art is concerned. Of artists now living or of those belonging to the last generation, there is not a trace. Classic art is represented only by a few wood cuts and copies of drainings. The deficiency in modern art might be supplied to some extent by art journals which often contain valuable pictures. But strange as it may seem, the library of Harvard does not possess an art journal. In fact, the only pictures Harvard owns on the illustrations of the art books, limited in number and often so crude as to be of little more than suggestive value.

The great want, therefore, as suggested by the writer of above-mentioned letter, is a collection of illustrations of the masters which can be used by all students. Copies and engravings are far too valuable to be available for such a collection, but photography has supplied the means of forming a comparatively cheap, yet none the less useful collection of pictures. Colleges much smaller than Harvard have begun the collection of pictures, and consequently art is better taught in these colleges than at Harvard. In no direction could steps for the improvement in methods of instruction at Harvard be more consistently taken than in the foundation of a collection of photographs to aid in the art courses.