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218 CONTEMPORARY ART
larity, and he rests replete
a leading British
artist. Is he ever plagued with nightmares,
I wonder, in which he dreams that outside
England no competent amateur could possibly
take him seriously.
Some British artists, when they were young
and some of them must once have been so
are said to have studied in Paris. Does it
ever occur to them that their proper rivals,
the men whose rivalry is stimulating and not
merely disquieting,
are not to be found in
London ? And does it occur to them that,
instead of hunting for tips in Bond Street and
Burlington House they might go
for lessons
to the National Gallery and South Kensington
? Whatever people may think of the art
of Henri Matisse, his fame is beyond cavil.
Just before the war commissions and entreaties
were pouring in on him, not from France only,
but from Russia, Germany, Scandinavia, and
America. He had he has, for that matter
what no English painter, with the possible
exception of Constable, ever had a European
reputation. Yet in the spring of 1914, looking
with a friend at a picture by Chardin, he is
said to have remarked that if he could believe
that one day he would paint as good a thing
as that he would be extremely happy. If one
of our famous portrait-painters would go for
once to the National Gallery and stand, not