Visitors to the Philadelphia Museum of Art this week waded knee-deep in the past, and came out tired but happy.
They saw 40 "popular favorites," mostly 19th Century, some good, some horrible —and asked an inevitable question: Why should one century's art become another century's banality? A good many Philadelphians snorted at such forgotten favorites as Munkacsy's Last Day of the Condemned (with a dozen relatives of the shackled prisoner in carefully composed attitudes of curiosity and grief), Thomas Hovenden's Breaking Home Ties (a gloomy, gawky boy, hat in hand, enduring a last, long look from his mother while the menfolk wait to take him to the depot), and John Henry Lorimer's Mariage de Convenance (in which a weeping, heavily veiled bride collapses in her room, deaf to the happy chirps of two little bridesmaids who have come to fetch her down). They generally admired Romney's pink-cheeked Willett Children for seeming recently tubbed and scrubbed yet true-to-life.
Some respectful and some grinning, the visitors crowded around two paintings, Millet's Sower (lent by the Provident Trust Co.) and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's Reading from Homer. A few of the oldest and boldest confessed that Millet and Alma-Tadema still looked great to them.
Both paintings had been reproduced hundreds of thousands of times; they were once tacked up in schoolrooms and kitchens from coast to coast. The Sower possessed an everyday drama for those who knew farming, and for schoolteachers it served to illustrate the homely lesson that dawn follows darkness and life rises again from the earth. And it was nice for turn-of-the-century housewives to glance up from the grits and bacon simmering on the stove and rest their eyes on the ancient world represented in Reading from Homer—somehow infinitely cooler and finer, and with more marble in it.
Could modern art ever mean so much to so many as Millet or Alma-Tadema had? Museum Director Fiske Kimball was not taking any bets. But in a thoughtful foreword to the show he pointed out that the art of the snob of today is often that of the minority of tomorrow and the majority of the day after tomorrow: "The public, which doesn't know much about art but 'knows what it likes,' actually likes what it knows."